Tag: rubber

DIY Light Up Cable Protector

writ­ten and updat­ed 3/04/23

What: Out­door rub­ber cord and cable pro­tec­tor ramp that lights up

Why: To charge a Bat­tery Elec­tric Vehi­cle (BEV) from a 120-Volt out­let by run­ning an exten­sion cord over a side­walk. This is for very infre­quent use (emer­gency charg­ing in the event of poor mem­o­ry or inclement weath­er). Not only is it a ramp which low­ers the chance of trip­ping, but when placed at night, hav­ing it pulse-shine increas­es vis­i­bil­i­ty. Cou­ple it with a spot­light or porch light­ing, should be plen­ty of indi­ca­tion of a haz­ard.

Sup­plies: Cable pro­tec­tor ramp, util­i­ty knife, razor scraper, bat­tery pow­ered/­cut­table/out­door-rat­ed LED strip with light modes, dou­ble sided stick­er dots, pli­ers (option­al), paint scraper (option­al), Shop Vac­u­um

Cost: 2‑Channel Cable Pro­tec­tor Ramp ($54.19) + LED Strip ($11.99) + Dou­ble-Sided Stick­ers ($5.99) = $72.17

Time: 1 — 2 hours

Process

  • Gath­er Sup­plies (the rub­ber ramp, itself, is extreme­ly smelly, so would rec­om­mend a few days of off gas unless stor­ing in a shed our out­side)

  • Test fit, mea­sure, and mark
Per­ma­nent mark­er

  • Start cut­ting. Use of razor blades are the best for cut­ting through thick rub­ber. Make sure to use safe­ty glass­es and gloves. Be care­ful!
Cut wedges

  • After remov­ing pieces in incre­ments, use the razor scraper to clean up the bot­tom.

  • Test fit again. In this case, the bat­tery case still does­n’t fit, so now to widen the side.
Does­n’t fit with the cord in there, too

  • Use pli­ers, the paint scraper, blades all togeth­er to remove the rub­ber

twist, pull, what­ev­er it takes
lev­er­ing
There it is!

  • Yay! It fits now!
This is a 10-gauge exten­sion cord

  • At first, I thought I’d need to drill holes to make the light more vis­i­ble, but I wast­ed time doing that because it works per­fect­ly with­out the holes!

  • Sticky dots now, to hold the LED lights in place. I am aware that the LED lights have an adhe­sive, too, but for ease of removal/replacement I opt­ed for the sticky dots
They were so annoy­ing to stick, I need­ed some­thing met­al and thin to help me place them

  • Test time!
No porch lights

  • Yay!! It works! I was real­ly, real­ly ner­vous about it out there all night long, but it worked real­ly well, and noth­ing bad hap­pened accord­ing to the cam­eras I had trained on it. I also had the porch lights on, but with­out the lights, it looked real­ly great, too. You can’t tell in these pho­tos, but I left the mode on a fade in and out. Grant­ed, this was win­ter, and there are typ­i­cal­ly very few peo­ple wan­der­ing around in the cold, dark, but I’m glad to see that in a pinch, the option is there to charge my EV overnight.

DIY: Toilet Fill Valve Seal Repair

updat­ed 8/7/2022

What: Kohler High­line Clas­sic K‑11499–0 (bought and installed May 2017) toi­let fill valve (Flu­id­mas­ter Uni­ver­sal 400A OE part — came with toi­let) issues

Prob­lem: Months of slow-fill­ing toi­let along with a loud squeal noise when float rais­es with water lev­el. It final­ly quit fill­ing alto­geth­er.

When: August 2022

Sup­plies: 242 Toi­let Replace­ment Seal, a cup

Cost: Around $4 and gas

Time: 10 min­utes

Dif­fi­cul­ty: Easy

Process

1. Turn off the water sup­ply (bath­room got a nice clean­ing after this)

2. Grab the fill valve cap and twist left to unseat it (you might have to grab the stem of the whole valve to pre­vent the entire valve from spin­ning. Here’s a video)

Grasp
Twist
It’s off!

3. Now to unhook the cap from the float. Give it a nice, care­ful tug, being aware that it is plas­tic.

Con­nect­ed
Not con­nect­ed

4. Exam­ine the fill valve seal for debris. Remove it care­ful­ly and inspect under­neath for debris. Clean it out. In my case, there was debris under­neath that was caus­ing a block­age and there­fore no water. It must have been there for a while and then final­ly occlud­ed the open­ing.

Seal on
Seal off

5. Sim­i­lar­ly, inspect the cap-less top of the fill valve for debris.

Looks clear to me! But just in case…

6. Now that every­thing is off, let’s go ahead and flush the fill valve itself. Appar­ent­ly, over the years pieces of Teflon tape, or min­er­als or oth­er debris can accu­mu­late in the valve. Flu­id­mas­ter sets the lifes­pan of a fill valve at around 7 years (mine is about 5 years old). SO, grab a cup and place it upside-down over the fill valve.

7. Turn on the water sup­ply and flush for about 10–15 sec­onds (accord­ing to Flu­id­mas­ter)

8. At this point, you would replace every­thing and test it out. It was no longer fill­ing slow­ly after the debris was removed, so BOOM, solved. BUT…the float mech­a­nism no longer worked…as in, the fill valve kept fill­ing with­out stop­ping. Oh, great. I bust­ed it some­how. Removed every­thing again and found that the orig­i­nal seal looked kind of chewed up around the float pin.

9. Turned the water sup­ply back off, and ran out to the store to grab a 242 Toi­let Fill Valve Seal (and oth­er stuff just in case, so I would­n’t have to run out again, but did­n’t need them in the end)

Spankin’ new
Instruc­tions aren’t super use­ful

10. Had remove it all again and here is an image of the old seal. If you look at the cen­ter, you can see how rough it looks where I tried to push it in with my fin­ger­nails and prob­a­bly from gen­er­al wear and tear

11. Here’s a side by side of the old seal and the new one

This side will face away from the cap
This side (with the nip­ple) will face the cap

12. Slide the seal onto the cap

New!
Shiny!

13. Now to reassem­ble it all. Line up the cap assem­bly with the float assem­bly stem groove and snap it in

*snap*

14. Place the now-attached cap back on the valve. Remem­ber that you have to turn right to replace it, so place the cap accord­ing­ly so that none of the parts inter­fere with each oth­er

*Let’s twist again! Like we did last sum­mer!*

15. Twist it to the right and, YAY, it’s back on!

Reassem­bled!

16. MOMENT OF TRUTH. Turn on the water sup­ply. You should imme­di­ate­ly hear the water fill­ing up. Now lift up on the float mech­a­nism. If the tank quits fill­ing, you are DONE, and it is REPAIRED! GREAT JOB!

Lift up on the float and BOOM! Hal­lelu­jah!