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.
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!
After 12 years, I decided it was time for a new table saw blade. Little did I know that the holes in the middle of blades are not uniform. The washer (arendela) / spacer from the old blade was too big for the new one. While in Maldonado a couple weeks ago with some free time, I wandered into a hardware store and entertained five bored employees for a while, none apparently aware this was an issue, so I didn’t bother to go back to the local hardware store where I bought it. A few blocks away, for some reason, we have a tornillería, a shop that specializes in screws and bolts (seriously, how is that a viable business outside the bowels of Montevideo?). The guy had an almost-but-not-quite washer, and referred me to a nearby tornero, who Icould find by looking for two blue doors on the frontage road of the Ruta Interbalnearia opposite Maudy, the electric-stuff shop. No sign, of course.
Long story short, a few hours later I stopped by and picked up the freshly-manufactured spacer that made the new blade functional with my saw. It cost 300 pesos, which is significant compared to the cost of the blade (990 pesos), but begs the question (I being from North America): where in North America could you waltz into a machine shop and get a precision metal part fabricated the same day for just over seven dollars?
All that thin wood on the right represents three hours of dragging lumber from underneath the avocado trees to the nearby carport, cutting it to length on the table saw (I would say “cheap table saw,” but anything with a motor or engine is not cheap in Uruguay), loading in a wheelbarrow and stacking 20 meters away in front of the casita (small/guest house).
There’s nothing quite like a shop vac for cleaning up piles of sawdust without having to breath it. This morning I emptied it and marveled at the simplicity of this 10-year-old supermarket-points purchase, still going strong.
Then I wondered if I had a manual for the shop vac (I always save them, even if I never look at them). Then I thought, what if it was my job to write a manual for this thing? I quickly concluded I would get fired, for my instruction manual would consist of a single line.
If you need an instruction manual for a shop vac, you are probably a liberal arts professor and should not be trusted with it.
I rarely throw away anything that can be taken apart, without taking it apart. La máquina actually had a few challenging bits, and I had to cut apart a bit of a plastic fan to remove screws, so it remains a mystery to me as to how that part of the thing was assembled.
The gear assembly with bevel gears that change the rotation 90 degrees. Quite remarkable to imagine designing or manufacturing things like this.
And this clever spline. The rounded bit goes into the rounded indentation on the shaft, protruding a bit, and the gear slides over it, so that it has to spin when the shaft spins.
Once assembled, it’s held in place by the gear it mates to. OK, enough of this. I must have something more important to do….
Cutting a plastic barrel in half to make planters, I noticed the angle grinder (almoradora here, called la máquina by Mexicans) was slowing down. I also noticed pain in a fingertip that I couldn’t quite place.
Turns out it was heat, and moments later I saw a bright flash and smoke.
After 12 years, la maquina is dead. Long live la maquina!
I’ve always liked autumn. “Back to school” was an exciting for me as a kid. New clothes! New faces! New things to learn!
Autumn here is familiar: crisp air, blue sky, bright sun (and a few sort-of-almost-colorful leaves). But northern hemisphere signals persist, and part of me thinks it’s spring cleaning time: focus on clothes, tools, organizing nooks and crannies, passing on unused items.
One morning my little tinkering-space caught my attention. It was trivial to cut a shelf in half to make cans more organized, but what a difference in terms of quickly locating nails and screws. Then it occurred that I had measuring tools scattered in different places. Since most projects start with measuring, I consolidated them:
Now, in the space of a few inches, I have two types of carpenter’s square, calipers, folding rule, measuring tape, and bevel gauge. All that’s missing is the framing square, which remains elsewhere because of its size. Bring it on!
Of course, none of my most recent projects — painting ironwork, pressure washing, disassembling a decrepit table, re-wiring a kitchen stove, reorganizing the patio and repairing masonry — has required any measuring at all. But the next one will, for sure.
Over three years ago, I scored the better part of a deck’s worth of dense curupay boards. I did only one small project, then a picnic table which, despite complete sanding and refinishing with marine varnish after a couple years, quickly weathered again into a mottled mess. I lost interest in working with this curupay again, and have from time to time cut up some of the smaller lengths for firewood.
Today I got a load of “real” firewood delivered, which prompted me to clean up the garage where we store it, where also lived an unused bicycle,* seen below restored to its previous parking spot outside the casita.
Before today — and for three years — the space from its rear tire to the far wall has been a pile of curupay deck boards of various lengths, collecting dirt and spiders and generally being ugly.
Remembering that I have had no further woodworking interest in those boards in three years, I made an executive decision, cranked up the table saw, and rendered them.
I saved a few of the longer and nicer boards por las dudas (who knows what sudden woodworking inspiration might arise?).
I put some pieces inside by the stove, and stacked the rest in the workshop. I was quite surprised how small the pile turned out. But in heat value, it’s probably the equivalent of pile four times as big of red eucalyptus (not cut into flat boards, of course).
Last winter was delightfully mild, which probably accounts for our bumper crop of avocados now, and I hope for the same this winter — so far very pleasant — but if it gets cold, we’re at least a little prepared!
* a quality German women’s bike purchased from Syd and Gundy’s *interesting* tenant Herbert for a whopping USD 40 years ago. Interestingly, another purchase from Herbert, a hand-held circular saw, I mentioned on another post about curupay.
I bought a hand truck (dolly) a couple years ago from some departing Americans. They warned that one of the tires loses air over time, an issue I tried to deal with a couple times at local tire places. Eventually, though, to no avail. With no inner tube, you can’t get air back in with something as slow as a bicycle pump.
So I brought an inner tube back from the US, since I happened to be going and was an easy add-on to an existing free-shipping order.
It took a bit of work to get the tire lose, and then putting the tube in was no big deal. But getting the tire back on? Impossible!
Then I found this wonderful video. My solution! But I needed some C-clamps, which understandably are called “G” clamps here.
So I immediately set to work with them, and …
… *sigh* later I’ll be taking the hand truck to the local tire place, to see if they have a way to get the tire over the rim.
The “G” clamps will prove themselves useful in other ways, no doubt.
This is so not a big deal. But it is. Last time we saw this fork, I had been using it on the barbecue grill outside.
And then it was gone. I looked around the grill, around the yard in case the dog had decided it was a chew toy, and of course we both looked through every kitchen drawer several times. And naturally the dishwasher, which we mainly use as a drying rack, where it should have been.
But wasn’t.
But was.
Turns out it had fallen through the rack, which we’re used to having happen. What we weren’t prepared for was that it might end up parallel to the dishwasher door, snugged up in the front against the ledge. How? Who knows.
Amazing how much we missed it. We use it all the time. Also amazing how many loads of dishes went through the dishwasher before my wife spotted it.
