Chalk it up to the unintended consequences of software upgrades; something broke our contact form for a bit. We’ve switched contact form plugins and all is well again. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Archive | April, 2020
Spot welding handle separation
Reader Brian was kind enough to fix a handle separation for a friend by spot welding the handle back on.
I just fixed a frying pan for a friend by spot welding. less then 2 minutes, back in business.
If the material on the pan fails, and holes are left in the pan, simply reattach like a puzzle piece
and put 8 new spot welds in 8 new places, there’s plenty of material.
Hope that helps.
I’ve fixed many pans and tea pots over the years by spot welding, with no problems.
We have been told that the stainless steel on the pans is too thin to spot weld reliably, but Brian has shown us otherwise. The result, much like the brazing test we did, isn’t perfect, but it is functional. Thanks Brian!
Here is the original broken handle:
And the repaired handle:
What to do if one of our replacement lid knobs won’t screw all the way on
Having sold tens of thousands of replacement lid knobs at this point, we’ve only have a few reports of the embedded nut not having any threads. Obviously, that defect is a show stopper and you should contact us for a replacement.
However, you might discover difficulty screwing the knob all the way down like customer Frank did. At first we thought it might be defective nut threads. But then Frank figured it out.
After I wrote this morning, I had the inspiration to shoot some WD-40 on the threads of the lid and into the threads of the knob. I unscrewed the knob, put the lubricant on, and tried again — and it went further. I did that several more times and each time it got closer to the bottom of the threaded post… and finally got the new knob to go all the way down to the surface of the lid. Hooray!
Turns out that when the old lid knob nut inserts rust to the screw, some of the rust can remain behind and impede the new knob from screwing on all the way.
Microsoft doesn’t like us :(
Believe it or not, we run our own email server, and have been for 20 years or so. There are benefits to running ones own email system, such as flexibility and privacy, but it comes at a price; namely keeping up with all manner of attempts at hacking the system, and, once in a while, one of the major email providers decides our email server is no longer safe. Last month it was the AT&T system that stopped accepting emails from our server. This time it is Microsoft.
Microsoft isn’t presently accepting emails from us from any of their email domains (msn.com, outlook.com, hotmail.com). We’ve contacted their support for such things and while they have pointed us at a page that lists best practices for email servers that communicate with them, we are unable to find anything that seems awry, they won’t tell us specifically what the problem is, and they say “we are not a candidate for mitigation” of the problem.
We reviewed our mail logs since the beginning of the year and have sent a whopping 30 or so emails to any of the Microsoft email services, which means we definitely aren’t a source of spam email.
We’ll continue to try and figure out what the issue is. In the meantime, please be aware that if you are contacting us from one of those domains, you may not get a reply from us, or you might not receive order confirmations from our system.
Ah the joys of being a small independent business.
Please feel free to tell Microsoft you are unhappy with them blocking email from us. 🙂