Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #2005: 55 pounds and still a loser. Maybe boring is good.

 

Introductory alcoholic ramble

This is the lowest of common denominators, a blog post about my experiences dieting.

I guess these days, with easy access to effective diet drugs, this is useless information.  But, FWIW this is all old-school.  Eat less.  Exercise more.

Some things that might make this post worth reading are that:

  • I’ve lost a bit over 55 pounds so far, from a starting point of 285, eleven months ago.  Little over a pound a week, at a steady pace.
  • My wife is, completely independently, also losing copious amounts of weight, and has decided that she likes bicycling as a form of vigorous exercise.
    • I’ve said “check for pods” enough times now that it is no longer even remotely funny.  (That is, this behavior is unlike the woman I thought I knew.)
    • We have been acting independently on the diet front.  Each to his or her own.  But doing something at the same time makes things a lot easier, for both of us.
  • In addition, things get a little weird with that much weight loss.  Particularly when you’re old (I’m a 65-year-old man.)  Stretch marks ain’t the half of it.  OTOH, I can now look down and see something other than my gut.
  • And yet, I’m still obese, so I should keep doing this.  Pretty much permanently.  And even if I hit some ultimate target weight, that just buys me a few hundred extra calories a day (from the lack of a need to lose additional weight.)
  • Surprisingly, that is not a bitter pill to swallow.  That’s new.  I had accepted this outcome intellectually long ago, but I feel that I have now accepted it into my heart.  So to speak.
  • And that’s all bound up with other lifestyle changes.
    • T-totaling after a lifetime of heavy drinking.
    • But also correcting some other bad eating habits.

I’ve had a remarkably easy time of it.  It’s like something in my head broke last September, and in a (mostly) good way.  Cravings of all kinds died.  To the point, my sense of hunger has died down.  On a good day, I’ll reach a point in the day where I feel that I should eat, but I will only have the mildest of sensations of hunger.

If that’s how you experience hunger, dieting is a snap.  I just never had that happen before.

I am hardly the first to have noted that this can happen.  I recall renowned magician Penn Jillette (like the razor, but with a J) talking about the potato diet, specifically, how he lost certain types of food cravings.

But, in my case, near as I can tell, loss of cravings was a gift.  I didn’t do anything to earn it.  Maybe I’ve done a bit not to screw it up, for example, avoiding high-starch high-calorie meals. But where this came from in the first place, I have not a clue.

Best I can say, I seem to have gone through a change-of-life experience, almost a year ago.  I don’t want to say I “hit rock bottom”, because that borrows from the gravity of those whose lives were destroyed by alcoholism, who then went on to sobriety.  But I think I may have had its kinder-gentler cousin, simple straight-up and reasonably immanent fear of an early grave. That seems to have done the trick for me.  YMMV.

I should probably write up some notes on the transition from being a heavy drinker to sobriety.

But, as with the rest of my life, it’s boring and logical.  No DTs for me.

Alcohol is a sedative.  Remove the sedative, and you catch some wicked insomnia on the rebound.  The story being that, when subject to chronic sedation, your brain fights back by growing more “stay awake” nerve centers.  The insomnia then ebbs slowly, because it requires your brain to un-wire all that.  I only had a night or two of straight-up total insomnia, followed by months of disturbed sleep.  I am now at the stage where I merely wake up to pee, which, for a guy my age, is unremarkable.

But a lingering effect is that I’m up for the day at a comically early hour.  Like 4 AM.  Not much I can do about that, and that might just be normal aging.

Did I mention that alcohol is a poison?  Remove the daily dose of poison, and if you’re lucky, and haven’t pushed it too far, your innards will eventually heal.  Mostly.  As with the disturbed sleep, it kind of asymptotes its way to a new normal over many more months that you would have thought plausible.

As for all the rest of the promises of lifestyle change — your energy will be up, and you’ll always look on the bright side of life — well, that hasn’t happened to me.  I’m not holding out hope that it will.

Source:  Tom Paxton, “Hand my down my jogging shoes today”.

It’s easier to get around, because I’m lighter.  That’s about it.  Occasionally I’ll do something and realize that, pre-weight-loss, that was a chore, and now it’s not.  That’s a kick.

Where was I? 

Ah, diet.

Just to prove this post isn’t like any other dieting post you’ve ever read, I’m starting off with some math.

I have to eat how much protein a day?

I’m used to eating a certain mix of foods.  Nothing extreme.  Not meat-heavy, but not vegetarian either.  Boring, middle-of-the-road eating.  If you’re old enough, you’ll recall being taught to eat “a balanced diet”.  That’s kinda the idea.

Vegetables, meats, grains, fruits, roots, shoots — it’s all good.  That results in a “usual mix” of protein, starch, and fat in my diet, and it suits me fine.

A balanced diet — in terms of the fraction of calories from protein, carbs, and fat — gets screwed up when you restrict calories.  That’s because, at a given weight, you simultaneously cut back your calories, and increase the amount of protein you should consume (if you lift weights regularly to try to minimize loss of muscle mass in dieting.)

As a matter of math, I end up with an unpleasantly large share of calories coming from the proteins in my diet. 

Example of 100 grams of protein a day

For the sake of argument, assume that I should ideally eat 100 grams of protein a day.  Recommendations vary a lot, even from seemingly reliable sources.  But that’s ballpark for a guy my size and age, trying to maintain muscle mass with regular weightlifting.

What’s the big deal?  That 100 grams is roughly four ounces.

Four ounces of pure protein.

My first mistake was in thinking that raw meat was mostly protein.  Actually, raw meat is mostly water.

Below, if I obtain that 100 grams of protein a day from lean ground beef, with the fat broiled out of it, I need to eat 1.25 pounds of lean ground beef a day.  Five quarter-pounders a day, of beef patties.  Like so, via the USDA.

Obviously, I can get that protein from other sources.  I could, alternatively, eat 16 hard-boiled eggs a day.

Or beans.  I’ve been told since childhood that they are good for the heart.  I could eat just shy of a half-gallon of cooked navy beans a day.

The problem is, I’d like to keep total dietary calories somewhere around 1700 per day.  That results in diet in which most of what I eat — the majority of my food calories — is in the mandatory load of high-protein foods. 

Heck, look at the bean line.  If my only protein source is beans, it’s an overdetermined system of equations.  I can’t satisfy both the calorie maximum and the protein minimum, because the protein in beans comes with a lot of starch attached.  If I ate nothing but boiled beans for protein, I’d exceed my current daily calorie target.

The result is that meat-fish-eggs comprises a much larger fraction of my dietary calories, compared to what I was used to all my life.  Not because I’m trying to eat paleo or go into ketosis.  Just because I’m trying to meet (what I think is) a reasonable daily protein target, under a calorie cap well below calories required to maintain weight.

Like the USDA food pyramid, on its head.

Too-many-proteins sounds OK, until you’ve had to eat that way for a few months.  Everything about the diet just says “way too much meat”.   As a fraction of the diet.

A solution to this overdetermined system of equations.

There are a handful of all-protein or nearly-all-protein foods that you can use.  Nonfat dairy products are high on the list.  And they’re OK.  But most of them (e.g., yoghurt) are mostly water.

But there are at least two types of all-protein isolates readily available that give you pure dry protein, extracted from some source.  One of which is whey protein isolate, from milk (I think), and favored by body-builders.  Shown above.  (Another common one is textured vegetable protein (TVP), from soy, favored by the cheap, and survivalists.  There are, of course, others, for example, plant-based protein powders.)

Today I broke down and took a trip to my local Vitamin Shoppe.  The place is weirdly well-stocked, despite the near-total absence of customers any time I’ve been there.  I picked up a big jug of whey protein isolate.  This gives me 25 grams of protein — more than in a quarter-pound (raw) broiled hamburger patty, for 100 calories, and essentially zero fat or cholesterol.

(It’s also modestly cheaper than lean hamburger as a source of protein.  That $80 jug above contains as much protein as 16 pounds of 93% lean ground beef.)

You’re well-advised to disguise it as best you can before you eat it.   Accordingly, almost all of this stuff is sold sweetened and flavored, to make a stand-alone protein drink.  My take on it is that it’s such a cutthroat market, the flavorings are sub-par.

So I bought the plain stuff, and I’m dumping it in my morning coffee, with some cocoa powder.  It’s … edible … that way.  And it gives me one-quarter of my daily minimum of protein.

I feel as if I’ve just re-invented Carnation Instant Breakfast (now renamed Breakfast Essentials), but my wife informs me that putting protein powder in your morning coffee was a hot new wellness trend in 2020, courtesy of Google Search.  So I’m just four years late to this hip new version of Instant Breakfast.

At any rate, this slug of fat-free protein should, in turn, should free up some calories that I can use to eat something other than meat and eggs. It’s a way to dodge an otherwise overdetermined system of dietary equations.

I’ll save the rest of my observations on weight loss, such as they are, for another post.

Post #2004: Switching to sugar-free credit cards. I mean cutting boards.

 

This post is briefly explains why I’m tossing out my worn plastic cutting boards and mats, and rehabbing a few wooden cutting boards to take their place.

This, based on two absolutely ridiculous research findings regarding the amount of microplastic in the diet, as measured in credit cards per year.

This will all make sense by the time I’m done.

A ratio of credit cards.

A few weeks back,  you may have read that the average American eats a credit-card’s-worth of micro-plastic a week, on average.  The obvious click-bait potential for such a bizarre and gross assertion meant that it got lots of attention on the internet.  (The research has been around for a while, but for some reason, there was a recent resurgence of reporting on it.)

I’m not giving a reference for that, because, as discussed below, that’s total 💩.

But, because normal isn’t newsworthy, you’d be hard-pressed to find any internet mentions of the the debunking of that credit-card-a-week.  Other scientists have taken the same (~) underlying data and calculated a weight of microplastic in the diet of around one-millionth of a credit-card a week.  Just under five millionths-of-a-gram per week, not five grams per week.

(How?  To be as charitable as I can, it turns out to be difficult to take counts of a few dozens of microscopic plastic fragments, in a few samples of food, and extrapolate those data to come up with the total weight of microplastic in the diet.  As I read the scientific debate, the authors of the various “credit-card” studies simply made an exceptionally poor choice of extrapolation method.)

Now, you personally may have thought that that “credit-card-per-week” figure was implausible.  And yet, because “microplastic in the diet” is such a squishy entity (starting with, invisible), you really had no way to prove that your instincts were correct.

Now, thankfully, somebody has jumped the shark.  There’s a  new study claiming that, in addition to plastic in the food chain, the use of plastic cutting boards adds a further ten credit-cards a year of plastic to the diet.(?)(!).

FWIW, this is the cutting board analysis refernce  The piece that points out the problems with the 52-credit-cards-a-year analysis is this reference.

The cutting-board estimate estimate is also total 💩.  But it’s useful 💩

💩 ?  Yep.  Same reason as the credit-card-a-week study.  See above.

But its useful in the following ways.

First, this most recent “credit-card-consumption” study is self-debunking for the average user.  Because, while I’m not exactly sure what “microplastic in the diet” looks like, I for sure know what a plastic cutting board is.

Do the math, and at 5 grams per credit card, ten is just shy of two ounces a year.  This research is claiming that the average person’s plastic cutting boards erode from knife cuts at the rate of (~) two ounces/year/household member.

Really?  For your consideration, I offer Orange Cutting Mat (below), weighing in at a svelte 1.1 ounces:

If the erosion rate really were two ounces a year, the mat above would have been worn to shreds a decade or two ago.  It’s old.  Origins are lost in the mists of history.  It’s used more-or-less daily.  It’s obviously scratched from use.

And yet  this venerable cutting mat continues to serve.

Worse — and for shame — the authors of this 10-credit-cards-a-year study could have convincingly debunked their own finding with a day of work and a kitchen scale.  Weigh a cutting mat (per above, 32 grams).  Chop vegetables on that mat for five hours (300 minutes) to simulate 30 days of typical household chopping.  If the estimated two-ounces-per-year is correct, you’ll have lost about one credit-card’s-worth of plastic, or about 5 grams.  At the end of the day, if the erosion rate was as-stated, that plastic mat ought to weigh just 28 grams.  That amount of plastic weight loss should be easily detectable on a gram kitchen scale.

In other words, you can literally check their work by subtraction.  With a kitchen scale.  And a month’s worth of vegetable.  And some manual labor.  Just weigh the cutting mat pre- and post-  a marathon cutting session.

But as importantly, this study makes you realize that, yep, some of the plastic from those scratches is exiting as tiny fragments.  And you’re eating those tiny plastic fragments.  Some of them, anyway.  There’s no reason to think that the authors did their lab work incorrectly.

And, if you follow the thread here, because 10/52 =~ 20% based on the well-known Universal Law of Credit Card Accounting, using plastic cutting boards ups your dietary consumption of microplastic by 20%.  Or so.  Under the assumption that both studies embody the same degree of (gross) overstatement of the actual weight of plastic.

I don’t know whether the actual amount of microplastic in the diet causes significant harm or not.

On the one hand, humans have been using copious amounts of plastic for decades.  If there is some health hazard from microlastic in the diet, chances are good that it has already occurred.  I suspect we’re hearing a lot about microplastic due to some change in technology that makes it easier and cheaper to detect.

(Take that cynicism with a grain of salt, as my entire house is carpeted in cut-pile polyester wall-to-wall (Post #1943, carpet fiber burn test).  And, accordingly, I must surely live in veritable airborne-microplastic-polyester-fiber-fragment miasma.)

On the other hand, you at least have to recall the mechanism of action of asbestos for lung cancer.  My recollection is that it was a micro-fiber disruption argument, The fiber in question, thought to spur generation of lung cancer, was an eensy asbestos fiber fragment that got inside the lung cell.  And proceeded to screw up the works just enough, when that cell next divided.  That’s how I recall the theory of it.

So, durable microscopic fibers (or other plastic bits) can’t be readily dismissed.  Plausibly, it only takes a tiny amount of that stuff to cause whatever havoc it’s going to cause.

Conclusion:  Putting the ick in clickbait.

The upshot is that while the jury’s out on the dangers of microplastic in the diet, there’s no sense in force-feeding yourself with it.

Not when you can easily cut your food up on something else.

As final insult to injury, I note two things.

First, as I read it, based on the underlying data used, that 10-credit-cards-a-year from use of plastic cutting boards would be in addition to the estimated 52 credit-cards’-worth already supposedly in the diet.  So the purported total now stands at 62 credit-cards a year, for those who both eat food and use plastic cutting boards. 

Second, I infer from this glimpse of the literature that there’s a whole slew of scientific papers in the pipeline that use minor variants on this same (bad) extrapolation methodology.  So, changes are, there’s now going to be a string of articles showing the mind-boggling amounts of microplastic you eat due to fill-in-the-blank.  These will, of course, be rapidly popularized on the internet, because they put the “ick” in clickbait.  Literal accuracy is not required, only some plausible (i.e., science journal) source.

Post 2003: TiLite Aero fork bearing replacement, Part 3: Replacing the bearings.

Recap:  This is a series of posts about replacing the fork bearings on a TiLite Aero wheel chair.

In the first post, I removed the forks from the chair.  What should have taken about five minutes actually took several hours, owing to a bearing that was rusted solid onto the fork axle.

In the second post, I worked through all the details on bearings.  As long as you know the size of the steel sealed bearings that you need, you can pick them up for around $1 each on Amazon.

This third post is about driving the old bearings out of the fork, and pounding the new bearings into the fork, using only these tools and materials:

  • snap-ring (c-clip) pliers
  • hammer
  • screwdriver
  • improvised bearing drift:  13/16″ spark plug socket (YMMV)
  • a smear of grease.
  • a surface to pound on.
  • a soft vise to hold the forks as needed (I used a Workmate bench).

The snap-ring pliers are not optional, unless you’ve got a whole lot more dexterity than I do.  There is one c-clip in each fork, whose purpose is to ensure that the bearings do not slide down from the weight of chair and user.  That c-clip is difficult to get in or out without c-clip pliers.

Also, be warned that driving the bearings in with a hammer and “drift” is not for the faint of heart.  You end up hammering pretty hard.  About as hard as you might when pounding a nail into a 2×4.  You have to do that, to get the bearing to seat all the way at the bottom of the hole it fits into.

If the very idea of hammering that hard on an expensive wheelchair part makes you squeamish, then you’ve got good sense.  This is nobody’s idea of a good time.  But once you’ve started this, either you drive that bearing all the way home or you buy/make a bearing press that can finish off what you started.

If I had to do this multiple times, I’d shop for a bearing puller (to take the old ones out) and a bearing press (to push the new ones in) before I started the repair.  There are also kits specifically marketed for common wheelbearing sizes (e.g., a kit for pulling and pressing in R8 bearings).

But you can do it with just the crude tools listed above.  That’s how I did it, for this one-off repair.  That’s really the point of this post.

Get the old bearings out using screwdriver and hammer.

The basic idea is simple.  You’re going to push the top bearing out of the top of the fork.  (As shown above, you’d be pushing it from below, so that it moves toward the camera.)  Then remove the c-clip, using c-clip pliers.  Then push the bottom bearing out of that same opening.

In other words, the top bearing comes out first, then you remove the c-clip, then the bottom bearing comes out.  And all of that comes out of the top hole in the fork.

To achieve this you:

  1. Flip the fork over (from what is shown above), and hold it in some fashion.  I used a workbench as a soft-sided vise. If you are careful, you can simply rest the flat top of the fork on a couple of cutting boards, or chunks of wood, but you must leave the full width of the hole unobstructed so that the bearing can come out.
  2. Insert a flat-bladed screwdriver through the bottom of the fork (the side away from you, in the view above).
  3. Catch the corner of the blade of the screwdriver on the inner bearing race of the top bearing.  (The one nearest the hole that these must come out of).
  4. Give the screwdriver a sharp tap.
  5. Move the screwdriver so that it catches the opposite side of the inner bearing race of the same bearing.
  6. Give the screwdriver a sharp tap.
  7. Move the screwdriver blade back to where you started.
  8. Repeat 2 – 6 until the bearing falls out of the top of the fork.

You keep moving the screwdriver from side to side, as you tap these bearings out, to try to ensure that the bearing stays level within the fork — perpendicular to the axis of the hole in which the bearings sit.  The last thing you want is to get the bearing wedged kitty-corner in that hole.

What makes this hard is that these are interference-fit bearings in a metal casing.  The hole they fit in — in the fork — is just slightly smaller than the diameter of the bearing.  So, while the bearing is friction-fit to the housing, there’s a lot of friction involved.

Which means, in no uncertain terms, you are going to have to tap these vigorously to get them to move.  And yet, not so hard that you break them.

How much force?  Take a look at this fellow, around 30 seconds into the video to get an idea of what a “tap” is likely to be, for driving a steel bearing out of a metal bearing housing:

He doesn’t bother to move the screwdriver from side-to-side for that particular bearing.  But you will want to do that here, particularly for the second bearing, which has to travel quite a ways before it is free.

A better view:  This next video provides an excellent view of what you’re trying to do with the end of the screwdriver, at around 1:10 into the video.  (Though, this particular bearing came out quite easily.)

Too easy:  Here’s yet a third example of this technique, around 30 seconds into this video, where the bearings are driven out of a plastic wheel.  You’ll have to hit harder than this to drive them out of the titanium fork.

I hope that gives an adequate feel for the process.  Catch the edge of the back side of the inner bearing race with a screwdriver.  Tap with as much vigor as necessary to move the bearing.  Move the screwdriver from side-to-side on the bearing to help keep it aligned within the bore.  Keep tapping until the bearing drops out.

Remove the c-clip. And do the same thing to the other bearing.

Clean up, grease up, test the fork axle.

Clean any gunk out of the inside of the fork.  It is particularly important to make sure there is absolutely nothing stuck in the “corner” of the bottom of the hole.

Why is that important?  Above you see the c-clip groove, inside the fork.  The first bearing you put in must be driven completely below that groove.  Then you place the c-clip in that groove.  Then you drive the second bearing into the rest of the space.   If the first bearing doesn’t sit absolutely flat on the bottom of the hole, you won’t be able to get the c-clip in.  And that, in turn, prevents you from correctly re-assembling the fork.

Wipe any gunk off the c-clip at this point, as well.  Just for good luck.

Coat the inside of the fork with a layer of thin grease.  I think lithium grease is what is what is typically recommended.  Some say that this helps prevent the bearing from seizing in the fork, so that you can get it out next time.  I say it helps lube the bearing going into the fork, because you’re going to need all the help you can get to drive the bearing all the way into the fork.

So spray a little grease in, move it around, then swab it out with a paper towel.  You want just the thinnest possible layer of grease.

Test to see if the new bearing will slide over the fork axle.  You’ll note that I barely bothered to clean up the axle.  In particular, I don’t want a nice shiny raw metal surface on that axle, because that just invites corrosion.  Leave it alone if you can.  The only thing that matters is that the new bearing can be slid over it.  Assuming it does, slide the new bearing off, and apply a thin layer of grease over the fork axle.  Wipe off any excess with a paper towel.

A brief calculation on freezing the bearing and heating the fork.

I’ve driven bearings like this many times.  It’s always a stressful process.  I’ve learned to take every advantage I can, if I’m unsure that I can drive the bearing into its housing properly.

Common advice for this next step is to put the bearings in the freezer to cool them, and take a heat gun to the bearing case (the fork, in this case) to heat it.  The idea is the take advantage of the coefficient of thermal expansion of metals, and give you a little extra room as you are driving the bearing.

Based on this reference, and my calculation, taking a 1 1/8″ diameter bearing from 70F down to 0F, while heating the titanium housing an equal amount, should increase the clearance for the bearing by almost a thousandth of an inch.

Believe it or not, it is well worth doing that, given that these are more-or-less zero clearance bearings.

If you are unsure of your ability to drive this bearing into this housing, go ahead and take the time to freeze the bearing, and use a hair dryer or heat gun to heat up the fork.

If nothing else, it’ll give you the courage to bang all that much harder at the next step.

BUT THIS COMES WITH A WARNING: WORK FAST.  The coefficient of expansion of steels is higher than that of most titanium alloys.  The upshot is that if you heat both the titanium fork and the steel bearing, the steel bearing will expand more than the titanium hole.  The bearing will actually get tighter, not looser, in that hole.  So if you’re going to try this freeze/heat trick, you need to get the bearing seated before it warms up to the temperature of the titanium fork. 

As a compromise, you could just freeze the bearing, and leave the fork alone.  That will help some, and there’s no harm done if the bearing warms up to room temperature during this process.

Bearing abuse, or using a drift to install the new bearings.

Normally, at this stage, you’d say “installation is the reverse of removal”, and leave it at that.

But in this case, that’s wrong.

To be clear, what you just did to remove the bearing — pounding on the center bearing race — ruins the bearing. At least, if you beat on it hard enough it will.  All the force of your hammer blows was transmitted through the “innards” of the bearing, in order to get the outer race to slide along the bore in the fork.

You are NOT going to do that when driving the new bearings back into the fork.  Instead, you are going to drive the new bearings by beating on the outer bearing race only.  Never on the inner bearing race.  That way, the force of your blow is transferred through the steel race directly to the side of the hole.  And you are not counting on the “innards” of the bearing to transfer the force of your blows to the outer race.

Clear enough?  These bearings come out one way, but they go in in a different way.  Beat on the outside race ONLY as you put them back in, because you don’t want to break your brand new bearing.

This is where you need to find a drift for your bearing.  A drift is some sort of sturdy hollow metal cylinder that’s just a fraction of a hair smaller in outer diameter than your bearing.  The idea is that as you beat the bearing down into the fork, using the drift, it only beats on the outer bearing race, and does not press on any of the “innards” of the bearing.  You can buy sets of drifts in graduated sizes on Amazon.  But, typically, you’ll use a socket, out of socket set.

Beating the first bearing flush.

Here are the issues.

First, you’re beating a metal bearing into a metal bearing housing — the fork. That’s going to take quite a bit of force.  And the further you beat it into the fork, the harder you have to hit it to move it.  So, you start off with taps, and you end up with hammer blows.

Second, until you have the bearing flush with the opening, it’s critical to keep the bearing level — going in evenly all around.  Stop every so often and eyeball the bearing.  If it’s high on one side, tap that side down, and then carry on.  So, center the bearing on the opening, nice and level, and start with gentle taps — on the outer race only.  (If you have a brass-faced hammer, this would be a good use for it.  I used a steel carpenter’s hammer.)

Eventually, you’ll get the bearing driven flush.  That’s when you need to center the drift on top of the bearing, and start pounding it home.  No more tap-tap-tap.  At this step, it’s bang-bang-bang.  You must drive this all the way to the bottom of the hole or you won’t be able to re-assemble the fork correctly.

Once you have the first bearing driven home, use your c-clip pliers (and fingers, and screwdrivers) to get the c-clip firmly seated in the groove.  There are no style points here — however you can get the clip to seat in the groove, that’s fine.  Note that once the clip is correctly in the groove, almost all the clip is hidden.

Finally, drive the second bearing in flush with the surface of the fork.  Same process as the start of the first bearing, being sure to tap-bang only on the outer bearing race.

Pat your self on the back if the result looks like this.  The outer race is flush all around.   And nothing is obviously broken.

.

You’re done

Slide the fork onto the fork axle, put on the washer and retaining lock nut.  Tighten the lock nut just enough to keep the fork from rattling.

And you’re done.

If all this pounding on expensive metal parts is off-putting, consider using bearing puller/press designed for this size of bearing.  For sure, if I did this routinely, that’s what I would do.

An end-note on cheap bearings

I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos on this topic, and I’ve seen a lot of people do things to sealed bearings that they really shouldn’t.  Take the seals off and grease them.  Change just one of a pair of bearings, because only one was thoroughly worn out.  Pop a bearing out of its fitting and put it back in the same fitting.  I have also seen my wheelchair-using friend hesitate to change bearings, or wait until the bearings are obviously worn.

All of this arises, I think, from the notion that these bearings are somehow precious.  If a set of bearings for your caster wheels is $40, you might think about taking some non-recommended steps to try to prolong their life.

And that, in turn, derives from the ludicrous prices charged for these commodity bearings by DME suppliers.

Hence the importance of the just-prior post.

You can easily buy commodity steel sealed bearings, in sizes to fit wheelchair fittings, for around $1 each.  Sealed bearings are designed to be disposable.  They are not designed to be serviced.  And at $1 each, it’s no hardship to treat them as the disposables that they are.

I hope this series of posts has been helpful.

Post 2002: TiLite fork bearing replacement, Part 2: A short treatise on wheelchair bearings.

 

Let me just jump right into this with the key question:

Why do “wheelchair” bearings from durable medical equipment (DME) suppliers cost six to ten times as much as seemingly-identical “generic” bearings sold on Amazon? Continue reading Post 2002: TiLite fork bearing replacement, Part 2: A short treatise on wheelchair bearings.

Post 2001: TiLite Aero fork bearing replacement, Part 1: Rust never sleeps.

 

This is Part 1 of a series of posts about replacing the fork bearings on a TiLite Aero wheelchair.

In this post, I only describe the “teardown” part of the process.   That is, getting the forks off the chair.  The removal and replacement of the bearings is for Part 2.

If you didn’t realize this repair might involve a complicated “teardown” step, and you were thinking of doing this repair yourself, then this post has done its job.

On this particular chair I ran into a worst-case scenario: The steel fork bearings had rusted solidly to the steel axles that they spin around.  This stops you from removing the forks from the chair, which you need to do, in order to get to the fork bearings.  Your choices are a) replace a few hundred dollars of wheelchair hardware, or b) break the bearings free from the steel axle that the bearing races are rusted to.

This step took several rounds of heating the axles with a propane torch, spraying with lube, then pounding and prying until the rusted-on bearings broke loose.

Edit:  You can see an alternative way to beat on the axle in this reference.   There, the user removed the fork axle from its fitting first (i.e., took the fork axle off the wheelchair, fork and all), then beat the axle out of the fork.  That’s arguably a smarter approach than what I did.  At the minimum, it shows that I’m not the only one have the problem of fork bearings that rusted solidly to the axle they sit on.

Other than spending a couple of hours doing that, the repair went smoothly.

The only practical takeaway is that before you buy new bearings, bearing puller, bearing press, and so on — first try to remove your forks from the wheelchair.

If they come off readily — once you have removed any retaining hardware —  move on to the next post, where I talk about options for replacement bearings, in some detail.

But if the forks don’t come off, even with a bit of lubricant and some gentle persuasion, then ponder just how hard you are willing to hammer on a wheelchair.

My lesson is that, even thought this repair eventually succeeded, I got lucky.  With those fork bearing races rusted to the axle, it could just as easily have ended up with an unusable wheelchair, and a few hundred dollars plus a wait for replacement forks and fork axle assemblies.

N.B., I don’t use a wheelchair.  I did this repair for a friend who does.  I’m writing it up for benefit of anyone thinking about doing a similar wheelchair repair themselves. Continue reading Post 2001: TiLite Aero fork bearing replacement, Part 1: Rust never sleeps.

Post #2000: A sidewalk, at $2000 per linear foot, in the Town of Vienna VA

 

Not a typo, unfortunately.   And, even more unfortunately, planned for my sleepy suburban street.

And not even “a” sidewalk.   For that paltry sum, we get two half-sidewalks, on opposite sides of the street.  That, together with a new mid-block crosswalk, is TOV government’s answer to the Town Council directive to “put a sidewalk” on my street.

I am going to take a couple of posts to tell the story of this, as I see it.

But, to cut to the chase, the punchline involves ~$2.5 million in free COVID money that the Town picked up.  Which has now become use-it-or-lose-it COVID money.

Which, I think, explains the Town’s decision to fire the money cannon at my street.   Mostly.  The terrain is also difficult in spots.

To cut to the final chase, I’m going to make the case that this is poor value.  And, that this is unsurprising, given that the process by which the Town is spending a free $2.5 million has little focus on value to the citizens.  I don’t believe the Town is deaf.  It may respond if you complain.  But that’s not the same as a value-focused planning process.

Anyway, this will be the story of how my Town is getting rid of $2.5M before it evaporates providing better pedestrian safety along Glen Ave SW.

It’s going to take a few posts to tell this.  This is not my idea of fun.

FWIW, my sole written comment to the engineer in charge of this is that he produce one sidewalk, on one side of the street or the other.

Part of this series of posts is to try to explain why I think he won’t or can’t do that.

First things first:  Could I literally pave this street with money, for that price?

Answer:  Sure.  In the sense of tiling the surface of the existing asphalt with U.S. currency.

A piece of U.S. paper currency covers about 16 square inches.  (Bills are a bit over 6″ x 2.5″).  Therefore $2.5M in $1 bills would cover (2,500,000 x 16 / 144 =~) 260,000 square feet.  The street in question is about 25 feet wide and maybe 1400 feet long, so it’s (25 * 1400 = ) 35,000 square feet.

For $2.5M I could pave (tile) my street with a 50/50 mix of $5 and $10 bills.

My point is not (just) to be a wise-ass, but to get a kind of gut-check on this.  There’s a lot of streets in Vienna that have nothing for sidewalks.  Town staff show an almost complete reluctance to spend local taxpayer money on sidewalks.    (Preferring to wait for grants, I guess, no matter how slow that process.)

My only point is that my gut tells me this is a lot of money to spend, for so little additional functionality to the citizens.   In a Town that is far from lavish about spending it’s own taxpayers’ money on sidewalks.

So I’m going to take a couple of posts-to-be to analyze the situation.  As I see it.  FWIW.

Post #1999: Power outages aren’t what they used to be.

 

A couple of days ago, we lost power for a few hours in the the aftermath of hurricane Debby, as it moved up the coast.  I took a walk during a break in the rain and found that a tree had split, bringing down some power lines a couple of blocks from my house.

Here are a few observations, sitting on my back porch, waiting for the power to come back on.

1:  It’s noisy around here when the power goes out.

Source:  Electricgeneratorsdirect.com

Used to be, power outages brought some quiet to the ‘burbs.  If nothing else, in the summer, all the AC compressors shut off.

But now, I can barely hear the wind in the trees over the droning of home emergency power generators in my neighborhood.  Instead of a bit of idyllic quiet, it suddenly sounds like I’m in the middle of a busy construction site.

All it lacks are the back-up beeps.

Unsurprisingly, these are all attached to the gi-normous McMansions that have sprung up in my neighborhood over the past decade.  (See my prior posts on the “tear-down boom” in Vienna VA.)  I’m guessing that about one-in-three of these new houses came with a permanently-installed natural-gas-fired generator.

The instant the power goes out, instead of quiet, you hear generators kicking in all over the neighborhood.   I can hear at least three, from my back porch.  Those turn on automatically, and won’t shut down until the power comes back on.  No chance they’ll run out of fuel, because these are connected to the natural gas supply.

It’s not as if my neighbors suddenly had some sort of preparedness mania.  They didn’t rush out and buy big home emergency generators in anticipation of the next snowpocalypse.  It’s that if you’re going to pay $2 mil for a house with all the extras (home theater room, sunken walk-in closets with windows, wine room, and so on), the $10K cost of an installed generator is rounding error.

So this is how power outages will sound in my neighborhood, for the rest of my life.  And as more small houses are torn down and replaced by as-large-as-the-law-allows McMansions, the density of emergency generating units is only going to go up from here.

2:  What is the sound of one reefer idling?

Now we get to the truly annoying part.

Near as I can tell, these new-fangled generators all seem to be old-school direct-drive units.  That is, an internal combustion engine (burning natural gas, in this case) is directly coupled to a generator creating alternating current (AC).

With that setup, the speed of the gas engine determines the Hertz (frequency) of the AC voltage.  The gas engine must therefore run at constant high speed to maintain 60 Hertz (cycles-per-second) AC.  That’s achieved by a governor that tightly regulates the speed of the engine.  At low electrical load, the engine runs just as fast and as loud as at high load, it just strains less to keep the generator spinning.

To a close approximation, these things are every bit as loud at idle — with no significant electrical load — as when they are putting out their maximum rated load.

The upshot is that each one is about as loud as a refrigerated truck.

So, instead of a bit of quiet, a power outage now means that my neighborhood sounds like a bunch of big diesel trucks are parked here,running at high idle.

3:  Where was I?  Ah yes, thrum-thrum-thrum.  Quiet emergency generators, explained.

So, as I sit on my back porch, enjoying the breeze and listening to the throb of my neighbor’s emergency generators,I figure I should explain the concept of “quiet” inverter-generators.

With an inverter-generator, the gas (or natural gas) engine turns a generator that generates DC electricity,  which feeds a piece of power electronics called an inverter, which then electronically generates the required 120 volt 60 hertz AC.

For that style of generator, there is no link between the speed of the gas engine and the frequency of the resulting AC (house) voltage.  This means that under light load, the internal combustion engine can slow down, and for any power demand, can be run at the speed/torque combination that most efficiently produces the required power output.

So inverter-generators are both more efficient, and on average quieter, than old-school direct-driver generators.  Though you will hear the engine speed change if there is a material change in the electrical load placed on the inverter.

Old-style direct-drive generator units are simpler to make than inverter-style generators.  But they are inherently less efficient, and, it seems, intrinsically louder, on average.  In any case, modern inverter-style generators have taken over the small-portable-generator market, specifically because they can be marketed as “quiet” generators.

4:  Direct-drive generators, inverter-generators, and three-legged-dog generators.

But my neighbor across the street, and one house up, seems to have purchased the worst possible kind of emergency generator.  It’s a maintenance-free natural gas generator that nevertheless runs like a three-legged dog.

The engine on that has kind of a ragged one-cylinder miss.  Which means that the engine speed and sound are constantly changing.  Which means the noise doesn’t fade into the background, but is constantly noticeable.  Particularly if you know anything about how an internal combustion engine is supposed to sound.

The result is an impossible-to-ignore loud thrumming noise, originating about 50 yards away.

Worse, while it sounds like it has a fouled spark plug, if I listed closely, a) the miss is a little bit too regular, and b) it seems to stop briefly from time to time.  I’m guessing this may be how the engine is supposed to run, and that it purposefully shuts down a cylinder under low load.  (I recall that GM tried such a strategy with some V8s, where fuel flow to half the cylinders could be cut off (e.g., when cruising at speed on the highway, where horsepower demand is low.)

So I think that not only am I being treated to the relentless thrumming of this generator for this outage.  I think that’s actually the way the thing is supposed to run.  So that I will be treated to this delightful noise every time the power goes out, from here on in.

I guess if I don’t like it, I can just hole up inside.

I may be without power for a while.

Maybe I need a my own whole-house generator.  That way, I can sit inside, in the AC, during a power outage, like all my neighbors.

4:  Quieter emergency power?  Hybrid-or-EV-plus-inverter, and USB-tethered Wifi hotspot.

For my emergency power source, I keep a 1 KW inverter on the shelf of my garage.  Hook that up to the 12V battery of a Prius, turn the car on and leave it, and run a heavy-duty extension cord from car to house.  The car will start and run the gas engine occasionally, to keep the battery up.  The only sound it makes is the occasional few-minute stretch with the Prius idling.

If the power isn’t back on in a couple of hours, I can set that up so that up so I can run the fridge.  In the meantime, I got around the loss of my FIOS internet by attaching my phone to my laptop, and using my phone as a Wifi hotspot.

5:  Aside:  Of magnetos and bike speedos.

Source:  Amazon.

Weirdly enough, I just installed a generator of sorts the day before this storm.

Old-school direct-driver backup generators are alternators.  That is, they directly convert mechanical motion into alternating current.

New-style inverter-generators are generators.  That is, they convert mechanical motion into direct current.  Which is then converted to alternating current by an inverter.  (Well, technically, a generator is anything that generates electricity, AC or DC.  But if it generates DC, you have to call it a generator, not an alternator.)

And then there are magnetos, something most have only heard about in the context of piston-engine-driven aircraft.  A magneto generates pulses of electricity used to fire the spark plugs of the engine.  It does this by passing a rotating magnet near a densely-wound coil of wire.  A common example is a typical gas lawn mower, where a magnet embedded in the flywheel creates the spark for the spark plug is it whips past a coil mounted a hair’s-breadth away from the flywheel.

And, oddly enough, an old-fashioned wired bike speedometer uses a magnet on the spokes, and a coil of wire on the front fork, to generate pulses of electricity in time with the turning of the wheel, which it then translates to speed.  Not exactly a magneto, but definitely in the magneto family tree somewhere.

6:  Final aside:  Just say no to GPS

Finally, apropos of nothing, bike speedometers are yet another area where the tech changed when I wasn’t looking.  And, in so doing, converted bike speedometers to just another class of disposable electronic devices.

Old-school wired bike speedometers work as described above.  They are, in effect, little magnetos, counting the rate at which a magnet on your spokes creates a tiny little electrical signal as it passes a fixed coil of wire.  In addition to wired bike speedometers, there are old-school wireless ones where the magneto signal is sent via radio waves.  Near as I can tell, these have all the drawbacks of wired ones, and none of the advantages.

But, because these are both old technologies, typical units come with easily-replaced standard button-cell batteries.  Buy a good one — I am partial to the Sigma brand — and they’ll last for decades.  Just change the battery every few years.

And then there’s GPS bike speedometers.  The latest thing.

In theory, this is a step up from magneto-based bike speedos, because there’s no need for any cables.  The speedometer captures a GPS signal, so it knows your location, and can infer your speed.  All for about the same $30 cost as a name-brand wired bike speedometer.

OTOH, owning one of those means that your bicycle now makes a permanent, downloadable record of exactly where you rode your bike, and when.  Presumably, this appeals to people who don’t mind all the involuntary electronic surveillance we already undergo.

But I simply didn’t want to buy yet another device that tracks me.  So, despite the ease of installation (no cables), I took a pass on a GPS-based bike speedometer.

If you immediately got to that punchline as soon as you saw “GPS”, then you get an A.

But, in addition, if you also inferred that these all inexpensive GPS-based bike speedometers have non-replaceable batteries, change that to an A+

And so, as with so much modern small electronics, these devices are disposables.  They come with an embedded USB-rechargeable lithium-ion battery.  When (not if) the battery reaches the end of its life, your sole option is to chuck your old one in the trash, and buy a new one.

Worse, there is clearly no engineering reason for this.  The previous generation of bike speedometers all had replaceable batteries.

It’s just that times changed.  User-replaceable batteries on cheap electronics had already become a thing of the past by the time low-cost bike GPS speedometers came on the market.  And so, if you want a cheap GPS-based bike speedometer, your sole option is to buy a disposable one.  Though, of course, none of them are labeled that way.

Which is how I ended up installing a little magneto-based wired bike computer on my wife’s bike.  It keeps no record of where I’ve biked.  And when the battery wears out, I can replace it.

Conclusion

When one house in a neighborhood has an automatic backup power generator, that’s an oddity.

When every third house has one, it’s cacophony.  As soon as the power goes out, the neighborhood is full of the sound of many loud, small, internal combustion engines, each powering an old-school direct-drive alternator.

I hadn’t realized how bad it had gotten in my neighborhood until I tried catching some breezes on my back porch, during this most recent power outage.  A power outage now makes my neighborhood sound like an overnight truck-stop parking area.

With any luck, maybe this is just a phase these houses are going through.  These days, you can buy a power wall or similar large home storage battery, which then serves as your backup power source.   So that maybe the next wave of oversized McMansions will come with quiet emergency power.

But for now, as small older houses in my area are steadily torn down and replaced by McMansions — where the built-in emergency generator seems to be a popular option at the moment — it’s only going to get louder.

Post #1998: Done in by a push pin.

 

Yesterday morning, while out for a bike ride, I ran over the above-pictured push-pin, in the parking lot of a park.  Despite its small size, it had no problem going right through the tread of my bike’s rear tire.

Mirabile dictu, I was able to get home before the tire went fully flat.

As my reward, I spent the next hour replacing the tube in my rear tire.  But at least I could cuss and sweat on my own back porch, instead of at the side of the road.

They say you never forget how to ride a bike.  But you surely can forget how to fix one.  The whole affair was a bit of a learning experience.

1:  Changing the tube in my back tire made me feel like a kid again.

Barely competent, and unsure of my ability to get by in the world.

But perhaps your childhood differed from mine.

In any case, I can still change a rear bike tire all by myself.  There was a fair bit of head-scratching involved, due to the unusual construction and tight clearances of my semi-recumbent bike.

But, in the end, I replaced the inner tube without breaking anything.

Source:  Wikipedia.

Except the Third Commandment.  (Or Second, depending on what you consider to be the theologically-correct numbering system.)

When it comes to moving rusty nuts and bolts, I consider a liberal amount of swearing to be at least as helpful as a liberal dosing with penetrating oil.  Neither one actually affects the rusted parts, they just give you the courage to twist harder on those parts than you otherwise would.

And, in any case, God seems to treat the breaking of Commandments much as our judicial system treats crimes by the rich and powerful.  The penalties for transgression are theoretical in nature, and if they occur, will happen so far in the distant future that they provide no practical deterrent to behavior in the present.

So, overall, it was a win.  This push-pin cut my bike ride short, but I confirmed that I can replace a bike inner tube using only the tools I routinely carry when I bike.

That was a nice surprise.

2:  Inevitable surprise

 

Post #1853: Urban bicycling really is as dangerous as it looks.

Bit of an oxymoron, that.

This minor random mishap reminded me of the events discussed in Post #1853, linked above, regarding a young woman who was killed while bicycling in a Maryland bike lane.  A truck turned right, across the bike lane, and ran into her.  Five seconds sooner, or five seconds later, and she’d have had no problem.

Similarly, this particular tire puncture depended on an almost comically improbable series of events.  Within my randomly-chosen bike route, across the entire width of an empty parking lot, a half-inch to either side and I’d have missed that push-pin.

But if you bike enough miles, you’ll run into your share of punctures.

And, like clockwork, about 1,000 bicyclists a year die in accidents in the U.S.  Year in, year out.

It’s a fair bet that each and every one of them was surprised by it.  Yet the overall rate remains rock-steady.

Weirdly, the flip side of that combination — the improbability of any one event, yet the stability of an average rate of such events — is that I must be having near-misses all the time.  Hundreds of tacks that I passed by but didn’t run over, for every one that I did.

And, correspondingly, accidents that would have happened but for a few minutes’ or seconds’ difference here or there.

It’s just the way it is.  You’ll typically never know how lucky you were.

May the odds be ever in your favor.

3:  The psychological benefits from owning emergency supplies that have quietly gone bad.

After I had put a new tube in that tire, I decided to patch the old one and keep that for a spare.  Rather than haul myself to the bike store for a new tube.  And as a consequence of that, I corrected a misunderstanding that I had had since I was a kid.

I thought that an un-opened metal tube of tire patch glue would last forever.

I was off by roughly infinity minus four years.  The tube of glue in my patch kit appeared pristine and flexible, but the solvent had evaporated long ago.  The tube of glue looked and felt perfect.  Still flexible, no leaks.  Only when I punctured the spout and squeezed did I realize that it had joined the choir invisible some years before.  Nothing came out.

Now that I look in detail at bike tube patch kits, the shelf life of an unopened tube of rubber cement is maybe  four years, when stored outside.

The upshot is that I had been carrying around a useless patch kit for years. 

Or, more likely, decades, given the indirect evidence.  My econometric clock says that I likely purchased this patch kit some time around the turn of century.  My kit, with a price tag of $3, currently sells for $5 and change on Amazon.

The fact that this was clearly purchased at a bricks-and-mortar retailer is just another blast from the past.  One with price stickers, yet.  They were a thing.  Look it up if you don’t believe me.

And yet, until today, carrying that patch kit on my bike gave me a sense of security.

Which means that, oddly enough, I was better off carrying a useless patch kit than carrying no kit at all. 

To be clear, if I’d known I had no way to patch a flat, I’d have been worried.  But with a (useless) patch kit on board, I never gave flat tires a second thought.

Rabbits’ feet.  Amulets.  Lucky charms.  Inner tube patch kits.

It’s all about the power of belief.

4:  Why do I even have a wet-glue tube patch kit?

The unfortunate answer is, because I’m old. And, like so many things, technology changed when I wasn’t paying attention.

The unusable patch kit was a wet-glue patch, requiring application of liquid contact cement (or rubber cement or sometimes a mysterious “vulcanizing fluid”), plus a peel-n-stick patch.   Patching inner tubes this way — gluing on a bit of rubber using rubber cement — goes back at least a century.

But now, there are so-called pre-glued patches, where no wet glue is required.  Just peel-n-stick. 

As it turns out, I owned both types of repair kits, from the same manufacturer (Park Tool).  Unlike the wet-glue kit, pre-glued patch kits remain good almost indefinitely.  My pre-glued patches were still good, and ultimately I patched the tube using a pre-glued patch.

Pre-glued patches are also faster and easier to use.  Lightly sand the area around the hole clean, peel-n-stick, and press firmly into place.  (The Park Tool patches are clear.  This makes it easy to chase any air bubbles out from under the patch.)

Plus, there are no fumes, no messy glue, no waiting for the glue to dry or cure.  No short-lived tubes of glue, period.

So that raises an obvious question:  If pre-glued patches are faster, easier, and have a longer shelf life, why do wet-glued inner tube patches still exist?

The internet tells me that old-style wet-glued patches are viewed as permanent, while pre-glued patches are viewed as temporary. They are expected to leak, eventually.  So if you want to fix your inner tube permanently, you need to use a wet (rubber-cement-style) patch.

OK, why even bother to patch a bicycle inner tube?  (Other than for expediency, I mean — for the second or later flat occurring on a given bike ride.  Assuming you carry a spare inner tube when you bike.)

Answer:  Once up on a time, a bicycle inner tube was an expensive piece of equipment.  Here’s the entry from the 1918 Sears and Roebuck catalog.  The roughly $1 standard inner tube of that day equates to over $22 today.  So, back when wet-patching tubes was the norm,  an inner tube would have made a rather expensive disposable item.

Source:  Sears 1918 catalog is currently accessible from https://christmas.musetechnical.com/

Back in the modern world, I can pick up a replacement inner tube on Amazon for $5.  Or less than the cost of a single-use wet-glue patch kit.  Based on how frequently I have bike flats, and the short shelf life of the glue in a wet-patch kit, it’s actually cheaper for me to throw the tube away, than to buy and use a new wet patch kit every time I have a flat.  (New, because the glue will most definitely go bad after a short while, once the tube has been opened.)

Conclusion:  Time to join the modern world.

The upshot of this post is that my whole approach to flats on a bike was outmoded.  I carry a spare tube.  In addition, I should carry some pre-glued patches as a backup.

At the rate at which I get flats, it never did make sense to carry a wet-glue patch kit.  Not even a fresh one, that would actually work.  I just didn’t realize it until I tried to use the long-deceased kit that I had been faithfully carrying on my bike since roughly the turn of the century.

Alternatively, I’ve looked into modern tire sealants such as Slime (r) and similar.   They get mixed reviews, and they may have limited effectiveness in high-pressure tires.  But the worst part is that bike tire sealants have a shorter shelf life than a wet-patch kit.  Slime (and other self-sealing tubes) recommend replacing the tube every two years.

And I know what that means.  If I went to the trouble to install self-sealing tubes, I would undoubtedly treat it as a one-and-done.  So that when I had a flat, N years from now, they would no longer work.

Much the same as my wet-patch kit.

Sometimes the right solution isn’t about the technology, it’s about eliminating the potential for operator error.

Extras for Experts 1:  My wife’s solution to a bicycle flat tire.

So here I am, trying to drag my thinking out of last century, abandoning wet-patch kits for flat bike tires.

I made the mistake of asking my wife what she would like me to do with the repair kit on her bike.

Because, you know, you’d hate to be stranded by a flat, miles from home.

She looked at me like I was a moron, pulled out her phone, and gave me the one-word answer above.

Apparently my brain has not fully absorbed the development of cell phones.  Because in this entire process, that option never even occurred to me.

In any case, the lesson here is that a flat bike tire, in an urban area, miles from home, is hardly the disaster it was in decades past.

Extras for Experts 2:  Primordial Slime

I thought that Fix-a-Flat, Slime, and similar leak-stopping chemicals were a modern invention.

Not so, per the same Sears catalog referenced above.  They’ve been around since at least the WWI era.

Even stranger, this ancient Slime(r)-equivalent advertised leak-stopping fibers, exactly as some Slime products do today.  Except that in 1918, the fibers were proudly noted as being asbestos.

Post #1997: Fixing a resin-cased watch with a broken lug

 

If you are reading this, you probably have a resin(plastic)-cased wristwatch with a broken lug.  The lug being the place where the watch band attaches to the watch case.

The question you need to ask yourself is, how much effort do you want to go to, to fix a cheap resin-case watch?

In my case, I was so irked by the thought of tossing a functioning wristwatch into the trash that I started small and just kept ramping it up until I finally got a repair that stuck.

What finally worked, for me was to glue the steel watch band to the steel case back, using a thin patch of baking soda and superglue that spanned the watch back and the first links of the metal watch band.  In effect, I bypassed the resin case and broken lug entirely.

Edit 9/1/2024:  This repair is not waterproof.  Which, in hindsight, should not be a surprise, as regular superglue isn’t waterproof.  After about a month, the repair separated cleanly from the underlying stainless steel following several hours of outdoor exercise in the Virginia summer heat.

The obvious solution would be to use dishwasher-safe super glue, but that’s too thick.  Neither one I tried would soak into the baking soda.

So I redid the repair using the same regular liquid superglue as I used the first time. 

I wear the watch every day, and the second repair is holding up fine as of 11/19/2024.  Based on that, I’m going to claim that this makes a permanent repair, as long as you don’t get it soaking wet. 

The original post continues below. 

Ultimately, I chose this method because superglue has a reputation for adhering well to stainless steel.  I’m not sure how well it would adhere to a plastic (resin) strap.  But I wouldn’t rule it out.  If nothing else, the mix’s adhesion to stainless was way above my expectations.I’d be willing to try the same repair with a resin strap.  Certainly if the alternative is to throw the watch away.

You can’t see the repair when wearing the watch (a Casio A158WA).

And you don’t want to see it, when you take the watch off.

Despite the looks, the watch is still comfortably wearable, and the repair seems to be holding up well.

But the reality is that nothing else even came close to working.

Plus, it’s cheap and easy.  My only cash expense was for a new battery, because it seemed prudent to change the watch battery before doing this.  Once I figured out what to do, the repair itself took just a few minutes.

If that’s success, what were the failures?

Source:  WalMart. 

The best way to understand why I ended up with this expedient repair is to see what didn’t work.  In particular, these four approaches failed:

A drop of superglue on the lug takes essentially zero effort, but was a total fail.  Couldn’t even get the watch back onto my wrist before that gave way.

A drop of two-part liquid epoxy on the lug, ditto.  The act of buckling the clasp broke that free.

A small amount of JB Quik (two-part epoxy paste), applied between watch body and watch band, failed after a few hours.  It didn’t stick well to either the plastic case or the stainless watch band.

A larger amount of of two-part epoxy paste (JB Weld’s Quik Weld), applied as a patch across the stainless watch back and stainless watchband, held for almost a day.  But the JB Weld adhered poorly to the stainless steel, e.g., it was easily removed with a knife.

Why did this repair work?

To summarize the failures:

  • Glues don’t stick well to plastics, no matter what anybody tells you.
  • If you try to fix the lug itself, the surface area you’re working with is tiny, so there’s little area for the glue to adhere to anyway.
  • The resulting piece of hardened glue/epoxy is so tiny that it has little physical strength.

All of which told me that I needed to:

  • Glue to some surface where I could get some adhesion.
  • Glue to a much larger surface.
  • Use a much larger patch, so that it has some physical strength.

The breakthrough was in realizing that a) this was a $20 watch, b) the battery lasts seven to ten years, and so c) there was really nothing to stop me from literally gluing the watch band to the watch back.  Basically, just take the plastic case and plastic lug out of the equation entirely.

I chose superglue because it has a good reputation for sticking to stainless steel.

But I also needed a physically strong patch, because it needs to keep the watch band rigidly attached to the watch.  That way, the broken lug simply doesn’t matter.   All the force between watch and watch band is transmitted through the glue patch.

That suggested trying the baking soda and superglue hack.  I had always thought that was just internet-based nonsense, but in fact, there’s some good chemistry behind it (reference).  Assuming that reference is correct, the baking soda isn’t merely a filler, it actually cures the superglue in a completely different fashion from what would normally happen.  The result is stronger than superglue alone, and has better adherence to whatever you’re trying to glue to.

Instructions, such as they are.

In any case, the repair was simple.  In concept.  The tricky step is wetting the powder with the glue, which turns out to be a timed test, as the superglue sets rapidly under these conditions.  If you try this, and read nothing else, read the paragraph below on wetting your baking soda with superglue.

  • Scrub the watch back and the watch band to remove dirt and oils.  Dry them.
  • Gently re-attach the watch band to the watch, using the broken lug.  This doesn’t have to be physically strong, it just has to look OK.  The repair itself is concealed on the back of the watch.
  • Set that face-down in a position that approximates the curve of the wrist.  (Because one or two links of the watch band will end up rigidly attached to the watch case, if this repair holds.)
  • Lay and sculpt your baking soda.  Spoon on and smooth out a bit of baking soda, being sure to cover a large area of both the watch back and the watch band, and making it thick enough that it will have some physical strength.  And yet, not too thick, or it’ll be uncomfortable to wear.  I was shooting for something about as thick as the pad portion of a band-aid.
  • Wet your baking soda with superglue.   Slowly drip on liquid (not gel) superglue until the baking soda is saturated.  I used most of a one-gram tube of Ace Hardware Future Glue liquid super glue.  See below for greater detail.
  • Dust a little more baking soda on, to cure any liquid glue remaining on the surface.
  • Let it sit for five minutes or so.
  • Clean up any excess glue using a sharp knife.
  • Use a bit of sandpaper to smooth out the surface that will touch the wrist.

In hindsight, cleanup would have been a lot easier if I’d taped over the parts where I didn’t want glue to stick.  But it wasn’t hard to remove the excess glue with a knife.

I don’t know if this baking-soda-and-superglue patch will stick to a resin band.  But it should be easy enough to try it and find out.

Wet your baking soda with superglue, some details. 

The tricky step in this repair turned out to be wetting the baking soda.  It’s a timed test, because the baking soda/super glue mix sets up fast.  And it’s critical to wet the baking soda patch thoroughly with superglue, because where you don’t, it won’t stick.  For sure, you need to get the full depth of the patch wet with superglue, all the way down to the substrate (e.g., stainless steel, in this case).

On the plus side, you’ll be done with it before you know it.  Because it behooves you to move fast.   Once I figured that out, I essentially paved the top of the baking-soda patch with closely-spaced drops of superglue.

I can tell you from experience that you pretty much can’t go back and fix any mistakes.  So if you (e.g.) get too little glue on a spot, by the time you go back to re-wet it, the top will already have skimmed over with hardened superglue, and you’re out of luck.  For a couple of “dry pockets”, I ended up using the tip of a knife to pierce the thinnest part of the dried layer of the superglue, then added fresh superglue.

Separately, in the end, I wish I’d done more (or, really, anything) to prevent adhesion of excess glue and excess glue/baking soda mix.  I wish I had used some tape, or light oil, or similar.  As it was, I ended up using the tip of a sharp pocket knife to scrape off excess glue and glue/soda mix.  FWIW, that’s a task that you should do as soon as feasible, e.g., before the mixture has had hours to cure.

An irrational repair?

To be clear, this is a cheap watch.  I could replace this watch — literally a more-recently manufactured clone of the unchanged model — for about $20.

But I like this watch.  It’s lightweight.  The only material that touches skin is stainless steel.  The quartz works are guaranteed accurate to within 30 seconds a month (or about twice as accurate as the best mechanical watches.)  This particular watch only gains seven seconds a month.  This makes the watch low maintenance, in that it stays within a minute of true time as long as I set it twice a year for the change in daylight savings time.  It’s waterproof enough that I can scrub the schmutz off of it.

And it’s simple.  Unlike any other digital watch I have owned, I can use all of its functions without reading the manual.

It has some faults.  The LED back-light is comically dreadful.  And the clasp is insecure in several ways.  And, as I now know, the plastic case is a potential failure point.  But Casio does not put this works into a metal case.

Anyway, I already own it.  And I hate tossing stuff that’s still (mostly) working.

Once I made my mind up to try to fix it, I was just too stubborn to give up.

Boiled down

How much effort are you willing to go through, in order to keep wearing a cheap plastic-bodied watch with a broken lug?

If you already own baking soda and liquid (not gel) superglue, it will take you just a few minutes to try this repair.

The big surprise was how strong and adhesive the super-glue-and-baking-soda patch is.  Before this, I had assumed that was all internet hype.  But, in fact, there’s good science behind it. And in this instance, it worked better than JB Weld epoxy, which is high praise indeed.

And when you get right down to it, what have you got to lose?  If it doesn’t work, then you are left with a broken wristwatch.  Which is what you already have.