Take THAT, piece of junk lighter plug

[cjsmith]

I now have the Radio Shack 12V 7.5A DC Power Plug 270-1509. It cannot be taken apart either, but at least I can see (and MAYBE reach) where the connection gets made, which is a big win. (This plug also has a lot of crap I didn't need, like a power LED and a fuse. Oh well. I takes what I can gets.)

Now I have to get my wire out of the little connectors that came with the bad plug. It will be easier to pull off the connectors (soldered as they are) than cut the wire, because I've been doing the wire stripping with scissors, and I'm not very good at that. And here I thought this project wouldn't require any desoldering braid. Ha for my hubris, ha!

[Edit: One of the great things about working at a hardware company is that sometimes the lab guy will let you borrow wire strippers. Heh heh heh. Thing works like a charm. Project complete.]

One of these days I will learn that the quickest, easiest, least expensive, most effective, best at decluttering, simplest lifestyle, thing to do with an Ancient Unfinished Project is to throw it away.

Comments

[shadopanther.livejournal.com]

I have wire strippers & I'm ok at stripping wire. It's getting the soldering right I've had trouble with. When I last soldered some jewelry in college, I had difficulty getting the solder to stick rather than run-off too thin & then not hold the two pieces of metal together.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh, I own wire strippers. However, given that the theme of this set of posts has been decluttering and organizing, you can guess why I'm not using my wire strippers. :-)

I've never had trouble with the soldering part of it, but then I admit I haven't been using solder joints as a structural element. All I need is good electrical contact. Fixing jewelry with it seems like a harder problem.

[shadopanther.livejournal.com]

Um... because the wire strippers either couldn't be found or the scissors just happened to be at hand?

Good point about the structural vs. electrical contact -- I hadn't thought about it that way before.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Basically, yeah -- it was too much trouble to dig out the wire strippers and I have scissors in every room of the house. :-)

[shadopanther.livejournal.com]

Are you finding scissors you didn't know you had as you organize?

When my mother and I went through my grandmother's dressers after my grandmother's death we found scissors in various places -- amounting to between 6-8 pairs of scissors or so.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Not yet I haven't, but I wouldn't put it past me. I just spent a few minutes mentally counting, and I've got ten pair before I start to stretch it and think of the first aid kits. Yeah, I think decluttering is a good idea...

When we went through my grandmother's house we found a lot of amazing stuff. A 1929 desk calendar. Handwritten household budget lists from some time when a load of groceries cost $1.27. Return envelopes of the kind that come with bills and such -- a big pile of them, assorted, all saved. Half a bicycle. It was really impressive in an eerie sort of way.

Were her scissors stashed in weird places? I'm imagining a pair of pinking shears tucked under the socks, some embroidery scissors in a hatbox, that sort of thing.

grandmother's things

[shadopanther.livejournal.com]

Nifty. :) ...I can relate to the return envelopes; I think my grandmother may have had a stack of those too -- just in case she needed them.

Among some of the more interesting finds we found going through my grandmother's things were:
Finding that below one layer of my grandmother's scarves one drawer, was a lower layer of my grandfather's things... as if un-touched from when they were put there before he died (before I was born) in 1967-1968. (My grandmother passed on in 1996, she was 94.) It was a time-capsule for my mother who remembered that very drawer being "her father's drawer."...and in a music cabinet in the garage: Vintage sheet music, including one with a big picture of Shirley Temple on the cover.

Not quite odd places (well maybe they're odd, I'm not sure)... various places... several in different layers of a drawer that was mostly costume jewelry, in the bathroom with the curlers, desk drawers, another with the sewing machine, another 1-2 with the spools of thread in a cupboard. I remember putting together a "bouquet" handful of different types and sizes of scissors that had been found in various places.

A lot of things get collected in a lifetime.

Re: grandmother's things

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

A lot of things, indeed, in a long lifetime. It's interesting to think about the things we collect and why.

(My grandmother was 94 also.)