Last year, I was walking into my parents' house while I had my B2D hanging around my neck. My parents' dog, in their excitement to see me, jumped up, hooked my IEM cable with their paw, and pulled the right IEM straight into the wood floor. Ultimately, it knocked off the faceplate, knocked loose the 2-pin port, and cracked the housing, losing three decent chunks of acryllic in the process.
I had been busy with writing my dissertation, moving, and looking for work since then, but last week I decided to get them fixed up. Unfortunately, since Moondrop has ended production of the Blessing 2, they couldn't replace the housing, so I had to repair it myself.
- First, I used a small dab of super glue to temporarily re-seat the faceplate and the 2-pin port. I used the tips of a few wooden toothpicks to plug the 2-pin holes and the hole in the back of the faceplate.
- I then used a 2-part JB Weld to attach the one decent size piece of acryllic I recovered back to the main body, gently sanding the slight protrusion from it not aligning perfectly with a nail file.
- Next, I used an epoxy putty, tinted with a black pealescent acryllic ink to make a nice slate grey that I think matches the vibe of the B2D and plugged the holes, smoothing and shaping them. I had to be very precise around the 2-pin port, as one of the missing pieces was right where the port is seated, so I used a small flatehead bit to perfectly square up the edge after the putty had become semi-firm.
- After adding the first layer of putty, but before it had completely hardened, I removed the faceplate and 2-pin port so that I could use 2-part JB Weld to permanently set them in place with the housing lip remade.
- For the smaller missing chunks, I was able to shape the putty in one go, but for the larger area, I ended up needing to use three layers of putty, building and smoothing with each one until the rebuilt area was flush with the acryllic.
So far, my budget repair has worked remarkably well. The sound quality is indistinguishable between the left and right IEM and I avoided gunking up any of the internals with either the putty or the epoxy. While it obviously looks "repaired" upon inspection, the surface is flush, smooth, and didn't turn out like the lamp from A Christmas Story. Ultimately, I spent $30 dollars on materials and ~8 hours total across 3 days of repairs/sculpting and managed to to salvage my most expensive IEMs.
There used to be a small icecream chain in SoCal called HugLife. Best icecream I'd ever had, vegan or otherwise. Incredible, creative flavors (matcha cookies & cream, earl grey, thai tea, etc.), creamy, incredible. Whenever I visited the OC to see friends and family, I would go at least 2 or 3 times, even getting noticed once hitting 2 locations in one day. I finally moved to the area, tried the icecream again, completely awful, but I figured it was a bad batch. Come back a couple weeks later, and they tell me it was this location's last day, icecream is once again bad. Figure they were downscaling, so I went to their last remaining location in Long Beach, and it was still bad. They just put up their closure notice. My fiancée and I think that they started losing money after expanding so quickly (they went from 1 to 3 locations in like 5 years) and had to change their recipe to cut costs, but changing the recipe made the icecream suck, so they went into a spiral of cutting quality to compensate for low traffic, then traffic reduces because of poor quality. My heart aches over the fact that the best icecream I have ever tasted went down the drain the moment I lived within driving distance.