The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tag: Repairs

If it used to work, it can work again

Horrible Noises Inside Kenmore HE3 Washer: Fixed!

So our whoop-dee-doo Sears Kenmore HE3 clothes washer started emitting horrible scratching & grinding noises, but only every now and then during the high-speed spin cycle or, more rarely, the washing agitation cycle.

In an ordinary washer, you’d suspect the transmission was going bad, but the HE3 has a direct-drive 3-phase motor: no transmission to wear out.

A bit of searching shows HE3 washer drums may fall apart at their welded (?) seams, but that didn’t seem to be the case here. So I press-ganged our daughter into a plumbing job; the machine is something over six years old, so it’s not as if we have any warranty to void.

Move the washer out where you can get to the back without contortions. Pull the plug, turn off the water, unscrew the water supply hoses at the back panel, squash the hose clamp & remove the drain hose.

Sediment buildup in hot water inlet

One obvious, but unrelated, problem appeared when we disconnected the water hoses: plenty of black grit in the hot water inlet. Looks like it’s time to drain & flush the hot water heater again, which will turn into a major project because the anode rod has firmly rust-welded itself in place. That’s a project for another day…

Disassembling the cabinet requires a Torx T-20 bit. There are a lot of screws, so fetch a stable container to hold them all.

Take off the top cover (three screws, then slides back) to reveal the angle brace across the back that holds all the electronics and valves and suchlike. Pull the big vapor vent tube (on the right as you face the rear) out of that bracket, remove the eight (!) screws holding the bracket in place, and move it up out of the way.

Remove the back cover, taking care to not loosen the screws holding the frame crossmembers in place; those are the screws in the U-shaped cutouts along the edges.

Note: you can remove just the back cover by removing the lower screws in the angle brace, all the screws holding the cover, then sliding it down and out at the bottom. It’s easer to see what’s going on if you take the top cover off and moving the angle brace frees up a lot of gimcrackery that gets in your way. Your choice.

Everything connects to the drum housing through exceedingly flexible rubber boots held on by circumferential wire clamps. Grab the ends with Vise-Grip pliers, squash ’em together, and the clamp should slide off the housing onto the boot. Peel the boot off and you can look inside.

Foreign Object Sighted

Peering in through the pressure sensor opening in the bottom rear of the housing revealed something odd: a loose black cylinder. A bit of deft tweezer and grabber work pulled out a much-the-worse-for-wear ballpoint pen housing, minus the cap, point, and pocket clip. The fiber-fill ink reservoir formed a tuft at one end.

Mmmm, that would account for the blue water in the drain tube…

Combine the number of missing parts with an inability to see any of them in the bottom of the housing: more surgery is indicated.

Tub drain boot

The housing drains into the ejector pump through that huge black boot clamped onto the bottom of the drum housing. Put a pan underneath the pressure sensor hole, squeeze the boot, and water will bloosh out the sensor hole, generally landing in the pan. There’s a floating-ball check valve inside the boot that prevents backflow to the housing, so you may need some wiggly-jiggly action to work the water around the valve. A few reps will get most of the water out of the drain boot.

Drain Boot Removed – Pump Inlet

Remove the boot from the housing and pump inlet, remove the ball, and admire the innards. We found most of the rest of the pen in the drain boot, plus a generous helping of slime and gunk. Oh, and a hairband and a big chunk of a pencil.

The pump has a juice-can-size reservoir just inside its inlet, which I think is there to collect debris: a barrier keeps most of the big chunks out of the pump impeller. There’s no way to get stuff out other than lying flat on your stomach and sticking your finger into that slimy hole, so get over it. We extracted the remaining pen bits and most of the rest of the pencil.

While you’re in there, roll over onto your back, reach up inside the drum housing and feel around to get anything else out. Your assistant can shine a flashlight down through the drum perforations; you’ll be able to see the shadows cast by any odds & ends that are lying on the housing.

Wipe the slime off the rubber boots, reassemble in reverse order, and you’re done!

However: the bottom of the washer consists of a big metal pan that will, most likely, start to rattle just after you push the washer back in position. Removal isn’t really an option because one of the front screws is under the motor drive box, but you can sort of pry up the edges and stuff thin cardboard, strips of duct tape, or other elastic stuff between the pan and the washer frame. It took me far too many iterations to figure out what was rattling around in there: it is not obvious!

Debris From Washer

Here’s what we found in the drum housing, drain boot, and pump settling tank: the corpse of one of my favorite Uni-Ball Micro pens, a tiny screw, bits of a pencil that my assistant had been looking for, and one of her hairbands.

That pretty much explains the intermittent grinding sounds: the drum would rotate normally until the swirling water swept the pen housing into contact with the drum, at which point the 800-some-odd RPM rotation would grind the pen against the housing for a few laps. Ditto for the pencil.

Now, the mystery is how that stuff got from inside the drum past the rubber sealing gasket into the space between the drum and the housing. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get a long rigid object through there, but obviously it happens!

Slime Behind Door Gasket

After you move the washer back into position, take ten minutes and a generous handful of rags to wipe the abundant collection of mold & mildew from behind the rubber gasket. You can sort of evert the gasket, which simplifies access to the edge of the drum. As you can see, ours has a nice biofilm going on in there; not visible is the gunk growing on the back side of the gasket.

It seems HE3 washers have a reputation for smelling bad, due to that sort of growth in hidden places. Oddly, we don’t have an odor problem, obviously not through any action on our part. Rumor has it that running a pure-bleach hot-water cycle helps, as does a product for dishwashers that removes their stink, but we don’t have any experience with those.

As a mental math exercise, I had my assistant divide the $300 bucks a plumber would have billed for this repair by the $7/hr she’d get for a typical minimum-wage shit job. She’s thinking that becoming a plumber might beat smiling at retail customers in a dying mall… but I think she should concentrate more on her math & science.

[Rant: Not that America seems to value tech jobs much these days, but she has the advantage of being female, so maybe she can still get a tech gig. Don’t get me started, you know how I get.]

Anyhow, the washer runs just as quietly as it ever did, which is to say that like a turbojet engine spooling up during the spin cycle. At least it doesn’t sound like it’s ingesting a bird every now & again…

[Update: And then the spider holding the drum in place failed, as it does with so many of these washers.]

2009-08-31
Sony DSC-H1 Shutter Button Repair: Putting It Together
The story so far: Damage Assessment and Button Milling.

Some key distances:
- Bezel bottom 3.3 mm thick, excluding depression on bottom surface
- Screw head sticks out of depression 0.9 mm
Some deft work on the bezel installed in the camera, using the blunt end of a transfer punch, a pin vise, and a calculator reveals these protrusions:
- 1.4 mm does not trigger anything
- 2.1 mm triggers the half-pushed focus action
- 2.4 mm reliably triggers the shutter
So the new stem can stick out about 1.4 mm when the button is released and must not stick out more than 2.4 mm with the button fully depressed: a whopping 1 mm of travel!

Eyeballing the shutter release on my DSC-H5, that seems to be about right. I think it has more travel between “released” and “half pressed” than those measurements indicate, but it’s close. And sloppy, too: the H5’s button has a lot of side-to-side wobble, indicating that the stem is not a close fit in the bezel hole.

The screw head is 3 mm dia after being turned down and that’s about the right size for the nut that will adjust the travel distance, as it must fit into the recess in the bezel. The nut sets the protrusion when the shutter button is released: 1.4 mm.

The distance from the shutter button’s bottom to the bezel sets the travel from “released” to “click”: 1 mm, more or less. They’re held apart by the spring, so that’s the default state.

Circular Milling the Nut

I re-centered the 3-jaw chuck under the spindle, put a 1-72 nut on the turned-down screw, and applied some gentle manual CNC to convert the nut from a hex to a disk. The trick is to approach the nut from the right side (the +X side) and go clockwise around it (climb milling), so that the cutting force tends to jam the nut against the screw head. Do it the other way and the nut will zip downward away from the cutter

Surprisingly, I got that right the first time.

Using a 2 mm end mill and figuring a 2.9 mm final diameter, the radius of the circle to move the end mill around the nut is:
R = (2.9 + 2.0) / 2
So the G-code for one pass looks like:
```
#<R>=[[2.9+2.0]/2]
G1 X#<R> F150
G2 I[0-#<R>]
```
Shutter Button Parts

Now, given the fragility of that setup, you don’t cut it all at once. You start from a diameter of maybe 4 mm and go down by 0.2 mm until you hit 3.0, then make a final pass at 2.9 mm. EMC2’s AXIS MDI mode makes this easy enough: type in the commands for a pass at 4.0 mm, then click on the previous command, change 4.0 to 3.8, and then just clickety-click.

Spindle far too slow at 3000 RPM, feed at 150 mm/min seemed fine. Sissy cuts worked out OK.

After the first few passes, my dim consciousness became aware of the fact that this is how I should have turned down the screw head…

Button Assembly – Top

I cleaned up the bezel by putting it in an ultrasonic cleaner to shake the crud off, put it on a warm firewall router overnight to dry it out, then slobbered some Plastruct solvent adhesive into the cracks and clamped it for another night. The bezel was slightly out-of-round from the damage, so I hand-trimmed the bent plastic using a “high speed cutter” (#193, basically an end mill) in a Dremel flexible shaft at about 1/3 max speed until the shutter button bottomed out smoothly within the inner recess. Not a bit of CNC to be seen: hand held all the way.

Button Assembly – Bottom

Then loosen the nut a bit, poke the screw through the bezel, put the spring on, and screw the shutter button in place. Adjust the nut so the screw head is 1.4 – 1.5 mm from the bottom of the bezel with the nut resting in the recess.

Button Assembly – Pressed

Twiddle the shutter button until the screw head protrudes 2.4 mm from the bezel with the button pressed down.

That’s measured with the hole-depth tang of a caliper, sitting atop the screw head. I don’t believe there’s 0.1 mm accuracy in the measurements, but they’re close enough. I did file off a few mold flash bumps from the shutter button & bezel during this adventure.

Mark the screw threads above the button, unscrew it, chop the screw off with a stout diagonal cutter (it’s brass and not very thick, it’s OK), file the end flat, clean up the threads.

The trick seems to be that the button must rest just below the inner ring of the bezel, so that it bottoms out smoothly when pressed. If it’s above the ring, then one side will hang up. The ring depth thus seems to limit the maximum travel, although I can’t say whether this is the way it’s supposed to work or not.

I iterated & filed until the screw was flush with the top of the button with it screwed down to the proper position. It helped to figure out that one turn of the shutter button on the screw changed the “pressed” protrusion by 1/72″ = 0.35 mm.

Urge some low-strength Loctite under the nut and into the shutter button’s hole, reassemble everything, and you’re done.

Urethane Adhesive on Body Socket

The fall bent the bezel tabs so they no longer latch firmly in the camera body. I put two dabs of urethane adhesive on the socket in the body. The adhesive expands (foams!) as it cures; I hope it will lock the bezel in place while still allowing it to be removed if needed.

I dabbed off most of the adhesive you see in the picture before installing the bezel; it’s not as awful as it looks!

The final result has slightly less travel than the (undamaged, original) shutter button in my DSC-H5, but it works perfectly: half-press to focus, full press to trigger the shutter.

Repaired Shutter Button
2009-08-29
Sony DSC-H1 Shutter Button Repair: Rebuilding the Button
Having figured out what to do, I started with the button, which is chromed plastic, nothing too fancy, and not at all hard to machine.

Laser Aligning to the Button Stem

A small post turned from an acrylic rod (the gray cylinder) supports the button in the Sherline 3-jaw chuck attached to the mill table; that was the only way to keep it reasonably level. Laser alignment got eyeballometrically close to the middle; it looks a bit off to the right, but the end result was OK.

Removing the Broken Stem

A 2 mm end-cutting bit chewed off the stem in short order; I set the jog speed to about 100 mm/min and just jogged down until the cutter was flush with the button. Spindle at 4000 rpm, for lack of anything smarter.

I decided to go with a 1-72 brass machine screw, which is slightly larger (1.75 mm) than the original 1.5 mm button stem. That means I must drill out the bezel hole, as well, but the 1.5 mm diameter of the next-smaller 0-80 screws in my assortment was a sloppy fit.

A touch of manual CNC for the drilling, #53 with the spindle at 3000 rpm, Z touched off at the button’s surface:
```
G81 Z-4 R3 F150
```
The spindle was slow enough and the feed fast enough to keep from melting the button without applying any coolant.

I tapped the hole 1-72 by simply screwing the tap in with my fingers…

Chuck-in-chuck For Head Shaping

The 3-jaw lathe chuck doesn’t grip a 1-72 screw (no surprise there), so I grabbed the screw in the Sherline’s smallest drill chuck and poked that in the lathe. This doesn’t make for great concentricity, but it was close enough. The right way, as my buddy Eks reminds me, is to slit a nested bunch of brass tubing and use them as collets, but … next time, fer shure.

Button With Reshaped Screw Head

Anyhow, here’s what the button & screw look like so far. The backside of the screw head looks like it needs some cleanup; there’s nothing like taking a picture to reveal that sort of thing.

The pencil lead is 0.5 mm and the grid in the background has 1 mm squares, just to give you an idea of the scale.
2009-08-28
Sony DSC-H1 Shutter Button Repair: Damage Assessment
Camera Body Damage

My brother-in-law Tee dropped his Sony DSC-H1 camera, which landed atop its shutter button on the pavement.

Bad news…
- the shutter button broke off
- the bezel popped out
- the teeny little snap ring that held the shutter button stem in the bezel vanished, because…
- the stem broke and the end vanished, too
Good news…
- apart from some scuffs, the camera still works
- he managed to find the shutter button
- and the button bezel
- and the spring!
Shutter Button – Spring – Bezel

A bit of browsing reveals that many, many Sony DSC-Hx (where x is an integer from 1 through 9, inclusive) owners have the same problem, minus the inconvenience & embarrassment of first dropping the camera. Turns out that the shutter button stem breaks at that notch in normal use.

It seems the stem snaps while you’re taking pix, whereupon the spring launches itself and the button cap into the nearest river / drain grate / weedy area, never to be seen again. Tee is exceedingly fortunate to have found all the major pieces!

Shutter Button Stem – End View.

Here’s the broken end of the stem, with the button cap out of focus in the background. The stem is 1.5 mm in diameter, so the snap ring was surrounding, what, 0.75 mm of plastic? In what alternate universe did this design decision make sense?

I think the snap ring contributed to the problem by eroding the stem in the notch; that little white stub isn’t half of the stem diameter; it may have stretched under impact, but surely not all that much.

Yes, you can buy a replacement button for about 30 bucks direct from Sony, but it seems the new stem is subject to the same failure after a short while. They’re standing by the original design, marginal though it may be.

Now, obviously, this stem failed from abuse, no argument there. Everybody else had their stem fail without provocation, though, so it really isn’t adequate to the task at hand.

Bezel Socket View

Anyhow, there’s also some damage at the bezel socket on the camera body, but nothing major. The dented silver areas on either side of the switch membrane are ESD shields, so that any static discharge from your finger will (most likely) dissipate on the external frame of the camera, rather than burrow into its guts via the switch.

The bezel twist-locks into the camera body, which means that you can remove the bezel if you can get a good grip on it. It turns clockwise to remove.

Shutter Switch Closeup

Peering closer at the membrane switch, it looks as though the button stem did some damage on its way out, although Tee admits to using various pointy objects to trigger the shutter while figuring out what to do with the camera.

More good news: the switch still works correctly, including the focus function with the button half-pressed, That means the switch membrane and contacts are in good shape.

Bezel – Top View

The bezel itself is pretty well graunched, with a nest of cracks underneath that damaged arc to the left of the pictures. I think it’s in good enough condition that I can remove the bent plastic, ooze some solvent adhesive into the damage, and compress it enough to make everything stick together.

Bezel – Side View

Obviously, this calls for some Quality Shop Time!

The overall plan is to remove the remaining stem from the button, drill-and-tap the button head for a miniature brass screw (1-72, I think), reshape the screw head into a membrane-friendly plunger (about 3 mm diameter and flat), then put it all back together with a nut in place of the snap ring.

I should be able to install the bezel (without the button), then insert some drill rod through the hole to figure out how far the screw must protrude to trigger the focus & shutter switches. Perhaps a pin vise will grip the drill rod and bottom out on the bezel’s central ring, so I can do a trial-and-error fitting?

Then I can adjust the screw to that overall length below the bezel with the button pressed, whack off anything that sticks out above the button, adjust the nut to limit the button’s outward travel, slobber Loctite over everything, and put it all together for the last time.

That’s the plan, anyway. As the Yiddish proverb has it, “If you wish to hear G*d laugh, tell him your plans.”

Some useful dimensions…

Button Dimensions

The rest of the story…

Rebuilding the button

Putting it all back together again
2009-08-27
Silver Soldered Bandsaw Blade: Test to Destruction

Broken Solder Joint

There I was, bandsawing a 24″-diameter circle from 3/8″ plywood when the saw stopped cutting… which is how the bandsaw tells me that the blade joint just came undone. That’s what I get for applying too much torque to the blade, I thought…

As you can see, the joint I described at great length there wasn’t nearly as good as I thought. It has a nice wetted spot in the middle, but the rest of the joint didn’t bond. Alas, the ends of the blade sections had just enough molten solder to look as though they were bonded.

I’ve done other joints with that resistance soldering unit which held up well, but I’ll cheerfully admit I don’t have years of deep experience with it. Given the effort involved in making a bandsaw blade joint (not to mention the fact that I only solder up a new blade when I really need one), this is the first destructive test I’ve seen. It’s not like I’m going to solder up a blade, then tear it apart just to see how it worked, as I did with the nickel strip on those AA cells there.

A change of technique seems in order. The carbon electrode produces enough heat directly under it (which isn’t surprising, that’s how resistance soldering works), so I must cover the full joint area with enough oomph to get a good bond everywhere. That seems to be 1.5 seconds per zap, more or less, repeated as needed.

I have some machinable graphite that I could cut to be one square bandsaw joint at the end, plus a stub from a searchlight electrode that might work with less overall effort. However, a larger electrode probably wouldn’t heat the joint enough to melt the solder everywhere at once.

For what it’s worth, I tried to re-solder the joint without doing full surface preparation by grinding down to bare steel. Didn’t work, natch, which should come as no surprise; wasted half an hour futzing around before I gave up and did it right.

Memo to Self: Use the carbon gouging rod electrode, hit the entire joint, and don’t move until each zap cools!

2009-08-26
Tour Easy: ERRC Easy Reacher Pack Repairs

Grocery Hauling Setup

I have a pair of underseat packs on my Tour Easy that have sagged rather badly over the years. That might have something to do with the fact that my toolkit and other odds & ends weighs more than some bike frames; while I don’t need that stuff very often, it’s good to have around.

Tools & suchlike live in the left-side pack, the near one in the photo, and you can see the problem. The right-side pack holds HT batteries, my belt pack, and other relatively lightweight stuff; I’ll fix that one when I see whether this works. The panniers at the rear wheel are for groceries and other bulky items. The trailer, well, that’s how we do groceries…

Broken Pack Backplate

Anyway, the underseat packs have a black plastic (styrene?) backing that cracked under the stress of the stuff inside, allowing the top corners to cave in and the bottom to droop.

The hooks holding the pack to the underseat rack were riveted through the backing sheet and the hardware, but a couple of good shots with a punch broke them free.

Some rummaging in the Parts Heap turned up a big acrylic sheet (“100 times stronger than glass!”) that’s absolutely the wrong material for the job: it’s too brittle. However, I’d like to see whether a stiff backplate will solve the problem or if I’m going to have to get ambitious and build an internal pack frame.

Acrylic Plate and Aluminum Stiffener

It’s essentially impossible to get a picture of a project built largely from acrylic sheet, but here goes.

I traced the outline of the old backplate onto the new sheet’s protective paper, introduced it to Mr Belt Sander to get those nice round corners, then drilled the holes. It turns out to not be quite symmetric, so there’s a right way and a wrong way to insert it into the pack.

All the hardware is stainless steel. They used aluminum rivets, which is the only reason I could punch them out without too much difficulty, that I’m replacing with SS 10-32 machine screws & nuts.

The aluminum stiffener is a random chunk of ribbed extrusion from the Heap; the original was almost exactly twice as long as one backplate, so the two halves (one for the other pack) are precisely right. I milled out the center rib around the nuts to get enough clearance for a nut driver.

Stiffener Hardware Detail

Herewith, a closeup of the hardware. There’s an acrylic sheet in there, honest, it’s under the aluminum extrusion and fender washer. Really!

I put an automobile license plate in the bottom of each underseat pack to act as a floor for all the crap inside; it’s an almost perfect fit and should give you an idea of the pack’s size. It also maintains the bottom’s rectangular shape and keeps heavy stuff from sagging; there’s a hole scuffed in the bottom from the intersection of a high curb and just such an oversight.

Tour Easy Underseat Pack Detail

Having washed the pack while it was apart (there’s a first time for everything), it looks a lot better than it did before. The yellow block in the front pocket is the kickstand plate mentioned there. It used to have a mesh pocket along the side, too, but that snagged on something and got pretty well ripped, so Mary trimmed it off when she sewed a patch over the aforementioned hole.

It’s still saggy, but the top corners of the plate are holding it up a lot better now. If they crack again, I might just have to go with some aluminum sheet.

These packs seem to be obsolete. The ERRC Lloonngg panniers (search for them) seem to be, well, too long for most purposes; they look as though they would interfere with ordinary rack packs. If I were doing it over, I’d look into hacking a pair of smallish duffel bags.

2009-08-19
Kensington Expert Mouse Trackball: Scroll Ring Troubles
Trackball Scroll Ring

The oddly named Kensington “Expert Mouse” (it’s a trackball) sits to the left of my keyboard, where it serves as my main pointer controller; I’m right-handed, but have used a left-hand mouse / trackball for years.

[Edit: a comment from the future compares it with a different trackball that may work on the right.

Also, search for Kensington scroll to find other posts. There may be no good fix for scroll ring problems.]

Recently the scroll ring has become balky, stuttering upward & downward rather than actually scrolling. It’s an optical device, so I suspected it had ingested a wad of fuzz that blocked the beam path.

The top photo shows the infra-red emitter adjacent to the scroll ring’s slotted rim. The silver bar to the right of the emitter is the magnet that provides those soft detents. There’s no obvious fuzz.

Disassembly is straightforward.
- Tip the ball out into your hand and put it where it can’t possibly roll off the desk.
- Peel the four rubber feet off the bottom, remove four screws, and the top half of the body pops off.
- Remove three screws from each of the two button cap assemblies and pry the button caps off the case bottom.
- Remove two screws from the ball socket, pull it off, and clean any fuzz from the openings.
Surprisingly, I didn’t find much crud at all.

Scroll Ring Emitter and Detector

This photo shows the IR emitter and detector, peering at each other across the electrical isolation gap in the circuit board. Nothing obviously wrong here, either…

They both seem to be dual elements, which makes sense for a quadrature position encoder. Unfortunately, replacing them seems to be really difficult; they don’t look like stock items.

So I put it back together, plugged the USB cable in, restarted the X server (this being Xubuntu 8.10), and it pretty much works again.

Kensington replaced a previous Expert Mouse under warranty when one of the three minuscule red bearing balls that support the trackball went walkaround, but that gadget had been getting erratic, too.

I’m not sure what’s going on, but I have a bad feeling about this.

[Update: More troubles lead to some interesting pix and an insight. Maybe even a fix!]

Further Update: Ten years in the future, a real fix appears!
2009-08-09