Handy Tips – Page 2 – Woody's Workshop

February 10, 2024February 10, 2024

Simple Vice tommy bar modification

Protection from getting trapped skin

I have a Record #34 vice. It has a seriously chunky tommy bar. If you accidently let this drop with a finger in the way you are heading for expletives and a large blood blister.

The fix is to force two O rings over the end stops to act as buffer protection. Apart from lowering your blood pressure and saving your stock of BandAids it reduces the clunk when the bar drops with or without your skin in the way.

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September 21, 2023September 21, 2023

Soldering Iron bit storage on Lytool soldering station

Including a 3D insert tip holder

In my recent post on a 3D print insert stand I mentioned the use of the Lytool soldering iron station. This uses a Type 936 style soldering pencil and it is supplied with five different profile soldering tips. When using the iron for non insert related soldering, I have found it lightweight to use, very quick to get to temperature and generally a good alternative to my Weller TCP1.

After some research I found that the best match 3D inserts tips for the Type 936 pencil are a screw in set with a common mounting bit. Here is the Amazon link.

Having now got five different soldering tips, the insert holder and six 3D insert tips, things were getting a bit messy and a potential recipe for something getting lost with all the ensuing frustration. The solution was a simple holder for these various components that mounted on the Lytool soldering iron holder. Here is the Fusion image.

and here is the finished item mounted on the soldering iron holder.

Clearly as a 3D print you can’t go putting a hot tip on a plastic prong … but that aside it is functional. As an alternative you could replace the prongs with M4 screws. Here is a view of such a variant. This uses M4 x 15mm countersink screws but space is restricted on the rear side to allow for the screw head size. There is still room for seven standard tips. If the threads don’t print well then the screws could be fastened with nuts on the top side instead. This would also protect the body plastic from any residual heat in the tip.

Here is a ZIP file with the STL files for the two versions.

soldering tip racks Download

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June 25, 2023June 25, 2023

Water Softener goes AWOL

Lesson to be learned – protect your overflow pipes

We’ve had a few weeks in France and were worried to hear from our UK house sitters that our TapWorks water softener’s sump had filled with water and was leaking salty water from the kitchen cabinet onto the floor.

My immediate instructions were to isolate the softener using the bypass valves and turn the supply off.

On arrival home I drained the sump and tried a regeneration routine. This revealed water leaking from the pressure vessel. This clearly was the source of the excess water in the sump. What was not obvious was why the sump had filled when there was an overflow pipe to an external drain.

The overflow pipe would have been far more effective without the nest of insect life that had chosen the pipe as their new home.

Moral to the story is to make sure all external overflow pipes have a gauze mesh protecting them from new residents.

That aside the pressure vessel was acting like a mini volcano slowly weeping out the balls of the softener medium. Given it was installed in 2008 it has given a good run for its money.

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November 19, 2022November 19, 2022

Noga External Deburrer and Cut Screws

Making life easier on cut threads

Minor tip – You have a thread that is too long. You hacksaw it down to length and then have the pain of cleaning the end up so it looks square and more importantly the thread will start. If you are organised you will probably spin a nut onto the thread and use this to clear the cut end thread.

Step up the Noga Classic Rotadrive external deburring tool. This is meant to take a burr off the end of a cut rod but is equally good for clearing the start of a cut thread. File the cut end flat and spin the Noga on the end for a couple of spins. Magic. Admittedly you can’t go down to diameters less than 4mm but below this size threads are usually not quite so difficult to start after cutting.

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September 29, 2022September 29, 2022

Technoline Wireless Weather Station problem

WS-2350 Poor Battery Life

I have had my WS-2350 Weather Station for a very long time and it has always worked reliably. The batteries recently died in the base station unit (3 x AA) and I replaced them. The unit sits in the kitchen and on entering the kitchen the following evening I noticed a glow coming from the LCD screen backlight LEDs. This was unusual as the LEDs should switch off after a few seconds of a key press. I didn’t think anymore about it and went to bed. Next morning the low battery symbol was showing…. and the LEDs were still dimly showing light.

I took the unit through to the workshop and powered it from a 6V external supply. Sure enough the LEDs were on and the current drawn was around 40mA, far too high for long life battery operation.

I removed the eight screws holding the case rear in place and struggled to remove it. There was a build up of corrosion around the battery contacts making them tight in the back cover moulding slots. Some careful cleaning eventually cleared this and the back cover came off. This revealed more accumulated ‘fur’ corrosion around the PCB lands holding the battery contacts and elsewhere on the board. This was cleaned off but the current drawn still remained high.

I next removed the PCB from inside the case. This needs six screws to be removed. A word of warning. These six screws while holding the board in place are also responsible for applying pressure to the conductive rubber contact strips that connect the LCD screen to the PCB. Be very careful not to disturb these strips. The board is also connected to the VLF rod antenna that receives the off air time code updates and also to the antenna for the radio transceiver that connects to the outdoor sensor module. Be very careful not to disturb these components.

I gently lifted the PCB out and sure enough there was even more corrosive fur on the back side of the PCB around the battery terminals and elsewhere on the board. I thoroughly cleaned all this off and with an abrasive pencil brightened up the the battery contacts.

After fastening the PCB back into the case, I powered it back up from the external supply. To my relief the LCD had re-connected okay and was fully working. More important was the power consumption had dropped to microamps. Problem solved. The corrosion somewhere on the board must have been creating a partial short across the PCB tracks. This must have been sufficient to make the processor think a key was still pressed and therefore the backlight LEDs needed to be held on.

As I had never had leaking batteries in the unit I would guess that there had been soldering flux left on the board when it was assembled and this had absorbed moisture and had ‘grown’ and become conductive over time.

I hope this helps someone who might be having similar problems. When battery powered devices are running with very low current it does not need much contamination between copper tracks to cause all sorts of weird effects.

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