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

  • Downgrading Yubikey-Manager

    It seems that Manjaro’s 5.0.0-1 version of the yubikey-manager crashes due to inscrutable errors, with the effect of not letting me use it to sign in at all the sites I’d set up to use TOTP authentication.

    If the previous version (4.0.9-1) were still in the pacman cache, then downgrading would be straightforward:

    sudo pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/firefox-64.0.2-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

    Regrettably, I had recently cleaned things up and flushed the cache, so I had to fetch the package (and its signature) from the “y” directory of the Arch archive, then install it:

    sudo pacman -U /tmp/yubikey-manager-4.0.9-1-any.pkg.tar.zst

loading packages...
warning: downgrading package yubikey-manager (5.0.0-1 => 4.0.9-1)
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (1) yubikey-manager-4.0.9-1

Total Installed Size:   1.11 MiB
Net Upgrade Size:      -0.13 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] Y
<<< snippage >>>

    Whereupon It Just Worked™ again.

    I expect someone more experienced than I will have long since filed a bug report / sent a pull request / whatever, because I have little idea how to do any of that. The next upgrade should work just fine.

  • Icemaker Water Chiller: Inlet Check Valve Debris

    Icemaker Water Chiller: Inlet Check Valve Debris

    Because the icemaker sits atop the cooling water bucket, when the pump turns off the water drains back through the laser tube into the bucket:

    Silonn icemaker - installed
    Silonn icemaker – installed

    The bucket contained all the water to start with, so with the icemaker and laser tube empty, all the water is back in the bucket. Getting all the bubbles out of the laser tube takes a while after the pump starts running, so I stuck a check valve on the laser output tube in the icemaker’s reservoir:

    Silonn icemaker - inlet check valve
    Silonn icemaker – inlet check valve

    Which, after a few days, developed a slow leak, once again emptying the reservoir.

    There being no way to dismantle the valve for analysis and cleaning, I just cut it apart:

    Silonn icemaker - inlet check disassembly
    Silonn icemaker – inlet check disassembly

    Lo and behold, a small tangle of thin fibers had found its way into the valve:

    Silonn icemaker - check valve debris
    Silonn icemaker – check valve debris

    Which held the silicone disk ajar and let the water slowly leak backwards through the valve.

    I have no idea where it might have come from, but a simple filter seems like a good idea. Given that the pump produces pretty nearly zero pressure, anything fancier than a coffee filter in a funnel would present too much back pressure.

    Or, with three more valves in the bag, I can wait to see how long it takes for another tangle to arrive …

  • Dripworks Mainline Puncture: In A Good Cause

    Dripworks Mainline Puncture: In A Good Cause

    Mary poked a garden fork tine into the mainline pipe of the garden irrigation plumbIng:

    Mainline pipe puncture
    Mainline pipe puncture

    Fortunately, I have a pipe clamp for just such occasions:

    Mainline pipe puncture - repaired - with cause
    Mainline pipe puncture – repaired – with cause

    After installing the clamp, we excavated the reddish lump just beyond it:

    Mainline pipe puncture - excavated sweet potato
    Mainline pipe puncture – excavated sweet potato

    It’s a purple sweet potato, one of several that had escaped from their assigned plot, grown beyond the pipe, and burrowed under the path.

    Her garden is as neat and tidy as a garden can be, but digging in the soil to find the crops isn’t an exact process!

  • Tour Easy: Another Front Fender Bracket

    Tour Easy: Another Front Fender Bracket

    The mudflap on my front fender rides low enough to snag on obstacles and the most recent incident (about which more later) was a doozy, breaking the left strut ferrule and pulling the bracket off its double-sticky foam tape attachment. Fortunately, the repair kit now has plenty of duct tape.

    The replacement printed up and installed just like its predecessors:

    Tour Easy - front fender bracket
    Tour Easy – front fender bracket

    Having the bracket be the weakest link makes perfect sense to me …

  • Never, Ever Run Your Laser Cutter Unattended

    Never, Ever Run Your Laser Cutter Unattended

    While running some finger-joint test pieces, this happened:

    Detached laser lens holder
    Detached laser lens holder

    The knurled ring just below the Tight→ label worked its way loose and released the lens holder tube collet, whereupon the whole affair fell out and dangled on the air hose & wires as the gantry continued to zigzag along the finger pattern.

    As is my custom, I was watching the proceedings and managed to poke the controller’s STOP button, which was a mistake. What I should have done was slap the EMERGENCY STOP mushroom switch, because the STOP button just tells the controller to cancel the current action and return to the home position, which resulted in dragging the lens holder across the plywood and platform.

    No harm done, as far as I could tell, and it realigned easily enough.

    The more typical laser cutter failure seems to be having the controller execute the Halt and Catch Fire instruction, resulting in at least a ruined workpiece, sometimes a ruined laser, and occasionally a serious conflagration.

    Lesson learned: practice slapping the Big Red Switch every now and then.

  • Epson ET-3830 Refilling

    Epson ET-3830 Refilling

    Although the blurb for the Epson ET-3830 All-In-One scanner / printer says “up to 2 years of ink in the box”, the black ink hit the bottom line of the tank near the end of August:

    Epson ET-3830 - refilling black ink
    Epson ET-3830 – refilling black ink

    Refilling is totally without drama, which is worth a couple of bucks right there.

    Being that type of guy, I keep track of ink vs. time:

    Epson ET-3830 - ink status
    Epson ET-3830 – ink status

    In round numbers, it looks like we use nearly all of a 127 ml bottle of black ink and a bit more than half of an 70 ml bottle of color ink every eight months.

    I find it much easier to read long articles and tech documents while slumped in the Power Chair than to scroll through them on big or little screens, so we go through much more ink and paper than most folks.

  • Champion Hose Nozzle

    Champion Hose Nozzle

    An old brass hose nozzle emerged from my garden hydraulics toolbox when a much newer plastic nozzle failed. Unfortunately, this one leaked a bit too much to serve as a replacement, so I grabbed it in the vise while pondering how to disassemble it:

    Champion brass hose nozzle - disassembly
    Champion brass hose nozzle – disassembly

    It turns out the knurled ring is threaded into the nozzle and, even at this late date, responds well to gentle persuasion with a Vise-Grip:

    Champion brass hose nozzle - parts
    Champion brass hose nozzle – parts

    The washer is a lost cause, but I managed to find an O-ring that fit perfectly in the space available. Clearing some crud around the nozzle hole and buffing up the matching conical section improved its sealing ability, so I’ll call it a win.

    The word ITALY stamped opposite CHAMPION suggests this thing might be as old as I am; it’s been a while since either brass or Italy was competitive in the world of cheap manufactured goods.