Manual Labor

This is about doing things with your hands, not necessarily digging ditches or re-roofing a house.

I did two things today that were basically manual labor. Aside from housework, I don’t do much manual labor anymore, and I forget how gratifying it can be.

A few months ago while traveling, I dropped my Remarkable, and it of course landed on the button corner. This mashed the button down, preventing the device from being turned on or off. This is an astonishingly common problem with Remarkables; in a way, I don’t blame them, because it’s all really tightly package in there and the fit and finish is one of the attractive things about them. On the other hand, the fact that this happens to so many people and that Remarkable charges about 50% of the price of the device to fix/replace it – even under warranty – makes me angry. Also, they could maybe design the devices better so this doesn’t happen so frequently. Anyway, to make a long story short, I tried a number of the “easy” fixes that work for some people (using duct tape as a sort of finger and wiggling the button), but the damage on mine was clearly crimping and metal-on-metal preventing the button from moving, so I had to go with the harder fix.

Now, taking a Remarkable apart isn’t exactly hard, compared to some devices. The back is basically one big sheet of semi-flexible plastic, so you wedge a knife under a corner and lift it enough to get a spudger in there, and then use a heat gun (a.k.a. expensive hair dryer) to losen the double-sided tape holding the back down and work the plastic away. From there, there are a couple of screws you take off and that metal edge slips off and you do whatever McGuyvering you need to fix the button; in my case, it was sanding out the port so that metal bits weren’t contacting the button. Basic instructions are here, and I think they’re enough – you can make the process sound far more complex than it needs to be. The main thing going into this is to make sure you have all the tools you need:

• A tiny phillips screwdriver, like for eyeglasses hinges. A magnetic one is best.
• A couple of spudgers, the more the merrier, but at least two, and I recommend the handled ones – I used a guitar-pick-style one as a spacer, and it adhered to the tape so well I had to spudgie that up.
• If you don’t have a magnetic screwdriver, a small magnet. The entire back of the Remarkable 2 is magnetized, and the little screws can be frustratingly hard to maneuver out if you can’t grab them with a magnet.
• A heat gun. I do recommend a heat gun, but really you can do it with a hair dryer. Heat guns are a little different, with higher temps and lower blowing, and they’re easier to work with for this kind of stuff.

That’s it. I will say that after I first broke it and realized that I couldn’t fix it externally, I was really sad and had mentally written the device off. So fixing it was a pretty amazing feeling – I love the Remarkable 2 and use it frequently, not to mention I hadn’t backed it up in a week or so and so would have lost some stuff.

The second thing involves a hobby I’ve developed in the past couple of years. Every time we have a work crew do something around the house – land/hardscaping, repairing the roof, replacing windows, whatever – they inevitably leave some small tool behind. If I find it quickly, I give it back, but sometimes I’m just puttering around the house and discover some tool. This hobby started the time I found a really lovely, quality pair of pruning sheers under some mulch. They were obviously not ancient, but they were a bit rusted, and I decided to restore them. I won’t go into details, but I usually use WD40 and sand paper to attack the rust, and then go at it with a battery powered Dremel and finish with some Ballistol or whatever. Anyway, this time it was a pair of decent needle-nose pliers that couldn’t have been very old, based on the condition of the rubber/plastic on the handles, but they were very rusty. It’s probably not worth the effort – these were probably $10 pliers and I can spend an hour polishing, but there’s something really gratifying about taking a beat-up found object and polishing it until it looks almost new. Plus, bonus pliers.

Anyway, my office is going to smell like Ballistol for the next few days, but it’s worth it. Also: battery-powered Dremels rock.