Projects that make or build something.
Source: Bunn Coffee Basics Brochure (.pdf).
Let’s use Mr. Coffee to validate the Bunn diagram.
What do those parts of the brew cycle look, smell, and taste like, coffee-wise?
Thanks to Mr. Coffee, I can find out, so you don’t have to. Continue reading Post #2078: A Mr. Coffee Try-at-Home Experiment.
I first tried the superglue-and-baking-soda trick back in Post #1997, where I made an expedient repair to a plastic-bodied wrist watch with a broken watch band lug.
FYI, the baking soda isn’t merely a physical filler, it interacts chemically with the superglue and 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 (reference).
When my wife snapped the plastic frame of her eyeglasses last week, that method was the first thing that came to mind. Like the wristwatch lug, you have a tiny surface area of plastic to glue to, and yet the part has to take a lot of mechanical stress.
And, in fact, that same superglue-and-baking-soda method worked exceptionally well to hold her eyeglasses together until the replacement frames arrived.
As common sense suggests, first wash and dry both parts to clean the plastic surfaces. (Just dish soap and water).
Then, first super-glue the plastic parts back together, to get the alignment right. If the snap was clean, this should look good when re-assembled. But super glue, by itself, isn’t strong enough. Lot of leverage on this part.
And note that, for this next part, you need liquid superglue. Gel won’t properly “wet” the baking soda.
I then added a thin layer of baking soda and super glue all around the broken plastic. For a thin layer, just wet the plastic with superglue and quickly heap on baking soda. Give it a few seconds to harden. Brush off what remains loose. Use sandpaper to smooth the surface.
Alternatively, you can build the thicker part of the patch by first laying down a thin, shaped layer of baking soda (make a “wall” of masking tape around the edge to keep the powder from spilling over), then quickly wetting it with liquid superglue. That was shown in Post #1997, the broken watch lug post. When fully hardened, file it down and shape it with careful use of a common (flat bastard) metal file. Sandpaper to remove any rough bits.
The result is an unobtrusive and surprisingly sturdy repair. I didn’t try to match the frame color or otherwise make it blend in.
Better than a piece of tape, for sure.
It’s now been a week, and the replacement frames have arrived. I doubt that this repair is going to survive having the lenses pulled out of the old frames. But it was more than good enough to hold the broken frames together, until the new frames could get here.
I believe baking-soda-and-liquid-superglue is is now my go-to method for unavoidable repairs on rigid plastics.
On the path to coffee snobbery, there is no better starting place than Walmart.
That’s where I just bought a made-in-USA Aeropress single-cup coffee maker.
In the end, coffee is all about chemistry. Chemistry and physics. Chemistry, and physics, and ruthless efficiency … and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Continue reading Post #2074: Coffee chemistry Christmas, part II: Aeropress.
A geezer, a propane torch, and some flammable material. What could possibly go wrong?
Update 12/29/2024: No freeze-thaw damage so far. Not on the big patch, that I treated so carefully, below. And not on a couple of smaller patches, where I did absolutely nothing to seal the surface.
Given that the untreated patches are surviving the winter just fine, it’s not clear that any of the stuff in this post is necessary to prevent freeze-thaw damage of surface-laid QPR asphalt patch.
Continue reading Post #2029: 20 bags of QPR, finishing the repair.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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.
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:
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
.
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.
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.
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.
