From Grits to Chopsticks

{Warning – the following post might not be suitable for typical readers. Proceed with caution unless you are an engineer!}

When living in a foreign country, it can often be difficult to replace things when they break (unavailable, language barriers, transportation limitations, etc).  That provides us with the “opportunity” to try and fix things.

Recently, there have been three “opportunities.”  The hinge pin on our portable oven door broke and I needed to rivet it back together – an easy fix.  Except, I needed a small washer to secure the end of the rivet and couldn’t just run down and get one at Home Depot.  Fortunately, one of our friends with a workshop made some on his drill press:

It was just the right size to secure the end of the rivet on the hinge:Everything worked great – sort of.  For some reason, the oven thermostat began to fail at the same time.  The elements eventually stayed on continually, creating a fire hazard (and making it difficult to cook dinner).  I took out the thermostat and wondered how to get a replacement:Interestingly, my friend with the workshop (also an engineer) happened to have an old broken oven.  He removed its thermostat and gave it to me, and I installed it into our oven:The good news is that it works OK.  The bad news is that the temperature settings are wrong (and non-linear).  Susan is able to use the oven, but she has to adjust the temperature based on a thermometer on the rack inside.

Another opportunity arose when white and black speckles began to spread across the screen while using our PowerPoint projector.  This is caused by failure of the DMD chip:Unfortunately, extracting the DMD chip was not a trivial task:You can buy a “nearly new” one on TaoBao (Chinese Ebay), but I’m wondering if it will have the same problems as my old one.  Hopefully, this job will only need to be done once…

I also took apart my Toshiba laptop to try and fix an overheating problem.  After cleaning everything and putting it all back together, it still wouldn’t startup.  Fortunately, a young friend found that the BIOS battery had failed and had it replace for $40.  After a week of reloading Windows on our slow internet, it’s almost ready for use!