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The LEDs on my deck were all on one long string leading to a 3-way splitter that is, under the best of circumstances, intermittent. I tore it all down this weekend and used a 2nd line out on my power supply. Now the edge lighting around the deck stairs is on one output and the lighting under the deck awning is on another. The previous setup had the lights run from one corner up to the center whereupon the splitter would send power & signal down to the other three corners. It turns out the splitter puts those three strands in parallel and one line out isn't going to drive 30' of LEDs and then a parallel load of three 5' strands.

New setup has a dedicated line out to a separate LED controller which drives two 10' LED strands in series. The new controller is also accessible via smartphone app and theoretically can be controlled via Alexa and a couple other smart home brands.

Not really a repair, but I also swapped the headlight on the motorcycle for an LED bulb. That involved some grinding to get the lock collar to fit, but it's done. Futuristic electric motorcycle and they didn't include an LED headlight. Craziness.

ludi wrote:

derFunkenstein wrote:

At that point you give up all freedom, though. There are three people taking showers, and one of them is a foot shorter than the others. I could only imagine the complaining.

If there are three people in the shower, can't the short one just request that one of the others adjust the showerhead?

Another one of those -- well, it's not really fixing something....

This weekend I fixed the state of the wiring in the theater room. It continues to amaze me where people skimp on houses. You own a house nice enough that it was built with a dedicated theater. You have a 7.1 system, with surrounds in wall, and projector installed. And yet, the wiring is a rats nest or bare stripped wires sticking out of the wall. They did at least run them out through a wall box with a hood. Put in a 7.2+HDMI wall plate and clean up the wiring mess. Also terminated the network connection, RF jack, and the IR extension for the projector on a separate 3 position wall plate.

--SS

I have my 7.1 with bare wire going into and out of the wall. I also have the HDMI as bare cable running into and out of the wall. I've had back luck with wall plates for HDMI when it comes to long runs. For whatever reason (maybe they were cheap quality) I always get intermittent signal when using any joints.

Lets see over the weekend I:
Showed the Bro-I-L how to use the DR trimmer. He said it was broken I showed him it was not.

We got the old garage roof torn down the rest of the way and we reclaimed some of the wood.
We went through the garage and got the cherry tree shaker out, plus some Dad's, CocaCola, and other 1 gallon glass jugs and crocks out of the garage along with some other Kerr, Ball, etc. canning jars.
Drained a raised fuel oil tank into a 5 gallon drum the wind picked up and just the right time we have clothes that smell of fuel oil.
Found some heavy duty power cable running through the forest, hooked it up to the tractor and pulled it all out. looks to be 200ft of it. That's going in the junk pile.
Took down what was left of the smoke house and recovered a 150lbs iron wood fired water heater. Luckily the base comes off meaning B-I-L and I could lug it to the tractor bucket. Also going in the junk pile.
We need to finish clearing some of the broken glass in the old house basement so we can get the antique washer out.

Tried to get my computer working stably again.
For the second time this spring I've had to fix the ridge cap on my roof over the ridge vent. We had strong winds with the last two storms that tore off shingles. I replaced some with a new regular shingle and the rest I just put back where they were. I used 3" screws with washers. Let me see the wind try and take those off now!

I come to work to relax from my weekends...

I've been hauling firewood with an old trailer of my Dad's, and as it's quite a load for my truck, the safety chains droop a bit too low, and I forgot to prop them up the last time I used it.

(HD trip #1)

So I set off the replace the well-worn safety chains because a trailer like this would become an instant death-missile if it hopped off the hitch at speed. I take a look at the previous chain's mounting points on the trailer and realize they won't fit the new larger gauge chain I bought, so I decide to grind them off and weld new tabs on.

I'm glad I did because it took me about 3 seconds of grinding away to realize whoever welded it before did a terrible job. Just from the small section of weld I ground away being gone the tab was weak enough a modest hammer strike knocked it clean off the trailer. No way it would have survived the shock load of 6 tons of trailer jumping it's hitch at 55mph.

Inside, cut off two bits of spare thick bar stock and started working on a hole to slip the chain through... and broke my drill bit (and nearly my wrist from the drill trying to helicopter).

(HD trip #2)

Fresh new bit in hand I get everything drilled and all the parts ready. I walk inside the barn to grab my welding card and in the 2 minutes it takes me to drag it outside to the trailer the weather turns from sunny and calm to cloudy and windy, and as soon as I get setup it starts sprinkling.

Sigh.

Next day the weather behaves again and I get the tabs welded on no big deal and the trailer is back in service. Of course I notice that now one of the tail lights isn't working...

Fun with trailers!

Wife's horse trailer will never light up all the clearance lights.
You get them all working once and then the next time you use the trailer a couple won't work again,.

Last fall the lights on _my_ trailer shorted out and blew a fuse in the truck so about a month ago I set out to strip and re-wire the whole thing, at the same time taking out the rotten wood floor and replacing it with a sheet of expanded steel grating. I figured it would be a good time to replace all the wiring since I would likely fry it any way doing all the welding. I got the floor welded on and painted, and about 80% of the way through the wiring before the weather threw a wrench in my plans and it ended up getting shelved for a few weeks.

Finally, with the nice weather (and reduced wind) yesterday, I was able to finish all the little odds and ends like re-affixing the tail gate and rebuilding the latches holding it closed. It went fairly smoothly apart from some mishaps with the dog chewing some of the unfinished wires that I left dangling.

I get everything wrapped up and hitched, test the lights out and everything is working, so I decide I should probably air up the tires because they are fairly small and hold a lot of pressure (80 PSI) and I was planning on putting fairly heavy loads into it. After airing it up I though I should also check the lug nuts as it had been well over a year since I'd checked them. First nut I go to tighten and the nut and stud spin freely together.

Crap.

So I go to pull the wheel off, and of course end up having 2-3 more lugs that don't want to come off, or come off half way then mar the threads and get stuck. So with a pair of vice grips and an air impact I plow through the stubborn ones and now have 3 studs and all 5 nuts to replace.

Sigh. The saga continues.

At least those are more accessible than the spark plugs that like to shear on the Ford V10 engines...

Oh the joys of home ownership.
Last week my well water started spitting out silt. Nice grey muddy water.
It turned out that my degasser tank valve was plugged open, which is supposed to shut off the water when the tank fills, and was making for tremendous flow from the well. I had a nice creek running through the basement and out the gravity drain. The degasser gets ris of the natural gas in the water so our house doesn't smell like a swamp or blow up.

It turned out the spray heads were clogged with deposits that help remove gas, which in turn prevented the valve from self-flushing due to relatively low flow. I had to drain 300 gallons of water, scrub out the tank full of silt and iron bacteria (grosser than you would think), clean the basement floor around it, play with the controller board which is supposed to stop the well after running 5 minutes and force it to be off for 15 and was bypassed for whatever reason (I think the original water system plumber got annoyed and bypassed it). In all, 8 hours of effort and 10 days before the water cleared up.

At least the water tastes great.

My LG frontloader has suddenly refused to spin. I think it may be just out of motor warranty (direct drive motor, 10yrs). I'm guessing that motor will cost me more than the $700 I paid for it. Still checking facts. This may be a repair. Or, it may be a replace.

Mr Bill wrote:

My LG frontloader has suddenly refused to spin. I think it may be just out of motor warranty (direct drive motor, 10yrs). I'm guessing that motor will cost me more than the $700 I paid for it. Still checking facts. This may be a repair. Or, it may be a replace.

I would be surprised if you could not get a AC motor with close specks for less than $100.

Unless it is a linear motor or a large DC motor controlled by an ac to dc controller it should be cheap.

Aranarth wrote:

Unless it is a linear motor or a large DC motor controlled by an ac to dc controller it should be cheap.

Guarantee it will be a VFD motor of some sort, even smaller direct-drive power tools like routers and large orbital sanders have those now so the startup torque doesn't dim the lights and jerk everything apart. The motor chassis, bracket, and coupling are probably not standard in any practical way, too.

ludi wrote:

Aranarth wrote:

Unless it is a linear motor or a large DC motor controlled by an ac to dc controller it should be cheap.

Guarantee it will be a VFD motor of some sort, even smaller direct-drive power tools like routers and large orbital sanders have those now so the startup torque doesn't dim the lights and jerk everything apart. The motor chassis, bracket, and coupling are probably not standard in any practical way, too.

Of course everything has to be the most complicated thing someone could think of...
Complicated usually means expensive and lasts just longer than the warranty.

My replacement latch piece arrived for the center console of the '98 Camry we keep around as a spare car, courtesy of eBay. The car is old enough that the latch was integrated into the structure of the lid. Naturally, there were some extra bits of plastic broken once I got the cover disassembled, but the fabrication work wasn't too bad, and now it's back to normal.

At some point in the decade after 1998, Toyota realized that latch assemblies are effectively consumable, and changed their typical design to a unit-replaceable assembly that attaches to the lid with two screws.

I replaced the headlamp on the motorcycle with an LED unit. It took much more effort than I was anticipating, namely due to the heat sink on the back of the LED preventing the lock ring from engaging. In the end, I had to grind away a couple tabs on the lock ring in order to get it in place. So far, so good. The new headlamp looks much better and is more appropriate for an electric motorcycle.

Next on the list: run USB power to the tail so I can power the camera off the bike and not batteries.

Is it an AC motor?

Darkmage wrote:

I replaced the headlamp on the motorcycle with an LED unit. It took much more effort than I was anticipating, namely due to the heat sink on the back of the LED preventing the lock ring from engaging. In the end, I had to grind away a couple tabs on the lock ring in order to get it in place. So far, so good. The new headlamp looks much better and is more appropriate for an electric motorcycle.

Was it something like this? These new direct replacement LEDs are pretty incredible. I've had bad luck with one that, AFAICT, cracked a solder joint on the driver PCB (which was, naturally, potted in place so a clean removal was impossible). But overall, impressive, and pretty much true to the OE beam pattern. HIDs were never any good that way because the arc globe could not act as a point source.

...aaaaannndd the Kenmore (Whirlpool) dryer is broken. Based on today's disassembly and troubleshooting, it's not the motor, heater, relays, or any of the thermostats or sensors. Probably the control board, but given the age of this unit, I think that a control board replacement would only be good money after bad. Guess it's time for a new one.

Mr Bill wrote:

My LG frontloader has suddenly refused to spin. I think it may be just out of motor warranty (direct drive motor, 10yrs). I'm guessing that motor will cost me more than the $700 I paid for it. Still checking facts. This may be a repair. Or, it may be a replace.

A little trouble shooting and code checking and it turned out to be the drain pump was bad. Paid $84 for the pump on Friday and they told me they would come put it in for $80 if I could not do it myself. Turns out this model you can tip it on its back and get to the three screws through the filter cleanout (no need to remove the top and front of the washer) so it was a pretty easy job.

Been digging in the back yard after a leak in my irrigation system. It started small, about 20" from the pump. I ran all last summer with just a trickle coming up (which I routed back into the irrigation ditch). But this year it became a bigger leak and routing it back to the ditch did not work because my pump can empty my 100 gallon sump in a couple minutes and then looses head). This is an old house circa 1958, so the sprinkler system is galvanized iron pipe. I get down there and find two things.
First The leak steps sideways a couple feet in stages and It is really really deep about 4 feet down. That is insanely deep.
Secondly although I can feel flow when the pump is on, there is no pipe, just a hollow area about 6inches in diameter extending both directions and the water is coming from the wrong direction. Actually, from the direction of a pump supplied faucet about 10 feet further away from the pump; so who knows where along this line leak actually exists.
Third the 220V power line for the pump is buried somewhere along this route.

My neighbor is a contractor and opines that galvanized pipe only lasts about 10-12 years. So, it may be rotted out all around the property.

So, put a manifold on the pump oulet with some brass T's and pipe and installed a couple 3/4" irrigation faucets and ran a 100' x 3/4" hose each to the front and back yard. Its a 2HP pump, I have 50psi at the far end with 2 big sprinklers on each line. I can branch 3-4 big rainbirds off each with splitters and other hoses and that will have to do for the summer. Thats about the maximum I can pull out of the ditch anyway without sucking air. The ditch flow is cut down due to drought.

Learned how to true up bicycle wheels this weekend by adjusting spoke tension. Oddly enough, clockwise is/was loosen and vice-versa. I found the bulging areas on each side of the rims by slowly moving the brake pad (one side at a time) toward the wheel as it spun slowly listening for rubs. The brake pad would eventually stop the wheel on the bulge, then I would start plucking the spokes like a harp. Listening to the tone of each spoke and it's relation to the surrounding spokes (on each side of the axle) was the easiest method to determine whether the problem spoke(s) needed to be tightened or loosened.
I borrowed a spoke wrench from a neighbor, but you could easily do it with a small crescent wrench also.
And don't worry, there will be some alarming creaks when you turn the spoke lug(s) for the first time. That's normal.

The tub plunger wouldn't close anymore. It actually was pretty simple to fix once I did some minimal research. Unscrew the overflow plate, pull the whole assembly out, put it back in and work it up and down to dislodge and crud that was blocking the mechanism, then it was good to go. Took less than 4 minutes. It's been "broken" for about a month. The unknowns of the repair are what make me hesitant to start in the first place.

ludi wrote:

...aaaaannndd the Kenmore (Whirlpool) dryer is broken. Based on today's disassembly and troubleshooting, it's not the motor, heater, relays, or any of the thermostats or sensors. Probably the control board, but given the age of this unit, I think that a control board replacement would only be good money after bad. Guess it's time for a new one.

We had the same issue with our GE washer. I knew it was the board, I can smell fried electronics from a mile away. Wife didn't like the front loader anyway so we got a whirlpool instead.

Now I'm just waiting for her to come to her senses and let me order a water softener but that will probably never happen...

Aranarth wrote:

Now I'm just waiting for her to come to her senses and let me order a water softener but that will probably never happen...

Eww. I hate the feel of soft water in the shower. I feel like I can never get the soap off my skin.

Try showering out of a Michigan well and you will change your tune. I would probably go through a bar of soap a day trying to shower without a softener.

you guys are funny. Soap! HA!

SuperSpy wrote:

Try showering out of a Michigan well and you will change your tune. I would probably go through a bar of soap a day trying to shower without a softener.

Been there, done that, smelled the iron and sulfur. Every stroke of the washcloth exfoliates another layer of skin and hair because the soap won't lather. *cringe*

Can't you just run it through a filter versus a softener? I'd rather just remove the contaminants rather than replace them with other additives. For reference, we bought our current house with a full-functional water softener which I took out on day 7 of owning the house. This thread has reminded me to actually hit the order button on Amazon for the GE whole home cartridge filter that's been in my cart forever.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Can't you just run it through a filter versus a softener? I'd rather just remove the contaminants rather than replace them with other additives. For reference, we bought our current house with a full-functional water softener which I took out on day 7 of owning the house. This thread has reminded me to actually hit the order button on Amazon for the GE whole home cartridge filter that's been in my cart forever.

My late grandparents' second house in central Michigan had a whole-house filter, and even with just elderly people living there and minimal outdoor use, that filter would go blackest of black....and the water was still pretty hard coming out of it. A water softener has the advantage of being relatively cheap to maintain. And you can always filter or import your drinking water supply.