Fixit Log

[Married2aSwabian]

Thanks, Sclass! Sounds like the Veblen curve is alive and well.

I wasn’t familiar with Sanden at all previously, but know Denso as “the Bosch of Japan” - they’re actually the largest tier one supplier in the world. I will definitely do more homework on next parts purchases. I bought the compressor at local Advanced Auto, not Honda dealer. The Honda dealer I go to for parts is all over the map on pricing as you say. I’ve purchased some parts like power steering reservoirs ($35), P/S fluid ($6/ bottle) and intake manifold adapter - flex rubber part btwn air filter and intake manifold ($40) that I thought were reasonable. Others, like small plastic push fasteners for plastic trim (that always break) were absolutely ridiculous ($5 each!). I asked the kid at parts counter how he could say that with a straight face! Best part was a mechanic there heard me, went back to his bench, grabbed a handful of ‘em and gave them to me! Those I found on Amazon for $15 for a bag of 100. That’s a part that doesn’t matter much and probably costs 3 cents each to manufacture. Nice markup.

I’m done with the 9 to 5 after next week, but it’s good to know a lucrative gig could be had selling car parts!

[Cam]

I've been getting confident enough to do work on our nice bikes and not just our crappy ones as my skills have improved. A couple months ago I did a drivetrain cleaning of our Devinci bike as it was oily and gritty. Got the bike nice and clean, but I made the mistake of spraying the cassette directly with degreaser. The degreaser worked its way into the freehub So whenever I stopped pedaling the chain would go completely slack which is no fun at all. I tried spraying some KL-13 anti rust/lube in there and it worked temporarily. The bike was back, at least for a couple weeks. I rode it to school and back for a while. Then one day I noticed the chain was going slack again, on the way home from school. The freehub had almost completely locked up. I did make the ride home, but it was with no coasting whatsoever. Not a relaxing experience.

So I needed to remove the cassette to get right in there and properly grease the freehub. I don't have a chain whip, because it's something I use around once a year or two. I tried making a DIY one by tack welding some old chain to a 5" long piece of scrap steel, but it snapped on the first attempted use. Then I looked on Youtube for DIY ideas. It's an easy tool to fabricate yourself. However I wanted the cassette off sooner than later, so I kept looking. That is when I found this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FFt21ZdWLM

For any of you engineers I'm sure a solution like this might be obvious, but to me it was not! I brought my laptop into the garage last night, cut about a 1' length of wood and grabbed an old chain to give it a try. It worked like a charm! As many of the comments say, I didn't use the groove and it still worked great. Just wanted to share this with you folks. If you don't have a chain whip, you can still easily pop off cassettes and freewheels. Just a block of wood and some old chain is all you need!

[Sclass]

Did some brazing today. I had to make a linkage part for my car’s doorlock. I could have 3D printed it but I wanted something made of steel. This is the tie rod that pulls the lock mechanism open when the electric door lock motor fires. It takes some impact and I didn’t want the plastic part failing in there requiring another opening and repair.

My prior link had failed. It was an adapter the Chinese linear actuator came with to retrofit the existing lock mechanism to their remote control door openers.

So here is the part. It’s a steel rod bent with a hook brazed on to a small washer. Steel to steel using brass beading wire and borax from the Walmart craft section. The joint wetted quite well and it looks strong. I used the MAP gas torch I discussed earlier. Finally got to braze something practical.





Installed in the lock mechanism on the car. The original fell apart. Hope this lasts longer.

[davtheram12]

It takes some impact and I didn’t want the plastic part failing in there requiring another opening and repair.

Looks good! I commend you for keeping your Benz on the road for as long as possible. I once had a plastic piece break inside the door lock mechanism of my 1998 Honda Civic while the door was closed. Had to take off the inner door panel, while the door was closed and locked, and drill out the mechanism from the inside. Ripped everything out piece by piece until it finally released the door. Took about an hour of sweating and swearing. Repairs like these really test someones patience.

[Sclass]

More fun brass brazing.

I'm trying some more experiments with brazing. This is such an inexpensive yet effective way to join metals I thought I'd post it up here.

Today I wondered if I could attach stainless steel to another piece of stainless steel. After wasting half an hour surfing for info online I decided to just go out to the garage and try it. Up to now I've been brazing low carbon steel to low carbon steel. Everyone seems to do this. Stainless is generally done with a TIG brazing setup with Silicon Bronze or an Oxy acetylene torch with silver alloys. Both are moderately expensive. I was going to attempt this with my new $60 MAP torch but I decided to try it with a cheap butane torch. I used this little refillable torch people commonly use for soldering, lighting cigars, smoking crystalline drugs, Crème brûlée caramel or heating small objects. Brazing wire is the same Walmart brass bead bracelet wire from the craft section. 25' for $3.

Well here are the results. I used 20 Mule team Borax again as flux. I have a lifetime supply for $5. Ant killer and brazing flux all in one box. I used this tiny cheap butane torch. I got this torch free but they can be bought at the dollar store for smoking. You need the one that has a turbo mixing head instead of just a simple butane lighter. Sometimes sold as a Cigar lighter. It worked great! You can see the fillet of golden brass bonding properly to the stainless. It is a super strong bond. I cannot break it by tugging on it with pliers in my vise. I'm putting 100 lbs of force on it and it won't snap. This is soldering on steroids! And lead/tin solder won't easily stick to stainless steel. The wire is 18 gauge stainless T304.

The trick with the braze is thin wire. 18 GA. So it can get red hot easily. That's how hot it needs to be to get the brass to stick. With a low power heat source you must be really efficient at delivering heat to your part. Using a little base of bricks helps keep the heat on the part. I used a vise but I cheated by using long wires to keep the heated joint away from the vise jaws that suck the heat out of the joint.

I've had negative results in the past with inconel and stainless silver soldering. I never could get the solder to stick. But I wasn't using cheap Walmart craft brass wire and cheap borax laundry booster. That was this high tech silver bearing alloy that cost a lot. This cheap brass stuff is amazing. opens up a lot of possibilities for fixes on stainless steel.







ETA-I just realized many of the bicycle people here are probably already doing this to their brake and shift cables to keep them from fraying at the ends. I always wondered what that stuff was on the end of the cable that kept it from fraying. As a kid I frayed the ends and never could get them back in the cable. Or I’d destroy the metal mushroom on the tip.

[sky]

How do you put the borax on it? Mix it with water?

[Sclass]

I gently heated up the brass wire and dipped it in a salsa jar filled with the powder. Did the same with the steel ends. Like making rock candy.

[Sclass]

Battery Desulfators

These have caught my attention this week. I had some beginner’s luck at reviving a car battery that wouldn’t accept a charge.

A few days ago I jumped into one of my cars that I only drive once every two weeks and the starter sounded weak. I didn’t think it was an issue since the battery should charge enough by the time I got into town. By the time I was in town it was barely starting. It’s a diesel and it requires a very hefty and expensive battery. I got home and checked the date on the battery and it was 4 years old. The battery is a 3 year prorated warranty model. Junk time.

I put it on a charger a few hours. I was able to start the car once. I tried again and the started ground to a halt. Click.click.click. Dead. At this point I usually head down to Walmart, plunk down my money and replace the battery. But this time I just couldn’t stomach the new higher price on the diesel spec battery. I decided to dry desulfating with some junk I had lying around.

My charger is simply a transformer with two taps - one for 6A charging and one for 2A charging. This old thing. It has a selenium rectifier inside to make rectified full wave AC 12V peak voltage and no smoothing filter. This is probably good for desulfating. Websites on the subject suggest high frequency pulses or low frequency pulses to “break up sulfates” on the plates. This supposedly rejuvenates a bad battery. Of course it hadn’t up to this moment so it needed an extra kick.





I decided I needed a bit more high frequency content than just 120Hz full wave rectifier output so I put a router speed control on the charger’s AC socket. These cheap devices from Harbor freight are like lamp dimmers. They reduce power by periodically chopping your AC power somewhere in the cycle. I figured the abrupt chop should put some high frequency in the output. Checked it on a oscilloscope and sure enough, there’s the 120Hz roll with some sharp spikes. It is especially spikey when I run the old charger at 6A and then ratchet down the router speed control to 50% speed.

I left it on the car like this for six hours. I came back and the battery was charged. I started the car five times in a row with no weakening of the cranking. Unbelievable. I think I saved myself $200. I was ready to drive down to the auto parts store and get new battery but I think I’ll keep using this one awhile.

I went over to Amazon and bought a charger that supposedly had “desulfator mode” to revive batteries. After it arrived I put it on a scope and it has a 2Hz low frequency roll with some high frequency hash on the charging voltage in “repair” mode. Model is Nextool and costs $25 Amazon prime shipping. I put in on my car and the digital display says my battery is already 80% recovered. I’m letting it run.

Not sure about all this desulfurization hocus pocus but it seems I saved my battery. There are a number of cheap diy circuits you can build to do this. The simplest (and most dangerous) is an incandescent lamp and a bridge rectifier hooked to mains power. I figured for $25 I’d avoid electrocution and potentially boiling over my battery. So I skipped the build and just bought.

DIY options. Don’t kill yourself.

https://www.instructables.com/Desulfato ... ltoids-Ti/
https://www.homemade-circuits.com/batte ... explained/
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/thre ... er.143301/

Buy.

I bought this one for $25


Make

Potentially deadly but easy and cheap to make.


Some of the people playing with this stuff had a green motivation. Reuse the old battery and save lead reclamation. Save money too. The diy devices looked very simple and there are a ton of designs online. The videos border on hillbilly engineering. The battery does get taken out of operation for a few hours to a few weeks.

Thought this might be interesting to some of you. It’s a cheap way to possibly save a lead acid battery. I’m not sure yet but given how many cars I own and idle this device may save me some money. Batteries aren’t getting any cheaper. There’s the whole question of long term reliability but for my weekend car it probably is worth the gamble.

Anyone doing this? Off grid solar with lead acid? Golf carts? Tractors? Boats? Batteries that sit idle sulfate up.

[SavingWithBabies]

Our Instant Pot stopped working the other day. I wasn't using it so I don't know what happened but it just wouldn't turn on at all. I suspected a fuse and searching revealed indeed there is a thermal fuse. I ordered a replacement and installed it and it came back to life! I realized the replacement I ordered had a 43c higher threshold which worried me so I ordered the right fuse (142c instead of 185c) and will install that when it arrives. The fuse was easy to get to by taking off the bottom. It's mounted with the fuse within a section of heat insulation "hose" pushed against the outside of the metal chamber and attached with a screw.

[SavingWithBabies]

@Sclass I haven't tried that but I think I will. Some of our vehicles don't get used a whole lot and with our SUV, if I forget to remove the two controller and/or the bluetooth ODB2 dongle, over time the battery will get drained. The SUV seems rough on batteries in general. I think I'll order one of those and try it on the SUV and also the various boat/RV 12v batteries that get intermittent use.

[Sclass]

That’s great about the thermal fuse. After my microwave lost its main fuse I’m really careful about looking for a fuse when an appliance completely blacks out. We have three instant pots now. My wife is nuts about them. One got moved to our place in LA for overnights up there. She apparently got a great Black Friday deal on another so she bought one and stored it. A year ago she insisted we were due for a bout of inflation. she wanted to have her replacement in place. I’m just happy to get the products of the pot. The aquarium silicone seal job on our first one is still holding. It didn’t kill us yet.

One thing I forgot to mention about the desulfators. Some can put out really nasty spikes. In the fine print buried on the instructions it says disconnect the battery (one terminal will do) when running the “repair” function. It warns that sensitive systems in a modern car can be damaged. It may be possible if the engineer who designed the system didn’t design in the appropriate overvoltage protection circuitry into the car parts. I took off the + connector on my battery before I ran it to be safe. Although I didn’t see anything on the scope that would make me particularly worried.

ETA - went out to lunch today. Got some pad Thai with the money I would have spent on the battery. I started the engine several times as I ran errands. Wow. It hasn’t spun this strong in a long time. I think it’s a legitimate fix.

[davtheram12]

*deleted because of redundancies. Realized I already talked about this repair in my journal.

[ertyu]

NICE

[davtheram12]

For the past few months, I've noticed a huge decline in my cars average mpg. City driving mpg has particularly been bad although highway mpg hasn't changed much. For reference, my 2011 Honda Fit has an EPA rating of 27mpg city and 33mpg highway with an average of 30mpg. I've been getting around 15-18mpg lately with about 85% city driving. I knew that was much too low considering my driving habits haven't changed much.

After a little research, I read that other Honda Fit owners were experiencing similar issues. Some also had a combination of additional symptoms (e.g. misfire, engine stuttering, smell of exhaust in the cabin, engine light on the guage cluster, etc). I had none of the other symptoms but the drastic mpg difference meant something was wrong. I narrowed it down to loose spark plugs, an issue the 1st and 2nd generation Honda Fit experienced.

Getting to the spark plugs took a little extra work but sure enough, each one of them was substantially loose. Cylinder 2 and 4 were so loose, I was getting blow back on the coil packs. Luckily I caught it early enough and nothing had lasting damage. I torqued the spark plugs down to 15ft/lbs, bolted down the coil packs, plugged in the wiring, reinstalled the wiper motor, reinstalled the wiper cowl and reinstalled the wiper arms. Took about 1.5 hours, including washing the engine bay, and it worked! I'm back up to 32mpg average. The car also seems to be running more smoothly. Here are a few photos I took.

Update: I started suffering from poor mpg again after about a month of light driving. I previously torqued the spark plugs to 15ft/lbs. I checked them again on 10/30/22 and found that the spark plugs in cylinder 3 and 4 loosened themselves again. I ultimately torqued them down to 20ft/lbs (as recommended by an updated Honda service manual). Hopefully this will be the last time I have to tighten the spark plugs.


Engine bay untouched.


The coil packs and spark plugs are between the engine and firewall. You can just barely make out cylinder 1. The coil pack plug is blue.


Wiper cowl was removed and now there is plenty of space to access the spark plugs.


Poor exposure but things should be easier to reach.


Coil packs 1 and 2 still installed.


Coil packs 3 and 4 still installed.


Engine bay cleaned and parts partially reinstalled.


Close up shot of a cleaner engine bay.

[Ego]

Wow! I had no idea this was a problem. I am going to check mine right away. Thanks!

[davtheram12]

I am going to check mine right away. Thanks!

Hey Ego! Good idea. It seems it's more likely to happen if the plugs have previously been changed. My first set lasted 120k miles and I never had any issues. The second set started giving me problems after 27k miles.

Honda eventually updated the torque specs in response. It was originally 13ft/lbs, then up to 15ft/lbs and then finally up to 20ft/lbs. I ultimately picked 15ft/lbs hoping I wouldn't run into the issue again. I'll likely have to go up to 20ft/lbs if I see that I run into mpg issues again. Good luck!

[Sclass]

Brazed a compact pin spanner for my grinder. I obtained this grinder second hand in college and it didn't come with the pin spanner or open end spanner to remove the disk. For the past thirty years I've made do with a pair of long nosed pliers in the little pips combined with an adjustable wrench. While sitting here staring at it I figured I could weld up a spanner from junk with the new welder. I found a nail and an old nut salvaged from something. Shaped it on the vise with a hammer and file.

Before welding it I realized I could braze it with brass wire and borax. I'm kind of in love with brazing. It has this ancient world look of gold and silver when it's done. Sumerian tech. Happens at friendly temperatures. I can do it with my propane torch. It's minimalist. I used a foot of thin brass wire to do this. A teaspoon full of borax laundry booster. Its a lot more approachable than welding. Welding is more violent. This feels like jewelry making.

It's really ugly with all the burned flux all over it but I quit trying to clean it because I realized it was mindless. The tool will work well in blackened steel rather than bronze so no more brushing. I was cleaning longer than it took to actually torch braze.

The constraints of this trick is small dimensions. I can get the nut red hot with the torch because it has a small volume. I heat on bricks to conserve my heat. I know I could buy a set of wrenches for this Makita online but I'd rather make it from discards. My big efficiency blunder was trying to clean it. I spent half an hour to get it to this point. It would have been fine dirty black charcoal finish but I wouldn't be able to see the golden braze.

Ok, so here it is. No more hunting for pliers when I want to change disks. Starting with cheap materials.



forming


clamping things together


brazed



finished result. still dirty. the fillets look good. quite strong. uses a wrench for leverage.



tie it to the cord so I'll always have it handy.

[Sclass]

Some more fixes. Air fryer plug fatigued off. I caught it right before it went in the dumpster. Spliced on a cable I salvaged from something else I threw away. Must have been something with a heavy duty cord like a heater. Anyhow, I had a junk power cord and I spliced it in. Good as new.





My Pfister faucet finally gave up the ghost. I had been getting their lifetime repair parts for it but lately they've been giving me pushback saying things like that hasn't been made for 10 years. So they no longer send out new parts. I bought a new one on Amazon for $80. I'll zip tie the receipt and warranty card to the plumbing below the sink. I salvaged the cartridge and aerator from the old one. They were in good shape and I'll use them for a future fix if they fit.

Also fixed a light switch. Straight swap. These rocker switches are not durable. But I'm stuck with them because I don't want to change the other switches and beauty plates. I've lost half a dozen in the last ten years. I just buy bulk packs now and keep them on the shelf.

keeping money in my pocket.

[Gilberto de Piento]

Nice fixes. I have a faucet that drips a lot but the handles are stuck on the faucet presumably by calcium so haven't been able to disassemble it. It may be easier and more cost effective (when my time fighting the build up is included) to buy a new one instead of the expensive cartridges but that still irritates me.

For many types of switches there are cheaper and more expensive versions. You could try the pricier version instead of the $1 version and see if that avoids the issue, though I don't know if those are available for decora style.

[Sclass]

The switch is decora style. They are old and they’ve worn out on the lights I use a lot. The little hole at the fulcrum cracks and it completely disables the switch. I can go around my place and see many of them are on the the verge of failing.

Good luck with the cartridge. Make sure it doesn’t have a thread or a clip that is still holding it. If it is really jammed up you can make a tool. I kind of recall I wrapped a para cord around one that wouldn’t come out and tied it to a medium sized hammer to jerk it upwards.