Tag: Repairs

So I finally got around to spraying some 10% bleach on an inconspicuous section of the roof (*) to see whether it would have any effect on that black fungus / mildew / crud. It’s too soon to tell, but in the process I discovered that the sprayer nozzle didn’t produce the nice, round pattern it used to. I completed the mission and took the nozzle to the basement. The problem was obvious:

Soaking it in vinegar didn’t have any effect; whatever made those deposits wasn’t soluble in water or mild acid. A few minutes with an awl and a (manually turned!) Dremel grinding point restored it to good condition:

You’d be more careful cleaning the orifice of a fine spray nozzle, but this is for a hand-pumped garden sprayer: Good Enough.

As soon as the weather clears, we’ll see if the situation up on the roof has improved. If so, I get to spray the rest of it.

(*) The whole north slope over the garage, in case you’re in the market…

A few days of high & gusty winds braided the cords of the aluminum fish school wind chime hanging over the end of the patio:

It’s obviously an old, much-repaired relic.

My Shop Assistant added those blue fins many years ago, quite some time after she and a friend lost one of the fish while using them as digging implements. An unmarked replacement fish, crudely bandsawed from black-coated aluminum, began swimming in stealth mode amid the school.

Sometimes it’s not the object, it’s the memories…

There never seems to be a good time to drain your water heater and check the anode rod, but I finally found a Round Tuit…

Pursuant to that comment, I drained a few gallons before applying the six-point 1-1/16 inch socket and loosening the anode rod without fuss or bother. I couldn’t get a good finger grip on the bolt head inside the enlarged hole, but a long-nose Vise-Grip pliers did the trick:

The first look showed a solid bar of corrosion:

You can see the 3/4 inch socket wrench in the background: I didn’t need the breaker bar this time!

The magnesium anode rod corroded down to the steel core wire just under the bolt head:

The entire rod was about half a foot shorter than the new one, but I cannot tell whether that much corroded away or rods have gotten longer (they’ve certainly gotten more expensive):

I sawed the rod to get it out of the heater, because I also wanted to see how much magnesium remained inside the corrosion. Quite a lot, as it turned out, so I suppose I could have reinstalled the rod and left it for another few years:

I don’t know where all the corrosion products went, because the water heater drained uneventfully, without clogging the valve or depositing a pile of crud at the end of the hose. There were a few particles, but nothing like the residue from the aluminum rod.

Then I cleaned off a new magnesium rod, tilted the water heater to get enough clearance, installed the rod with a wrap of PTFE tape, and reinstalled the water supply lines. I suspect the next owners of the place will be looking at it a decade down the calendar…

If I had more guts and less sense, I’d chuck the bar stubs in the lathe and turn off the corrosion to get some nice steel-core magnesium rods. The prospect of extinguishing a magnesium fire in the basement doesn’t entice me in the least.

Long ago, in a universe far away, IBM gave Mary a desk clock as part of that Technical Excellence Award:

The double-stick foam tape holding the plate on the front aged out a few years later, at which point I cleaned off the solidified goo, drilled 2-56 clearance holes in the plate and tapping holes in the clock base, installed four pan head stainless screws, and neatly aligned the slots. That’s what it should have looked like from the beginning; this was, after all, a Technical award…

The clock movement failed recently and I got a drop-in clock insert from Klockit to put it back in operation. The fit wasn’t quite solid, but two wraps of silicone tape around the case under the ribbed friction-fit band solved that problem.

One new movement cost just about as much as the shipping, so I bought a pair with black and white faces.  Mary picked the white face for this clock, which left the black movement as a spare.

Tomorrow: what to do with a spare clock insert.

It’s leaf-shredding season again and our MTD Chipper-Shredder began shredding not nearly as well as it had in years gone by. Last season I laid in a stock of replacement parts, so I swapped in a new Shredder Screen (781-0457):

The flail blades (719-0329) on the massive rotating impeller assembly protrude through the parallel openings in the screen, which is where most of the shredding action happens. The old red screen bent outward enough so that the blades pushed the leaves against the screen, rather than through it, producing frequent clogs.

Now it works fine again… although I’ve had just about as much fun shredding leaves as any one person should experience in one month.