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 snapped loose while we were on our way for groceries, but my repair kit now once again includes a few feet of duct tape and we continued the mission:
Tour Easy front fender – duct tape FTW
The final fracture seems to be just the little gray section amid the older fractures, so the Planet Bike clip was hanging on by a thread:
Tour Easy front fender – broken clip
Our bikes being equipped as alike as I can make them, another copy of the bracket I used on my bike sufficed:
Tour Easy front fender – new bracket
Stipulated: duct tape is déclassé, but it works better than anything else I’ve tried.
Yup, gently crushing it in a vise splits the case enough to work the Designated Prydriver around the joint, a process considerably simplified by the knowledge the case isn’t going back together again.
Prying the top off reveals the cells and their connections:
Dell laptop battery – circuitry
One of the cells had corroded, accounting for the pack’s failure:
Dell laptop battery – corroded cell
The others were undamaged, but had self-discharged down to about 1.5 V over the course of several years and refused to charge.
The moral may be to tear the pack apart as soon as it fails, a point always easier to recognize in retrospect.
So I taped the packs to prevent shorts and tossed them into the recycle box.
Down near the end, the poor thing barely gave one brushing after an overnight charge.
While I was dismantling the case, I charged the last two new-old-stock NiMH cells:
Sonicare Essence – charging short cells
They arrived the same five years ago as the deaders in the toothbrush, but haven’t been used in the interim and charged well enough. The NiteCore D4 charger arrived after they did and isn’t really intended for 2/3 AA cells, so I used short brass tubes to make up the difference. I should have used the 300 mA low-current charging option (press-and-hold the Mode button for a second), although it didn’t overcook them at 750 mA.
The process went pretty much as before, with the new cells soldered in place atop the PCB:
Sonicare Essence – batteries on PCB
And the PCB tucked back into the case:
Sonicare Essence – batteries installed
I applied a solder bridge to the BLINKY pads, which seemed to disable the blinking and turn the LED on full with the toothbrush in the charger. Without waiting for a full charge cycle, I sucked the solder off the pads and restored the previous blinkiness.
A few strips of Kapton tape and it’s back in operation:
Sonicare Essence – retaped
The first charge lasted for two weeks, so things are looking good again. When the stock of knockoff replacement brush heads wears out, it’ll be time to get a whole new toothbrush … even if the batteries aren’t completely dead yet.
We were tasked with replacing the foam cushion and seat covering on a pair of kitchen chairs. Removing the existing fabric seemed simple, until I pulled a dozen staples holding the cardboard cover to the bottom of the chair and exposed the fabric stapled to the MDF plate:
Chair reupholstering – stapled fabric
That’s just part of one corner. Obviously, whoever built the chair wanted to be very very very sure the fabric didn’t come loose!
Removing the staples from one corner produced a pile:
Chair reupholstering – one corner of staples
Piling up all the staples from the other chair looked even more impressive:
Chair reupholstering – staple pile
I fired maybe a third as many staples into the new fabric, which seems secure enough.
The stops aligning the top two drawers of an old desk vanished, so I got the job of replacing them. They’re hammered into the wood frame:
Drawer Stops – width measurement
And stand up just enough to engage the back of the drawer face:
Drawer Stops – height measurement
Back in the Basement Laboratory Shop Wing, I harvested steel strips from a defunct PC case, rubber-hammered them flat, sharpened a cold chisel (un-hardened, so it always needs sharpening), and got to work:
Drawer Stops – chiseled blanks
The pointy sides should have sharp edges, which you get for free with a chisel. You also get a bench full of little steel slivers perfectly suited for embedding in human flesh. Wearing eye protection is more than just a good idea, too.
Introducing what will become the visible edges to Mr Disk Sander makes them marginally less hazardous:
Drawer Stops – in progress
A slightly fuzzy picture of a test fit shows the stops should suffice:
Drawer Stops – trial fit
Which they did:
Drawer Stops – installed
Nobody will ever notice the blob of hot melt glue behind each one:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 