Making Tins More Useful

The food for the ongoing project comes in large metal tins. They look like they might be useful for storing things, but they have two drawbacks. Firstly, they are big. Well, tall. They take up a lot of space and whatever you put in them would end up jumbled together. Secondly they have a lip around the inside just below the top. This is to help in levelling the scoops of food so that they are all the same volume. It makes the tins less useful, though as the lip just gets in the way. So, what to do? i decided to chop them down to make them shorter:

I'm going to make a few different heights of tin, for storing different sized items.

I bought a Casio fx602p and found a puzzle

I bought a Casio fx602p and found a puzzle

Well, it might be a puzzle, or it might be a coded shopping list, or something completely ordinary. It's a puzzle to me though.

The numbers don't appear to all be primes, so I don't think the calculator was used with a program to find primes. The other card doesn't have all the letters of the alphabet on it, so can't be used to code words. At least it can't code all words.

Here's the cards in close-up:

What are they for?

Festive

In the spirit of the season one of these was created:

Six millimetre plywood cut on the bandsaw and hand finished. Screwed together, so easily serviced in the future.

Tripod Fix Adjustment

I fixed my tripod a while back:

https://trochilidae.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/tripod-fixed-ive-printed-two-new-clamps.html

The clamp works by pressing onto a small rectangular block which stops the leg from collapsing. The 3D printed clamp wasn't quite the same size as the original on one of the clamps, so it didn't push very hard on the block. this meant the leg wasn't very firmly held when extended. Eventually the clamp slipped over the block and I lost it.

So I machined a new larger block out of nylon. This has fixed the problem and the clamp is now very firm when latching the leg.

Miele Induction Hob Problem

Miele Induction Hob Problem

We've had a Miele KM5731 for nine years or so, it took a while for me to fit it after we bought it, so it's probably been installed for more like 8 years. Anyway, a few days ago it started to give an error code of FE32.This is the hob, it has four induction coils and some touch buttons:

The error code appears in the power level displays:

Once the error code appears the hob is unusable. The instruction manual isn't much help, it says turn it off and on again. Well, that might work, but it's got progressively harder to conjure away over the past few days. A search on the internet resulted in many useless sites and one very useful Dutch site. From that site it transpires that there are a couple of capacitors on the power PCB that can pop and lead to this error code. I took the hob apart and had a look and indeed there were two capacitors with bulging tops.

They are both 470uF 25V electrolytics, this one has split and opened:

This one has just expanded on top:

I ordered some new high quality capacitors to replace these two and also some to replace the other electrolytics on the PCB. These arrived today and I have replaced the capacitors. So far no sign of FE32, but we'll have to see over the long term whether it's fixed or not.

Interestingly the decent quality (Panasonic) capacitors I ordered were identical to the ones fitted, except for the date code, apart from the two that had popped. So it looks like maybe there was a supplier issue with those two.

UPDATE 13th February 2018
So far there's been no re-occurrence of the problem, so it looks like the capacitors were the problem.

UPDATE 25th March 2021

I have made a video of the disassembly of my hob, it's here:

https://youtu.be/MCJaZrRvgdE