Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Rather than cutting the pack apart, I buttered up the end of an intact plug with some ABS solvent glue (a hellish homebrew mixture of acetone and MEK), rammed it into the socket, and held it in place for a minute:
LiIon Pack – undamaged plug insertion
The tip emerged on the first try:
LiIon Pack – rescued plug tip joined
Even better, it cracked off the plug without too much effort:
LiIon Pack – rescued plug tip separated
More solvent glue and a few hours of clamping worked fine:
Somehow, I thought those neoprene O-rings that replaced the grenade pin straps on my BOB Yak trailer would last more than one season, but they’ve already rotted out. A bit of rummaging produced a hank of rubber gasket intended to secure window screen in its aluminum frame, so it’s presumably better suited to an outdoor life than O-rings; it comes without provenance, so I have no idea what it’s made of.
A few snips, a handful of cable ties, and it’s all good again:
BOB Yak Grenade Pins – new strap
But I’m not expecting a decade out of these straps, that’s fer shure…
It’s garden fence stapling season, which means it’s time for the annual stapler annoyance. There’s supposed to be a plastic tab angling under the right side of the latch, pressing against the bottom of the staple channel and forcing the triangular tab on the top out through a small opening. All that’s left is the stub:
Stapler latch – broken spring tab
It looks like it ought to be a great 3D printing project, but I came to my senses and snipped off a length of phosphor bronze spring stock, rolled it up, and positioned it inside the opening:
Stapler latch – metal spring fitting
The latch slides into the staple channel until the pin on the side you can see above engages a hole in the channel. The spring looked like this on the way in:
Stapler latch – before closing
And now it’s ready for action:
Stapler latch – in place
Works like a champ and took maybe 15 minutes, tops, to accomplish. Shame it took me a few decades to get around to fixing it, but I finally dropped the clipped-and-filed nail I’d been jamming between the latch and the channel one too many times…
For obscure reasons, I’m kibitzing on a project to rehabilitate an ancient Brother industrial sewing machine. It has a floppy disk drive that stored various custom stitch patterns, but it now crashes / jams / stalls after loading any of the patterns.
I booted an old PC that had a floppy drive using System Rescue CD, only to discover that /dev/fd0 didn’t exist. A bit of search-fu revealed that the floppy kernel module isn’t automagically loaded: a simple modprobe floppy did the trick, after which mount -o ro /mnt/floppy worked fine (it’s in fstab, even if the kernel module isn’t loaded).
The floppy was in IBM PC-DOS format, as you might expect in a system with ICs date-coded in the early 90s and an 8085 CPU (not an 8088 or 8086). Applying dd bs=512 if=/dev/fd0 of=/tmp/floppy.bin produced a measly 12 kB file containing the boot sector, many binary zeos, a line or two of pinball panic, and more binary zeros up to the 0x3000 file size, where it ended due to a hard read error.
So now we know there’s no point in trying to run from the floppy, because there’s nothing to run. According to the instructions, the sewing machine can write to the floppy, so we can examine some of those results to see what the data structures should be.
A new-to-me off-lease Dell Optiplex 760 that I just picked up (for the M2’s LinuxCNC controller) has a floppy drive, so I can let that old hulk go to the recycler. I don’t see a big duty cycle for the floppy, but ya gotta have stuff…
The hose attached to this garden sprayer had failed last season, but the hose fitting had become one with the sprayer. Soaking it with penetrating oil for far longer than seemed necessary didn’t help, so I tried brute force:
Garden sprayer hose fitting
After convincing myself that wasn’t going to work, I cut the fitting off and tried the old standby of collapsing the threaded shell inward with a small punch:
Garden sprayer – rolled-in fitting
That didn’t work, either: the shell really had become one with the sprayer.
As it turned out, the plastic sprayer body had begun to crack in several high-stress locations and would shortly become Yet Another Project. I cut my losses and tossed the hose and the sprayer.
Quite some years ago I installed miniblinds on the southern windows in the living room, which keep the afternoon sun off my upstairs desk. Time passes, they collect a generous layer of dust, and it’s easier to just replace them than to give them the thorough cleaning they deserve; they’re under $10 each.
Miniblind center clip
With the new blinds in hand, the job turned out to be not quite as simple as one might expect(*). The new blinds have their middle support bracket on the right side of the central ladder, which means they’re not a drop-in replacement for the old blinds with their support on the left. That’s OK, I can just unscrew the adapter I made that fits the intended-for-a-flat-window-frame bracket to our mid-1950s curved moulding frames, drill another hole in the right spot, and screw it back in place.
Too bad about that paint, but we agreed that because it’s invisible from inside, we’re just not going to worry about it.
The adapter is a slice of bed frame steel that turned out to have exactly the right length for the job.
Of course, the new bracket has a completely different and incompatible screw hole pattern than the old one, but due to some bizarre slipup, the old bracket fits into the slot in the new blind. I have no explanation for that.
Miniblind mount adapter bracket
I also replaced the sun-faded end brackets, which were essentially identical to the new ones and perfectly fit the existing screw holes.
We had to return and replace the first two blinds, though, as I’d managed to pick up two identical packages with different manufacturing dates. They both had white miniblinds inside and sported the same SKU, but one blind was definitely white and the other a very light gray. This wouldn’t normally matter, but when they’re installed in windows just a few inches apart, the mismatch became painfully obvious.
The new-new blinds come from the same manufacturing lot and had a slightly different shade from both of old blinds and each of the old-new blinds.
(*) Full disclosure: I knew it wasn’t going to be simple, but hope springs eternal.
We put the new furnace (replacing the old one) closer to the wall with the flue pipe, displacing an ancient slop sink (which vanished from the end of the driveway in about an hour) in the process. I “plugged” the drain with a twist of paper towel until the installation was done:
Corroded sink drain nut
The overexposed blue-hot glow comes from the LED worklight on the right.
Despite being chrome-plated brass, the nut at the base of that vertical chrome pipe was firmly corroded to the short nipple emerging from the iron tee. After a few minutes of fruitless wrenching, I deployed a Dremel cutting wheel, slit the nut, gave it a shot with a chisel, and it popped loose. A rubber cap clamped around the nipple finished the job:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 