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

  • Car vs. Mailbox: Replacement Boxes

    Car vs. Mailbox: Replacement Boxes

    Combining a new mailbox with a post and an old mailbox I had on hand, upcycling some scrap wood, then sticking on a few digits and a seasonal decoration found on a walk, should shake loose the mail currently stuck in the USPS delivery system:

    Mailboxes - south view
    Mailboxes – south view

    That’s an Extra Large mailbox, suitable for most packages arriving by USPS, and dwarfing the ordinary mailbox on the north side:

    Mailboxes - north view
    Mailboxes – north view

    The post is just uphill from the utility pole stub formerly supporting the previous mailboxes. Much to my astonishment, my post hole digger got 30 inches down before hitting The Final Rock, deep enough for the task at hand.

    The boxes sit on slabs harvested from an old door and screwed to two layers of Chinese plywood from the laser cutter’s shipping crate, all unpainted / untreated interior-grade (at best) wood cut with a circular saw. My assumption is they’ll last long enough for the purpose and, not having formed a deep emotional bond with them, I won’t feel too bad when the assembly gets pulverized.

    The whole affair sports a rakish tilt toward the street, in the hope of encouraging rainwater to run off, rather than soak in, but I fully expect the untreated plywood to act as a sponge and delaminate / curl / splay in a spectacular & amusing fashion.

    The pale rectangle across the vertical post is a (laser cut!) Chinese plywood plate intended to hold the crossbar together. The vertical and horizontal posts meet in a simple cross lap joint that surely wasn’t intended to support nearly so much weight: reinforcement seems appropriate.

    Next project: sort out the insurance claim …

  • Toilet Flush Valve Re-chaining

    Toilet Flush Valve Re-chaining

    I don’t think I flushed the pot any more vigorously than usual, but the plastic chain snapped off at the flush valve:

    Flush valve chain - broken plastic
    Flush valve chain – broken plastic

    Some rummaging in the Chain Locker produced a steel chain from a long-ago flush valve that snapped into place:

    Flush valve chain - steel
    Flush valve chain – steel

    Despite what you may think, I do not enjoy fiddling with this stuff, so I locked the link in place with a dab of hot melt glue:

    Flush valve chain - steel glued
    Flush valve chain – steel glued

    Having recently repaired the other pot in the house, perhaps they’ll stay fixed for a while. It could happen!

  • Acrylic Engraving Dust

    Acrylic Engraving Dust

    The MDF signs I made last year disintegrated pretty much on the expected schedule, so it’s time for something more durable:

    Please Close The Gate - acrylic engraving
    Please Close The Gate – acrylic engraving

    The idea is to engrave both sides of a 3 mm orange acrylic sheet, shoot it with rattlecan black paint, and declare victory. The second step awaits warmer weather, but at least I’m doing my part to prepare for the new gardening season.

    Vaporizing that much acrylic produces a fair bit of debris:

    Please Close The Gate - acrylic dust on laser head
    Please Close The Gate – acrylic dust on laser head

    Some dust / vapor accumulates / condenses on the honeycomb platform beyond the orange sign, but most of it gets through to the baffle on the exhaust duct:

    Please Close The Gate - acrylic dust on exhaust port
    Please Close The Gate – acrylic dust on exhaust port

    A closer look shows it really does grow out from the perimeter of each hole:

    Please Close The Gate - acrylic dust on exhaust port - detail
    Please Close The Gate – acrylic dust on exhaust port – detail

    Now, if that doesn’t trip your trypophobia, nothing will …

    A few passes with the trusty Electrolux vacuum’s dust brush brought the visible surfaces back to normal.

    By now, the duct fan blades have surely layered on a good coating, too, which shall remain undisturbed until I find a better reason to open the duct.

  • Ersatz Library Card: Fixed

    Ersatz Library Card: Fixed

    Sharper eyes than mine pointed out I misspelled Poughkeepsie, so I took advantage of the opportunity to make the whole thing look better:

    Library card tag - revised front
    Library card tag – revised front

    It turns out the low-surface-energy tape stuck like glue to the acrylic tag (because that’s what it’s designed for) and peeled right off the laminating film on the printed paper. So I stuck some ordinary adhesive film to the back of the new paper label, left its protective paper on the other side, cold laminated the film+paper, laser-cut the outline, peeled off the back side of the laminating film with the protective paper, and stuck the new adhesive to the LSE tape still on the tag.

    I have no idea how well this will work out in the long term, what with two adhesive layers bonded to each other, but this whole thing is in the nature of an experiment.

  • Eyeglass Spring Temple: Screw Hole Tweak

    Eyeglass Spring Temple: Screw Hole Tweak

    A screws in one of Mary’s eyeglasses unscrewed itself, but, miraculously, we found it and I retired to the shop.

    Because the glasses have spring temples, the screw would not align no matter what force I applied to it:

    Eyeglass spring temple - screw misalignment
    Eyeglass spring temple – screw misalignment

    So I just embiggened the hole until the available force did the trick:

    Eyeglass spring temple - hole filing
    Eyeglass spring temple – hole filing

    Dots of Loctite worked into the threads should prevent that from happening again, but I’ve learned to never say never.

    In retrospect, the temple pivots have an exposed slot that I think would allow jamming a block in place after pulling the spring-loaded pivot outward. Temple springs are impossibly stiff and I have previously failed to budge them in glasses without the slots, so I don’t know how well that might work.

    Verily: If brute force isn’t working for you, then you’re not using enough of it.

  • Kitchen Under-sink Cabinet Fan Incident

    Kitchen Under-sink Cabinet Fan Incident

    During the course of diagnosing and fixing the latest oven igniter failure, an unrelated series of events produced a flood under the kitchen sink and across the floor. After cleaning up the mess and determining the floor under the cabinet was merely damp, rather than wet, I drilled a hole suitable for another PC cooling fan from the Box o’ MostlyFans, installed the fan to pull air upward, and let it run for a couple of days while watching the humidity drop.

    Fortunately, I had a hole saw exactly the right size for an 80 mm case fan:

    Kitchen sink - fan cover plate
    Kitchen sink – fan cover plate

    I will lay big money on a bet saying your kitchen cabinets don’t have Real Wood like that, nor are the interiors painted bold Chinese Red. This place really is a time capsule from 1955.

    While the drying happened, I made a hole cover from 1.5 mm black acrylic and, there being no style points involved, rounded up a quartet of black-oxide self-drilling sheet metal screws to hold it in place.

    Although it’s not obvious, there’s a layer of transparent plastic “shelf paper” in there. It covers the fan hole under the cover, so any future spills will have approximately the same difficulty reaching the floor as this one did.

    The LightBurn layout produces both the fan cover and a template to mark the four screw holes around the fan opening:

    Kitchen Sink Fan - LB layout
    Kitchen Sink Fan – LB layout

    The blue tool layer lines serve as a guide for the rest of the cover layout; the matching orange square on the right marks the fan outline on the drill template as a quick size check.

    No need for an SVG version, because now that you have the general idea, it’s easy to recreate it for your own fan.

  • Kenmore 362.75581890 Oven: Another Igniter Bites The Dust

    Kenmore 362.75581890 Oven: Another Igniter Bites The Dust

    Our story so far:

    • We installed a Kenmore gas range around the turn of the millennium
    • 2006 – Oven burner tube & igniter replaced
    • 2014 – Igniter replaced

    Apparently igniters last about eight years, regardless of provenance, because the igniter just failed, with the usual symptoms of low current draw (about 2 A), failed ignition, and a faint smell of propane (well, mercaptan) before the safety valve kicked in:

    Oven igniter - location
    Oven igniter – location

    The new igniter, another low-buck Amazon offering, came with half a green plastic connector block that mated neatly with the existing half under the oven. Unfortunately, the new wires had female pins crimped on their ends, rather than the male pins required by the existing connector and the ceramic wire nuts I’d used to join the previous igniter to the OEM connector were non-removable.

    So I trimmed the old wires to a usable length and applied the new ceramic wire nuts to the stubs:

    Oven igniter - connector rewiring
    Oven igniter – connector rewiring

    Also as before, the new igniter measures 3 A, definitely below the low end of the valve’s 3.3 to 3.6 A range:

    Oven igniter - current test
    Oven igniter – current test

    If this one lasts eight years, I won’t be the guy replacing it …