Fixit Log

[Sclass]

I did an interesting one a few nights ago. I fixed an oil drip from my oil drain plug that was bothering me. Left a drop of oil everywhere I parked the car. Just one drop, but it is diesel oil and it stains carbon black like india ink. Not cool on white driveways. All I needed to do was change the plug bolt that had been scraped on an obstacle and damaged and change the metal seal washer to one of the new metal and rubber bonded seals common in modern cars...basically a copper washer with an o-ring built into it.

Voila. It doesn't leak anymore. Wow that was easy.


The interesting part is I didn't have to drain out the oil. I had just changed oil and I didn't want to dump it out again so I found out you can hold the oil in the engine with a shop vac on the oil filler opening while you change the plug and seal. No oil was lost. Physics...and YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp1SpNpXwlE

[davtheram12]

@Slcass

That has to be one of the coolest way to fix a leaky oil pan bolt! Thanks for sharing. I almost feel like trying it just so I can experience the wizardry myself

[Ego]

Yeah, that looks like fun but you could have just drained the oil into a pan and dumped it right back into the motor after installing the new washer, or am I missing something?

[Riggerjack]

or am I missing something?

Yes, that would work just fine.

But in a pro shop, like in the video, oil is drained into the red vertical tank, and would pick up contaminates, so wouldn't be likely to be reused.

In a personal garage, draining and then reusing still results in waste and cleanup.

But where I looked at the possibilities for something like this is working on my backhoe. I couldn't use this for diesel tank or hydraulic fluid tank drain plugs (2 inch bolts, the hole I expect to be too big for the vacuum to hold back the fluid) but I could use it for things like replacing a fuel line or filter. Those tanks are in the 35-50 gallon range, so not having to catch and replace the fluids is a very neat trick! I think I may make a modified tank cap, just for this purpose.

Plus, anything that cuts the waste of hydrocarbons is always a good thing.

Thanks Sclass, very cool vid!

[Ego]

Yeah, the whole time I watched the video I was thinking the vacuum produced by the shop vac would either suck up the oil or not be powerful enough to hold it back from flowing. I imagined it would require a rather precise, narrow range of vacuum to hold it without sucking it up. But obviously it worked for sclass and the mechanic.

If I were to try this, I know beyond doubt I'd end up with an oil clogged shop vac or I'd accidentally trip on the cord and get a face full of oil.

[Sclass]

I don’t think the vac is strong enough to pull the oil up through the oil galleries in the engine. It is easier to pull air instead of oil...and I think that is exactly why this works. You hear this gurgling and bubbling when the oil plug comes out. I think it is the same phenomenon that makes a bong work. Air bubbles into the drain hole and it doesn’t allow the oil to rush out.

The option of draining it out was unacceptable because it makes a mess. I’d have to get a clean pan at $0.99 only stores and that would waste a dollar and some plastic. If I save it I waste a bunch of rags. There is also the spilling when I spaz on the refill. I think of this movie when I try to pour fluids from a big vessel back into the car. I pour this well.

https://youtu.be/2ccAx792uoI

[davtheram12]

I spent this past weekend doing some car maintenance. Car is a 2011 Honda Fit with 126k miles. I've owned it since day one when it had 3 miles and have since done all of the maintenance and repairs. The following was completed in preparation for a long road trip.

Serpentine belt ($15)
Drivers side turn signal bulb ($5)
Interior dome light bulb ($2)
Brake fluid flush ($18)
Oil change ($22)
Transmission fluid change ($30)
Transmission fluid filter ($20)
Cabin air filter ($2)
Engine air filter ($18)
Iridium spark plugs ($20)
Coolant/antifreeze flush ($15)
Thermostat ($15)
Drivers side headlight bulb ($12)
Restore faded black grill and windshield wiper cowl ($Free)
Inspect and clean rear drum brakes ($1)

I can't imagine how expensive it would have cost me had I paid someone to do all the above listed work. A coworker once told me his 2011 Honda Accord was totalled after getting sandwiched between a semi truck and a wall. He said insurance paid him for the value of the car but he lost out on the brake job he recently paid a mechanic to perform. I asked how much the brake job was and he responded "oh it was like $1,200"

Yeah I think I'll keep doing my own car maintenance.

Best part of the whole ordeal was being able to do it in a climate controlled garage that had a carpet lined floor. (old carpeting from the main house that was repurposed. It made things very comfortable

[Sclass]

Awesome. You saved hundreds of dollars and made your car robust. The Fit is a really nice minimalist car. From what I've heard they're well made. Have a safe trip!

Check this out.

Oh no! How did this happen? My brand new double wall vacuum lunch bowl! Oh s..t! I just bought this!


Apparently dropped on the tile floor.


I dug this whisk out of the trash. My wife didn't "like it's performance". So she dumped it. It had a nice stainless steel shaft. Food grade. I may need it someday. Like today. Time to sacrifice it to make my lunch bucket live again. Cut it up for the steel rod.


Fabricate a little metal "L" shape with the rod and some simple tools.


Drill it in and glue with superglue.


A fix!

[Sclass]

I can't imagine how expensive it would have cost me had I paid someone to do all the above listed work. A coworker once told me his 2011 Honda Accord was totalled after getting sandwiched between a semi truck and a wall. He said insurance paid him for the value of the car but he lost out on the brake job he recently paid a mechanic to perform. I asked how much the brake job was and he responded "oh it was like $1,200"

You know, I think I spoke too soon. Your work looks like it went into the thousands not hundreds. This stuff adds up. The shops always jack up the price of the parts too. You basically get half price when you buy online or at Autozone.

In grad school (1990s) my friend got reamed on a brake job for his Ford Escort. $2300 in 1994 dollars. He called me after the fact to hear if it was reasonable. He needed pads/shoes. They sold him, pads, shoes, rotors, drums, hoses, master cylinder, calipers and slave cylinders. Basically the entire system was replaced. The car was only worth $5000. But he was told “it was dangerous!” And he bit. This guy wasn’t a dummy either. He got a doctorate in Electrical Engineering and now designs RF circuitry at Apple. But he bit it on the car repair. Grease monkey gave him a righteous reaming. He slowly paid it off out of his stipend.

So after that all my classmates started hanging around my lab (that conveniently had a service bay for our group’s mobile lab) and learned brake jobs. Just pads and shoes. That’s it. $20 of parts and you’re good to go. Forget all the scare stories at the brake shop. We even used our lab’s micrometers to measure our rotors to check for wear. I still have the old Norton respirator I snatched from the chem stockroom to protect my lungs from asbestos. We all had them. And like good grad students we wore those disks down to the limits before replacement which never came because we graduated and bought better cars.

I remember years after graduation my buddy who was now working at PayPal stopped by our home with brake pads and beer. My wife came running out in the garage yelling “you make more than Sclass stop bringing your *$#@ing car here like a grad student!”

Fixing and driving an older car and investing the savings had a big effect on my numbers. A few thousand in the right place twenty years ago has become a handy sum of retirement savings.

[Gilberto de Piento]

You can also use a shop vac to find exhaust leaks. With the car off, jam the vacuum hose into the end of the tailpipe and turn the vac on. You should be able to hear and feel where the leak is.

[Sclass]

Yes, I did that on my 65 pickup. I wish I had a photo. It was hilarious. I have dual exhaust tips and duct taped a blue rubber glove over one pipe to plug it up. Blew into the other with the shop vac hose secured with duct tape. Neighbors thought I was crazy. The glove inflated to about 1' in diameter so I had this big blue hand waving off one pipe and the shop vac howling in the other as I crawled around the car feeling for leaks.

Found two leaks, one at the manifold ring seal and another on the recirculating heat valve (old car thing) for the carb. I learned that one from ChrisFix on YouTube. I'd been chasing that leak for months and dozing off behind the wheel with a CO induced coma. I bought at CO meter for $20 on Aliexpress and discovered I had dangerous levels of CO in the cab ~5ppm which got to me after half an hour of driving. Once I knew the sleepiness wasn't boredom/depression behind the wheel of my old truck I started YouTubing for an answer and found ChrisFix. Shop vac trick worked great for pinpointing the leak. I used soap suds on the suspected spots and looked for bubbles.

Last night I noticed my NordicTrack ski machine was getting a little clunky. Turned out there are these plastic glider buttons on the ski boards that need to run in the wood channels on the machine. I've used one of these for a few years.







they were worn flush down the the boards. I guess it happens over time. time to laminate with some plastic bottle. this'll buy some time before I need to buy the $13 ones online. My trash company doesn't recycle this kind of bottle. It says recyclable on the side but they only take clear drink bottles.



cut some strips. laminate and glue.





And voila, fixed. Good for a few more hours of fake cross country skiing. Now it stands proud of the surface by about one peroxide bottle's thickness.

[jacob]

Fixit fail...

The stem on one of my watches has been bent so the crown is at an angle---likely the crown caught on something at some point. I therefore wanted to remove the stem to straighten it out (with force) w/o risking the watch. I get the back off. I've never removed a stem before but according to the internets there's usually a lever or a hole or some such that must be depressed with a pair of tweezers while pulling the stem out. Sometimes these are marked with an arrow. There's indeed a hole with an arrow pointing towards it. In the hole (and using 10x magnification) I can see a lever with an indent in it. I (think I) press it down and pull the stem but it doesn't come out. Internets say not to use force, so I don't.
There are two other holes next to the arrow hole closer to the stem. I can see the lever there too and it's clearly moving when I pull the stem in and out (to set time and date). However, it's unclear how the system works, so I give up.

[Sclass]

Oooh boy. Don’t force it. Sounds like you’re doing it correctly. The little button usually lifts a lever out of a slot on the stem. That lever is part of the setting mechanism. I don’t know the correct name off hand, “set hack?” Maybe. On some watches is a screw and cam mechanism but it sounds like you have the little button one.

It might matter if the crown is in the winding position, time set or date set position when the button is pressed.

When it comes out be careful when straightening. The stems are very brittle. I’ve broken one or two trying to straighten them. Use mild heat to remove the crown. Then slowly bend the stem straight.

Good luck.

[horsewoman]

We got a young dog a few months back. He is now in this delightful stage of his career where he chews on and destroys everything in his path. As a seasoned dog owner I know that this will end soon, plus it trains one to pick up stuff before it gets eaten. So it is not all bad :)
His latest victim was an old armchair the dogs sleep on. He bit a hole into the fraying fabric and pulled the stuffing out. My first impulse was to throw the old chair out but I really don't know how to do this - in Germany you need to get a special (and costly, for us cheapskates) pick-up for large pieces of rubbish like furniture, and they do not even come for one chair. So fixing it was actually less hassle than getting rid of it.



First step: Pulling the edges of the tear together with messy stitching. I had to remove stuffing and was not able to pull very tightly due to the brittle fabric.



Second step: Covering the tear. I used a cut-off leg from a denim jeans I had left over from another project, and finished the edges with the serger to avoid fraying. The hand sewing was a little cumbersome, since I'm not really practised in it. It is messy but since the surface will be covered with another layer it did not matter. I also put in some wide stitches on the sides to attach the denim more securely.



Last step: putting a layer of artificial leather on the seat. I bought this PU-leather last year to protect the dog sofa but - you guessed it - the young dog chewed a hole in it - right in the middle of course. So I have two smaller pieces of it on hand, perfect for recycling it in this project. I put a few stitches in close to the backrest to keep it from slipping off. I hope this will last for while. The seat might be a little lumpy but that's usually not something my dogs object to. So we will see how it is accepted as a bed in this form. This fix took me about 45 minutes, which I consider a worthwhile use of my time.

[George the original one]

My first impulse was to throw the old chair out but I really don't know how to do this - in Germany you need to get a special (and costly, for us cheapskates) pick-up for large pieces of rubbish like furniture, and they do not even come for one chair.

American rural tradition, the clean version: dig hole, dump item in, fill hole.

[horsewoman]

American rural tradition, the clean version: dig hole, dump item in, fill hole.

Considering how much debris we dug up when we renovated our farm and yard I suppose this is a Bavarian rural tradition as well. I really don't want to continue it, though. There was a layer of packed shingles, cement and stuff about 75 cm in the soil, so I guess they "recycled" a whole house in this way. We consider very carefully if we need to dig holes or if we can do without...

[Sclass]

The chair came out very nice.

[Sclass]

Fixing Vacuum pump for my air locks on Mercedes. My door locks on my S class failed again. I recall when I bought the car in 2010 the lock pump had failed. It needed some grease on an O-ring seal inside the pump.

I didn't want to buy a new pump. They're $140 online. A junkyard one will be old and worn out...like getting a heart transplant from a senior citizen. Taking it to a shop would cost a couple of hours of labor with is another $300. Yuck. Time to get to work.

The pump is mechanically complex. 80s German engineering. Build a mechanical control device instead of using some electronics. So there's a SPDT switch in the driver's side door that toggles 12v to the pump motor on two wires. The pump motor is DC so in one polarity it pumps air and on the other it sucks air. Each door, trunk and fuel door have an actuator that opens on pressure and closes on vacuum. Sooo then the motor has to know how long to turn on then stop, and latch the direction based on the last setting. They basically build an H bridge out of mechanical switches and use air flow through a pinhole to make a delay timer to give the pump time to build pressure before deactivating.

All easy with some digital circuitry. But MB engineers did it with pneumatics, mechanical switchover valves, switches and mechanical latching mechanisms. Alas after 35 years it leaks. In their defense, automotive grade digital systems were still pretty dodgy back then. They were shooting for reliability. And how did that work out? Pretty well admittedly. All the mechanical bits still worked. If you see a 1982 car on the road now chances are its a Mercedes...with rotten butyl rubber seals.

I tore the pump to bits and found the O-ring seal that I greased up to induce sealing upon 10 years ago had disintegrated. I needed a new o-ring. But the problem was this was an oddball metric O-ring with a 1mm cross section. Harder to find at Home Depot than P95s.

I ordered some I found on Aliexpress and the delivery dates were in April. Notes from sellers all said "we are temporarily away". Awww man. No power door locks till April. This is actually going to create havoc in global supply chains btw.

Anyhow, I'm just fixing my locks. I needed an O-ring. So I made some with Silicone glue and a 3D printed mold. Here is the photo story.

Here is the pump. So over built. Strong wires, bearings, metal components...but rubber O-ring seals that only last 20 years. Cannot complain, that's why I like 80s Mercedes. If you know what $0.25 seal to change you can keep them on the road cheap.


Open it up and offending seal needs to go here between a pneumatic "flip flop".


Make a mold on the 3d printer. Just a bunch of loops on a plate. I thought that I didn't even need draft if I used silicone rubber that will shrink a bit when you stretch it. Easy demolding in other words. Just pick out the seal and it peels out. It helps to use silicone oil on the mold as a release compound.





The tools. Silicone oil lube for mold release. RTV silicone gasket maker from the auto parts store. I used high temp exhaust type since I had a lot of it. A putty knife to drive the glue into the mold and the mold itself. The real way to do this is use a two part anaerobic catalyzed silicone mold compound and use a two part mold with sprues and gates but heck, I think I can get away with this simple design and process.


Filling the mold, demolding seals with a pin and fingernails. New seal shown with old disintegrated seal.






Seal in place. The rubber is soft so it takes up a lot of the imperfections on compression. Seals nicely and my locks work again.


A very cheap fix for a potentially pricey problem.

[ZAFCorrection]

Nice job with the o-ring mold. That's the first time I ever saw a 3D printer job that would be potentially useful for me. Much better than having to buy 1000 and wait a month just because I needed an oddball size. You think that o-ring would go to 10^-3 Torr in an otherwise decent joint?

[Sclass]

You think that o-ring would go to 10^-3 Torr in an otherwise decent joint?

No way. The limitation is the rubber which is soft form a gasket glue. Also, the surface finish on the mold is awful. It’s not like we cut it out on a mill or EDM machine like a real mold tool. The o-rings surface is too rough.

But, I measured the pressure on my door locks. It’s less than 10 psi under pressure and 20”Hg of vacuum. I can get away with murder. What I couldn’t do was use faucet packing, wax dental floss, pvc tape, Teflon tape and a bunch of other stuff I had lying around. I tried all that stuff and it leaked. I needed a 5.5id x 7.5od x 1mm cross section O-ring. It is oddball.

Now if you want to use better rubber like two part flexane or higher durometer silicone I think you have some hope of holding more pressure. But if it is anything critical I’d get real high quality seals made by a reputable manufacturer.

This was just a stop gap effort for the long delays from the Chinese suppliers.