Becos Beko

Our existing washing machine has stopped working (more on that elsewhere). As a fix it was decided to buy a cheap second-hand spare off Facebook Marketplace to fill the gap. For £50 enter a Beko WTL74051W washing machine. Beko is a Turkish brand (the machine was made in Turkey) of Arçelik A.Ş. which also owns Grundig, Indesit, Hotpoint, Arctic, Ariston, Leisure and Blomberg. They aren't great machines, but have a reasonably good reputation for being cheap and cheerful (just not in terms of energy efficiency).

Beko WTL74051W
Washing Machine

This particular one came from under a tarp in someone's back yard, but it didn't look too bad (and was being bought from a friend of the Major's). Unfortunately the whole process was completed in a bit of a rush and I forgot to look at it properly. I didn't even spin the cylinder to make sure the bearings were OK, 😟. Once it was on the van I did notice that underside looked OK, if a bit cobwebby. But, stupidly, the fact that one of the feet was missing passed me by.

Wonky washer

The vendor couldn't find the original foot. So now there are two broken washing machines in the house 😞.

Beko washing machine underside showing
foot placement inside and out (circled)

On inspection the feet are screw-threaded with a plastic lock nut and fit into a press-moulded tapped socket made from the case of the machine. As you can see there is a bit of rust on the case under the front right foot, actually the one that was missing. Hopefully this won't be a problem…

Original and replacement Beko washing machine feet

Fortunately getting a replacement foot wasn't a problem and was only a fiver. I washed the other feet as they were a bit grotty and gave the insides a light vacuuming. After that it was simply a matter of screwing the feet back on and pushing the machine back under the counter after it had been plugged in and connected to the cold water supply. Levelling the machine was straightforward and an empty test run was uneventful.

JOB DO…

Then the Major then came along, after previously expounding on her expert knowledge of washing machines, and put three times the recommended soap powder into it causing it to leak everywhere. Working on the basis that, A) it will be sold at some point in the nearish future and B) the designers should have planned for this misuse case, I've elected to cross my fingers and assume that it will be OK to keep using it as is. However I still think I'll need to extract it from under the counter and give it a once over, but I'll let it dry out properly before attempting that as I don't want tip it and get water into places the machine isn't designed for.

JOB DONE

Time: 10 mins

Cost: £5.29 (or £55.29 inc. washing machine).

Kitchen Scissors

Following in the footsteps of the tin opener, ;the kitchen scissors also broke. At some point one of the handles had gotten too close to the stove and been melted a little. Then someone else seems to have dropped them and the loop of the handle has snapped. Although this is all supposition, I was presented with them as "found like this." On inspection you can see that it is a clean break.

Damaged kitchen scissors

At this point I'd pared back the bubbled plastic so it isn't really visible on the close-up. Ideally I would like to have solvent welded the break but, as I couldn't identify the manufacturer (initially), I couldn't find out what polymer it was made from. Assuming it might be ABS I tried MEK but it didn't touch it at all, with none of the usual tackiness that usually results from interactions between the two. My next guess was nylon, as the bubbling on the handle looked a lot like the same damage you get on a fish slice that has been overheated, which means superglue. In the end it turned out to be polypropylene so superglue was probably not the best choice, but I didn't know that at the time.

So I retrieved the superglue from storage, applied it and it stuck well. However superglue does not do well in water so I needed to protect the joint somehow. I settled on a liberal application of black electricians' tape. The result, whilst not pretty, was functional.

Repaired kitchen scissors

If I'd had my wits about me I would have used heat shrink sleeving instead but I didn't have my good head on that day.

The Wrong Head

Fast forward six months and the repair is still solid, so no complaints, even though now I'm not sure whether it is the superglue or the electrical tape that is holding it together. However one of the tykes has walked off with them and they are not coming back (just the scissors, I think). So I am back into purchasing mode, as with the tin opener 'repair.'

I'm not sure where the scissors originated from. The view is that they are probably from Oxo but no-one really knew. However, they had been a good pair of scissors and were still providing reliable service. Five out of seven review sites recommended Oxo Good Grips Kitchen & Herb Stainless Steel Scissors. These aren't the same design as the earlier scissors (if they were Oxo, that is), but the most important feature is that they come apart for cleaning. It also makes sharpening them a lot easier as well.

In an ideal world an all steel design would be better as there is no risk of the blades parting company with the handles. The downside of this, though, is that it increases their weight and to minimise this manufacturers make the handles smaller and thinner and this impacts on the comfort of using the scissors. I suppose wrapping a stainless steel core with a better grip would ease this, but that is more pennies for the manufacturer to lay out. Another factor against all-steel designs is that they are pretty exorbitant, think £50-100 a pair compared to £17.50 for the Oxo scissors, ouch! You'd have to get a lot of use out of a pair to support that cost and our last pair has lasted over 10 years.

So, Oxo it is.

Oxo Good Grips Kitchen Scissors

Probably.

Not being able to identify the source of the original scissors was irking me. Guessing that they might be from Lakeland or Debenhams a Google search for images identified something similar from Lakeland. Right-clicking the picture and copy image link and it was off to Google image search (which has steadily become more and more useful over the years).

Using Google Image Search to identify the manufacturer

And they were quickly identified as Arcos Prochef Series 195 mm Kitchen Scissors. As I had no complaints about the first pair I dropped the Oxo scissors and rebought the original ones from the Arcos Store on Amazon. Even better they were only £9.86, about half the price of the Oxo scissors.

Their advert could use a bit of work though. I could have had them for £7.20 if I would have picked them up at the local Post Office, but the delivery time, stated as "Usually dispatched within 6 to 7 months," was a little too long to wait. Also the handle material was described variously as polypropylene, polyoxymethylene and wooden all on the same page.

Arcos shonky Amazon product page

Arcos makes a great play of their Spanish heritage but, like everything else, these are made in China. The blades are fashioned of something called Nitrum stainless steel; it turns out that this is a tradename for Arcos' own brand of stainless steel. Its composition is a secret, apparently. A secret to everyone, that is, apart from any other knife manufacturer with access to an XRF analyser who will know the elemental composition. Arcos haven't patented it, so my guess is that this 'secret sauce' is probably more marketing than technical know-how. Not that this really affects my use of the scissors.

Once the scissors arrived they were washed, dried and put into service. One thing I noted when dealing with the packaging was that they come with a 10 year guarantee that isn't even mentioned on their Amazon product page, which is nice.

So for Arcos, 9/10 for their cost and quality but 2/10 for their Marketing Dept.

JOB DONE

Time: A day of research

Cost: £9.86

Tin Opener

Another day, another thing broken. The tin opener this time. The main problem being that it is not opening tins any more. It pierces the lids OK but just won't move round the tin as the gears keep slipping. On inspection this is because they are, technically speaking, shagged.

Old vs New Tin Opener

I happened to have a new tin opener to hand and you can see that, apart from being almost identical bar the handle (?all made in the same factory), the gears on the old (and yes I know rusty) one are completely rounded over. So, just a matter of replacing the drive gears and it can be put back into service then?

Partially dismantled tin opener

Well the tin opener can be reversibly dismantled with hand tools, which is a good start. There was a stainless steel screw holding the angled drive gear and blade assembly in position and the other flat drive gear was held onto a threaded spindle and could be released by holding the finer toothed gear above it with a pair of pliers and screwing off the handle.

Nadgered drive gear

As you can see the cogs on the drive gears were irretrievably damaged. But their repair ought to be simply a matter of buying a replacement set on the web and fitting them, no?

No, not allowed. Why let you pay a quid for new parts that are standard across multiple brands when we can make you buy a whole new tin opener and, even better, we'll shave a few pennies more off of the manufacturing process making the new one even more difficult to repair.

New opener mechanism

You can see that they have replaced the screw thread on the handle on this model for a permanent rivet and the screw and thread on the angled blade for a one-way press fitting. Just in case you might be able to work around the lack of parts.

This is a great (not really) example of manufacturing enshittification by prevention of repairs planned obsolescence. Watch Louis Rossman cover this by example of LED ceiling fans.

Louis Rossman

Believe me I tried really hard to source these parts on-line and came up with a blank. Either they just aren't available or I am completely failing to use the correct search terms/pictures.

So in order to fix the tin opener I would have to actually make the parts. This has been successfully attempted by at least one person in a real tour-de-force display of engineering bloody-mindedness. But only for the flat drive gear and on an opener where the angled drive gear was in better shape. Also I don’t have a Sherline mill handy… Unfortunately I needed to replace the angled one as well, which comes as an assembly with the cutting blade. Both are notched (double D-holes) and what looks to be press-fitted together onto a spindle.

It was just not practical to make both pieces; the flat gear is difficult but not impossible; the gear-and-blade combination is, however, too much trouble for a £5-10 piece of kit. I will point out that this doesn't absolve the manufacturer for having no spares available and offering something that can't be fixed. Thus costing the earth yet another dollop of resources it doesn't need to part with; I am throwing out 170 g of tin opener because I can't replace 9 g of duff parts.

Resignedly I had to accept the fact that I would have to dance to the manufacturers' tune and buy a new, even less reparable tin opener.

After a long dive into review sites, reddit, etc. I came to the conclusion that they had all tested brand new openers and no-one had published _any_ data on how well they work over time or how long they last. Suffice to say the older your tin opener the more likely it is to be a bit blunt but still working. The lifespan of a new tin opener appears to be about a couple of years and generally people are dissatisfied with that fact (even product designers).

My decision tree was, manual not electric, then not something dirt cheap like a butterfly opener, but after that I was fairly agnostic about which brand to go with. In no particular order here are the results from an incomplete selection of review sites.

Review Site	Brand
Serious Eats	Oxo
Spruce Eats	Zyliss
Which?	Joseph & Joseph
BBC Good Food	Zyliss
NYT Wirecutter	EZ-duz-IT
CNN Underscored	Oxo

I also asked Copilot for a recommendation and the Oxo opener came up on its list (although I am not sure whether it is really 'reviewing' all the options rather than just providing one). Some amusing points were America's Test Kitchen getting roundly abused in their comments section for not being able to use a safety can opener and coming down against them and the Which? reviewer being obsessed with the size of the opener. Really, who cares what size a tin opener is? There's plenty of stuff that you could throw out of most utensil drawers before you got rid of the tin opener.

In the end I decided to weigh the reviews on Amazon, counting any reviews with three stars or less as dissatisfied customers. In last place was the Joseph & Joseph Can-Do opener with 27% not satisfied out of 4,500 ratings. Next came the Zyliss Lock 'n' Lift opener with 18% dissatisfied out of 27,450 ratings, then the EZ-duz-IT opener with 9% (but not being in the States it was too expensive anyway) on 13,900 ratings. Finally, the best rated was the Oxo Good Grips opener with only 8% dissatisfied on 50,100 ratings

Oxo Good Grips Soft-Handled Can Opener

So Helen of Troy earned the sale and I bought an Oxo Good Grips Soft Handled Can Opener, which is essentially a like-for-like replacement for the defunct KitchenCraft opener. I am extremely dubious that A) it will last as long as the recently deceased one or B) that the Oxo brand name implies any better quality than any other opener. But they are offering a lifetime warranty on the opener so perhaps I will be proved wrong (their customer service dept. claims 10-15 years of use). It is also completely unrepairable.

Kuhn Rikon Safety Can Opener

As I am a sucker for new tools I also bought a Kuhn Rikon Safety Can Opener, even though its' dissatisfaction rating was 16% on 14,100 ratings. Mostly because of the comments in the America's Test Kitchen video and a video by Technology Connections. It comes with a three year guarantee and just looks cool. And again, it is also completely unrepairable.

In conclusion then, most tin openers are now unrepairable by design, despite earlier models having this feature. Once the blade dulls or the gears wear out the whole thing has to go into the waste, which is a shame as 95% of the opener is still functional.

This got me thinking. There is free open-source software for almost every application out there. Where is the open-source hardware movement? Are we limited to electronics (Raspberry Pi, Arduino, etc.) and basic components (like resistors and screws)?

The answer appears to be, mostly yes. In the kitchen area there is a bit of stuff on actual kitchens but searching for open source kitchen utensils doesn't return much of anything, apart from a really nice blender. Further digging found a few prints on Thingiverse for replacement handles for tin openers. Including a nice one that improves standard butterfly openers making them easier to use.

Open Source Hardware Tin Opener

The nearest I got was a student project by Alexander Cielsa which provides .stl files for most of a standard Bunker-type can opener. The author claims to have sourced the gears and cutting blade from "a local hardware store", which is a bit doubtful given my experience. A more likely source was from another, working opener than from the local hardware store. In fact you can see the rust on the gears in the photos of the finished opener.

But I am not knocking the effort, it is a really good start. In fact the only things missing are the gears and cutting wheel, which brings me back to the same dead end. Until I or, more likely, someone else out there works out how to source these components, tin openers are going to stay a disposable item, unhappily.

JOB DONE

Time taken: Too long

Cost: Oxo opener - £8.00; Kun Rikon opener £14.95

P.S. Yes I know it is overkill to buy two, but hey, at least when one breaks I'll have a spare.

Labtec LCS-2612 Speakers Fix

The Major has expressed a desire to have some speakers for her home office so she doesn't have to use headphones all of the time. So an ancient set of Labtec LCS-2612 speakers were located and extracted from a bedroom of one of the tykes. They had been using them for playing music from their phones until they demanded Bluetooth speakers instead.

When I say ancient I mean it, these are from back when beige was king and arrived with an equally beige desktop computer way back when (20+ years ago). If there was a manual with them when they arrived it's now long gone.

Labtec LCS-2612 Speakers. Never the knees of the bees.

It should have simply been a matter of setting them up and connecting them to her laptop, but all was not well with them. They sounded like they were playing from the bottom of a well. The problem seemed to be at the volume controls, as when they were pressed in and turned the sound came back to normal levels. Dodgy potentiometers are a common issue.

Potentiometer diagram

Over time either crud builds up on the track and wiper or one or other of them can get oxidised. Both issues lead to patchy contact across the pot, which creates the characteristic pops and crackles that you get from a bad pot. Fortunately options are available for cleaning and restoring them so I didn't have to go straight to pulling them out and replacing them. First though I needed to get at them.

Labtec LCS-2612 external front and rear views

Removing the rear and side covers was just a matter of taking out the four cross-head screws at the back of the subwoofer to reveal more discrete components than I have seen in a while.

Labtec LCS-2612 subwoofer internal view

The pots were located at the front of the box and the front cover was secured by another set of four screws in a much more difficult position to get to than the first set. However I managed to remove them without too much bother.

Volume, treble and bass pots

Looking at the pots, the external shells were tarnished, so it seemed a safe bet that the internals were likewise affected. The first choice to make is to replace or clean. Replacement means identifying the part then sourcing a supplier. For some more specialist pots this can be a tall order, but these are not high-end parts so it was possible to locate a picture on the web.

Panasonic dual-gang 50K pot

I couldn't quite tie down a part number but at about £8 each that would come to £24 plus p&p to replace all the pots. As a similar set of secondhand speakers would come in at about the same price it didn’t seem worth either the expense or the trouble to replace them.

The next choice was to clean in situ or desolder and clean; in situ is obviously best/easiest. I needed to accomplish three actions, clean up the wiper and track of the pot, remove oxidation if present and lubricate the cleaned surfaces.

And this is where I fell down the rabbit hole. There are many contact and control cleaners out there and twice as many opinions on what is the best product or strategy to use. The market leader is about £30 a bottle, which again is a bit toppy given the replacement cost of the speakers.

So I had to venture even further into the rabbit hole. In the end it looked like trying to clean and then lubricate the pots would be the first strategy to try. Most contact/control cleaners (the ones you can buy now anyway) use naphtha or white spirit as a base, both to solvate their active ingredients and for its cleaning action. So I took a fine plastic pipette and dropped just a couple of drops into the pot housing via the notches at the tops of the pots and worked the controls for a bit.

Notch on the top of pots provides solvent access
without having to desolder component

White spirit isn't conductive so it shouldn't matter if there was a bit left behind. Even so I dried the pots out with a hair drier as sparks and white spirit aren't a good mix. Once that was complete I plugged the power in and tested the system and everything was back to nominal. So I wouldn't need to remove any oxidation this time. The next job was to lubricate the controls to stop the dry surfaces abrading the track of the pot and knackering it. Again there was a wide range of lubricants on offer…

WD-40 was mentioned quite frequently and appears to be quite a polarising topic, with some saying that it has worked fine for them for 20 years and others saying that it will wreck controls. For me it has a couple of major advantages, in that A) it is cheap and B) I have it to hand. I don't think the speakers will get that much more use and if they fall over they don't owe us anything.

So I put a couple of drops on the joint between the shaft and case of the pots and let it wick into the body of the pot. Then I rotated each of the pots from fully open to fully closed ten times and put the hair drier back on it.

Now to get the stuff back together. I ended up using a magnetic catcher to replace the screws, As you can see they were well buried and it required a Phillips screwdriver with a 10" shank to get them in and out.

Buried access to front cover fixings on a
Labtec LCS-2612 subwoofer

I also noticed that one of the struts protecting the subwoofer was broken so I solvent welded it back together with MEK as the case had ABS stamped on it. No problemo.

Broken strut on Labtec LCS-2612 subwoofer cover

So I now had the pots working smoothly and the case reassembled. But the sound was not really that good and the high ranges seemed to be missing? Back to troubleshooting mode again.

This time it looked like a problem with the feed in. Either there was another bad connection or the system wasn't processing the stereo input properly, as it looked like it was expecting a pair of L/R mono inputs. After a vain search of the cables box for a stereo to mono splitter lead it was off to eBay.

Female stereo 3.5 mm jack to a pair of male mono 3.5 mm jack plugs

Once that arrived I duly plugged it into the rear of the box. But whilst doing so I found a bad connection in one of the jack plug housings on the lead I had been connecting the laptop and speakers with. So it was at this point that I found out that the stereo-to-mono splitter wasn't required. Doh! But that is what comes of working off no manual. At least the next time they will be to hand and they weren't expensive. So the inputs labelled 1 and 2 are for two different stereo inputs. Noted.

I then swapped out the dodgy patch cable and the volume came up to expected levels. Better, but the high ranges still weren't right. Next I plugged in a pair of headphones to the jack at the front of the box and everything was good, indicating that there wasn’t a problem with the stereo output of the amplifier.

The only culprit left was the speaker and after a few runs with a stereo test program and some swapping around of the speakers it was obvious that the left speaker unit wasn't working properly.

Labtec LCS-2612 tweeter internal view

On opening it there was nothing obviously wrong (there isn't much to go wrong), so it's either the cable or the speaker. The impedance was 4.6 Ω so it wasn't an obvious fail. I would now have to replace the cable and/or the speaker, but at this point the law of diminishing returns loomed large. The Major decided that the speakers were good enough as is, so I called it at that.

JOB DONE (sorta)

Time taken: 1 hr (plus literally 2 days for contact cleaner research!!)

Cost: Cleaning materials, pennies - stereo to mono splitter cable, £2.95

Immersion Heater Issue

Due to another (as yet unresolved) issue the immersion heater for the hot water tank was needed during a recent heatwave (≥34^oC for a few days). However it had been previously noted as not working.

These are not complex pieces of equipment, with only marginally more parts than a kettle, consisting of a heating element and two temperature controlled switches (a thermostat and an overtemperature cut-out) bolted into the hot water tank and powered from the mains electricity. Generally they are used as back-up heating devices and therefore only sporadically.

Hot water tank diagram. The immersion heating element
is in red and the thermostat in grey - Source.

Our system is slightly different to that shown above in that we have an unvented cylinder with the immersion heater mounted on the side of the tank.

Baulky immersion heater

Immersion heaters are an industry standard item and ours is from an Italian company, Thermowatt. I couldn't find the exact item on their website, but given their generic nature I got close enough to get a circuit diagram.

Thermowatt circuit diagram for immersion heaters with
unipolar thermostat and safety disconnection.

The circuit diagram is pretty straightforward. So what is wrong with it? All I had from The Major is that 'it isn't working', so some general troubleshooting is required. As is commonly the case, YouTube came up with a good guide in the shape of John Ward of Flameport Electrical.

Immersion heater fault finding guide

Out with the multimeter for a bit of testing then; no issues with the fuse in the plug or the lead to the heater.

Internals of immersion heater. The thermostat control is in red and the
overtemperature cut-out is in the hole to the left of the lower brass screw.

If the unit is below its' set temperature the resistance across the live and neutral pins of the plug should be around 20 Ω, which it was,. So next, under the guise of checking that the thermostat was working correctly, I did the usual thing of twiddling the knobs and pressing the buttons and everything appeared to be working normally. Somewhat perplexed I put the cover back on and switched it back on. And lo and behold it was working.

Had it been working all the time? Had altering the thermostat set point or pressing the cut-out helped? No idea, but…

JOB DONE

Time taken: 20 minutes

Cost: £0.00

Unblocking the kitchen sink drain

Over the past month or two the kitchen sink has been draining more and more slowly, and it is now flirting with stopping altogether, making for an unsightly and unsanitary mess.

Blocked kitchen sink

Attacking it with the plunger didn't really improve the situation. So it was time to tackle the issue from both ends, so to speak.

I started first at the external drain, which had merged back into the undergrowth since the last adventure in that area.

Overgrowth regrowth

Out with the gardening gloves, shears and secateurs (I enrolled one of the tykes to do the hack and slash) and the drain hopper emerged again.

Not-so-clean drain hopper

It wasn't sparkling, but there weren't any signs that the drain was blocked (there is a grille over the drain). Pulling out the accumulated detritus and testing the drain with a bucket of water showed that everything was working OK at this end.

Cleared drain hopper

As the drain end was working, I turned to investigate from the plughole end. Once the cupboard under the sink was emptied out dropping off the U‑bend was straightforward, as this is also something I've tackled once before.

Checking the U-bend

Annoyingly it was pretty much clear, meaning that the blockage was somewhere in the permanently fixed part of the waste pipe. I gave it a bit of a hopeful rodding with a battered bottle brush that is only used for filthy jobs, but this didn't seem to make too much difference in terms how it felt to the touch. So I decided to re-attach the 90^o compression fitting on to the waste pipe but pointing upwards to use it as a funnel to pour in some drain unblocker I had to hand and left that to do its business for 30 mins.

Perhaps you are thinking that I could have just poured some drain cleaner into the sink in the first place? Possibly, but I would have had to completely fill the U‑bend with the stuff in order to get it back to the blockage further down the pipe; also the external drain hopper wouldn't have been cleared out.

After giving the unblocker some time to work I then put the piping back together, crossed my fingers, and ran some water through the system. Back to normal, thankfully. Now it just remained to clean everything back up and repack the cupboard.

JOB DONE

Time taken: 2 hours
Cost: £0.30 worth of drain cleaner

Dead maker pens

What’s this? Two dried out marker pens (can you tell that I'm working on clearing off my desk?).

Dead Staedtler Lumocolour Pens

These are Staedtler Lumocolour pens, non-permanent 316 fine point in this case. Marker pens are generally fire-and-forget items but these are marked as refillable, not something I have seen before. Ordinarily they would just get junked and replaced by new ones, but Staedtler make excellent markers, so let’s investigate.

Got a part number from the Staedtler catalogue for the refills package, which appears to be a small pot of ink that you stand the pen up in while it wicks the ink back up through the nib. The whole thing is quite neat.

Staedtler Ink Refill Station

At £8.50 on Amazon the price is OK as the pens are £1.30 a pop new (so not cheap but not too dear either). As a pot should refill 10 pens it will take 6.5 refills before buying the ink is cheaper than buying new pens, which is equivalent to buy 2 get 1 free. Although it is a reasonable deal, the downside is that I would have to buy 2 different colours and I don’t get through enough maker pens for me to feel confident that I will get 10 pens out of a refill pot before the ink goes dry. It might take 5 years to get through 5 red pens.

What to do?

I think I will sit on this one and just chuck them into the pens parts bin in case a use case for large amounts of non-permanent markers crops up.

JOB DONE

Time taken: About an hour of research
Cost: nil