Mind boggling

A couple days ago, a homemade extension cord ceased functioning. So, obvious first step before taking it apart, was a quick continuity test (resistance) with the voltmeter.

But it didn’t work — the needle’s movement was almost imperceptible.

I don’t know when or where I got this voltmeter, but it was decades ago at least. And for the first time in all those years, a thought occurred to me: in order to measure resistance, it must have a power source. I swear, I had never thought of that before.

It took all of thirty seconds to discover and remove the battery cover, and sure enough, on the bottom of the AA battery was its expiration date. Usually they’re guaranteed to retain 80% of their charge 10 years from manufacture. This one only died after 27 years and four months….can’t complain!

Clever credit card container

This one really had me baffled, so I had to open it up. I slit it open along one edge.

The yellow arrows are what I slit apart.

The orange arrow is an “island” piece of cardboard attached between the sides.

The red arrow is a very fine plastic ribbon that loops around the “island,” attached to each of the sliding parts. So when you pull one one way, the other goes the other way.

Seems like a magic trick. Clever!

Dishwasher redux

Time to retire our dishwasher, rarely used, rusted, recently converted to one function. (But still needing cleaning and getting rather nasty inside.)

So of course it has to be torn apart in the spirit of inquisitiveness.

And it goes well, with the occasional sheet-metal flesh wound, until I get to the hose clamps, unlike anything I’ve seen before. I have no idea how they were attached, and can only remove them with great effort.

So imagine trying to remove all of them from the works on the bottom of the machine.

Logically determining that I had hit a point of diminishing returns, I called the project finished. Except, of course, for cleaning up the mess I created.

Take 3 (cochera windows)

Take 2 kept rain out of the cochera for over a year but, as you can see, plastic mesh on either side of the “nylon” didn’t solve its inherent weakness, and probably susceptibility to UV — the sun can be very strong here. I’ve been thinking about the roll-down plastic “curtains” used to close in porches, extending their usability as the weather gets cool, wondering where I could get plastic like that.

The local ferretería (hardware store), it turns out. All you have to do is ask. Who knew? One down, one to go.

Point of failure

Friends were ditching their long-used toaster oven because the door wouldn’t stay closed. I was curious to see if I could fix it. It didn’t take long to see that the spring had pulled inside (yellow arrow below) the part that connected to the door.

So, simple to diagnose but not — for me, anyway — simple to repair since it needed a rivet, there being insufficient clearance for a nut and bolt (double red arrow). Much as I have always thought a rivet tool would be cool to have, I’ve never been able to justify buying one, and this was no exception. I placed a small nut and bolt to hold the pieces together, and gave it, door not closing, to our cleaning lady, whose husband probably has a rivet tool, or if not probably knows where to get his hands on one.

My latest invention

Wife asked me to mash some garbanzo beans to make hummus. A potato masher is tedious and relatively ineffective. The electric hand mixer does a good job, but with the slight inconvenience of making an unholy mess if you’re not real careful. And slow.

All of a sudden I got an idea. An old plastic saucer, couple of minutes with the table saw, and…

…blast away on top speed, no problem!

Painterly house painting

The other day I opened a half-empty 5-liter paint can to touch up an exterior wall, and it looked and smelled a little like a science experiment. Yuck. So today I stirred it all up with a little fungicida and put it to use.

This looks like a sloppy paint job, but look to the left. It’s worse—the paint stops!

Likewise on the right side: fades out in a slightly painterly fashion. The wall is highly textured, so it takes a lot of paint, and that’s as far as a little over a half gallon of paint goes. For what reason?

Because that’s the part you see out the dining room window. But of course….

Nothing deceptive here

A yogurt maker we picked up at someone’s moving sale. A little slider for adjusting temperature, I guess?

Problem is, the slider only goes to the left as far as 3/4. It stops at the indicator light. Which is not why I took it apart, but…

…lo and behold, the slider is connected to nothing. Purely decorative. Unbelievable.

Just plane fun

Another chore put off for the better part of 15 years: for the first time, those doors close properly. What makes it sweeter is that the jack plane wasn’t functional before I started, and I was able to engineer a solution to that. Wonderful tool when it works!

15 years later

Not long after we moved in, I had the bright idea to insulate the roof above our bedroom. I started with the north (sunny, because we live in the southern hemisphere) side, ripping little 1×1″ strips to support thin tongue-and-groove lambriz pieces, above which I installed fiberglass insulation.

I seems fairly straightforward until you recall this was an owner-built house, meaning that the ceiling beams are not only not evenly spaced, they’re not even necessarily parallel. So I could only cut strips for a foot or two at a time before I’d have to measure again, scramble down the ladder and downstairs to cut more pieces, slightly longer or shorter.

Which is part of the reason I didn’t proceed with the south side as well (which btw still gets plenty of sun in the summer).

The problem lay in finishing each row at the top. They ended with a gap, and insulation showing. After staring at that for far too long, I finally decided I needed a solution. It’s a bit complicated to explain, but required more lambriz, clamping and gluing, a template, drilling and installing screws, among other things.

All while balancing on the penultimate step of an eight-foot folding ladder.

One of those small projects that makes all the difference, if only to me. Oh, and one fun detail. I bought one piece of lambriz – 3.3 meters – and this is what was left over when the project was done 😉