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Pouch Repair and Lathe Stuff
Several months ago the pivot on the silly plastic beltclip on my Visor pouch broke. I bought a generic nylon pouch to replace it, but it was a pain to get the Visor in or out of it. The Visor is also my cellphone and this wasn't acceptable. Since a new pouch would probably break in the same way, I decided to repair the old one.
Plastic was obviously too weak, so I decided to go with metal. Luckily I have a lathe. (Thank you,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
randomdreams! randomdreams is a wonderful person! All praise randomdreams!) After many silly misadventures it is up and running again and working quite well.
First I made a nut to replace the broken plastic pivot. This was just a chunk of aluminum from Boeing Surplus turned down and tapped. The replacement can be seen next to the original pivot here. You can see the replacement nut engaged in the beltclip here.
Then I cut a piece of 1/8" plate, filed the edges down nicely, and countersunk a hole in it. This provides the backing plate for the nut, shown here. The backside with the nut screwed on can be seen here. It's insanely overengineered, but by making the plate so wide it only rubs against the Visor case and not the screen. I just spent $60 replacing the screen and I don't intend to do so again any time soon.
The finished assembly, with the Visor and phone module in the pouch are shown here. The copper wire visible on the beltclip is a kludge to prevent it from opening. After losing the visor on the bus once I decided that 'feature' wasn't worth it. (As an aside, I have lost phones/PDAs on Seattle busses twice now, and both times they have turned up in the lost and found. Seattle busses [and bus riders] rule.) The beltclip is generally a pretty silly design. Not only does it hinge to clip onto/off of the belt, there is a little button you can push to release the pivot, in case you want to remove the pouch but not the beltclip. Unfortunately the Visor/phone combination is bulky enough that the pivoting feature is convenient, so I'm stuck with this stupid design.
As some even more pointless and explicit showing off, here is a picture of the lathe and the right side of the workbench with bandsaw and drillpress visible. I'm still kinda spooked by how clean the workbench is. And it has stayed clean for weeks now! Very weird.
Fixing the pouch took the lathe, the bandsaw, the drillpress, a file, a deburring tool, drillbits, a counter sink, a tap and a calliper. It's a wonderful feeling to have the correct tool for a task at hand. What I have jokingly refered to as my shop in the past is finally starting to live up to the title. It just needs a big drill size chart, saftey posters and an emergency shower to be complete.
Plastic was obviously too weak, so I decided to go with metal. Luckily I have a lathe. (Thank you,
randomdreams! randomdreams is a wonderful person! All praise randomdreams!) After many silly misadventures it is up and running again and working quite well.First I made a nut to replace the broken plastic pivot. This was just a chunk of aluminum from Boeing Surplus turned down and tapped. The replacement can be seen next to the original pivot here. You can see the replacement nut engaged in the beltclip here.
Then I cut a piece of 1/8" plate, filed the edges down nicely, and countersunk a hole in it. This provides the backing plate for the nut, shown here. The backside with the nut screwed on can be seen here. It's insanely overengineered, but by making the plate so wide it only rubs against the Visor case and not the screen. I just spent $60 replacing the screen and I don't intend to do so again any time soon.
The finished assembly, with the Visor and phone module in the pouch are shown here. The copper wire visible on the beltclip is a kludge to prevent it from opening. After losing the visor on the bus once I decided that 'feature' wasn't worth it. (As an aside, I have lost phones/PDAs on Seattle busses twice now, and both times they have turned up in the lost and found. Seattle busses [and bus riders] rule.) The beltclip is generally a pretty silly design. Not only does it hinge to clip onto/off of the belt, there is a little button you can push to release the pivot, in case you want to remove the pouch but not the beltclip. Unfortunately the Visor/phone combination is bulky enough that the pivoting feature is convenient, so I'm stuck with this stupid design.
As some even more pointless and explicit showing off, here is a picture of the lathe and the right side of the workbench with bandsaw and drillpress visible. I'm still kinda spooked by how clean the workbench is. And it has stayed clean for weeks now! Very weird.
Fixing the pouch took the lathe, the bandsaw, the drillpress, a file, a deburring tool, drillbits, a counter sink, a tap and a calliper. It's a wonderful feeling to have the correct tool for a task at hand. What I have jokingly refered to as my shop in the past is finally starting to live up to the title. It just needs a big drill size chart, saftey posters and an emergency shower to be complete.
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Yay!
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It should help prevent me from hanging up on people as I remove the phone from the pouch, a problem I've been having (particularly recently) with the replacement pouch. This should make
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This doesn't mean I have to buy an emergency shower for Christmas, does it?