Catching up Pt. 2

Then, after working on the yard. Rachel's food processor and blender broke kind of. So I fixed them both. Her food processor has got this button and a ridiculously over complicated linkage system of nylon/plastic pieces in the bowl handle and food chute that prevents the machine from turning on if the chute and bowl are chocked inside. Well the little pieces wore out and now the button would never press, therefore the food processor would never turn on. So, I opened it up and bypassed the switch. Not without first going to the hardware store and buying some tools to do it. SWEET! NEW TOOLS! Plus it was for Rachel so its a perfectly justified purchase. Now our blender we use a lot. More so than any normal human beings. Hey, its not my fault Rachel makes delicious pina coladas. That plus she uses it for a ton of other random things. So daily pina coladas, daily fruit smoothies, plus other random crap made the little plastic gear thing the motor spins break some teeth off. Alittle gorilla glue should give us another six months or so of trouble free blending (this has happened before and gorilla glue fix it for a while). I wish manufacturers would make these little pieces metal for psycho power users like us. (No pics, not that interesting)

Ok, now, my neglected PID/espresso machine project has gotten alittle love this weekend. I have a functioning circuit of the PID working with the boiler's heating elements. THE CIRCUIT WORKS! Just not reliably. It gets VERY hot. If you start it up, the elements turn on for a long time until the PID starts to modulate temp around 190F. So from 80F to 190F the elements are on pulling a lot of current through my homemade solid state relay board. So hot that it will start to boil and smoke the thermal grease between the thyristor and heatsink (thyristor being the component that carries all the current for the elements). This boiling degrades the thermal conductivity of the grease so much that when you turn off the PID and then turn it back on it will not conduct the heat to the heatsink and the thyristor will burn up. I lost a SSR this way, one is enough. To prevent this from happening again I needed an enclosure to house my SSR and provide air flow. Well I looked all over Guam for a sturdy enclosure for a week and found one at the arts and crafts store. It's an acrylic box that house a computer fan for air flow and is large enough for the fan, the relay board, two PID's, and wiring. This will be outside the espresso machine when finished and most likely be an eye sore but it will work. This bad boy set me back five bucks. Try not to be too critical of my lack of craftsmanship. As soon as I attempted to jigsaw a hole in the lid it pretty much exploded from the vibrations. It's thinner acrylic than what I am used to but I did manage to salvage most of it and it will still work.