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Somewhere in my schooling, I learned that the process that uses the most energy is phase change. So to take a lot of heat out of something, put water on it and the boiling will take up the heat from the object, leaving the object cooler.

Fast forward some years and I was about to get a pan out of the oven and a hot pad was not readily available. But a towel was right nearby.

My brain recalled the bit of trivia about how to consume a large amount of heat and it came up with the plan of using a dish towel that was wet.

The pan in the oven should have been about 350 degrees, which is about the 212 for boiling water, so all the water in the dish towel should boil off and drop the temperature of the dish to something that can be handled with a dish towel instead of a hot pad.

I was glad I grabbed it cautiously because I was able to set it right back on the oven rack instead of dropping it on the floor when my hands felt the sensation of searing heat.

I think two things happened:
1. My hands were grabbing the wet dish towel, surrounding the part that touched the hot pan. So all the steam that was produced had to go past my skin. And:
2. Thin wet dish towels are a good conductor of heat. So even if my plan had reduced the temperature of the pan to 211, that meant I was essentially grabbing a 211-degree pan with my bare hands.

Not quite the best plan, but I didn’t know that at the time. Now I do, and now you do too.

Our dryer stopped working last week. It would heat things up but it didn’t spin anymore, so the clothes just turned from a cold wet lump to a warm wet lump. As head of the household, it was my duty to repair it.

I haven’t fixed a dryer before, but no time like the present to learn. At best it saves us $100+ for a service call, at worst it delays the service call and annoys the technician who would have to undo my mistakes in addition to fixing the original problem.

I got the top off the dryer fairly easily – two screws. The side was a little trickier, but once I got that out of the way it was obvious what the problem was because the broken drive belt was right there. I pulled it out and went to the hardware store. Five dollars later, I was home with a new belt. I took the old one into the store and compared it to the new one to make sure it was the right length before I bought it.

Getting the belt on was an adventure. I couldn’t just wrap it around the drum from the side, so I had to take off the front of the dryer. With 3 sides out of 6 off the dryer, it gets rather wobbly. I slipped the belt over the drum and then put the front back on. The belt was around the drum and I found the motor easily, with its pulley open so the belt just slid on there too.

Side note: if you ever have to take a dryer apart for anything, take your Shop-vac with you and clean out all the lint that has found its way inside the dryer.

Side side note: I don’t know that I would have messed with a gas dryer, as tinkering doesn’t always go well with flammable gasses. Our dryer is electric, which is easy to work around because you just unplug it.

Back to the story…

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to get the belt around the tensioner pulley too. Tip: the tensioner is going to make the belt really really tight, so you’ll have to push the tensioner down more than you expect in order to get the belt on it.

I couldn’t test it before putting the dryer back together, as the drum won’t stay in place without the front panel secured, which needs the side panel fastened back on. At least I was able to leave the top off. When that was accomplished, I plugged in the dryer and turned it on. It worked! First time, too. The drum was spinning smoothly and it was blowing hot air. So I put the top back on, buttoned everything down, and put the wet laundry that had been patiently waiting in the washer into the dryer. I turned the dryer back on and it didn’t spin.

I took the top back off and spun the dryer. I was heavy but it moved. I took the laundry out and turned it on and it spun. The belt was looser than I remembered, so I took the side panel off and saw the tensioner pulley was caught and wasn’t able to pull the belt all the way tight. I freed the pulley and the belt was tight again, so I put the side back on the dryer and tried it. It worked fine, so I put the top back on and started it, only to stop it because it was making a horrible scraping sound.

Ugh.

I did not want to take the dryer apart again, so I took the top off and tried to hear where the sound was coming from. Looking down at the front of the tub while it was spinning, I noticed the dryer wasn’t square. So I pushed on the diagonals to square it up, relative to the drum. That made the scraping sound stop, so I put the top back on, which made the scraping sound start up again. I took the top back off and maneuvered the dryer until the scraping stopped.

So now if you stop by our house and see our dryer, you’ll notice the top is resting on the dryer but not fastened down, with a large-ish gap between the front of the top and the rest of the dryer. Please don’t try to help fix it by pushing down on it, as then I’ll just have to fix it again.

Having replaced our minivan’s struts, I thought it wouldn’t be much of a problem to help my brother-in-law replace his struts. Or rather, his minivan’s struts.

Even though I knew what to do and how to do it, it still took about 2 hours per side. The main culprit is the sway bar link bolt. If you have any vehicle whose sway bar link design includes using an allen wrench to hold the bolt still while you turn the nut with a normal wrench, replace it as soon as possible.

Looking back, I think it would have been worth it to get a 3/16″ hex head socket for my wrench, rather than trying to use an allen wrench. As it is, I lost another 3/16″ allen wrench. I have about 3 sets of allen wrenches, you know the plastic organizer with 8-12 allen wrenches lined up. And they are all missing only the 3/16″ size. I would love to be able to buy a 5-pack of 3/16″ allen wrenches. But all I can do is buy another full pack of all the sizes, because no one sells normal allen wrenches of just one size.

Technically speaking, I didn’t lose my last 3/16″ allen wrench. I have it, but I can’t use it anymore. Before starting the project, the allen wrench looked normal, with a ball-type thingy on the long end and a standard end on the short side.

Here’s what it looks like now:

Notice the ball-end has been snapped off. It’s stuck inside the sway bar link bolt. That was after the first problem:

I had to switch to the long end because the short end was too far gone. It ended up rounding itself off, but that’s after it twisted at least 100 degrees around. That bolt did not want to give up, and it was stronger than the allen wrench.

After running out of allen wrench, my only option was to grind the bolt off. That was slow going. I really need to get a cutoff wheel for my angle grinder, rather than just a grinding wheel. And it heated up the bolt so much the ball joint on the other end of the bolt fell apart. The ball joint of the sway bar link, not the wheel hub ball joint. That would have been bad.

After spending a while grinding off the bolt but getting only about 1/3 of the way through, I thought I’d try again because the grinding was taking forever. This time I clamped some vice grips onto the other end of the bolt (the stock link is perfectly round, so you can’t get a good grip on that end – except the grinding gave it a nice big flat spot). The nut certainly wasn’t freely spinning, but I could turn it. I think the intense heat is what broke it free. If I had realized that earlier, I could have saved myself some time.

After all that, I had a new sway bar link to put on but no allen wrench to keep the bolt from spinning. I was so glad to see the aftermarket part did away with that design and the bolt can be held in check by a hex shape on the ball-joint end. No allen wrenches needed.

It took us two days to do the job, because they gave my brother-in-law one strut that was correct and one that was backwards. At least he thought to compare the new strut to the old before we took the old one off. So the first day we replaced the one strut we had, and then he went and got the backwards strut replaced, and he came back the next weekend.

All’s well that ends well.

We have a corn stove to help heat the house. It’s like a pellet stove, but instead of wood pellets it uses corn.

Because of that, I need to buy a decent supply of corn. Local feed stores have it in 50 lb. bags, so I buy several of those at a time and fill up the bins in the garage. This last time I had a couple extra bags that didn’t fit in the garage, so I just left them in the Jeep.

For those unfamiliar with winter driving in the Midwest, it helps to have extra weight over the rear axle for rear-wheel-drive vehicles. My Jeep (97 ZJ, in case you’re wondering) can be shifted into 4WD, but I leave it in 2WD until I actually need 4WD.

A lot of people get extra bags of something they’ll need anyway and just leave them in the back of the vehicle all winter. Dad used to leave 40 lb. bags of softener salt in the van. I figured I’d leave the corn in the back of the Jeep all winter unless we ran low and I couldn’t get to the store, in which case I’d use that then just leave some of the next batch in the Jeep.

Fast forward a week or two. The Jeep had been sitting unused that whole time. I got in it and needed to get something out of the glovebox, and I discovered a handful of corn in there. I know I didn’t put any corn in the glovebox – it’s all supposed to be in the back of the vehicle.

I went to the back and checked. Sure enough, there’s a hole chewed in the bag of corn and some small critter had been helping himself to my generous supply of his winter food. I immediately unloaded the corn into the garage bins, finding remnants of corn underneath the back seats.

I went back to the Jeep, and drove it as I originally intended. I noted, however, that the heater wasn’t blowing right and sounded bad.

So, the next day that I had some time for it, I went out to the Jeep and got some tools and took apart the blower.

On a side note, if you need to take the blower motor off a ZJ and you got the three screws out and it’s not cooperating, it’s not clearing the relay. Take the fuse panel off, unplug the topmost relay, and then you’ll be able to get it out.

Anyway, back to the story. Once I got the blower out from under the dashboard, it was easy to see why it sounded bad.

I cleaned the mouse nest out of the fan. Funny enough, it’s a squirrel-cage type fan design. But I doubt it was a squirrel that found its way into there.

I put the fan back in place and turned it on. It still sounded wrong. Certainly better than it did before though.

I took the fan out again. I poked the screwdriver up into the ductwork to see if I could dislodge any more nesting material. I got some, but the screwdriver wasn’t the best tool for grabbing stuff. So, very carefully, I reached up into the ductwork with my hand. I was able to pull some more out, and I think I got it all. At least all that was in that area.

I put it all back together (after I shot some WD-40 into the fan assembly because that helps just about anything that moves in a vehicle – notable exceptions being brake pads/rotors and the serpentine belt) and there was a slight clicking sound once I turned it back on. I turned the fan up a notch, and the clicking got louder. I turned the fan up all the way and the clicking got even louder, then I heard a small thunk and the fan was quiet again.

I’m not going to check. Everything is working now so I’m just going to leave it.

Moral of the story: don’t leave bags of anything in your vehicle that mice consider food.

I decided to have winter/snow tires for the minivan this year. They’re like insurance – you probably won’t need them, but if you do need them you must already have them installed.

To make life easier, I wanted dedicated rims for the tires. I have no problem keeping a spare set of tires in the barn when they are not being used, and I didn’t want to pay twice a year to have winter tires swapped and unswapped off the one set of rims for the vehicle. I’d rather pay a little extra up front for another set of rims and then it’s all set.

Then I started looking at purchasing rims.

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We were at some place that wanted to indicate what certain areas of its establishment were for.

Of course I’m posting this because I thought they worded it oddly.

Do they really think women want to give birth to 4-year-olds? It’s enough work and pain to bring forth a 0-year-old. Multiply everything by about five (weight, height, gestation time) and I think no one would sign up for that. Plus there was no privacy and it was fairly unsanitary as far as maternity wards go.

No wonder that section was empty.

In case you’re wondering, I think they meant “A space for 0- to 4-year-olds” or “A space for kids up to age 4.”

Psst! Hey buddy, I got this here, but I’m going to let you buy it as a box and not as a package. Don’t tell anyone.

I don’t know the story behind it, but I noticed that printing on the bottom of a box of something from the fireworks store. I wonder what the charge/penalty is for selling it as not-a-package.