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

Resurrection of Dead Ballpoint Pens

What is this? A couple of ballpoint pens, both not working.

No need for photos, we all know what a ballpoint pen looks like. In this case one was a freebie from Barclays Bank and the other is marked The Inn At Penn (no idea how this arrived). I know they are disposable, what isn't these days? But it's still not very environmentally friendly to chuck stuff out if it can be repaired. However in this case the amount of time I'm willing to spend on resurrecting them is very limited. WikiHow has an in depth article on what to try basically heat, pressure, solvent, or combinations thereof.

Parts of a ballpoint ink pen

The Barlcays pen first. On opening it and holding the white ink chamber up to a light bulb it appears most of the ink has gone (not that it would have had much in it in the first place). I tried scribbling furiously to get some heat into the nib in order to make the ink flow and that gave a few streaks of colour, then I tried bending over the ink chamber in order to pump the ink down towards the nib, no effect. Finally I pulled off the nib and dipped the end of the ink chamber in some acetone to get the ink moving. Still nothing, so into the pens parts bin for that one.

Next was the Inn at Penn pen. More ink was visible in this one, in fact it looked almost full. Scribbling did nothing, but bending the ink chamber over did the trick. Result.

OK 50% success rate, not too bad.

JOB DONE

Time taken: 5 mins
Cost: nil

Dead alkaline batteries

What is this? A small collection of dead alkaline batteries.

Collection of dead alkaline batteries

Although presented to me as dead they weren't all in that state, as their measured outputs ranged from 0.05 to 1.55 V (after I looked at them again I noticed that one was a rechargeable, doh!).

Measuring voltage of unloaded batteries

The C and AAAA cells can be put back to general use as OK(ish). The rest would usually be put out for recycling but I got to thinking… is there another use for them?

So, what is an alkaline battery made from?

Diagram of the internal parts of an alkaline battery

A variety of things it appears. The chemicals inside are Zn/ZnO and Mn(III) and Mn(IV) species plus some KOH wrapped up in a stainless steel can with a brass current collector. Nothing I really need to play around with at the moment, and it's not like dead batteries are hard to come by. So that's a pass on the raw materials.

When I measured the voltage of the remaining 3 AA cells they were 0.05, 0.55 and 1.12 V, indicating that they are all pretty dead, ie there was not even any juice to be recovered by using them in a less demanding item. It is possible to charge alkaline cells another couple of times with a special charger (such as this one), but generally they are pricey for what they are and are not recommended. Making one would be a nice scratch build, but that is a project for another day.

Chart to assess the remaining charge of an alkaline battery

So the answer to the question of 'is there anything else I can do with them?' is, not really. Off to the recycling bin it is then.

JOB DONE

Time taken: 5 mins
Cost: £0.00