Viking Auto Dryer by the T. Eaton Company, 1995, front control panel. Photo by Don Tai
Dead it was, our dryer, a Viking Auto Dryer, from the T. Eaton Company, circa 1995, model number EDX22RW1181, front load, Toronto, Canada, hopelessly turning and turning, all without heat. Of course our clothes were not dry after an hour. Wife was not impressed and put the dryer at the top of my “to do” list. A solution was required before the next weekend load. Nothing stops for laundry or cooking.
These spanner slotted screw heads are a pain in the butt. My broken Black and Decker VS200 Heat Sealer used 2 of 9 screws as spanner slotted, the rest were philips. Why go non-standard? photo by Don Tai
Heat sealing some frozen corn with my Black and Decker VS200 heat sealer, from a 2 kg bag down to 0.5kg bags, I heard a pop, and then noticed the heat strip of my heat sealer was no longer hot. Damn, we are going to need a repair.
Had a hunch I did, that the warped Alvin cutting mat at Goodwill could be repaired, and I was right. The mat seemed to have some smooth but pretty funky curves and did not sit flat. I baked it!
The Alvin cutting mat is pretty thick, so simply bending it would probably break it. After some Google research I tried the oven reheat solution. Here it is:
Replacing fan and light switches on a San Yang Pai CY-760 range hood. Toronto, Canada, photo1 by Don Tai
My San Yang Pai model CY-760-A range hood came with our house. Overall it is a good range hood suitable for Chinese stir fry cooking. We did not buy it new, so I do not know exactly how old it is, but I estimate it to be about 20 years old. The on/off switches were giving trouble, and the left fan stopped turning on. These switches are in constant use.
Older American Standard Ballcock fill valve. Use Google Search images to find your valve type. There are many different ones.
Recently the water pipes on my street were refurbished. as a result a lot of gunk they scraped off was flushed through my water system. Shortly after my older American Standard toilet started acting up, like it was not getting water into the tank. While there are a lot of sites and videos that show you how to replace the ballcock fill valve there are none that show you how to repair it. Here is how I repaired mine. It was very easy.
Hate it, I do, when a product fails before I believe it should. I have ranted about such products here before and I stand by my rants. Specifically you see products fail mere months after the warranty has expired, seemingly on queue for you to purchase yet another replacement. The old one goes into the garbage and then landfill, and the environment takes an unnecessary penalty for our stupidity. Clearly this should not be. I purposely buy products that last a long time, if I can, and take measures to ensure they do last.
Friend Dave had ripped one of the wires on his Sony earbud headphones, MDR-EX38iP, so I decided to fix it. With the help of the Internet he now has a headset back in service.
The wires on these headphones are really very thin and fragile. There is no apparent physical shielding between the signal and ground wires, and twisting like wires together did not get the cut off earbud working. Luckily my friends at Instructables gave me hints to the solution.
Old machinery is ugly, strongly made of metal, is serviceable and lasts a long time. This is the case of my Viking Auto dryer, made by the T. Eaton Company (long defunct), model no. EDX22RW1181. This dryer came with the house and has been working pretty well until recently. Ten years ago or so it stopped heating, so I took it apart and fixed the broken heating wire. Now it runs but the heat shuts off after about 20 minutes, so our clothing takes 3 hrs to dry. Why did I wait this long to repair the dryer? Because others in the house did not tell me of the problem until recently. Now that I cleaned out all the lint from 10 years it should run well again.
Olympia Nomad motorcycle jacket: nice jacket, well constructed inside and out
Textile motorcycle jackets are really for one time crash use, then they are trashed. “Face”, from Toronto, Ontario, Canada had bought an Olympia Nomad textile motorcycle jacket in May 2012, then lowsided at 80 mph in Montana in July 2012. With only a couple of months of use and about $300US later, it was a shame to trash the jacket. We opted to try a repair of the damage. The jacket had minor melting and a hole in the left elbow, some teeth missing from one of the air vent zippers, small rips of the cordura that covered the zipper, and abrasion and stitching destroyed in the slide. The right elbow had a couple seams abraded away that needed to be resewn.
Maintenance of any mechanical device is important for the smooth and trouble free operation. A ripstik is a kid’s toy, similar to a skateboard, and as a kid’s toy, gets vicious abuse. We bought a used Ripstik Classic and it really needed some TLC. Here is what we did. As a result of our maintenance the ripstik runs much smoother and glides farther, resulting in faster speeds and/or less effort. These are all benefits of a couple of hours of maintenance.
