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

  • Mini-Lathe Carriage Stop Rebuild

    Mini-Lathe Carriage Stop Rebuild

    I finally managed to whack the mini-lathe’s carriage stop handle with the chuck, prompting a quick repair:

    Carriage Stop - handle epoxy clamping
    Carriage Stop – handle epoxy clamping

    I probably should have epoxied a rod into the recess under the handle, seated in a drilled hole into the hub, but let’s see how long this quick-n-dirty version lasts.

    While I had the hood up epoxy was curing, I lasered a block of edge-lit acrylic to replace the credit card shims:

    Carriage Stop - spacer
    Carriage Stop – spacer

    Which turned out to be one itsy too thick. Rather than sand / machine it down, the step over on the left grew a little brass shim:

    Carriage Stop - spacer and shim
    Carriage Stop – spacer and shim

    Both pieces depend on snippets of adhesive sheet to hold them in place, which seems reasonable because they’re always in compression. That also eliminates the hole and pin I originally thought would be necessary; living in the future is just grand.

    Thing looks like it grew there:

    Carriage Stop - installed
    Carriage Stop – installed

    The orange stripe on the handle is laser-safe PSA vinyl.

    That was easy …

  • SJCAM M50 Condensation: Redux

    SJCAM M50 Condensation: Redux

    The SJCAM M50 camera gasket seems unable to cope with The New Normal weather conditions around here:

    SJCAM M50 - screen condensation
    SJCAM M50 – screen condensation

    I think this was probably another case of diurnal pumping, given the exceedingly hot days and cool nights in late July.

    Plenty of water condensed on the bottom of the battery compartment cover:

    SJCAM M50 - battery lid condensation
    SJCAM M50 – battery lid condensation

    And inside the compartment around the AA cells:

    SJCAM M50 - battery compartment condensation
    SJCAM M50 – battery compartment condensation

    Unlike the previous leak, the camera lens wasn’t involved, so I did not disassemble the case. I let the opened camera (without batteries) dry out in the hot hot sun for the rest of the day and it seemed fine by evening.

    Keeping it out of full sunlight during the day definitely limits the locations I can use.

  • Dandelion Weeder Repair

    Dandelion Weeder Repair

    This dandelion weeder was no match for the rugged weeds among the decorative grasses Mary planted along the road out front:

    Dandelion Weeder - bent
    Dandelion Weeder – bent

    You might expect the tang to extend well into the handle, but that’s not what you get in a cheap tool:

    Dandelion Weeder - ferrule detail
    Dandelion Weeder – ferrule detail

    The Bucket o’ Rod-like Materials had a rake handle about the right diameter, so I sawed off a suitable length, set up the steady rest with a bushing, and turned the end to match the ferrule:

    Dandelion Weeder - end turning
    Dandelion Weeder – end turning

    Pound the ferrule into place and drill the new handle to fit the tang:

    Dandelion Weeder - drilling setup
    Dandelion Weeder – drilling setup

    The handle seemed a bit raw and, as it was already chucked in the lathe, got a synthetic string wrap with clear epoxy coating:

    Dandelion Weeder - string epoxy
    Dandelion Weeder – string epoxy

    The pourable epoxy is reaching the end of its shelf life, but seemed entirely suitable for the purpose. I wrapped two layers of string around the dry handle, laid paper over the lathe bed, slathered epoxy over the whole affair, and let the lathe turn dead-slow for most of the day to even out the coat.

    The next day: hammer the blade mostly straight again, smear JB QuikWeld on the tang and into the hole, gently hammer them together, chuck the blade, apply more epoxy to the ends, and let it turn:

    Dandelion Weeder - end epoxy
    Dandelion Weeder – end epoxy

    A careful inspection reveals my casual disregard of the finer points of tool handle craftsmanship, but it came out surprisingly pretty:

    Dandelion Weeder - repaired
    Dandelion Weeder – repaired

    The blade remains the finest butter-soft cheap steel and still doesn’t extend the length of the handle, but Quality Shop Time™ is not to be sniffed at.

    And, hey, nary a trace of 3D printing or laser cutting!

  • FitBit Charge 5 Reboot

    FitBit Charge 5 Reboot

    Wearing my FitBIt Charge 5 tracker in the shower without activating its Water Lock feature occasionally produces odd results, but the most recent mishap ventured deep into the peculiar:

    Jammed FitBit Charge 5
    Jammed FitBit Charge 5

    Its complete lack of buttons makes the thing completely waterproof, but also means it cannot continue when the touch / swipe interface gets horribly confused.

    The recovery process requires snapping it onto its USB charging cable, then pressing the nearly invisible button embedded in the USB connector shell three times, with one second between each press: click hippopotamus click hippopotamus click.

    Then it restarts / reboots and eventually all is well again.

    Perhaps I can now recall the magic incantation without digging through the online help again, because I am certainly not going to suddenly remember to do the Water Lock dance before showering.

  • Gooseneck LED: First Failure

    Gooseneck LED: First Failure

    Twelve years ago I rebuilt a gooseneck lamp to carry a surplus LED head:

    Finished LED Floodlight
    Finished LED Floodlight

    One of its three LEDs just failed:

    LED Gooseneck lamp - first failure
    LED Gooseneck lamp – first failure

    Given that I very deliberately glued the whole thing together in the sure knowledge “the lamp should outlast me” and much later built the other LED head into a desk lamp, well, it’s like that and that’s the way it is.

    The Sherline will be just a little bit dimmer in all those photos …

  • Schwalbe Marathon Plus vs. Glass Chip

    Schwalbe Marathon Plus vs. Glass Chip

    My pre-ride thumb check showed a flat rear tire on Mary’s Tour Easy:

    Glass chip - end view in tread
    Glass chip – end view in tread

    So we fetched groceries with the car.

    As usual, no tire armor can withstand a glass blade:

    Glass Chip - side view
    Glass Chip – side view

    It’s a bit over 5 mm from the knife edge to the ground-flat end, just long enough to punch through a rather well-worn Schwalbe Marathon Plus tire and poke a slow leak in the tube.

    The tire has covered enough miles to wear the tread down to maybe half a millimeter over the blue armor layer:

    Glass chip - tire damage
    Glass chip – tire damage

    Time for a new tire!

    For the record, the odometer is just shy of 35 k miles and she rides about 1500 miles a year; somewhat less over the last year for reasons not relevant here. As best I can tell, the tire has been on there for about five years and 7000 miles.

  • Manjaro XFCE Slow File Loading

    A month or so ago a Manjaro update caused all file loading to take minutes, rather than seconds. This sort of breakage seems endemic to rolling update distros, although most glitches vanish within a few days as more knowledgeable users track down the problems and apply the fixes.

    File loads and program startups continued to be achingly slow, so I trawled the Interwebs in search of a resolution, tried various suggestions, and had no success until:

    sudo pacman --remove xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

    Some background information:

    A description of what a desktop-portal is all about:

    When using Free Software, when it breaks you get to keep all the pieces. In this case, I do not profess to understand how the pieces fit together.