Using my phone camera to fix.... a gas stove

 Recently one of our front burners on the stove refused to light. I could see a spark, could smell natural gas, but could not get the friggin thing to light. Bizarre.  I ended up using my phone camera (Pixel 4a has an awesome camera) along with my little LED work light panel to debug the problem. While the burner looked reasonably clean-ish, there’s a tiny tiny little pinhole in the burner that apparently controls the burner lighting. It looked like it was clean, until I was able to get the phone camera closeup. 

 

I used the LED panel and was able to see light thru the pinhole as I carefully fished around with a toothpick, and eventually cleared it up. The design of the burner is such that it requires a ratchet of a small small size that I don’t have, and the pinhole is tucked away well hidden. Translation: it’s like they wanted to generate service calls by designing it that way.

I’ve found that my phone camera becomes a useful tool when doing household projects fairly often.

here’s the cleaned out view.