Patriotic Soda Display

Saw this over at a car-guy place, and since I haven't seen it before, I thought I'd share it.

Quiet Day

Thursdays are generally pretty quiet here.

Wednesdays I'm on the Iowa all day, so Thursdays are used to catch up on other things, and just kick back.

I've got the EGR passages in the Supra's intake manifold all cleaned out, along with the EGR valve and Vacuum Modulator for it.

I used a Hoppes 20 gauge "Boresnake" to get the passages all scrubbed out from fore to aft, and pipe cleaners and compressed air to get the valve and modulator cleaned out.

The red line shows the path of the EGR passage from the valve 'atthe rear, to where the throttle body bolts to the Upper Air Chamber" portion of the intake manifold. In the center is a core hole plug (aka "freeze plug") that you gently remove to gain access to the passage.

Photo credit goes to my buddy "Driftingmy85" over on the celica supra forum.

The entire HOWTO thread is located here in case you're curious about how to do it.

Tomorrow I'll put the whole shebang back together and take the car out for a run, AFTER I do the "apply full vacuum to valve to see if the engine stalls" test, which will tell me if the exhaust gas is indeed getting into the manifold.

I'll probably wait until Monday to go back to the smog test place and see if it passes.

If it doesn't pass, I'll get a replacement catalytic converter. I took back the Magnaflow converter I bought as it had an extra fitting for supplemental air injection which this car doesn't have, and it's the ONLY converter Magnaflow has in production that's supposedly for this car.

Two emails and a call to Tech Support at Magnaflow yielded exactly *nothing* other than "We'll get back to you".

Walker Products makes a California legal converter without the air fitting, so if if cleaning out the EGR doesn't produce a passing result, that's what I'll get.

Freedom.....I WON'T

Or as our friends over at the Western Rifle Shooters Association are given to say, resist.


I first read this little story by Eric Frank Russell back in high school, and thought it was quite interesting, and more than a bit quaint, but then I grew up in the Midwest, with all the accompanying values and morals that growing up middle-class in the 1960's Midwest entails, including taking your "obs" seriously.

It's a little story of a vast Terran empire reaching out to its long neglected colonies in order to bring them "into the fold", and most likely tax the living snot out of them.

The residents of one particular planet aren't about to be enslaved, and have pretty much perfected The Ultimate Weapon, and show the Terran empire what it can do.

So grab a cup of coffee, and head on over to abelard.org and read "And Then There Were None".

I'm sure you'll enjoy it, and maybe pick up an idea or three.....

TGIF!

Raining here in SoCal in May.....amazing!

So, with the rain, I'm not doing much on the Supra today.

Vacuumed the house (and fixed the vacuum!), cleaned the bathroom, and unloaded/reloaded the dishwasher.

We're going to see some female comic Saturday night, so I'll report back on that.

In the meantime, enjoy this old Leon Russel classic.

It has a great lyric in it...."The left ones think I'm right, and the right ones think I'm wrong".

Cruz Suspends Campaign

Trump beat him in Indiana, so Ted's throwing in the towel.

Details on all major news outlets.....

Cartoon courtesy of various places.....

You Tell 'Em, Charlie!

You tell 'em, Charlie!

Shamelessly borrowed from OldNFO.....

Busy Saturday

WELL....I had wanted to continue work on the Supra today, BUT...I had volunteered to help with "Volunteer Recruiting Fair" this morning on the Iowa, from 0800 to 1230.

Then one of the other Radio Guys who was at the table with me (we had ZERO visitors) asked if I could stick around for a while and get him checked out on the Ham Radio gear. That took an hour or so, but while I was running him through the checklist and making sure he understood everything, my cell phone rang, and it was another new radio guy who wanted to know how long we'd be hanging around......

Well, he showed up about an hour later, and brought the Hallicrafters SX-100 he bought last week with him. The radio is in stunning condition for being well over 50 years old, having been owned b a Professor at the Naval Postgraduare School up in Monterey, CA.

And he only paid $100 for it!

So he and the other guy got out the tube tester and proceeded to start checking the tubes in it, when another radio guy came in to operate the station for a few hours.

He saw I was there, and asked if I could mentor him a bit on operating the "Digital Modes" (PSK31, RTTY, SSTV, etc), so I spent a couple of hours with him going over the software we have on the station computer, the little SignaLink box that interfaces the radio to the PC, what the modes sound like, (we have tagged audio recordings of quite a few of them), and proper operating procedure.

Soon enough it was 1700, and since I didn't care to hang around and listen to the ABBA tribute band they had for "Music Under The Guns", I headed home.

The wife was out shopping, so I crashed out and took a nice little nap, and then we went out to dinner at Panera Bread.

So, had a good and busy day, but the car will have to wait until Sunday.

I have most of the EGR system cleaned out, and just have to check out and clean the vale itself, and the vacuum "modulator" that goes with it. After that I'll put it all back together, do the "engine stall" test, and should be good-to-go.

The Magnaflow P/N 332888 catalytic convert I ordered turns to NOT be usable on the car as it has an additional fitting on the side for an air-injection pump that my car doesn't have.

I'm not going to modify it because if I do that, and the smog inspector sees it's been modified, he'll tag the test report with a "TAMPERED WITH" flag, which will fail the car.

I emailed Magnaflow on Friday about this issue, but haven't heard anything back. If I haven't heard anything by Monday afternoon, I'm going to give them a call and find out if they make a CORRECT converter for the car.

The people who really know these cars well on one of the forums are split on whether I should replace the converter or not, and also split on if it will give me the cushion I need to feel comfortable about getting it smogged again. The consensus seems to be to just go get it tested after I clean out the EGR, and if it fails again, THEN replace the converter and try again. The problem with that solution is I'll have to cough up another $60 to test it again, as that EGR-repair-only "test" will burn my "Free Retest in 30 Days" from the place that failed it.

AND I'd still have to buy the converter and swap it out!

So, I'll hold off a while until I can find an EXACT FIT replacement converter, and get it retested with the repaired EGR AND a new converter.

I wouldn't mind doing a test before and after replacing the converter, but not without telling the guys on the forum to take up a collection for the $60 it would cost me!

I'm all for "Science Experiments", but not when they cost $60.......

Small Block Chevy Time-Lapse Rebuild

Yeah, I know I've posted this before, but being in a "car guy" mode these last couple of weeks, I thought I'd post it again.

Two-bolt main block, pressed-in rocker studs indicate it was never a High-Performance engine, but they have the Corvette "Rams Horns" exhaust manifolds on it, so perhaps it came out of a (very) early Corvette.

Enjoy!

Toyota Smog Test FAIL Again

Well, she failed the smog test again.

This time it was for NOX emissions, and the HC and CO passed.

EGR is a technique used to lower the combustion chamber temperature, thereby reducing the amount of Oxides of Nitrogen produced.

It's a "known issue" with the 5M-GE engine that the passage through the intake manifold from the EGR valve to where it dumps into the throttle body gets plugged up.

A very simple test is to apply vacuum to the port on the EGR valve, which opens it, and dumps large quantities of exhaust gas into the intake manifold.

It should make the engine stumble ot stall, as the EGR is normally disabled at idle.

I hooked the valve to direct manifold vacuum, and I could hear and feel the valve "POP" open and shut.

NO change in idle speed or quality, indicating that the passage is plugged.

Not a terribly difficult job to do, but time consuming, and you have to do with engine COLD.

I'll also be replacing the catalytic converter, as the one on the car looks to be the original one, and after 30+ years, and 165,000 miles, it's about time to retire it!

Since I was driving on expired plates and didn't want to get pulled over and ticketed, I took the side streets to the nearest smog test place. As a result, the car didn't get the usual "30 minute highway blast" to get it FULLY warmed up, and get the converter nice and hot. A converter at the correct operating temperature is essential to get it working correctly, and an old one usually benefits from a good highway run before getting the car tested.

Hopefully a new converter and cleaning the EGR system will get rid of the vicious pass/fail/pass/fail cycle this car has been trapped in for the last 10 years or so.

And I'll also replace the distributor cap and rotor, as the one on the engine looks pretty old, and I have a couple of new ones I bought on sale at Rock Auto.

One other thing I'm considering is to put 5 gallons of lead-free, alcohol free 100 octane VP racing fuel into the tank before I take it back to get retested.

The octane requirement for these engines is only 91 octane, BUT when they were designed and built, the computers were calibrated to use GASOLINE, not some funky blend of gas and moonshine!

As far as I'm concerned, adding 10% booze to the gas I buy at the pump means I'm buying adulterated gasoline. There are a few "pure gas" stations here in SoCal, but none are close to where I live.

Luckily there's a VP distributor here in Long Beach, so getting a 5 gallon bucket is just a short drive.

One of the things about the 10% ethanol blends here in Kommiefornia is that the quality is all over the map. Sometimes the refiners will use a lower grade base stock, and ballast it with ethanol to get the octane up, and sometimes they won't.

And it's well known that 10% ethanol blended gas can damage the fuel systems on cars not modified to use it.

The whole thing is just another "feel good" program to con people into thinking "renewable energy", when we have plenty of oil in the ground here in the USA.

Of, well....enough ranting for now.

Off to the auto parts store (NOT Auto Zone!) to order a converter, and grab a new gas cap while I'm at it. The car passed the "EVAP" portion of the test fine, but the smog guy was suggesting that the old, crusty gas cap get replaced just for peace of mind, and I agree. It's just one of those things I kept forgetting to do.....

Hey, Kids....What Time Is It?

It's LOG TIME!

A blast from the past.....




There's a longer, much funnier commercial, but I can't embed it, so here's the link to it.

GQRX is Broken.....RATS!

Thought I'd try messing around a bit with a few of the USB "dongles" I have last night, and went to fire up GQRX on this PC.

It wouldn't start.

Running it from the command line revealed the following error: gqrx: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib64/libgnuradio-osmosdr-0.1.5git.so.0.0.0: undefined symbol: hackrf_device_list

Google shows nothing posted about this error in the last year, and some of the comments I did find about it related to broken symlinks.

SO....I proceeded to remove ALL of the SDR, radio, hamlib, gnuradio, linrad, hackRF, and other numerous assorted and sundry files from this machine. This took a bit of searching, as removing the software with the YaST package manager still leaves some debris behind in hidden config files and libs.

Did a reboot, reinstalled only gqrx and it's requirements, and was greeted by the same error.

SO.....back to searching, or I guess I can build it all from source, which takes a while, and can be no guarantee of producing an error-free install.

UPDATE

Well, it seems this package provides functionality for a lot of things:

"OsmoSDR Gnuradio Source supports the OsmoSDR hardware, but it also offers a wrapper functionality for FunCube Dongle, Ettus UHD and rtl-sdr radios."

Now to find out why it's broken.... 


UPDATE 2 

Well, I've got one of the little receivers working with a very basic Linrad configuration. Here it is receiving NOAA weather radio on 162.550MHz: 

  

 So, either Linrad uses completely different libraries, or something "fixed" itself.

Linrad is really cool software, and I should spend the time and learn how to use it better. At this point, it's a bit hard to adjust things and change/add things "on the fly". For example, while you can grab the side and/or top and bottom of the screen to resize it, those settings won't "stick" when you exit the program, and it will restart at the size you choose when you set it up the first time. A lot of things can get set in the "Global Parameters" setting, but require a restart to see the changes.

Guess I'm too spoiled by GUIs in my old age!

I'll try running GQRX again, but I have a feeling it's going to stay busted until an update rolls out.

Oh, and Gnuradio doesn't work anymore.

I try and start GRC from the command line, and it barfs back: Warning: Block key "blocks_ctrlport_monitor_performance" not found when loading category tree.

Segmentation fault

Seg faults are bad.................