Posts Tagged Repairs
Dell U2711 Monitor: FAIL
Posted by Ed in Electronics Workbench on 2019-06-25
My landscape monitor, a six-year-old Dell U2711, died after a few days of flickering and failure-to-start. As you’d expect with any old electronics, particularly from Dell, it’s the electrolytic caps:
All of the black-cased caps on the board had bulged cases:
They’re (allegedly) made by FOAI, for whatever that’s worth.
They’re not really capacitors any more:
I replaced all of them with cheap eBay caps to no avail. Spot-checking the other (“brown”) caps on the logic board showed they were still good, but the power supply board is firmly glued in place and I can’t get to the HV cap.
A new monitor arrived two days later and it’s all good again.
Primitive Screwheads
Posted by Ed in Home Ec, Machine Shop on 2019-06-24
Painting the patio railing required removing the short section on the garage, which stalled with a thoroughly galled / corroded nut on the 2 inch bolt going through the wall. Deploying a Dremel slitting wheel and bashing the slit open with a cold chisel saved the day, as shown in this staged reenactment:
It seems square head bolts have gone out of fashion, at least in the 3/8-16 size seen here, over the last half century:
I reused the lag screw with no qualms at all.
The local fastener emporium had square bolts ranging upward from 3/4-10, which wasn’t much help. Amazon has ’em, if you spend enough time rummaging around in the debris from its search engine, at a buck apiece in lots of ten. Fortunately, a local big-box home repair store had 3/8-16 hex head steel bolts and square nuts, so I needn’t start from scratch.
Start by turning off the hex head:
Thread the end, starting in the lathe and ending with a die turned just barely enough to accept the nut:
Epoxy the nut in place and sand it to rough up the surface finish enough to hold the primer:
Yeah, that’s a nasty little zit. Fortunately, nobody will ever notice.
Prime & paint the railing, affix it to the garage wall, then prime & paint the bolt:
Thing looks like it grew there; tell nobody about the zit.
The yellow blotches decorating the shiny black paint come from the pine trees across the driveway. The first day of pine pollen season corresponded to the second day I intended to paint; the dust clouds were a wonder to behold.
Bonus Quality Shop Time!
The far end of the railing around the patio has a bracket against the house siding with a hole intended for a 1/4 inch bolt they never installed, perhaps because there’s no way to maneuver a bolt into the space available.
The threads on the 3/8-16 bolt may be wrecked, but turning the shank down to 1/4 inch isn’t any big deal:
Part off the head with a stub just long enough to fit into the bracket, epoxy that sucker into the hole, and paint it black:
The square post on the left goes down to an anchor in the concrete patio, the railing is welded to a 4 inch column a foot away, and the end of the railing isn’t going anywhere; the fake bolt is purely for show.
And, yes, the dust atop the railing is more pollen from the pine trees responsible for the weird green-yellow reflections on the vertical surfaces.
No boomstick required!
Kitchen Blender Base Spacer
Posted by Ed in Home Ec, Machine Shop, Software on 2019-06-21
We don’t use the blender much, so the most recent bearing replacement continues to work. I never got around to re-making the overly long shaft spacer from the first bearing replacement, which I compensated for with a spacer kludge cut from a random chunk of bendy plastic sheet.
Which we put up with For. Eleven. Years.
The blender recently emerged from hiding and, with my solid modeling-fu cranked up to a dangerous chattering whine, I conjured a real spacer:
It pretty much disappears into the blender base, which is the whole point of the operation:
When the bearings fail again, I promise to make a proper shaft spacer and toss this bodge.
The OpenSCAD code as a GitHub Gist:
Not that it really deserves so much attention …
Dryer Vent Adapter Rebuild
Posted by Ed in Home Ec, Machine Shop on 2019-06-20
When we bought this house, it had its original clothes dryer, which was vented directly through the wall with a few inches of 3×10 inch square duct. Alas, contemporary dryers use 4 inch round hoses, so I conjured a round-to-square adapter from a length of air handler duct:
I’d used … wait for it … duct tape to hold the end caps on, because I knew I’d be taking it apart to clean out the fuzz every now & again. The most recent cleanout occurred when I noticed the end cap had eased its way out of the adapter, releasing warm fuzzy air behind the dryer.
The solution, which I should have done decades ago, holds the end caps in place with sheet metal screws:
A pair of small clamps held everything in the proper location while I applied a suitable step drill and installed the screw:
Now the duct tape just seals the gaps, rather than holding against the minimal pressure in the box, and it should be all good until the next cleanout.
So simple I should’a done it decades ago. Right?
Hearphone Deterioration
Posted by Ed in Electronics Workbench, Home Ec, Machine Shop on 2019-06-19
I bought my Bose Hearphones in late August 2017, so they’re just shy of two years old, and have used them more-or-less daily since then. Although the innards still improve my hearing, the exterior is falling apart:
The conspicuous blue tips come from silicone tape holding the “soft touch” silicone shell together:
The white line seems to be silicone glue holding the hard cover plate to the equally hard base. So far, it’s working, but the two-piece soft cover is peeling away from the very thin adhesive (?) holding it to the hard parts.
The silicone glue under the flexy cover on the control pod along the right earbud cable hasn’t fared as well:
I blobbed ordinary RTV silicone under the cover, ignoring the caveats about acetic acid corrosion, because I don’t have any platinum-cure silicone on the shelf.
When the blue tape wears out / falls off, I’ll replace it with black silicone tape going further up the ring to hold the rest of the soft cover in place:
The ear buds have soft silicone strain relief tubes around the cables. The friction holding them in place failed long ago and, because no adhesive will work with silicone, I wrapped enough double-sided tape around the cables to produce a sticky lump jamming them in place:
A bit of the muck sticks out on both ends and I expect to replace the tape every now and again:
I also expect to replace the non-replaceable lithium battery / cell in about a year, as they’re now barely adequate for a day’s use.
Fortunately, I can’t see any of this hackery while I’m wearing the things:
my face I don’t mind it,
Because I’m behind it —
‘Tis the folks in the front that I jar.
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1243103
Reversible Belt Buckle Re-staking
Posted by Ed in Machine Shop on 2019-05-19
It’s a shorter belt with the same failure mode:
I clamped the whole affair on a block to align all the parts:
Drop the pin and spring in place, whack it with a punch, and it’s all good:
That was easy …
Epson R380 Printer: Waste Ink Counter Reset
Posted by Ed in Machine Shop, Software on 2019-05-07
Following the same drill as before, the Epson R380 printer once again thinks I’ve changed its diaper before resetting its waste ink counter. Instead, I’ve poured what would be a moderate fortune of waste ink down the drain from the external tank, had I not grafted a continuous flow ink supply onto the thing.
To judge from how often I must reset the counters, I’m expected to buy a new printer every three years. For sure, it’s uneconomical to have anybody else (the nearest Epson Authorized Customer Care Centers is 68 miles away on Long Island) do the deed. As Epson delicately puts it “replacement of ink pads may not be a good investment for lower-cost printers”.
Epson now provides a utility allowing you to reset the counters exactly one time. Having a scrap Windows PC ready to go, I didn’t bother capturing the partition before firing off the previous Sketchy Utility™, nor did I restore it, so the whole process took about half an hour.
The hard drive platters will eventually become nightlights.
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