Posts Tagged Repairs
Whirlpool Refrigerator Drawer Support Re-Re-Re-Gluing
Posted by Ed in Home Ec, Machine Shop on 2019-07-03
Spring cleaning provided the opportunity for Yet Another Episode in my long-standing battle with the Whirlpool refrigerator entropy generator:
That little thing supports half the weight of the two drawers across the bottom of the refrigerator; how such a thin plastic member was supposed to be adequate to the task continues to escape me.
If we had to pay real money for all the repairs I’ve made to that piece of crap, we’d have replaced it long ago. The only thing that hasn’t failed so far is the compressor, so driving it until it drops continues to make sense; replacing a working anything seems like a bad idea.
American Standard Kitchen Faucet: Valve Shaft Mystery
Posted by Ed in Home Ec, Machine Shop on 2019-06-30
The latest in a continuing series of annoyances from our American Standard kitchen faucet: it became increasingly hard to turn it on with the handle all the way to the left in the “hot” position. Bear in mind this valve is less than a year old and I replaced its predecessor two years before that, after maybe a decade of service from the OEM valve.
Pulling it apart revealed the problem, which requires a close inspection.
The view from the “cold” side:
And from the “hot” side:
See it?
The valve handle stem pivots on the 4 mm shaft passing through the black “engineering plastic” shape inside the red hot-limit ring. This top view shows the overall layout:
The shaft has worked its way leftward, toward the “hot” side, until it bumped into the limit ring. The right end of the shaft hasn’t come completely out of the inside of its pivot, but it’s apparently gone far enough to stop pivoting freely.
This may also explain how the previous hot-limit ring worked loose: the misplaced shaft applies torque to the limit ring as we move the lever to the “cold” side. I don’t know how the ring worked its way upward from its positioning notches. Overall, it seem plausible.
Installing a new valve isn’t going to get us a better design, so I must figure out how to keep the shaft in the middle of its travel. Perhaps replacing it with a slightly longer shaft will work around the problem, because it simply can’t slide in either direction.
Loosening the three screws holding the cartridge down (and applying pressure against the seals) reduces the force required to move the faucet, even with the shaft in the wrong position. This suggests the valve body distorts slightly, so I loosened all three and (roughly) equalized their torque; the valve isn’t leaking and we’ll see what happens next.
Garden Soaker Hose Connector Repair
Posted by Ed in Machine Shop, Software on 2019-06-27
Two of Mary’s garden soaker hoses failed their pre-installation checks with leaks from around their connectors. The problem seemed to be a break in the hose inside the connector, with water spewing out of the connector around the hose. Having previously fixed a gash in another hose, I figured I might have some success at fixing these leaks.
The general idea is to squish enough silicone rubber inside the connector to seal around the hose, then clamp the hose and connector snugly enough to hold the rubber in place:
The enlarged recess fits around the brass connector shell, which is squashed loosely around the hose and from which the leaking water emerges. Of course, because this is a different hose, the previous model didn’t quite fit and I had to doodle up new geometry:
As before, I bandsawed aluminum backing plates to ensure the plastic didn’t get all bendy in the middle:
The hose clamp (!) around the connector on the far right ensures a split in the brass shell doesn’t get any larger.
They’ll spend the rest of their lives under the garden mulch, where nobody will ever see those bulky lumps. Life is good!
The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:
Ooma Telo 2: Speaker FAIL
Posted by Ed in Electronics Workbench, Home Ec, Machine Shop on 2019-06-26
The tiny voice inside our Ooma Telo 2 box died, although the VOIP phone service continued to work fine. A bit of searching showed the speaker seems to be the weak link.
Well, I can fix that.
Start by prying the recessed top panel off the case:
Remove the circuit board to expose the tiny speaker, taking care not to rip the tiny wires out of the tiny connector:
You can’t measure a dead speaker, but it seems to be an 8 Ω unit.
The speaker sits in a rubber surround, with a foam rubber cushion against the PCB, tucked into a walled garden stiffening the case:
I don’t happen to have a tiny 8 Ω speaker, but I do have a bunch of small speakers, so I bulldozed those walls with a flush cutting pliers and a bit of cussing to make room:
Nibble an adapter ring to match the rim of the new speaker, thereby routing the sound out those little holes, and hot-melt glue it in place:
Hot-melt glue the new speaker in place atop the adapter, taking care to fill all the edges / cracks / crevices below it with an impenetrable wall of glop:
The sealing part turns out to be critical with these little speakers, because a leak from front to back will pretty much cancel all the sound from the cone.
Cut the wires off the old speaker, affix to the new one, replace the PCB, snap the case lid in place, and it sounds better than new.
Millions of transistors in those ICs, but Ooma can’t spec a good speaker? Maybe they should have used a bigger speaker to begin with; ya never know.
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 …
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