The mystery of the rusty ceramic knife (SOLVED), or destructive partial disassembly of a Kyocera ceramic santoku knife

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Mucking About With Things Teardowns The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand
Last time, I mentioned that our older ceramic knives’ plastic handles had developed cracks and propounded my hypothesis that the cracking was a consequence of the blade material and the handle material having different coefficients of linear thermal expansion and my having, in the past, run them through our dishwasher periodically.

Having a gander inside a SMART SENSOR AS808 (an inexpensive, standalone 1xAAA-powered temperature and humidity sensor)

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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Teardowns The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The screen of the (reassembled) SMART SENSOR AS808, displaying the ambient temperature and humidity as well as the date. We have some small and accurate-enough temperature and humidity sensors (“SMART SENSOR AS808”). They run on single AAA batteries and the batteries last for months and months. Their biggest flaw is the lack of any way […]

A mildly satisfying micro project: increasing the run time of a pull-string cat toy by making the string longer

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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Teardowns The Diary of Lupin Pooter
The pull-string cat toy, disemboweled. Some recently-bought cat toys came with spring-powered vibration motors. The springs (likely spiral torsion springs, i.e. watch springs) are loaded by drawing back a length of string attached to the motor’s axle. When you draw back the pullstring and release it, the eccentric mass on the motor’s axle causes the […]

Canon laser printer teardown pareidolia

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HerpDerp Teardowns The Diary of Lupin Pooter
To satisfy my own curiosity, I recently tore down two old Canon multifunction printers, an inkjet and a laser. When I removed one of the motors, the relative positions of the hole into which the gear on the motor axle had gone and two rivets (which were actually the ends of metal axles for other […]