Hunter Ceiling Fan Light Repair

TL;DR Summary: The Limitor part you are looking at (T160: Labeled Y59 B 120C or similar) is a thermal/current limiting switch.  It has failed and is probably why your lights aren’t coming on.

A couple of weeks ago I flipped on the light to my kid’s room and I was startled by a PLINK and blue arc flash of death that signified that it was time to begin the ritual hunt knowing that there was, like, a 5% chance I would have any bulbs that would fit.  

Oh, it’s not like the socket or bulb are anything special - I was just playing the odds with my Schroedinger’s Lightbulb Cabinet of Utter Inconvenience.   Since I needed two 40W candelabra bulbs, it was likely I would find one 15W, one 40W standard socket bulb, and twenty-seven 100W outdoor flood lights.  If I need a flood light, there would be a completely different distribution of stuff there.  Maybe it would just be filled with scented candles and a whale oil lantern but it would almost certainly contain no flood lights.  I’m sure you have a junk drawer or pantry shelf with similar qualities in your house.  

So imagine my surprise when, lo and behold, there were two perfectly good 40W bulbs at the ready.  Awesome.  Let’s just screw them in and flip the ol’ switch and… nothing.

Hmmm…

The fan’s still working so maybe I didn’t screw in the bulbs tightly enough.  Nope, that’s not it.  Let’s try the pull-chain - I never use it, but, hey, you never know - while I was hunting for the bulbs maybe someone else in the house tried to be “helpful” and yanked the pull chain a random-but-odd-number of times (look, don’t even get me started…).  No dice.

“The pull switch must have died when the bulb blew.  Wonderful,” I thought.  I shut off juice to the fan, removed the bulbs, took off the housing, removed the switch and took it to the garage so I could write down the info for a replacement.  On a whim I screwed in the bulbs, got my multimeter, and measured resistance across the switch.  Low resistance.  I pulled the chain.  High resistance.  I pulled the chain.  Low resistance again.  Everything was fine.

Again, hmmm…

Well, maybe the switch had some crud in it and I knocked it loose taking it out. I put it back in the fan and, of course, nothing.  I wondered if I was getting power to the bulbs at all... I mean, the fan runs, the bulb must have been getting power before it blew, and all the breakers looked OK...But since you never know what kind of maniac wired your house it makes sense to check all sorts of things it makes no sense at all to check, you dig?

Since the wall switch felt mechanically "fine" (not loose, good action going from up to down then back) I decided to test for power to the bulbs at the fan. With the wall switch in the OFF position I got the expected 0.0VAC. In the ON position, though, I got less than 1.0 VAC but not zero. I mean, what gives? It's a switch, some wire, another switch, and some bulbs, right?

Wrong. I didn't notice the little part (pic in the upper left of this post) that was in series with the bulbs.  On the front it had the label “Y59 B 120C” and on the back it had “Limitor T160”. After some searching (I couldn’t find an exact match [9/27/15 edit: see comments for link to part]) I was able to determine that it was a thermal/current limiting switch.  If its surroundings get too hot (120C) or the current gets too high (B = 5 amps, I think), the switch opens and kills power to whatever it is that is causing the issue.

Good idea, right?  I guess, but in this case I'm questioning the reasoning behind installing it here.

I mean, 120C?!  Yikes!  This is higher than the melting point of many commercial grade plastics, but is thankfully under the melting point of PVC insulation. Based on the location of this item, the recommended max wattage of the bulbs, and the distance of the bulbs from the metal housing, things would have to be pretty bad for this tiny thing to decide that the only way to save the day is to shut off the lights while the apparently-engulfed-in-flames ceiling fan blades continue to merrily spin round and round...  

I can almost hear the calliope music now. 

Since the lights were off when I flipped the switch and stayed off after the remaining lightbulb popped off to join the choir invisible I was 100% sure this part did whatever it does to keep the inrush current under 5 amps while the tungsten filament vaporized (destroy itself, I guess).  No heat issue. No lasting over-current issue.

After some more searching on Hunter ceiling fans I discovered that lots of people have had this problem. I also discovered that some people REALLY, REALLY hate the Hunter corporation and Home Depot. It's all "lack of customer service" this and "horribly filthy expletive deleted" that. Entertaining but not super helpful. The Limitor website seems to disavow any knowledge of that exact part number, and the closest match I could find at AllElectronics was for a normally open switch, not a normally closed one.

A couple of sites, though, said some people simply bypassed the switch and things got back to normal.   The reasoning some gave for justifying the bypass was a little cavalier and/or conspiracy theory driven (ranty planned obsolescence stuff). 

Normally you don't want to bypass or defeat safety devices but, in this case, I couldn't come up with a scenario where the thermal part of the switch would ever be useful.  Maybe... and this is a pretty big "maybe"... if the room was already at the upper operating limit for the fan AND the bulbs inside were at or exceeded the max wattage AND the fan was not running then maybe the temperature inside the wiring housing could get to 120C, causing the switch to open in an attempt to cool down the unit. But, even then, once the unit cooled down the switch would (maybe) close and either a) arc weld itself shut or b) self destruct open.  

Exactly the way a lightbulb filament fails...

So why not use a thermal fuse to begin with?  Or "nothing"?  Does this thing also have some surge-suppressant capability that helps extend the life of the bulbs?  Maybe. If so, maybe it’s also there to extend the life of the pull-chain switch.  I’m sure there is a reason I am not smart enough to understand, and I wasn't going to armchair quarterback their engineering/sales/legal decisions any further. After all, the sun was going down and you need good light to fix a light (something that totally blew my six-year-old's tiny little mind).

So in the end I cut power to the fan, snipped out the part, stripped the wires, and twisted them together with the smallest wire nut I had. I reassembled the... uhh... assembly and flipped the wall switch. After cursing profusely in the gathering darkness for a few seconds I remembered that I yanked the pull chain to the light while I was putting it back together. Dummy.  Another pull and there was light.  

And I saw that it was good. 

I kept the two 40W incandescent  bulbs shining for a few hours and "measured" the housing temperature with the back of my hand. Nice and cool.

I might someday just out of curiosity take a thermocouple and actually measure the temperature inside the housing but I probably won't. If I notice that I am going through a lot more bulbs than usual I might revisit this issue, especially if I begin blowing through the newer fancy-schmancy expensive ones.  Time will tell.

All in all seems that the bypass surgery was a success - your results may vary.  If you do choose to bypass the part, do yourself and your family a favor - use your brain and be careful.  After all, I'm just some dude on the Internet and, as Richard Bach might say “Everything in this blog post may be wrong”.  

Good luck! 

Frankenfoods?

Hey!  I know what'd be fun! Showcasing my ignorance and rapidly declining cognitive abilities with a couple of quick pics!  Let's do it!

I have been driving past this sign along Route 58 every fall for about 10 years and this is the first time I was able to take a picture of it.  It's gotta be on purpose... right?  Right?

I sat there in the parking lot and read this sign half a dozen times but for some reason I could not for the life of me figure out that they meant A-1 Steak Sauce here.  I guessed "AI"was some fast food abbreviation I had never heard of or maybe it was slang marketing thing like "super-sized".  It bothered me enough to force me to type into Google "AI BACON CHEESEBURGER" when I got home that night.  I immediately felt so stupid that my next Google search involved looking for hospice providers that specialize in caring for folks who think that there might actually be such a thing as an Artificially Intelligent bacon cheeseburger...

Geocache Update November 2014

Now that it has cooled down a bit and the leaves have begun to fall in earnest it is once again perfect weather for Geocaching.  

We went out of town a few weeks back so my wife could visit with her relatives so the boy and I went and hit some caches around central Virginia.  The following Saturday he asked if we could go again so we spent the day cruising around our stomping grounds and finding what we could find.  A lot of new caches had popped up since I had last gone so it didn’t take too long to find an area that was dense enough where we wouldn’t be doing more riding around than walking.

He loves his backpack.  Lots of pockets mean lots of places to stuff snail shells, sea shells, cool leaves, cooler stones, and about a bazillion acorns.

Hiking through the woods with the six-year-old is a blast.  He is more jazzed about finding waterlogged, broken dollar-store trinkets in a muddy sandwich container under a rotten log than any sane person really has the right to be, and that energy is super-infectious.  Also, he is tenacious without being ridiculous about it.  That is, he’s not a quitter but he knows when to give up when we can’t find what we are looking for.  As the great philosopher W.C. Fields once said “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.  Then quit.  There’s no sense being a damn fool about it.”

“Besides, we can always come back some other time, right, dad?”  “You bet.”

It’s not entirely about the stuff in the caches, really, or even finding them at all (we are about 75% successful).  For both of us the coolest part is the hunt and exploring along the way.  For example, the picture you see in the upper left of this post is a California Redwood tree that someone transplanted to the middle of downtown Suffolk, Virginia in 1954.  It was my first time ever seeing one and I doubt I would have ever known it was there if I hadn’t been looking for geocache number GC2319B. (If you are reading this, TFTC, SN&P!)

Odd nooks of public land sit awkwardly in areas you would never expect.  Tiny jetties forty feet wide and a tenth of a mile long jut out into protected swamplands all over the place here – just park on the street and walk a “trail to nowhere” for a really rewarding view even if you aren’t rewarded by finding a cache.  It’s weird to be able to stand less than 75 yards from a CVS drugstore and still be enveloped by nature (pics below).  

 

That tree in the second photo had about two dozen vultures in it… just silently watching us not fall down and die, I guess.  Off-putting, sure, but cool nonetheless.

Rook Update: The rook I put into a geocache forever ago (see pic in sidebar) is now in South Wales.  It has traveled 10,000 miles since it was turned into a Travel Bug by the people who found it 16 months ago.  I am not sure what the owners have in store for it after it completes its “tour of Scottish castles” but I am thinking about offering to trade the D20 cache container I made for it should the little guy ever make it back to the States.  The D20 is (still) sitting in my garage taking up space and I (still) have no desire to be a CO for it. Nonetheless I would really like to see it used “out there somewhere”.

Geojunk Clock Update: Although a couple of pieces of the geocache treasure that had been hot-glued to it have fallen off, the clock is still ticking away as expected.  After 300+ caches, though, real-estate on it is at a premium so I might be forced to come up with a solution for what to do with new cache finds sooner than later.  

Also, I only have a couple of handfuls of the cipher discs and the little fish I made to trade so it will soon be time to plan for replacements.  Not sure what I will build next, but I doubt it will be puzzle-related.  

Maybe something with invisible ink, though… Hmmm…

Happy Halloween!

It's that time of year again!  Pumpkins have been carved and the boy is bouncing around the living room waiting for some buddies to get here so they can go out trick-or-treating.

This year he was going to be The Flash but changed his mind after one of the kids he is going out begging with tonight said he was going to be a Jedi.  My kid "had no choice" but to go as a Sith Lord, "of course".

So it goes...

Last year we tempted fate by wearing all black as we walked about our poorly lit neighborhood - he in his ninja outfit and me in my Grim Reaper garb.  Instead of playing another impromptu game of Invisible Pedestrian I opted for a Mad Scientist outfit - welding goggles, wild white wig, white lab coat, couple of glowsticks in the pockets.  He has a red lightsaber, and one of the kids will have a green one, I guess.  Dragging along the plastic wagon covered in battery-powered blinking orange skulls should guarantee that we can be seen by any traffic... probably even air traffic.

The craft this year was making some zombie heads out of some repurposed pretzel and animal cracker jugs.  They were painted with leftover house paint and given torn-up grey rags for hair.  Nearly bounce-less tennis ball halves make the eyes.  That's them there in the pic.

Oh, hey, FWIW, cutting apart a tennis ball is easy if you use a bandsaw.  Ten times easier, though,  is accidentally cutting your thumbs off with a bandsaw while trying to cut a tennis ball in half.  My fingers were violently yanked to within a skin-cell's width of the blade because I am an idiot like that. After my heart rate returned to normal I grabbed a c-clamp and used it to carefully guide the balls through the danger zone.

Well, gotta wrap this up.  Have a fun and safe time tonight and may your pumpkin patch be judged the most sincere.

Bad Kitty. Bad.

Man, things went south quickly after I left for the gym this morning...  One day, I swear, autocorrect is going to give me a heart attic.

Guitar Stuff October 2014

After taking a while off from the game, I have returned to playing Rocksmith 2014 regularly.  I didn't quit playing guitar altogether or anything like that - I was practicing off-line.  Well... Strumming, running scales,  and learning the tabs to simple songs I was interested in learning anyway... The word "practice" probably doesn't work there.  Just fooling around I guess.  

I got a little bored with the music selection, even though I have close to 160 songs to choose from. The songs I liked  I played a dozen times but I never really practiced them offline (or even online using the Riff Repeater tool) so I plateaued in the 70% - 85% Mastery range. The songs I hated I played maybe once. Songs I was ambivalent about got a handful of plays.  Thirty or so tunes went completely untouched - sure, some was just avoiding stuff I didn’t like but some of those songs I got as DLC!  

I got bored with the mini-games because... Well, I guess because I didn't see the need to practice harmonics and my bends sounded just fine to my tin ear. In many of the games I was just getting crushed over and over and got irritated with seeing the “LEADERBOARD CHALLENGE FAIL” message pop up all the time. Besides, I wanted to make better use of my limited Rocksmith time by...

By what, exactly?  Learning songs? I thought we just went over that...

After a while I came to the realization that I was just going through the motions.  I wasn't getting worse, really, I just wasn't getting any better. I even stopped playing songs that required me to retune my guitar which severely pared down the catalog - it was just too much of a “hassle”. Listening to snatches of some of the offerings like Satch Boogie or In the Hall of the Mountain King was depressing because I “knew” that mastering stuff like that would be out of my reach even if I lived to be three hundred years old, so why bother?

Eventually I just didn't feel like digging the cable out of the drawer and hooking up the guitar and waiting for the software to load anymore. And, I knew, the more days that went by like this the less I would be able to recall, so the worse I would get, which would make it even less likely I would want to play the next day.  Remember, I am not a musical person - stuff like this doesn't stick for me and without constant exposure my already tenuous grasp of the subject poofs into nonexistence. 

Man...talk about a funk.

One day, my in-laws came to visit and I showed my wife's father the 3/4 size Strat Squire I got for $40. He used to play a little about a million years ago so after a bit of messing around with it he asked if I had an amp. I said I did and fetched it and my bass. I plugged him in and there we sat in the kitchen swapping instruments back and forth bickering about the chord progression to House of the Rising Sun.  I think our free-form whatever-ing sounded... well, if it didn't sound exactly "good" it wasn't horrible to listen to, either. Since we both appear to play with the same level of skill it wasn't annoying or embarrassing when we stepped all over each other and it didn't turn into some sort of bizarre contest where the most obscure chord or hipster-iest technique "won".

It was a blast and gave me the boost I needed to lift me out of this most recent rut.  Hey, I know there will be other ruts but, for now, I wanted to be better so that impromptu jam sessions would be even more enjoyable!  Back to the software!

Ok, since I wanted to "get better" I was going to have to look at a lot of these songs for what they were - many of them were just there to hone techniques so I might as well make peace with that. Incubus (I Miss You) is pretty much all harmonics, Nirvana (In Bloom) is all about power chords, the Black Keys (I Got Mine), Tommy Tutone (8675309), David Bowie (Rebel Rebel) are mainly relentless grinds of a handful of notes that are there to test coordination in the face of boredom (I think). 

Unlike the old version of Rocksmith, there are no gigs to strive to qualify for - there's just Percent Mastery, a pure number. There's no penalty for ignoring the Goals like "Achieve 75.42% Mastery in Pour Some Sugar on Me”, so the forced focus isn’t really there anymore.  While this software is a better teacher then the older version the open-ended nature of the new version relies on a much larger scoop of self-discipline so, you know, not so great if you, like me, have the attention span of…

In order to gauge where I was with where I wanted to be I needed to pick a metric. It's all well and good to "master" (score 100% or more) some of the songs but some are so easy that it would be difficult to not master them. On the other side of that coin is stuff that is so fast and complex that hearing the little snatches that play when I am making my selection makes me wonder how it is possible that a single human holding a piece of wood that has six strings nailed to it is capable of making the noises I am hearing. I needed an "overall mastery" that made sense to me and that didn't require me to check out my stats online from a PC. 

I didn't want to do a lot of math and I didn't want to have to write down all of the mastery levels for all the songs so I just counted them in groups of 5% and used the weighted average to determine my overall mastery.  Here’s what I have so far:

I have played all the stuff in my collection at least once now. As you can see, doing so really kicked the average to the right. 

You might be thinking, “Well, just download a bunch of new stuff and play the songs once and that will increase your average even more”.  No, not really.  Oh, at first, it would, since it seems that I average 30% or so mastery on any new song that I play once (see that peak there?).  After a while, though, the peak in the 30% range would get higher and higher and begin to dominate the average, anchoring the overall mastery to that level.  

Plus, for each song I add, the less of an effect each individual song has on the average as a whole.  Huh?  Well, let’s say I wanted to bump my average up by 10% - I would need to improve by 1600% (the number of songs I have times 10%).  So each and every song would have to go up by 10%, or half the songs would need to improve by 20%, or I would have to bring 20 of the songs from the 20% and below level to the 100% level…  Adding new songs (unless they are trivial to play) does nothing for the score, and, worse, doesn’t really make me a better player, which is the whole point of doing this in the first place.

So how long would increasing my mastery by 10% take, anyway?

With 160 songs increasing the mastery by 10% in one go is probably not going to happen.  For every song that I have bumped from 30% to a whopping 65 or 70% in one or two attempts, there are a couple that I have seen pathetically inch up by one or two tenths of a percent.  By my reckoning the best case scenario is 10 hours of game play (160 songs, 4 minutes a song), assuming the songs I make huge strides in balance with all of the ones that are kicking my butt. Although I guess this could be done in five days, a more realistic goal for me is a 1 or 2 percent improvement per week.

Also, I don’t mean to imply that in six weeks time someone could go from my level of mastery to somewhere near 100%.  That’s ridiculous.  At some point the whole “diminishing returns” thing really kicks in and the only way to go up is to actually learn the songs note for note, not just plow through them in a general, unfocused way.  I’m not sure I will ever get to that stage.

I guess what I will try is to bump one song in each category (like the 20-25% range) up into the next category (the 25-30% range) each time I play.  This should sloooowly push the graph to the right while making sure I am not leaving any songs behind.  Looking at my song list I see that’s gonna require a lot of re-tuning.

Since I still don’t like having to retune all the time so when I need to play a song that is way out from E standard, I grab my old Strat Squire. It doesn't hold a tune as long as the Ibenez but it’s way quicker to get on point - the changes in mechanical stresses don’t de-tune the other strings as much for whatever reason.  Also, I can just leave it in Drop D or whatever.  For stuff that is slightly sharper or flatter than E standard I stick with the Ibenez.

So (until my next rut, that is) that’s my plan for the guitar.  The bass is another overly-long story. I need to wrap up this post for now but here’s a quick summary: 1) many of the arrangements for the bass on Rocksmith 2014 are really, really easy 2) I think the software might be a wee bit too forgiving in some cases and 3) As generally unskilled as I am, I may be “faking the funk” in the pit band for a play at some point a few months from now. 

More later.

Staaahrt Sorting Legos, Sorting Legos (Part II)

(Continued from Part I)

As you stare at the larger than expected task in front of you, you might get a little disheartened. I know it looks imposing. But, like they say, "Man, this is gonna suck".

No... Wait... They say "How do you eat an elephant sandwich?  One bite at a time."

Yep. That's better.

Before we start, a disclaimer : this method worked for us but may not work out so great for you.  There are as many ways to do this job as there are little plastic pieces you are trying to sort.  That said, I hope you find something here that helps out a little. 

Now, this is going to be a multi-day project (assuming you have other things more pressing in your life than performing this nearly pointless task) so you will need a work area that won't be disturbed while you answer the phone, use the restroom, Faceblog your Tweetselfies, or whatever. If that's not practical because you live in a 100 square foot apartment with your fourteen cats or something then use one-gallon Ziplock bags to store everything as the project grinds on.

Gather all the Legos and Lego-related paperwork you can find, leaving all the stuff your kid wants assembled intact. Just because you think the secret agent alien gun trap zombie factory he hasn’t touched in months is just a jumble of random blocks, it's his jumble of random blocks. Respect it. Feel free to remove all the things that are not Legos (Trashies, Squinky-Zinkies, Hot Wheels cars, etc.) and put them someplace else, though. Any questions about what stays and what goes? Ask your kids. They know.

Now count out the instruction manuals, minifig sheets, Ninjago cards and any other paperwork that you've kept (or can find).  This will give you an idea of how many 3-ring binders and transparent binder sleeves you will need. Sort the paperwork as needed (some kits have more than one manual) and put one kit's-worth of documents into each sleeve. This is a good place to put (ugh...) Ninjago cards and minifig sheets, too. Don't make the binders so big little hands can't move them around. I found that three-inch binders will hold roughly 30 sets of manuals comfortably. 

Pro Tip: Don’t put the binders on the shelf upside down. Not that this has ever resulted in accidentally dumping all the manuals and stuff into a sad little pile on the floor or anything.  Not even once.  Or three times… in a row…

Sort the black, grey, and white pieces into a pile. Typically, these will far outnumber any other colors in your kid's collection, so this is a good metric for how many and what size bins you will ultimately need.  

Get yourself a small number of plastic, see-through containers. Don't overdo it and don't commit to a particular size just yet. Tupperware or similar works great - just make sure the lids (oh, yeah, you need lids to prevent the pic in the upper left from happening - thanks Mr. Kitty-Cat!) are tight but not too tight for little fingers. My son ended up Rip Taylor-ing hundreds of Lego studs all over the room when the lid of the container he was muscling open finally popped free. Not his fault - just a typical "dumb dad" mistake. I sanded the lids a bit so, now, no worries.

Now that you’ve “sorted” the black, white, and grey pieces, you might be thinking to yourself that the job would go quicker if the whole family helped. In fact, you twisted, misguided sociopath, you might even think that this would be some sort of bonding experience. Yeah... While that looks like an iffy-at-best idea on paper that’s super wrong. Think: are you the only one that wants to get this done? Do the number of people in your house who couldn't give a rat's behind if this Sissyphian chore ever gets accomplished outnumber you?  Also, how much time will you actually be saving?  There you are, constantly halting your Great Work having to stop people from ”misfiling" the pieces, having to answer questions about where certain things go, debating the answer to that question, stopping to sweep up shattered whiskey bottle fragments, answering the door and trying to explain to the cops that the neighbors must have heard the TV or something, begging CPS to return your child, etc, etc…

Oh, yeah... The bins... The bins should be transparent and be a maximum of a few inches deep. This makes rooting around a lot easier and you can lift the container up over your head to see the littler stuff hiding on the bottom, too. 

The groupings I chose for this effort were based on the distribution of bricks. I didn't want too many in one bin, but having a bin for every shade (white, cream, glow-in-the-dark white, light grey, dark grey, black, silver...) would be an equally bad storage issue, at least for the order of magnitude of Legos my kid has. If, God please please forbid, the order of magnitude changes I might need to subdivide the main groups further. But, for now, here they are:

Regular Bricks

• Whites, greys, blacks, silvers
• Reds, browns, oranges, golds
• Greens, yellows

Each of these enormous piles were broken down by the number of bumps they had on their primary surface, NOT by size. This decision was key to getting the job done in a way that used enough bins to be useful but not so many as to require infinity minus one of them to do the job. It was an arbitrary decision but a useful one - questions about what went where simply vanished. The bins for these are 0-1 bumps, 2 bumps, 3 bumps, 4 bumps, 5-8 bumps, and 9+ bumps (see pic). All the "tiny" pieces were set aside, as were the "grid" pieces - more on that later. The "3 bump" bins are way underpopulated but since neither I nor my kid can't seem to NOT pick the same one up numerous times when looking for a 2 or 4 bump piece, the bin stays.

Note: there were not enough Legos in this category to justify subdividing the blues and purples further. Thank Jeebus. 

Translucent pieces - Not car windshields or windows or doors though. At the boy’s request, things that were “cool glow-y” (neon) got a separate container.

Tiny Thingies - We call them “buttons”. These are where all the studs, little sloped pieces, and little flat pieces live. They are sorted by color like the bins are. At the boy's request the neon pieces and pastel pieces (marked ???) have their own homes. In case you are wondering why there are three whole cups of red translucent tiny things, uh, dad went a little crazy with the cheeze whiz filling the nooks and crannies of a cup at the Lego store once (they charged by volume, not weight), and now we have a bajillion of these. Hooray. 

Car/vehicle parts - Wheels, bikes, hubs, tires, steering wheels, and control sticks.

Screens and Chairs - Can't ever seem to find these when they are needed so they get their own space. 

Plant and Animal Parts - Sounds grizzly, I know, but it makes sense. Man, there are a lot of eyeball pieces. But, like the chairs, they can't be found when they are needed so they get their own space. 

Machine Parts and Flat Parts - All machine-y looking bits like gears, props, and stuff like that go here. There were enough of these to justify two bins: one for black, grey, and white pieces, and another for red, orange, and brown.  Also, the red machine bin has all the grid pieces of that color in it.

Special Stuff - Hey, man... there's just ain't no categorizing some stuff, you know? Light bricks, chains, ropes, boat hulls, spider webs, railroad tracks... They're all here.

Ladders, Walls, Gates - Also contains fences, stairs, and black, white, and grey grid pieces.

Doors and Windows - Doors and windows.  Also railings. 

Minifigs - Hey, as long as they have a head, a torso, legs, both arms, both hands, and a hat or hair chalk that up as a "w" and move on. It really doesn't matter if they are horribly mismatched - please trust me on this. A Minotaur head on Lex Luthor's body is fine. Also, don't worry about where the waitress's ice cream sundae is or whatever. We will deal with it in the next group.

Pro Tip: Weapons outnumber the minifigs by a shocking amount in my child's collection for some reason. Keeping the weapons in separate containers as described should thwart a violent, bloody uprising in the event the minifigs turn real and demand revenge for the countless decapitations, dismemberments, and other indignities they've had to endure while under your roof.

  

Minifig Stuff

• Ranged weapons and dynamite - yes, there is enough dynamite to warrant mentioning it. Yikes. 
• Melee weapons (mainly swords) and light sabers 
• Spears, ranged weapons, more swords, shields
• Food and small animals
• Police and spy stuff
• Tools
• Containers, science, magic
• Other hand held or minifig specific stuff

Here is the most important box of all:

To Be Sorted

It is where the child can cram all of the Legos after playtime is over.  It is unsorted. It is meant to be that way. Unless you want to punish your kid or raise a serial killer or something then by all means force them to burn three-quarters of their playtime re-binning little plastic bits in the approved way.   Your kid is not the one reading this. You are the one who wanted these sorted. You need this bin. When the random bin fills or when you are bored or if you feel like multitasking while Oprah is on or while ODU is totally getting their behinds handed to them by Middle Tennessee (Really?!?! An interception on the very first play?!?! Jeez...), grab a handful and get to it, I guess.

Labels were made and the pic on the left is the end result.  We now have a manageable selection that is easy to get to, can be brought out as needed, and, most importantly, quickly and neatly put away when it isn’t.

For now…

Like I said, I know that everyone's situation will be unique, and this is not meant to be a catch-all. This one solution works for us and, if it doesn't completely work for you or your child(ren) then I hope you can at least use parts of this strategy as a guideline. 

I wish you the best of luck!

Staaahrt Sorting Legos, Sorting Legos... (Part I)

If you are reading this, you have done your warm-up stretches, grabbed a bottle of Gatorade, and cheerfully began your brisk power-walk down the path to madness.  

Good for you!  

By now, you have looked at the dresser drawers and/or bags and/or bins and/or boxes crammed with thousands upon thousands of little plastic bricks and decided “there must be a better way”.  

Maybe you even started the process of sorting them by color before coming to the stark realizations that a) this is really tedious b) holy cow, there are a lot of different shades of color c) there are about a million times as many black, white, and grey pieces as there are light blue and dark blue pieces what’s up with that d) hey, what do I do with the translucent pieces e) does… does this hinge-y thing that is part red and part grey go in the red pile or the grey pile f) does the little computer monitor go in the white pile or in the minifig pile and g) SCREW IT, HALF THE FUN IS DIGGING THROUGH THE BOX ANYWAY I’M GETTING A BEER (sweeps Legos onto floor in disgust).

You are probably not reading this if:

1. Your kid/kids has/have less than 5,000 Legos.  It is not a real-estate issue (yet) so the idea of sorting them has probably never come up.  I know it sounds like an enormous, unrealistic number but that is actually only a few kits a year for a few years… Birthday parties get a little ridiculous once the moms know/hear/suspect/assume a certain kid likes Legos.  You can pretty much pre-fill-in the Thank You cards a week before the event.  Not a complaint, btw – just an observation.
2. Your kid has never politely and meekly asked you to help him/her find “You know, that one grey piece that looks like a small triangle with the tip cut off” in a bin of random Legos that is about the size of a Chuck E Cheese ball pit. 
3. You have OCD.  (You are too busy sorting Legos to read this).
4. You are an Adult Fan of LEGO (AFOL – yep, that’s a thing).  This article is not for you, dude.   
5. You stopped reading after the title of this post since I use the word “Legos” instead of the “proper” terms “LEGO” or “LEGO bricks”.  Why do I make the conscious choice to use this (apparently) unforgivable grammatical error?  First, because if I tell my kid to “Pick up your LEGO” the six-year-old will pick up exactly one brick and just stare at me awaiting further instructions.  Second, if I slowly and carefully explain to him that the term LEGO refers to the material (like wood) and is therefore technically plural already I would pretty much be signing a death warrant for him once he starts parroting this pedantic nonsense to his classmates. Third, it sounds better to my ears, so it stays.
6. You actually, sincerely believe that “half the fun is digging through the box anyway”.  Half?  Really? That seems high… But, hey, you’re the boss…
7. You super-enjoy the grindy, clattery sound of Number 6 above for hours on end since your response to Number 2 above is “Tough.  Use something else.”
8. You don’t own pets that find Legos irresistibly delicious (dogs) or delightfully smash-y and chase-y (cats).
9. You force your child to keep assembled kits assembled forever and always as per the approved directions.  You, sir, are a monster.

“Wait,” you might say, “That’s a great list and all but how do I know if my kid has less than 5,000 Legos or not?  There’s no way I’m counting all these things and I just want an estimate anyway.”

Again, good for you!  You are a well-adjusted person.  Well, for someone who is considering sorting Legos, anyway…

It couldn’t be simpler to estimate the number of Legos in your kid’s collection!  All you need is a scale, the density of the plastic Legos are made from…um, the packing factor of the Legos... Hmm… I guess you could derive that last one by filling the Lego-filled container with a known volume of water… but then the stickers would get ruined and that’s a lot of water anyway… Not sure a typical household scale that can measure 10 pounds has the precision required here… Maybe you could put them in a vacuum chamber or something and suck all the air out and derive the packing factor that way, but you would still need a really accurate scale for that… Oh, yeah, and a vacuum chamber and vacuum pump…

Ok, forget that… How about this: you sort the pieces into piles based on size, grab a representative volume (like a cupful or something) of each size, smoosh them down good, weigh the cupfuls, count the number of pieces in each cupful, then weigh the whole shebang making use of the density of plastic and the weighted average of the derived packing factors… But some pieces are kinda big and the error bars on this estimate start to get a lot out of control the smaller the number of bricks you have per cupful and here we are back to counting hundreds and hundreds of basically pre-sorted bricks anyway… 

Maaannnn…

Once the number of Legos gets to this “uh, look, nerd-o, just forget I asked” stage, here are a couple rules of thumb to get the “good enough” answer you want assuming your kid gets kits as Christmas gifts, birthday gifts, in-law “just cuz” gifts, or buys them with their own allowance.  If you are the dad from the Lego Movie or something then this estimate will not suit you whatsoever.  Not that you would choose to spend the time away from tweaking your near-perfect Lego scale reproduction of the Shotz Brewery from Laverne and Shirley to care…  

Based on info from the Lego site, I put together a list of all the City-themed kits for sale looking at the number of pieces in each kit and number of minifigs in each kit.  Assuming those 60 or so items make up a representative sample of all the kit offerings from the Lego company, it seems the average number of pieces per kit is about 330 and the number of minifigs per kit (not including dogs and sharks and stuff) is about 3.25.

I know you are but what am I?

So… if you have kept all of the manuals you can just count those and multiply that number by 330 and there you go.  Alternatively, I guess, you can look up each of the kits online by using the manuals and get the real numbers that way… But what if you don’t have all the manuals conveniently bound in one place ripe for the counting?  

Well, another way to estimate using the numbers above is to count the minifigs (just people and monsters – no animals) and multiply by 100.  My thinking here is, barring extreme circumstances, the kits with zero minifigs in a child’s collection will kinda-sorta balance with the non-kit packages that have just a minifig in them. 

Assuming my assumptions are good enough (both the estimates above jive with each other shockingly well for my kid’s collection), the estimates should be within 7% of the actual total.  Even if it’s actually 10% off, the time saved to get your “good enough” answer (a few minutes vs. a few days for 25,000 Legos) is certainly worth it.

Another fun fact: the average cost per Lego in kit form from the Lego site is about 15 cents (higher than the 10 cents or so in stores).  Again using the numbers above, you can make the decision on whether or not you should immediately upgrade your home’s security system or start inquiries as to which universities will accept little plastic bricks as tuition payment ten or so years from now.

Hey, this post was supposed to help with sorting Legos, not counting them!  Let’s get back on track.

(To be continued…)

Sail On, Silver Girl

Thanks for all the Happy.

Thanks for all the Joy.

You will be missed, sis.

Victim Man!

About three months ago, my then-five-year old proudly showed me his new creation.  That’s it there on the left.  So, in this particular “bite-your-cheek-and-try-not-to-laugh” moment (there are lots) I needed to find out what Victim Man was all about.  I mean, there he is all splayed out with a look of utter anguish on his face and what appeared to me to be tire tread marks across his torso.

Worst…  Superhero…  Ever.

After careful questioning, however, it turns out that the boy was trying to make a crime fighter  that was a total badass.  He wasn’t 100% clear on the definition of the word “victim” but he knew the word kinda sorta meant “someone who is defeated by someone else”, therefore Victim Man defeats everyone he comes across.

Meh… makes sense.  

I like my interpretation better, though.  Enjoy!

Highly-Focused Yet Nearly-Baseless Hate

I write this short article to fill what I see as a glaring hole in the Internet.  I know I am not the first person to search for the words that ultimately brought you here.  You aren't alone, friend. I feel your pain all too well.  Here it is:

"I hate the Superkids".  There it is. The phrase that Google thinks no one has ever expressed before this moment, apparently.  Once the bots get here there should be no more of this "No results found" nonsense. 

If the last two paragraphs are just gibberish to you, consider yourself blessed and feel free to move on to the next article. The rest of us are just gonna hang here for a bit. 

Like most hate, it's not based in logic.   I mean, how can anyone legitimately hate a clearly effective phonics-based mechanism that is designed to help kids enjoy their path toward literacy?  I don't know.  There's just... something there. But if I had to rank the level of hatred, I would put it somewhere above my hatred of the CarFax fox but below that of the original USell guy. Maybe on par with that of Sid the Science Kid and his classmates at the Montessori School for the Hyperactive, Lumpy, and Oddly Hued. 

Yeah, that's about right. 

Jeez, I... I hate a lot of things. I'm sure that's a healthy sign...

With the Superkids it's a photo finish between what I hate most: the androgynous style of the art or the other-worldly naming conventions of the gang members. There are somewhere between, like, ten and fifteen hundred of these...um...kids and their pets every one of which is absolutely special, uniquely skilled, and yet totally interchangeable and forgettable. Kids apparently have no problem figuring it all out and keeping it straight but all of the parents I have talked to have at least some difficulty. Is this Tac or Toc? Is Ettabetta a girl? Is this kid seriously named Icky? Wait... "Fast Cat" is not the cat?

Definitely making it into the top ten of my grievances with these characters is the bipolar nature of their emotional responses to anything that happens to them. Every event is a cause for ticker-tape-parade-level celebration (finding a lost mitten) or bottomless grief (being the "rotten egg" because you are last to jump in the pond).  Cripes, find a center, would you? I mean, while I was writing this I discovered that the apple in my lunch was unexpectedly juicy and sweet but I also noticed a typo in a test procedure I wrote, but I'm not going to respond by doing a few cartwheels of joy immediately  followed by offing myself with my stapler in a fit of suicidal depression. 

Everything in their whole world is "fantastic" or it is a "flop" - there is no middle ground.  I mean, how can a small wooden desk be "fantastic"? In my life I have built a number of desks, and not one of them has ever been described as "fantastic".  "Well-built", sure. "Adequate", closer to the mark. "Interesting", uhh... nope. I'm pretty sure a desk would need to be crafted out of materials not normally found in this dimension or it would need to be known for its ability to slay dragons to earn the title "fantastic".  

And who besides movie critics describes something as a "flop" in normal conversation?  "Tac  tries a handstand. The handstand is a flop." Pfft. Frankly I would rather have my (then) five-year-old read "Tac tries a handstand. As you can see, Tac kind of sucks at handstands."

Finally are the after-the-book questions that don't test reading comprehension as much as they test my ability to resist reading them in the most sarcastic tone imaginable. For example, I try to not say things like "As if you could possibly give half a rat's behind, do you think the clubhouse is a good place for the stuffed lion?" Here's another: "(Heavy sigh) After what's-her-face gets a letter from whosits, how do you know she is happy? It couldn't possibly be the fact she is smiling rapturously and hugging her friend, so it must be something we're missing... (rolls eyes)".

But, hey, like I said, I can't argue with the method. Teaching a kid to do something "simple" like reading, riding a bike, swimming, tying a shoe or any of the other things we all "just do"  is really challenging. And maybe... Just maybe... if the Superkids were around when I was growing up people wouldn't have to deal with grammar and spelling errors littering every single thing I write like shattered cinder blocks strewn all over a bike path.  

Peaches

I was grilling out a few weeks back listening to iTunes Radio attempt to converge on a solution you the question "Who exactly are you, SnowUrchin, musically speaking?" I was about to get up and check on the burgers when all of a sudden a few chords transported me to a long since demolished college bar. There I stood with a fifty-cent Natural Light draft in one hand and a pool cue in the other. Just audible above the people noise of the crowded hole-in-the-wall were some cheap speakers blaring "Peaches" by The Presidents of the United States of America. 

A half-second later I poofed back to my deck and grinned. I grabbed my tongs and dealt with the food and I was shocked to discover I still remembered the music and most of the words - I mean it's not like I really liked the nonsensical song in any more than a vaguely ironic way.  After dinner I looked up the song and discovered (in the Content section) the most soberly written and thorough description of music lyrics I have ever seen.    

Other songs I have looked up - Sussudio, Iko Iko, Angela, Red Red Wine - have had your typical fuzzy artist-y non-answer "well, you know, it's sort of like this but maybe not..." feel to it.  That's what made this description so great... 

Well, to me, anyway...

If you know the song look it up and appreciate the care and complete lack of whimsy the author took in nailing down the details of the description. While you go off and do that, I’ll be completing my Master’s thesis outlining the 19th century historical origins of the animosity between Triangle Man and Particle Man.