Category: Stuff

El pico

Off and on over the last few months, I’ve been doing maintenance at our little country place. It becomes a little inconvenient, such as today when I needed the pressure washer and realized I never brought it back after cleaning out there. Off we go!

But at least I knew where it was. The pick was different. It’s my weapon of choice for uprooting thistles, and it had disappeared. Not in the house, not in the galpón (shed/barn). I sometimes leave it in the middle of the yard when cutting grass, but I hadn’t seen it anywhere. Would someone have stolen it? Hard to imagine.

So, after washing frog turds off the kitchen sink, I grabbed the power washer, turned to leave, and voilá.

Almost like I’m playing tricks on myself.

A very, very small thing

My favorite note-taking pen broke the other day – sad! 🙂 But wait—it broke exactly as it ran out of ink! Hmmm.

It says “Courtyard” (by Marriott). I remember them as a nice place, but having gone nowhere in over 5-1/2 years, we haven’t been near one. And before that, we didn’t stay in one after what, early 2000s? I have no idea.

In September 2012 we traveled to Connecticut for my niece’s wedding. Since freebie pens were not a thing in Uruguay (and still aren’t really), I noticed the “junk drawer” in my sister’s kitchen, and asked if she could spare some pens. We came back to Uruguay with a handful, secured with a couple rubber bands.

Which gives me an idea. Yes! Some of those pens from 2012 are still in my collection. Grab a sheet of paper to test, and results:

  • 3 put into service;
  • 5 retired.

The cute little plastic container was one of several gifted by our neighbors Wayne and Janet, who left Uruguay for British Columbia in May 2023.

Small things.

Orgonics

It looks like I tossed a perfectly good Orgreenics omelet pan. Fact is, it was a perfectly good Ogreenics omelet pan for eight or nine years. Until it wasn’t. No matter how many “surefire” Youtube videos I watched and how many times I tried to season it, it just got stickier and stickier.

I cashed in some Disco (supermarket) points for a replacement, which isn’t perfect, but isn’t bad.

It’s been several weeks since I dumped this. I have almost no doubt it’s in somebody’s kitchen as I write this.

The hard drive case

Our neighbors are moving back to Canada, and in a box of old computer junk I offered to make go away, there were a couple of external drives. Wayne wasn’t sure if they had data on them. I offered to find out, if possible, and sanitize them.

The smaller had a long-deprecated Mini-AB USB port. It’s been a while since I had a cable that would fit the early-2000s USB port, so I pulled out the 2.5″ 160 GB drive, clamped it in the vice, and gave it a couple of smacks with a hammer. Ta.

The other was a monster by comparison, a 5.25″ drive manufactured in 2003 with a capacity of (drum roll, please) 5 GB! It looked like an old Apple Firewire connection–again, nothing like that lying around. I was unable or unwilling to completely disassemble the hard drive assembly, so I drilled a few holes through the drive. Ta.

The case was an aluminum wonder which I planned to recycle, but after mentioning to a couple of people that you could probably run over it with a car without hurting it, I knew what I had to do.

Yup.

That would have been a very well protected 5 GB of data!

Retiring an old hard drive

I didn’t remember when I bought this hard drive (I thought 2004). It was an HP product with an unalterable HP partition, designed for Windows backups. Which I probably never used it for. That was a bother, but even more of a bother was my trying to overwrite the disk so I could give it away. My command-line Linux magic simply rendered it unusable, unmountable, impossible to format in Linux or MacOS.

So, impossible to erase. All my data still on there.

However, that raises a question:

Short answer: That being said, if you just want a quick rule of thumb for how long you can expect the hard drive in your laptop should last, we’d say you should be prepared for disk failure after three years of use. source

Of course, this was not in constant use. But, at 13 years and four months, it is now retired. And my data safe.

The scanner

I almost never discard anything complex without trying to take it apart and learn something from it. Non-destructively, if possible.

When my 13-year-old scanner abruptly stopped working, I quickly discovered it would not be coming apart without a fight. There’s essentially nothing you couldn’t see just by looking through the glass, so no real surprises, other than the motor being remarkably small – barely wider than a pencil.

The main thing I learned, though, was that this was designed to NEVER be taken apart – the way the glass was sealed … and then it struck me: of course not. It was assembled in a dust-free environment and it was essential that no dust ever had a chance to get inside!

Armature balancing and worm gear

I got back to the circular saw tear down which left off with a worm gear assembly that I couldn’t get apart. A couple weeks later I remember it, try again and it slides out like it’s greased. Because it is.

It turns out the worm gear reduces the rotation speed by a factor of six, meaning the motor itself was spinning at 27,000 RPM. Yikes!

That solved, another question remains: what are all the little indents in the armature for?

UPDATE: I posted this question on ElectricalEngineering on Reddit, speculating they had to do with balancing. Yes, I learned, they are balancing cuts. The post has been viewed over 1,300 time in 24 hours.

Circular saw dissection

Cutting up 2×6″ jungle hardwood proved too much for the used German circular saw I bought twelve years ago for USD 40 (I’ve gotten my money’s worth ;-). I thought it needed new brushes, but no, I fried the armature. Quite interesting taking it apart; some simple and some very tricky. I’m still working on the worm gear assembly. Why does it have one?

The repair shop sold me a Skil that they refurbished. 1400 watts versus 1200 on this one; 5,700 RPM versus 4,500. The thing is a BEAST!

UPS dissection

From one day to the next, a UPS unit died. I charged it up, checked battery output – only 8 volts where there should be 12. Meanwhile, no electricity passing through, meaning it doesn’t even have any use as a surge protector. So, tear it apart. Nothing too challenging,

the exception being the outlets, which appear to have been snapped in place and soldered. No big deal; happy to leave it at that. Nowhere near as much fun as tearing apart other things, like a laser printer.