So…about that Hardware run I mentioned the other day…

I was away from the house over the weekend (more on that later) and I’ve a habit of turning off the water to the house if I’m away on a road trip, however short. What I’ve noticed over a long enough period with the house water turned off is one or both of the toilet tanks will drain empty.

The leakage can’t be much or I would notice it and replace the leaky flapper valve and all is good again. But the very very slow leakage I don’t notice until I return home, turn the water back on, and hear one or both toilets in the house start filling. Which usually means a trip to the hardware store for new flapper valves. You let them dry out after a period of use and they either shrink when they get dry again or harden and won’t seal anymore.

This is something I just need to bake into a long road trip: go buy some flapper valves before leaving, so I have one or more ready for when I get back home and turn the water back on.

Anyway…this time I saw water on the bathroom floor, apparently because one or more gaskets had also failed, not badly just enough to start dripping, and I ended up replacing everything from the turn off valve to the stuff in the tank.

Which was easy and simple because the parts for my old-ish standard toilets are available practically everywhere. I am no Luddite but before buying into the latest and greatest new thing my first question is how easy is it to get parts. Because everything breaks eventually. Most of what is in my house may seem surprisingly low tech or old tech for a guy like me because of this.

When I did the big backstage tour at Walt Disney World I was told the rides that required the most maintenance by far were the water rides. In this house it’s nearly always something water touches. The sinks, the toilets, last month it was the hot water heater. I’ve had to replace my roof three times to deal with leaks. The electrical and gas services have given me next to no trouble at all, though I’ve had to replace a bunch of appliances. It’s almost always something to do with water.

…and it goes very well, thanks to the advice I got on a Facebook page. Imagine that!

A few days ago I had the F1 out and put the 85mm f2 lens on it, which isn’t a large telephoto but it’s still a honking big piece of glass, and I noticed some wiggle. It was ever so slightly loose, but not in the lens mount but on one side of the camera body flange. That was worrisome because the wiggle meant the lens wouldn’t be square to the film plane and of course it was going to get worse if I didn’t attend to it. I figured it was just one or more screws loose on the flange, and wondered if it was something I could fix myself because old film camera repair shops are getting scarce, and I’d probably have to ship my camera somewhere, and that particular camera is precious to me. It’s been my companion in the art of photography since I was a teenage boy in high school. 

So I asked on the Facebook Canon F1 page I follow if it was something I could fix myself or did it require taking so much of the body apart to get to that screw I was better off taking it to a camera repair place. I mentioned how precious that camera was to me. I got a reply that it was a super easy fix that just involved removing four philips screws that held the plate around the flange to the body. BUT…I absolutely had to do it with Japan Industrial Standard screwdrivers or I’d strip the heads trying to get them off. I did not know about JIS screwdrivers until that moment. I thought my usual jeweler’s screwdrivers would suffice. But I took the advice and, discovering I didn’t actually have any, bought a small set of JIS screwdrivers.

Much glad I did. The difference is the screws they match to are for screwdrivers that fit deeper into the head, which gives them a much better surface area grip. The screws in question were the tiniest things I’d ever seen, but with the right JIS screwdriver it only took a little torque to get them started and the entire operation went smoothly, once I figured out how to jiggle that front plate off around the flange.

And yeah…the screws holding down the flange were all lose but one. So I tightened those and put everything back together. I’ve never been more grateful for a magnetized screwdriver because I could not have possibly fingered those tiny things back in to get them started.