OT - What are you fixing right now?

johnmitchell · October 31

You always amaze us 👏👏👏

GrateEggspectations · October 31

Bravo, @WeberWho. Great and satisfying acquisition and restoration on the cheap. She’s a beaut and looks brand new. Your post serves as a good PSA for generator maintenance.

You don’t know you need one until you know. Never thought I’d want to own until we went 10 straight days without power a few years back. Now we always have one and a few gas cans at the ready, and when we replaced our panel last year, we bought a model with a designated and legal input for the generator. Good peace of mind.

kl8ton · October 31

@WeberWho - Fantastic! I always like your restoration projects.

zaphod · October 31

GrateEggspectations said:

Bravo, @WeberWho. Great and satisfying acquisition and restoration on the cheap. She’s a beaut and looks brand new. Your post serves as a good PSA for generator maintenance.

You don’t know you need one until you know. Never thought I’d want to own until we went 10 straight days without power a few years back. Now we always have one and a few gas cans at the ready, and when we replaced our panel last year, we bought a model with a designated and legal input for the generator. Good peace of mind.

My Sister and BiL got hit by that same 10 day outage - they live in Halton Hills. After that they got a whole house Generac generator fueled from their house propane tank (about 1500 litre size, no nat gas where they live). They are all set now unless the company forgets to come in and fill it up.

Which they did in late February last year. I really feel for the company having my irate sister on the line with them. Something along the lines of "you have ONE job ..." but with swearing.

GrateEggspectations · October 31

zaphod said:

GrateEggspectations said:

Bravo, @WeberWho. Great and satisfying acquisition and restoration on the cheap. She’s a beaut and looks brand new. Your post serves as a good PSA for generator maintenance.

You don’t know you need one until you know. Never thought I’d want to own until we went 10 straight days without power a few years back. Now we always have one and a few gas cans at the ready, and when we replaced our panel last year, we bought a model with a designated and legal input for the generator. Good peace of mind.

My Sister and BiL got hit by that same 10 day outage - they live in Halton Hills. After that they got a whole house Generac generator fueled from their house propane tank (about 1500 litre size, no nat gas where they live). They are all set now unless the company forgets to come in and fill it up.

Which they did in late February last year. I really feel for the company having my irate sister on the line with them. Something along the lines of "you have ONE job ..." but with swearing.

She went Hoekstra on them.

RRP · October 31

here’s mine which compared to other posters here makes my task seem trivial. unlike most of you i still maintain a land line in addition to my cell phone. suddenly one day my phones quit working and all 5 phones read NOLINE. but when calls come in the phones all ring until the caller hangs up. But if I try to answer there is nothing but silence. So I know the calls are in thru my Comcast modem. Today i plan to plug the master station directly into the modem to see what happens and prove or disprove an actual line problem somewhere. if all that fails then maybe its the master phone has gone bad since the other 4 phones are wireless satellites.Anybody have other ideas?

zaphod · October 31

like you, I also have a land line. and most of my phones are wireless. But I keep at couple of wired land line handsets so that I can still have a phone line in a power outage.

Of course this fell down when I had my copper line from the road replaced with fibre, as the wired phones now have a power injector on the line, but still, a wired phone would help you debug your issue.

RRP · October 31

thanks for the idea but I no longer have a direct line into the house - my phone service is strictly thru my Comcast modem then slice into the wired line to the master station.

zaphod · October 31

yes, but .... at some point the base station for your wireless hand set plugs into an RJ-11 jack on the wall. do you have an old hardwired style phone you could plug into there? That would remove the wireless basestation and it's handsets as a source of the problem.

SmokinJazz · October 31

kl8ton said:

Does that black blob look normal to anyone? Unit will not turn on. Power feeds are the black and white wires. My eyesight is not as good as it used to be. Taking pics and zooming in. Barrel fuse seems hardwired.. If it's not, I cannot easily remove it. I have to go find my multimeter.

My guess is that black blob is probably just RTV used to secure the NTC (likely to limit inrush current) to the fuse, probably to pass a vibration test. Fuse is leaded/soldered in, so not meant to be field replaceable. Did you find your issue? Ohm out the fuse and the NTC (without power).

fishlessman · October 31

zaphod said:

like you, I also have a land line. and most of my phones are wireless. But I keep at couple of wired land line handsets so that I can still have a phone line in a power outage.

Of course this fell down when I had my copper line from the road replaced with fibre, as the wired phones now have a power injector on the line, but still, a wired phone would help you debug your issue.

miss the old copper lines, the fibre crap is always out at my house. its as bad as my cell phone coverage

kl8ton · October 31

SmokinJazz said:

kl8ton said:

Does that black blob look normal to anyone? Unit will not turn on. Power feeds are the black and white wires. My eyesight is not as good as it used to be. Taking pics and zooming in. Barrel fuse seems hardwired.. If it's not, I cannot easily remove it. I have to go find my multimeter.

My guess is that black blob is probably just RTV used to secure the NTC (likely to limit inrush current) to the fuse, probably to pass a vibration test. Fuse is leaded/soldered in, so not meant to be field replaceable. Did you find your issue? Ohm out the fuse and the NTC (without power).

I haven't done anything with it yet since my pool is closed. I was going to play around with the soldering iron this winter. I will check out the resistance on that fuse without power! Thanks for the tip. I have an excellent electronics store in my town. You can buy resistors and capacitors and pretty much anything that would solder on to a board. You walk out of there paying like 89 cents and you have three things you can solder on to a board. I don't know how they stay in business but I'm happy they are there. I will buy various things from them hoping to keep them afloat. These types of stores are few and far between.

RRP · October 31

zaphod said:

yes, but .... at some point the base station for your wireless hand set plugs into an RJ-11 jack on the wall. do you have an old hardwired style phone you could plug into there? That would remove the wireless basestation and it's handsets as a source of the problem.

What I did like I said I going to do was plug the base directly into the modem completely bypassing any internal phone line wiring and it still read NOLINE. Either the phone female plug-in in the modem has gone bad which I doubt then the base has puked. Since I can't bypass the modem to get a phone connection I'm going to replace the phone network. Besides this system is at least 25 years old. While I can't imagine why it suddenly died, but seeing the only way to tear it apart is the use of a 16 oz hammer then I'll get one ordered tonight.

Buckwoody Egger · October 31

Ron sounds like a time for a replacement. word to the wise on features. look for a cordless base model where it intercepts all incoming calls and asks them to press a code (that you determine) before the phones ring in the home. hugely successful. the call block where you block individual #s is ineffective. it bypasses the prompt for all saved contact numbers.

RRP · October 31

Thank you @Buckwoody Egger! I haven't shopped in so many years I probably would have simply bot a replacement though my base and satellites were all wireless so I would never have gone back to the Princess time!

Buckwoody Egger · November 1

https://help.na.panasonic.com/answers/how-to-use-the-automated-call-block-feature/

looks like panasonic and a little research on specific models will get you there.

WeberWho · November 11

Another rinse and repeat post about a generator. Shortly after finishing up the first generator another one popped up on Marketplace. This time it was $70 but the owner said it only had 4 hours on it. His friend gifted him the generator but said he never drained the gas out of it from the year prior. I don't think the new owner wanted to deal with it and decided to sell it. The owner started it up when picking up the generator but it didn't want to run off choke. A good sign that it was just a carburetor. He showed me the hour meter and it showed 4 hours. It looked brand new. So I picked it up.

I removed the carburetor and cleaned it up. After sliding the carburetor back on I noticed an issue. The choke side of carburetor didn't want to sit flush with the airbox. I had to sit there for a minute and try to figure out what was wrong. It turns out the back of the airbox was somehow pushed in. The way the back of the airbox was pushed in looked like it could have came that way from the factory. No scrapes or scratches. It's not some cheap tin airbox where something could have been easily tweaked. Something hit it good and just right where I had to second guess it wasn't something else that wasn't aligning properly. The main reason I was second guessing myself was that the front of the air box was in perfect shape. No scrapes or scratches on the airbox showing any type of damage. I still don't know how or why it could have been pushed in but something hit it just right. I stopped over at my parents house and had my Dad double check to see what I was seeing. He was just as perplexed as I was as how it could have been pushed in perfectly without any evidence of damage. Since the metal airbox was pushed in the choke on the carburetor didn't want to fully open. I'm guessing it was part of the issue of the generator not wanting to run off choke. (On top of the carb being dirty)

Here's a picture of the carb when I noticed something wasn't right. I backlit it and could see the issue but it didn't make sense as the back of the airbox didn't show any visible damage.

We stuck a piece of wood in the bench vise and went around with a ball peen hammer to straighten it back into shape. I have to say how impressed I was with the paint they used on the airbox. It didn't seem to mind being reworked!

No pictures of the carb as it was pretty much identical as the one from the other day. I think there is only 3-4 factories in China that make these Honda clone motors. So I'm sure most of these Chinese carburetors are all the same with different names.

It's an off brand generator name. Parts are still available as most of these are all just renamed Chinese generators that big box stores sell. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing. They seemed to have a good job stealing/cloning Honda's engineering over the years. While it's a cheaper generator I've read that people have put over 8,000 hours on them with timely oil changes. So with a little luck this thing should be good for sometime. Here's the kicker, the previous owner pointed out that the generator only had 4 hours. After getting it running I happened to look at the hour meter. It said 5 hours. I figured I must have caught it as it just switched to the 5th hour. After some adjustments with be carb while it was running I noticed the hour meter said 7 hours. Instead of quickly glancing at the hour meter I actually stopped and looked at it as I knew I didn't have two hours of run time since owning it. The hour meter read .7 of an hour! So that meant the two previous owners put on a whopping 20 or so minutes on it!

A pic of the generator put back together.

A buddy of mine picked up the other generator I worked on as a backup for his fish house. So that was nice to help him out while able to get this one going a few days later.

lousubcap · November 11

@WeberWho - always a great recovery story. Your family's mechanical talents are truly impressive as is your generosity. Thoroughly enjoy your salvage and success adventures.

Botch · November 11

WeberWho said:

A buddy of mine picked up the other generator I worked on as a backup for his fish house. So that was nice to help him out while able to get this one going a few days later.

Have the north MN lakes been freezing as normal, these last couple years?

WeberWho · November 11

Botch said:

WeberWho said:

A buddy of mine picked up the other generator I worked on as a backup for his fish house. So that was nice to help him out while able to get this one going a few days later.

Have the north MN lakes been freezing as normal, these last couple years?

The last few years we've had very mild winters for Minnesota. The resorts have been struggling with the lack of snow and shorter period of time with frozen lakes. I think I've snowblowed my driveway once or twice in the past two winters. The northern part of the state surrounding Canada saw my much more than we have had in central and southern part of the state. Still way down from your typical Minnesota winter.

johnmitchell · November 11

Another great read and result 👍

GrateEggspectations · November 16

No pics for this one.

14.5hp Briggs and Stratton snowblower seemed to be leaking gas from an unknown location when I filled it for a test run last week. Did some research and read it was likely the carburetor (and maybe the float inside, or a gasket, etc.). Disassembled the carburetor this morning and gave it a good cleaning (it already appeared spotless). Took the opportunity to check all the connections, gaskets, etc. Figured I’d change the oil as well. The old oil seemed like maybe it had some gas mixed into it.

When all was said and done, it ran like a beaut without any leakage. Still don’t know what the specific issue was, but it doesn’t seem to be leaking anymore.

I feel like a regular @weberwho.

Have to obtain more cold temp small engine oil and a new collar for the snowthrower chute handle.

(Edit: After reading up, I’ll likely just just synthetic car oil of the correct specified viscosity in the snowblower. Searches tell me that’s just fine, but anyone who knows otherwise should please speak up!)

alaskanassasin · November 16

Sounds like your float was stuck open, good thing you checked the oil! Also you can just run 10-30 in the winter instead of 30w

GrateEggspectations · November 16

alaskanassasin said:

Sounds like your float was stuck open, good thing you checked the oil! Also you can just run 10-30 in the winter instead of 30w

I wondered that too. No apparent issues when I disassembled the carb, so hopefully, it doesn’t happen again.

alaskanassasin · November 16

GrateEggspectations said:

alaskanassasin said:

Sounds like your float was stuck open, good thing you checked the oil! Also you can just run 10-30 in the winter instead of 30w

I wondered that too. No apparent issues when I disassembled the carb, so hopefully, it doesn’t happen again.

Assuming you ran the fuel out of it when you parked it, the float would be down holding the needle in the open position, when the residual fuel evaporated it probably just stuck in that position, you might have got away with tapping on the bowl with a screwdriver handle or something once you had the fuel on. Good on ya for digging in and figuring it out though! That would have cost you a 100 loonies at the local mower shop!

GrateEggspectations · November 16

@alaskanassasin

Really good explanation. Thanks. I’ll have to watch for this issue again.

You don’t know until you know.

alaskanassasin · November 16

GrateEggspectations said:

@alaskanassasin

Really good explanation. Thanks. I’ll have to watch for this issue again.

You don’t know until you know.

Glad you got it running I hope you don’t have to use it!

GrateEggspectations · November 18

Shure SM58 microphone went dead. Opened her up and it seemed the wires had disconnected. Went to solder them back, but couldn’t find my soldering iron. Fast forward 30 mins and once back from the hardware store with a new iron, I soldered them up and we’re back in business.

Canugghead · November 18

^^^ Nice. That's how I ended up with two of every tool 😂

zaphod · November 18

what do you record?

OT - What are you fixing right now?

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