Category: Making

Projects that make or build something.

Post G24-025: Squash-off, round 1: Waltham Butternut versus Georgia Candy Roaster.

 

On today’s menu is winter squash soup, made with rich chicken broth.

Crude recipe is given below, for putting this together in well under an hour, using a pressure cooker.

More importantly, this is a taste-test of traditional butternut squash versus newcomer Georgia Candy Roaster squash.  Both of which I grew in my back yard garden this year.

My conclusion is that Georgia Candy Roaster (GCR) is not so much boastful advertising as a statement of limitations.  Boiled — as here, in this soup — it’s pale and flavorless compared to butternut squash.  I’m guessing GCR actually needs to be roasted to bring out any latent sweetness and flavor.

Alternatively, maybe I just got a bad GCR.  If the rest of them look or taste any better, I’ll come back and edit this.

In any case, the picture tells the whole story.  The butternut (left) and GCR (right) have a depth-of-flavor that matches the depth-of-color.

The Waltham butternut is a thin-skinned, thick-necked, sweet-fleshed winter squash, with deep orange flesh.  In this taste test, the boiled butternut tasted much like sweet potato, but perhaps dryer or starchier or more potato-like in texture.

The Georgia Candy Roaster is a thicker skinned, no-solid-neck, starchy-fleshed winter squash, with much lighter-colored flesh.  In this taste test, the boiled Georgia Candy Roaster tasted like potato, that is, starchy, but with no distinct flavor and no detectable sweetness.

Boiled, together, in squash soup, the mix of the two works fine.  But the GCR is little more than a bland vegetable filler in this context.  It’s definitely food, but not much more than that.

Plausibly, GCR squash is a lot better roasted.  Just plausibly, this small-and-tubby GCR was some kind of sport.  The coloring definitely matched the other GCRs.

My other observation is that the GCR has a much thicker skin than the butternut.  I certainly wasted more of it, in the peeling process, trying to pare away any green material.

Neither here nor there.  It’s food.  This year, it out-produced butternut by a fair margin, owing mostly to the large average size of the fruit.

 

Schmaltzitarian squash soup.

This dish is winter squash cooked in full-fat, un-skimmed chicken broth.

The only seasoning is salt.  The flavor comes from the squash and the chicken.  If that’s not good enough for you, perhaps consider cooking something else, before you add flavorings to this recipe.

It’s meatless in the sense that the chicken meat. used to make the broth, is reserved for a separate meal.

Elapsed time is under one hour.

You need

  • a pressure cooker
  • a few (4 to 10, say) bone-in skin-on chicken thighs
  • chopped vegetables enough to fill the pressure cooker 2/3rds full.
    • Winter squash, primarily.
    • With optional soup vegetables such as carrots or celery
  • a teaspoon of salt

Step 1A:  Pressure-cook the chicken thighs:  Elapsed time 30 minutes.

Put a modest number of chicken thighs (4 to 10, say) into a pressure cooker.  Cover (barely) with water.  Heat.  Figure on ten minutes to bring the pot up to pressure.  Cook at high pressure for 20 minutes.

Step 1B:  Cut up the vegetables.

As that’s going on, peel and cut up whatever is going into the pot.  The backbone of the soup is squash, but I added carrots and celery that needed cooking.

You want enough to fill the pressure cooker about two-thirds full.

Step 2:  Remove the chicken and excess chicken stock, if any.

Release the pressure by running the pressure cooker under a faucet.

Use a slotted spoon or similar to remove the chicken from the pot.  Put the chicken aside for a separate meal.

Remove and save any excess stock.

In this soup, you want about one unit of stock for every two units of vegetables.  So you want the pressure cooker to be about one-quarter full of chicken stock, to which you add chopped vegetables up to the two-thirds line on the pot.  Or so.

Salt to taste.  I use a teaspoon of salt for the pot of soup.

This doesn’t need any spices.  With any luck, the chicken fat and salt add just enough savoriness to make a fully-satisfying bowl of soup as-is.

Step 3:  Pressure cook vegetables for five-ish minutes.  Elapsed time around 12 minutes.

Bring the pressure-cooker back up to pressure, and cook for five or so minutes.

Depending on how hungry your are, either release the pressure immediately, or let the pressure cooker cool off for a “natural” release.  The longer it sits under pressure, the softer the vegetables get.

Step 4:  Open and eat.

If the squash is soft but not fully disintegrated, you have chosen wisely.  It is ready to eat.

If the squash has turned too soft, use a stick blender, then pretend that that’s the kind of squash soup you were after in the first place.

Post #2011: Simple, reversible center-draft oil lamp conversion to electricity.

Today I converted a couple of antique center-draft oil lamps, turning them into electric lamps.  The cost was $8 each (plus the cost of a light bulb).  It took maybe two minutes.  No modifications were necessary to the lamp.  And it’s completely reversible, if for some reason I want to burn oil in those lamps again.

If you’re not into oil lamps, you may rightly think “big deal”.  But if you look, you’ll see a lot of electrified oil lamps for sale in antique shops, and these lamps come in two flavors.  The more heinous are the DIY hatchet jobs where somebody literally drills a hole through the oil font, for the electrical cord to pass, thus making sure the oil lamp will never again hold or burn oil.  The less heinous are those where the original oil burner assembly has been removed, and replaced by a modern piece that is wired.  The original oil-burner top is inevitably lost, but those can be restored to burning oil if you can find the right original top for them.  So to get a conversion that a) doesn’t damage the lamp and b) doesn’t lose any original parts — that’s a good thing.

My only “cheat” is that I had emptied these lamps months ago, and had let the lamp oil evaporate from the wicks.  So the round wicks in these center-draft lamps were already dry and no longer smelled of lamp oil.

The key part for this oil-to-electricity conversion is a candelabra-base light socket and switch, from Lowes:

Source:  Lowes.com.

Turns out, the plug and switch will fit through the central draft tube of a Rayo oil lamp with room to spare.   Remove the flame spreader, slide that whole assembly, plug-first, down the top of the draft tube.  Let the metal prongs on the light socket lightly grip the inside of the top of the tube.  The bulb sits right where the oil flame used to be.  (Wire the flame spreader to the underside of the lamp so it can’t get lost.)

 

You need to raise up the lamp base about an eighth of an inch, to give clearance for the electrical cord, which simply runs out from under the lamp base.  Currently I’m using folded-up sheets of paper.  I’ll eventually cut a couple of nice-looking thin pieces of wood to do the job.

Choose an LED bulb with a candelabra base and amber glass, put some sort of frosted or opaque chimney or shade on the lamp, flick the switch, and you end up with a nice, clean electrical impersonation of a steadily-burning oil lamp.  Alternatively, with a different bulb, you could have the worlds classiest night-light, as night-light bulbs fit a candelabra socket.

This only works on center-draft oil lamps, not on flat-wick oil lamps.  The presence of that central draft tube is what allows you to make the conversion without butchering the lamp in the process, or having an electrical cord hang down the length of the oil lamp.  The electrical plug, at its widest, is 1 3/64″, as shown.

One final nicety is that any candelabra-based bulb will do.  If the 40-watt-equivalent LED amber-glass bulb I’m using now is too bright, or too dim, there are plenty of options available.  (Or plug a dimmer onto the end of the lamp cord and use a dim-able bulb.)

If nothing else, this highlights what LEDs have done for home lighting.  The socket and wiring are designed to take up to a 60-watt traditional incandescent bulb.  But this 40-watt-light-equivalent LED bulb draws just 4 watts, and produces a similarly reduced amount of waste heat.  The result is that the socket and wiring are vastly over-specified for the amount of heat and electrical current they actually get when used with an LED bulb.

In any case, I rarely have a DIY project go this smoothly.  I was in the process of trying to sell them on Ebay, when my wife asked why I didn’t convert them to electricity.  And that’s when I realized that, unlike flat-wick lamps that are converted to electricity, there was no need to butcher these lamps to make the conversion, as they already have a big hollow tube running right through the center of the lamp.

No muss, no fuss.  No drilling holes in antiques.  It only took one trip to the hardware store, and a couple of minute of time.  And it would take just a minute or two to remove the electrical add-on, and return these to being oil-burning lamps.

Post #2008: Pedestrian traffic counts via cheap camera.

 

It took about an hour to construct the vehicle and foot traffic counts you see here.  The hardware was an $18 Kasa camera, plus my laptop to view the resulting footage.

I let the camera film the street in front of my house.  That was not intrinsically different from (e.g.) a Ring doorbell.  (It is legal in Virginia to film anything in the public right-of-way, or anything you can view while in the public right-of-way, other than restricted areas such as military installations, as long as you don’t record conversations that you are not part of.)

I then did the simplest thing possible.  I transferred the SD card from camera to laptop, and watched the video on fast-forward.  It was like the worlds most boring, yet tense, home video.  I stopped the film when something happened, and put down tally marks.

The fastest I could comfortably watch was 16X.  Doing that, recording the events in eight hours of video took about an hour.  (The camera itself is capable of noting the passage of cars, via built-in motion detection, but would not identify passing pedestrians at the distance this was from the street.)

If nothing else, this confirms what my wife and I had both noticed, that this street is used by a lot of dog-walkers.

This is just a proof-of-concept.  Today it’s drizzly, and there’s a school holiday, so this would not be representative of typical Friday morning foot traffic.

The context is the value of sidewalk improvements in the Town of Vienna.  With rare exception, there are no counts of pedestrian traffic in any of the Town’s various studies.  (I did find one, once, but they referred to rush-hour pedestrian street crossing counts along selected corners of Maple Avenue, our main thoroughfare).

The idea being that there’s more value in putting a sidewalk where people will use it, than putting it where they won’t.  Assuming that current foot traffic along a route is a good indicator for eventual foot traffic there, once a sidewalk is built.  (There could be exceptions to that.  But in the main, I think that’s right.)

And that, for planning purposes, you’d like to have some idea of what they’re using a particular route for.

There are currently at least two ways to get pedestrian count data on (e.g.) suburban side-streets that do not have traffic lights.  Other than the old-fashioned approach of having somebody sit by the street and count passers-by.

One is to use cell-phone data, because many cell phones track and report their user’s location on a flow basis, and that information is sold commercially.  Courtesy of the improved accuracy of GPS, data vendors can now tell you (e.g.) how long the average customer walks around a store, based on how long their cell phones linger there.

(I am not sure that this tracking is entirely “voluntary” or not.  That is, did you download an app that, had you bothered to scrutinize the dozens of pages of fine print before clicking “ACCEPT”, would have revealed that you gave that app the right to collection and transmit your location to some central source?  Or, just as plausibly, if you don’t manage to turn off every blessed way that your phone can track you, then somebody’s picking up your location on a flow basis, you just have no clue whom?  For sure, the phone companies themselves always have a crude idea of where your phone is (based on which cell tower your area nearest), and I’m pretty sure they also get your GPS data, nominally so that they may more accurately predict when your signal needs to switch from one cell tower to the next.)

The problem with counts based on cell-phone tracking that it is of an unknown completeness.  Plausibly, some people manage to keep themselves from being continuously tracked.  Or, more likely, any one data vendor only buys that data from a limited number of app providers.   Generally, it’s fine for making relative statements about one area versus another, but needs to be “calibrated” to real-world observations in order to get a rule-of-thumb for inflating the number of tracked phones in an area, to the actual on-the-ground pedestrian count.

Plus, it costs money, and it’s geared toward deep-pocketed commercial users.

Finally, it’s likely that certain classes of pedestrians will be systematically under-represented in cell phone data, most importantly school children, but also possibly joggers.

The other way to do it in the modern world is to use a cheap camera.  Then count by eye.

So, as an alternative, I decided to see how hard it would be to gather that information this way.  Turns out, it’s not hard at all, even with doing the counts manually.  All it takes is a cheap camera, my eyes, and, for eight hours of data, an hour of fast-forwarding.

Not sure where I’m going with this, in the context of writing up the multi-million-dollar make-over of my little street.  I just wanted to prove that it’s not at all hard to get data-based counts of pedestrian traffic on any street.  All you need is a camera, and a place to put it.  And the time to view the results, if you can’t figure out an automated system for that.

My approach may be a bit low-tech for the 21st century in the surveillance state.  But it works.  Fill in the hourly wage of (say) the employee who would have to watch that video, and you come up with a pretty cheap way to provide hard data on need for sidewalks, as evidenced by counts of pedestrian foot traffic.

If you’re going to spend millions of dollars on sidewalks … how could you not do this first, to see that the expenditure is efficient, in the sense of pedestrians served per dollar of expense?

More on this still to come.

Coda

As if to underscore the power of the surveillance state, about six hours after I posted this, I got my first-ever email from Kasa, with an offer for a video doorbell.

That, presumably, because this blog post had the words “Kasa” and “doorbell” in it.

This happens enough that I know the root cause of it.

Sure enough, yesterday I signed into Google, using this browser, to access something via my Google account, and I foolishly forgot to sign out.  Google was therefore somewhat aware of just about everything I did on this browser in the meantime.

Presumably Google ratted me out to Kasa.

Somewhere, the ghost of Orwell is surely laughing.

Post #2007: How hard is it to switch to wood cutting boards?

 

Short answer, easy.  The only thing wood won’t do, that plastic will, is flex.  Everything else is not a problem.

But when They say “hand wash only”, They really mean it.  See Death by Dishwasher below.  Also search “sanitary” (below), if that’s your hangup with wood.

Continue reading Post #2007: How hard is it to switch to wood cutting boards?

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 #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 failed about a month later, following three sweat-drenched hours of helping a friend move furniture.  The patch came away cleanly from the stainless steel.  I’m guessing that prolonged moisture exposure was the issue.  (Superglue is not waterproof.)  But, two different dishwasher-safe super glues failed to work for this repair because they would not soak into the baking soda.

The upshot that I fixed it one last time, using regular liquid (not gel) super glue, as shown below.  My final take on this baking-soda-and-superglue repair is that this repair is strong enough, but not sufficiently water-resistant.  And water-resistant (dishwasher-safe) superglue won’t work, because (for whatever reason) it’s not sufficiently runny (and so beads up on, rather than thoroughly wets, the thin baking-powder patch.)

So, now I know not to wear the repaired watch in a wet situation.  It’s once again my daily-wear watch.  If it breaks again, I’m tossing it, and if that happens, I’ll try to remember to come back here and record the time to final failure. 

For now, the re-repair is solid.

Edit 11/15/2024:  The re-repair remains solid, and I continue to wear the watch daily.

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 my 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.

 

Post #1977: Updated: Twenty bags, and done. What I have learned about QPR asphalt cold patch.

With the final patches in place:

Edit 10/6/2024:  Below is the final surface, after using some tar-based crack filler and Latex-ite 10-year seal coating.  See Post #2029.  The seal coat did more-or-less nothing to hide the patch.  That said, while it ain’t pretty, it’s a lot better than it was.

This post summarizes what I learned using QPR cold patch (from Lowe’s) on a badly deteriorated section of asphalt driveway.   A prior post (Post #1974) explains the situation, and go back to Post #1971 for an assessment of options for patching asphalt.  Edit:  Post #2029 describes the final steps of crack-fill and seal-coating.  One heads up:  A squeegee does not work for spreading seal coating on an uneven surface like this.

Above, that may not look so hot to you, but I guarantee you it looks a lot better than it did.  Once I seal-coat this, in the fall, I think it’ll be … acceptable.  Given how torn up the driveway is.  I have no idea yet whether these surface-laid patches will survive the winter, but will update this next spring.

First, it took between 3 and 7 weeks for this to cure fully, in the heat of early summer in Virginia.  The reason I’m a little vague is that the patches seemed to be cured after one week.  At three weeks, a heat wave (near 100F temperatures) re-activated them, and the surfaces were once again sticky in spots, shedding little tarry bits.  At seven weeks, another heat wave (several days at 100F) did nothing.  By seven weeks, they were as solid and tar-free as the asphalt they were laid on, despite the heat.

Second, this stuff varies from batch-to-batch.  As you can see above, I laid mine down as a series of separate patches.  I bought and laid the bags of QPR a few at a time, because that’s all I could handle.  From one batch to the next, the QPR material differed in how “liquid-y/tarry” it was, in the final color once set, and to some degree, in the surface finish once set.  I’m going to seal-coat this in the fall, so the color variations don’t much matter.  But if you doing a big area, and are particular about how this looks, you might want to buy all you need, all at once, from a single batch or lot number. 

But arguing against buying a whole lot at once, see the note below on how hard it may be to estimate what you need, if your driveway surface is as un-level and messed-up as this one was.

Big batch-to-batch variation could also explain part of the strong differences of opinion among on-line reviewers of QPR.  In my case, if I’d stopped with my first first batch, I’d have said “QPR is a dandy product”, period.  With the later batches, that has a huge qualification, that the “walk on it anywhere, any time” cure time is unknown.  And all the hassle that can bring, during a hot spell.

Third, foot traffic across these patches makes a mess, due to the tiny little tarry stones that get tracked everywhere.  It’s tough to state just how much of a pain those are.  The get everywhere.  The surface sheds those rocks for the first few days (again, Virginia, early summer), and then starts shedding again if it gets hot, for some weeks thereafter.   So if this is going to be laid in place where people walk, either lay it in patches so that people can walk around the newest patches, or maybe lay plastic over it.

Fourth, the manufacturer says you can drive across these patches immediately.  And … yeah, technically that’s true.  If this were out in the middle of the street, and looks didn’t matter, I’d have no problem with that statement.

But I’d say that’s mistake, if you can avoid it, if you are picky about how the final product looks.  In my experience, there’s a risk of marking the pavement surface slightly for the first couple of days, no matter how carefully you drive (i.e., don’t turn the wheels when stopped).  And there’s a near-surety of picking up some of the tarry surface stones on your tires for the first few days.  Better to stay off these patches as much as possible until they’ve had a few days to cure.

That said, laying down plastic, then thin ply, and driving over that, did seem to compact the surface finish better than I could do with just a tamper.  So, drive over the plastic-and-ply protected surface to get the best flat-level surface on the patch.  But don’t drive over the unprotected patch for a few days, if you can help it.  If you have to, the patch will survive, but you’ll likely ding up the very top surface a bit.

QPR asphalt cold patch.

1:  Why QPR.

QPR was a relatively cheap patching material that could be applied overtop the existing asphalt surface.  I cannot over-emphasize how much labor that saves, relative to digging up all the alligatored asphalt that was deeply embedded in the clay soil of my driveway.  And then applying a much thicker patch of some alternative material.  If those patches will just stay stuck down, and don’t get popped up by freeze-thaw this winter, that labor savings alone will make it worthwhile to use QPR over other locally-available materials.

Of the cheap, asphalt-based patching compounds I could buy locally, one (Sackrete, at Home Depot) was for filling deep holes only.  It should not be laid atop existing asphalt, per manufacturer’s directions.  Using that would have meant digging up all that alligatored asphalt.  All of which is firmly embedded in the underlying clay soil, because this broken-up section of driveway had originally been laid directly onto the dirt.

But QPR (Lowes), by contrast, can be laid directly over an existing asphalt surface.  At least, that’s my takeaway from the manufacturer’s minimal instructions, and comments on the Lowes website and elsewhere.  Obviously, that won’t work if the underlying asphalt itself is subject to movement.   But as long as it’s firmly stuck in place, it should fine.

A completely different product, Aquaphalt, is a competitor to QPR that can also be laid directly over an existing asphalt surface.  That’s a water-cured patching material that looks like asphalt, but isn’t.  And while Aquaphalt appears to be a superior product in almost every way — particularly with a 15-minute cure time — it’s also between three and four times as expensive as QPR, per cubic foot.  It also comes in plastic buckets, which then must be disposed of.   (I used one bucket of Aquaphalt, on one particularly ugly stretch of pavement.  I explain that below.)

2:  I used a half-ton of material for this ~105 square foot patch.

Each bag of QPR weighs 50 pounds and costs about $20.  Therefore, my 20 bags of QPR weighed half a ton, and cost a little under $400. 

On net, for the area I patched, I got about five square feet of surface covered, per bag.  But that’s clearly a function of how deep my patch is, on average.

I brought the 50-pound bags of QPR home six to eight at a time, in my hatchback, after lining the back with a plastic sheet.

And it’s a good thing I bought just a few at a time, because I waaaaay over-estimated the amount needed, when I first looked over this section of driveway.  Raising the entire sunken driveway surface back to its original level would have taken about 60 bags of the stuff.  So instead of raising it to be fully level, I just filled in the low spots (the puddles), and raised it as little as I could, beyond that.

I’d have had a mess on my hands if I’d stockpiled the full 60 bags that I thought I’d need, before I started.

3:  Applied in manageable pieces

I put this down over several sessions, over the course of a week and a half.

Each session being maybe three or four bags’ worth of material, applied to one defined section of the driveway.

From start to finish, you:

  • sweep the area to be patched,
  • haul in a bag of QPR patch,
  • Slit the bag bottom, dump the QPR.
  • Rake it out/shape it at the edges.
  • Haul/slit additional bags as needed.
  • Tamp it.
  • Tamp it some more.
  • Run over it with your car, after covering in plastic and thin plywood.

Some days I went through that two or three times.  Most days on which I worked on the driveway, I only did that once.

One full cycle, from sweeping to running it over, seemed to take me about two hours.  But that includes some time pondering the situation, wondering what I should do next.  Mostly, pondering whether I was maintaining enough slope for water to flow, with the help of a 4-foot level.

In my “puddles first” strategy, the goal was to cover the entire area and not end up with standing water anywhere, after a rain.  With that as the goal, it was helpful to have some rain halfway through the patching, so that I could see what puddles remained after I’d filled in the biggest ones.

4: It makes a mess if there’s foot traffic.

At least it did, in my climate (Virginia, typical day in the mid-70s, sunny).

The freshly-laid patch has a tarry surface.  It will be stickier or less sticky depending on temperature and age.  Fresher and hotter mean tarrier.  As long as the patch is still tarry — either because it’s fresh, or it’s a few days old and in the hot sunshine — if you walk on it, you will pick up and track around tiny little tar-covered rock chips.  Which then stick to everything.

And that’s a pain in the ass.

5:  The tarry top surface of my patches temporarily went away over the course of a week. 

(I have now rewritten the intro to reflect what actually happened over the course of seven weeks.)

After a week, in my climate, I could walk cleanly across the patch and not pick up anything.

Before that point, though, in addition to shedding rock chips, the surface of the patch tends to pick up any stray organic matter (e.g., leaves, pine needles, wood chips) that will stick to the tar.  I believe this stuff will mostly move along once the surface is no longer tarry.  At any rate, the week-old patches were mostly clear of debris.

In principal, these were “ready for car traffic” almost immediately after they’d been fully tamped.  But only in the sense that the car tire would not squish the patch, much.  But you’d still be well-advised to wait until the next day before driving over these.  I think my car treads lifted some surface stones off the patch, when I drove over the patch on the first day.

The upshot is that, as the manufacturer advertises, you can drive right over the patches on Day 1.  Don’t stop and turn your wheels.   But my take on it is that you shouldn’t drive on the fresh patches if you can avoid it.  Your tire treads are going to pull some tarry stones off the top of the patch when you do that.  Better to minimize that until the top surface of the patch has had a few days to cure.

The other interesting aspect of aging of the patch is the surface gets smoother over time.  I guess it continues to flow a bit.  But, for sure, the fresh patch (dark) has a much rougher surface texture than the week-old patch, despite being laid and tamped the same.

6:  Pros and cons of doing this piecemeal.

Doing this piecemeal, as I did, has several advantages.  First, I don’t think I could have done 20 bags of QPR in one day.  Second, I would walk on the older (cured) patches, as I put in the newer (fresh) patches.  And I could walk on them as a way to walk around that freshly-laid patching material. Third, the only way I could figure to end up with a reasonably level final product was to fill in the low spots — the puddles — first.

Arguing against this approach are the looks and the time.  I believe that the entire patches surface will cure to roughly the same dry and densely-packed finish.  But the joins between the individual “batches” of patching will probably remain visible no matter what.  But in addition, each fresh patch extends the time during which you’re at risk for tracking tarred stone chips around.  For example, I started this more than a week ago, and it’ll be a week from now before the most recent patching material will have a cured, non-tarry surface.

Conclusion

I’m not sure I’d do this again.  And I’m not sure I wouldn’t, either.

For me, it boiled down to QPR being the easy and cheap solution.  You can drive down to your local hardware store, pick it up by the bag, and (after some significant surface prep) spread over a badly damaged asphalt surface.

This, as opposed to (say) trying to get three bids from pros, to come out, tear that up, and re-lay that section of the driveway correctly.  If I could get a pro around here interested in something that small.

The physical labor wasn’t that big a deal as long as you can lift the 50-pound bags.  I worked up a sweat tamping it, but I’m not even sore from doing that.  (OTOH, I lift weights regularly.)

Sure, it sticks to your tools.  And to your shoes.  And anything else it comes in contact with.  And it stinks faintly of asphalt, for some days afterward.  All depending on the temperature.  But, given that it basically is asphalt, none of that should be a huge surprise.

I have no idea how well it will last.  For now, it all appears to be physically solid and well-attached.  This, despite doing my best to apply it as thinly as I could, in some areas.  And without the best surface prep in the world.

The individual pieces of the patch give it a little bit of a redneck look.  But that should mostly go away as all the patches cure to the same shade and surface finish.

In any case, I have to leave it alone for a couple of months as it cures fully.  So I get to look at that patch until August or so.  At which point I’ll apply some modern miracle crack filler to any remaining cracks, then top coat the entire pavement.

That’s the plan, anyway.

Addendum:  Plus one bucket of Aquaphalt.

I actually started by purchasing a bucket of Aquaphalt 4.0 (smaller stones).  That, before I realized how much of this stuff I needed.  And how much Aquaphalt would cost to do the entire job.

I ended up using the Aquaphalt on one section of pavement that had been heavily colonized by grasses.  Unlike QPR and similar products, Aquaphalt cures by addition of water, and it cures fast (15 minutes) and hard.  No tarry mess.  I figured that if the grass should try to grow back (despite my heavily salting the area per Post #1973), Aquaphalt would stand a much better chance of keeping the buried grass roots from growing through the pavement than would the slow-to-cure QPR.

Edit 7/19/2024;  And, so far, so good.  Going on eight weeks later, and nothing is poking up through my asphalt patches.  I’m guessing that spraying the alligatored asphalt with a strong salt-water solution, prior to patching, killed the roots of all the vegetation that was there, as intended (Post #1973).

As far as I can tell, other than the high price and the waste stream of plastic buckets, Aquaphalt is a superior product.  It spreads and shapes almost as easily as QPR, and seems to stick to the pavement just as well.  It cures in 15 minutes, as advertised.  The surface finish of the Aquaphalt 4.0 is much finer than that of the QPR, owing mostly to the smaller average gravel size in the Aquaphalt 4.0.  The sole downside I noted to Aquaphalt is that it didn’t flow/rake to the edges of the patch as easily as QPR, and I don’t think I was able to lay quite as thin a patch with Aquaphalt as I was with QPR.

Edit 6/5/2024:  That’s not quite right.  Aquaphalt’s main downside is that it “flows” less well than QPR, at least once you’re at the water-and-compact stage.  I ended up leaving marks in the Aquaphalt in areas where the tamper did not hit squarely onto the surface of the Aquaphalt.  At the time, I thought I had fixed that by tamping these areas flat.  But, in fact, the Aquaphalt’s surface had so little “flow” at that point that it didn’t fill in the little low spots my mis-tamping had created.

But worse, the finer surface finish of Aquaphalt is much less forgiving than the coarser surface finish of QPR.  Little imperfections that are lost in the background roughness of the QPR surface finish stand out in the Aquaphalt surface finish. 

The moral of the story being that if you are not the best at leaving a smooth surface finish on materials like this, Aquaphalt may not be the better choice, relative to a tarry patch such as QPR.  For the reasons described just above.

That’s a lesson that my driveway and I learned the hard way. 

Looking on the bright side, the little dings in the Aquaphalt section get lost in the overall unevenness of the patch. 

I guess that’s a bright side.

We’ll see how it looks with a seal coat.

Otherwise, if I didn’t care about the expense or the waste stream of big plastic buckets, think I’d do the whole thing in Aquaphalt.  It’s as versatile as QPR (in that you can lay it over existing pavement), but lacking all the factors that make QPR a bit of a mess.  You also avoid QPR’s months-long wait prior to seal-coating over the patch and roadway.

Edit 6/5/2024:  But on a raggedy, roller-coaster asphalt surface such as my driveway, you aren’t going to end up with a beautiful finished surface of Aquaphalt as-seen-on-TV.  If nothing else, there’s no flat reference surface to screed to.  Unsurprisingly, the finished surface of my driveway — after QPR top coating — is not flat.  Plus, making it flat (level) with the remaining sound driveway surface would have required laying down three times as much material as I actually used with a “puddles first” patch-application strategy.  I’m pretty sure I’d have done Aquaphalt the same way — in a series of discrete patches — if only because it’s 50 pounds a bucket, and don’t think I could move 1.5 tons of that material in a day.  Let alone get it laid, watered, and tamped.