Tag: Repairs

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.

The Vassar Farm Garden requires fairly heavy watering, because it’s in full sun all day long, so we lay in a set of drip lines connected through Y valves to a main feeder line running down one end of the plot. Plastic valves tend to be overly fragile, so this year I tried a few much larger full-flow ball valves with a metallic housing:

This valve lay on the ground (as they all do) just inside the gate and served as an occasional supply for a short hose with the hand sprinkler head. I don’t know what’s driving this corrosion, but it’s eating the external threads as well as the valve bore.

Overall, I’m unimpressed…

As expected, my crude bearing repairs on our Whirlpool refrigerator’s freezer fan didn’t last forever; the freezer dog crept back inside over the course of a few months. I recently ordered another replacement fan (yes, sixty bucks for an open-frame fan!), installed it, and have some interesting data points.

The OEM fan in the Whirlpool refrigerator was made by FSP and has no country of origin. The date code on the winding insulation reports 1993 and it lasted for the better part of a dozen years.

The replacement fan, which never sounded quite right and failed in short order, was made by Exact Replacement Parts and has no country of origin. I scrawled 2006 on it, although the bearing noise caused me to remove it almost immediately and re-fix the OEM fan bearings.

The new fan is once again made by FSP, comes with Whirlpool logos on the screw-and-bushing kit bag, and sports Made In Mexico on the winding insulation. So far, it’s sounded OK, although the normal fan whir seems a bit louder & growlier than before. No howls, though, and that counts for a lot.

I infer that the ERP fans weren’t entirely satisfactory, but that’s just a guess.