Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
My pre-trip checklist now includes “Duct Tape”, so, when the tiny screw holding my sunglasses together went spung and dropped the lens on the parking lot gravel, I was prepared:
Sunglasses – duct tape FTW
I continued the mission in full-frontal Harry Potter mode.
Fortunately, it’s a captive screw and returned home with us. Back in the Basement Laboratory, with a Philips 00 screwdriver and threadlocker at hand, the repair was no big deal:
Sunglasses – loose lens screw
You’re looking at the screw head, believe it or not.
And, no, I’m not packing a Philips 00 screwdriver on our next trip.
Recharge and test to get the blue lines, with the red lines from the DOT-01 batteries:
Wasabi DOT-01 NP-BX1 – 2019-11
The double blue line came from a second recharge of that battery, just to see if more electrons would help. Nope, it’s still dead.
The Wasabi battery with the highest capacity also has the weirdly rippled voltage trace and, when I extracted it from the test holder, came out disturbingly warm and all swoll up. This is A Bad Sign™, so it spent the next few hours chillin’ on the patio and now resides in the recycle box.
I swapped the Frankenpad + receiver to the least-conspicuous streamer and, someday, I’ll update all the labels on all the keypads to match the current streams. Until then, the white keycaps shall remain in the same bag as the defunct black keypad, tucked into the Big Box o’ USB mice & suchlike.
While washing our ancient electric crock pot (“slow cooker”), I wondered how corroded the inside of the steel shell had become. A simple nut secured the base plate and unscrewed easily enough, whereupon what I thought was a stud vanished inside the shell.
The shell wasn’t rusty enough to worry about, but the stud turned out to be a crudely chopped-off thumbscrew on a springy rod pulling the base toward the ceramic pot:
Crock Pot Base – OEM thumbscrew
Evidently, they pulled the thumbscrew through the base, tightened the nut, then cut off the thumbscrew flush with the nut.
I desperately wanted to drill a hole in a new thumbscrew and repeat the process, but I no longer have a small drawer full of assorted thumbscrews. So I must either lengthen the existing thread just enough to complete the mission or build a screw from scratch.
The thumbscrew is threaded 10-24, I have a bunch of 10-32 threaded inserts, so pretend they have the same thread diameter and tap one end to 10-24:
Crock Pot Base – tapping insert
Jam the new threads on the thumbscrew and jam a 10-32 setscrew into the un-wrecked end:
Crock Pot Base – thumbscrew extender
You can see the surface rust in there, right?
Make a Delrin bushing to fit around the insert poking through the base:
Crock Pot Base – drilling Delrin button
Reassemble the internal bits with permanent Loctite, top with a nyloc nut, and it’s only a little taller than the original nut:
Crock Pot Base – assembled
The setscrew let me hold the new “stud” in place while torquing the nut, plus it looks spiffy.
Memo to Self: If it ain’t broke, don’t look inside. Hah!
Surprisingly, both Amazon and eBay lack useful thumbscrew assortments …
For the last year or so, the oven temperature control on our Kenmore gas stove has been decreasingly stable, sometimes varying by 100 °F from the setpoint before settling down somewhere close to what it should be. Spotting a replacement control board for a bit over $100, I decided the board used an absolute rotary encoder of the open-frame variety, so I took the thing apart:
Kenmore oven control – PCB overview
The encoder was, indeed, an open frame:
Kenmore oven control – rotary encoder
The red droplet is DeoxIT, the rest of which went inside, just ahead of the contact fingers, and got vigorously massaged across the switch contacts on the wafer by spinning the shaft.
Some time ago, the membrane over the TIMER ON/OFF switch cracked and I applied a small square of Kapton tape. Having the entire controller in hand, I replaced the square with a strip of 2 inch Kapton, carefully aligned with the bezel marks embossed on the membrane, and now it’s smooth all over:
Kenmore oven control – Kapton tape cover
The MIN(ute) ^ switch required a much firmer than usual push, so I tucked a shim cut from a polypropylene clamshell between the membrane and the pin actuating the switch.
We rented a van to haul our bikes on a vacation trip, but the tire pressure warning alarm sounded when I turned into the driveway. Measuring the tire pressures showed the left rear tire was at 51 psi, far below the 72 psi shown on the doorframe sticker, and a quick check showed a possible problem:
Tire FOD – in place
The small circle in the tread to the left of that mark turned out to be a metal tube:
Tire FOD object
Their tire contractor determined the tire wasn’t leaking, the metal tube hadn’t punctured the carcass, and all was right with the world. After, of course, two hours when we expected to be loading the van.
The rental company was good about it, perhaps because I reported they sent the van out with the other rear tire grossly overinflated to 86 psi (!); obviously, their prep didn’t include checking the tires. Somewhat to my surprise, the space under the passenger seat for a jack was empty.
During the trip, the van laid an egg:
Transit Van with Egg
A good time was had by all, but our next bicycling vacation will definitely have much more bicycling and much less driving!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 