Thread: We Have Skills Too !!

Really nice work on those.
That first one in the second post in particular, beautiful work.

There was a time in my life when I was an FFL and played more with guns than with knives and razors. These are some of my side projects. The rifle is a Howa 1500 in 6.5 Grendel that I bedded in a Boyds stock and did a few other modifications to such as cutting the magazine down and modifying it for a "flush fit". The pistols were "parts only" and I made the receivers as out of pipe as "zero percents".

thanks for sharing! Very nice knives. Even sneaky enough to catch a bear taking a nap out on a hunting trip .

I forged this little guy between church and dinner today. Made from a scrap piece of leaf spring that I had left over from my last razor.

Cool little knife!

Very cool lil blade.
Like the twisted handle, nice work.

Nice grind on the blade, and yes the twist is cool. I do like small blades.

Pool heater started acting up, she’s 12 years young.
Would light and reset, go through her purge, relight, re go out re purge. Would do this thrice and then lock out.
Started with the flame sensor, nope.
Then Replace the gas Vv as it had less than 24 vac at the coil. 22 vac, so should be ok, but just in case, change it. Mmm nope.
Next I replace the ignition control board. Now she stays in stand by and won’t go to heat mode???
More wire and PCB board tracing and lo and behold, on my keypad button ribbon output I find this.

Zoom in a bit more I see this, point of failure and ingress of outside environment.

Ok, so the corroded ribbon strip on the cable turns out to be the return path from all three selector buttons. So in effect none of the button presses do anything anymore.

The ribbon from the display plugs in to that 4 pin on the left side of the display card which in turn plugs in to the icb card via that white ribbon out the bottom.
So multiple issues possibly triggered from the ribbon as it failed.
Put the new icb card in, with the the original display card. Unplug the keypad input card from the display card and power everything up.
Goes into standby like before.
Jump pins 1 and 4 on the display card at the keypad input connector to simulate the mode key being pressed and voila the input switches to pool mode.
Now jump pins 2 and 4 and the temp request starts to increase. So I select 80’ as the actual water temp is 72 and everything works again. Heater goes through it’s start up sequence and actually stays on!
Still waiting on the new keypad but I can live like this till it arrives.
Found 2 of the 5 burner tubes gas orifices were totally spider clogged so cleaned out all of them while troubleshooting so I probably gained 100 000 btu’s of efficiency along the way.
Gonna be a happy Father’s Day swim tomorrow before some obscenely decadent steaks.
Cheers men. I will be sharing this on the Hayward forum, but thought some of you might appreciate the walk through as well.
This would apply to any gas or propane fired force draft pool or spa heater..
The techs all said replace the heater as they only last 7 years. Bullshit.
The s.s. Heater tubes look perfect still, barely any bluing. Maybe the heat exchanger will go in a few years but a new heater is 2500, the parts cost me 700. My time was measured in pilsners so, say 4..
Think I came out ahead..

It looks to me that there is enough on each end that you could scab a wire.on it. Scrape off the ends and solder a wire. Ive done this many times on ribbon with many more traces than 4.

Originally Posted by Gasman

It looks to me that there is enough on each end that you could scab a wire.on it. Scrape off the ends and solder a wire. Ive done this many times on ribbon with many more traces than 4.

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