Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
The front fender on Mary’s bike suffers a bit more stress than you might expect, as she must wheel it through high grass to her Vassar Farms garden plot and the low-hanging spray flap can snag on the taller greenery.
Re-slicing the original model, printing the result, and installing it took about an hour:
Tour Easy front fender bracket – installed
Affixing the strut with duct tape and a cable tie looks déclassé, but continues to work better than anything else I’ve tried: simple, flexible, easily readjusted, totally nonfussy.
At least I now use black outdoor-rated double-stick foam tape, so life is increasingly good …
A pair of antique collectible Cordomatic reels get occasional use in the Basement Laboratory:
Cordomatic 500P reel – installed
The extension cord reel didn’t latch reliably when needed, so …
There’s an obvious screw on the other side and a non-obvious screw hidden in the obvious place:
Cordomatic 500P reel – hidden screw
The electrical contacts were in good shape, although I smeared the grease around the rings just to make it seem like I did something:
Cordomatic 500P reel – contacts
The ratchet pawls hide under a riveted cover:
Cordomatic 500P reel – pawl cover
The duct tape shows I’d been in there once before, likely for the same problem, and had already drilled out the rivets.
Alas, I forgot to take a picture after removing the cover, but the general idea is to put just a dot of oil on the pivots (which, as you’d expect, are the rivets), wiggle everything around, and reassemble in reverse order.
It’ll surely work long enough that I can forget I was in there twice before …
All the work on Mary’s bike reminded me of the rear fender bracket I meant to install on mine, with more clearance for the strut stabilizing the under-seat packs:
Tour Easy Rear Fender Bracket – long setback – solid model – show
Rather than glue a PETG filament snippet into a screw, I turned a little Delrin plug:
Tour Easy Rear Fender Bracket – screw insert
It’s ready for installation when I’m willing to put the bike up on the rack and pull the rear wheel:
Tour Easy Rear Fender Bracket – screw detail
That’s actually the second iteration for the screw, as the first suffered a lethal encounter with the Greater Shopvac. I know exactly where it is, but I’m not going there …
This happened while switching from natural to black PETG:
M2 nozzle clog – exterior
A closer look:
M2 nozzle clog – exterior detail
Those pix happened after trying to extract whatever-it-is with tweezers, so it’s definitely something with a higher melting point than PETG.
Removing the (warm) nozzle with the block held in a vise reveals a tuft of something:
M2 nozzle clog – interior
The tuft accumulated several turns while unthreading the nozzle from the hot end.
Heating the nozzle a bit more released the tuft:
M2 nozzle clog – extracted tuft
The black-to-clear transition tailing off at the bottom came from the PETG around the tuft in the cone-shaped end of the nozzle above the aperture. The 100 mil squares suggest the tuft was a distinct entity, rather than a collection of threads, and might have been over 5 mm long.
Perhaps a fragment of PTFE or another high-melting-point plastic?
Reassemble in reverse order, reset the nozzle to Z=0 on the platform, and it’s all good.
The plastic frame failed at the pull cord opening, obviously a weak and, alas, non-repairable point.
A quick trip to Lowe’s produced a new miniblind with mounting hardware completely different from the old one. This came as no surprise, as every new miniblind differs from all previous ones; miniblind mounting hardware is not strongly conserved.
The broken frame fit into the plastic end caps mounted just beyond the scarred paint marking the bracket location required for the previous miniblind:
Miniblind bracket – V3
Note that the caps mount with a single screw in the homebrew bracket’s face, which has two holes to match the previous-previous cap.
Although the shiny new hardware had two slots, they neither lined up with the existing bracket holes nor extended quite far enough vertically. I lined things up, marked and drilled a single midline hole in both the new hardware and the old bracket, and reused the old screw and nut:
Miniblind bracket – V4 side
Moving the bracket back to its previous-previous location exposed the scarred paint under the previous position:
Miniblind bracket – V4 front
Fortunately, it’s hidden by the installed miniblind.
Hairline V tool – 0.2 0.3 0.4 DOC 10K RPM – water cool mid
The bottom blue hairline started with a good cut and ended with the V tool skating along the surface without cutting. The raggedy red one just above it is what happens when you (well, I) try engraving a hairline through Kapton tape without coolant; just don’t do that thing.
The 3D printed fixture holding the cursor came from a neurotically aligned Makergear M2 and the tooling plate has never had much attention to its alignment, so I figured the tilt probably came from crud between the tooling plate and the Sherline’s X axis table, with the printed fixture contributing zilch to the problem.
Which turned out to be the case. Scraping a few flakes from the bottom of the plate and top of the table, dissolving old crud with water + alcohol, and passing a file over both surfaces definitely made a difference. I converted a sheet of 0.1 mm laminating plastic film into a pad by punching holes for the T-nuts:
Sherline tooling plate pad
Snugging the tooling plate down produced perfect alignment along the length of three 0.3 mm deep hairlines:
On rare occasions, our longsuffering and much-repaired Kenmoreclothesdryer will sometimes not fully dry a load, as if the heater didn’t turn on. Setting the temperature selector to High:
Kenmore dryer temperature selector – front panel
Then resetting the cycle timer to the spot marked with the otherwise unlabeled asterisk to activate the humidity sensor gets the job done:
Kenmore dryer cycle select dial
We normally crank the knob to the asterisk, leave the temperature set to Normal, and mostly it works.
I thought perhaps the temperature selector had become intermittent, along the lines of the temperature control knob on the oven, so I turned off the breaker, verified the dryer was disconnected, and popped the top:
Kenmore dryer temperature selector – part detail
It turns out that part is no longer available from any of the usual sources; one describes their inventory as both “used” and “out of stock”; if it’s dead, a resurrection will be in order.
The selector knob has three positions:
Low = 0 Ω, as in a closed switch
Medium = 5.8 kΩ, most likely a fixed resistor
High = open circuit, as in an open switch
The Low and High positions meet the limits shown in the diagram and Medium falls in between, so it seems to be working as designed. If it intermittently fails as a short, then the clothes would get Low heat and (I think) would emerge somewhat more dry than we notice.
I put it all back together, but we won’t know for a while if my laying-on-of-hands non-repair had any effect.
One terrifying possibility, which we reject out of hand, is that we occasionally forget to crank the cycle knob around to the asterisk before punching the Start button. That would explain all the observed facts and contradict none, but is inconceivable.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 