Warm Weather Runnin' 'Round

Going to be in the low to mid 90's later this week, and with the humidity so low here (~20%),  I have to remind myself to keep hydrated. When I was dripping wet working outside in Long Beach it was pretty easy to remind myself to have some water or Gatorade, but here you just don't get "dripping wet". Well, I don't seem to get soaked when I'm bashing away on something and it's in the upper 80's/low 90's, but then I run at a slower pace these days....

Anyway....we're well stocked with electrolyte drinks and powders, so now I just have to force myself to keep a container of water or a 'sports drink' handy.

Gonna head out to Home Depot and Harbor Freight in a few. Need some yard things from HD and gonna get some cheep saw horses at HF to hold the rear spoiler for the Supra when I scrub it down and put my substitute gasket on it. One of my buddies on the celicasupra.com forum suggested putting some blankets down on the hood, and using that as my 'work table' while I put the gasket on. That would have been a 'zero cost' thing as we have plenty of big, padded moving blankets, but it doesn't take into account I'm going to be applying a couple of gallons of Elbow Grease to it while I scrub it down, and I don't want to risk damaging the hood.

Had a mild but unpleasant reaction to Singulair, which my Doctor put me on the see if it would help with my allergies, which are NOT liking Spring In The Rockies. It did very little/nothing for my allergy symptoms, but did give me a feeling of "general uneasiness", so I quit taking it and was back to normal (whatever that is) a day later. Didn't expect it to have that effect on me, so I read up on it, and it's a listed side-effect. No biggie, as it didn't help with the allergies anyway. The FloNase is working well, when I remember to use it! After a few days, I'm 'all better', so I forget to use it, and the symptoms come roaring back in a day or so.

If allergy attacks are the worst thing about living here, I'll gladly put up with them.....

Alan Bean, Apollo 12 LEM Pilot and Artist, Passes At Age 86

Just heard about this from one of my Boeing Buddies.

Captain Alan LaVern Bean, USN, was quite a guy. He piloted the Lunar Module on Apollo 12, and was the Commander of the Skylab 3 mission. His 1969 Corvette is one of the very few "Astro-Vettes" (Corvettes owned by Astronauts) left. The car, and Capt Bean, were the subject of several articles in various car magazines. He said the neighborhood kids never cared much about his spaceflights, but they ALL remembered his Corvette.

I think this one is my favorite painting of his.

Godspeed, Captain Bean!

"Making Do" When Parts Aren't Available

I've done this many, many times in the Electronics and the Mechanical field, and you do it for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes you do it with what parts you have on hand and it qualifies as an "Upgrade", like when you increase the voltage rating of a capacitor because that particular capacitor  was the only one you had to work with.

Or you have to make a gasket from a heavy brown paper bag (or two) when you're miles from nowhere.

Or sometimes it's for economic reasons. Years ago (late 1970's), we had a customer bring us his Ferrari to see if we could do something about his wheel bearings. The dealer in Chicago quoted him $1500, and he felt he was being taken. We pulled it apart, cleaned the bearings, and took them down to the local Big Industrial Bearing Company, and walked out the door with new bearings and seals for about 75 bucks. Same bearing, different box. Printing a little prancing horse on the box makes even commodity parts skyrocket.

VW and Porsche people can tell similar stories.

Examples abound, and I'm sure you've done it yourself.

One of the problems with trying to preserve/restore a 33 year old Japanese car is that some parts are NLA, No Longer Available. I just put in a $300 parts order to a place I use regularly, and the entire order was canceled, as every single item on it came back from the Toyota Mothership as "Discontinued, No Warehouse Stock Available". Just last year I put in several orders that size, or larger, and only a few items bounced. Looks like the well is finally running dry on OEM parts.

Anyway....there are a few vendors around who cranked up production on some reproduction "soft trim" items like gaskets for the glass, fender flare welting, and the 1985/86 spoiler gasket.

Since I'm in the "get the car spruced up" mode, one of the things on the list is to get the rear spoiler/sunshade installed again. The OEM gasket had degraded so severely that it was gone in places, and rock hard where it still was. Between that, having "30 year old torque" on all the fasteners, and the desert dust where this car lived, the spoiler has chewed into the paint pretty badly in places. I got that touched up, and after I scrub the rear spoiler, it goes back on.

You can see here how the OEM gasket has shrunk and puckered up. It also crumbled away easily on the sunlit side!

As far as the gasket goes, well, I have a very good quality reproduction kit, BUT...they're no longer available, and they were like $120 when they were. Since I'm in "preservation mode" with the car, I really didn't want to burn my gasket kit, so I improvised. I made some measurements of the thickness of the spoiler, and how far the OEM gasket wrapped around from the bits of it still stuck on. I found some 1/16" neoprene U-Channel, and it looks like it's going to work just fine.

It even goes around the curves easily, which was my main concern.

Total cost? About 35 bucks, and it should last a good long time.

Whittle & Co. Smack Another One Outta The Park

Great commentary from Bill and the guys on the Progressive's latest gun grab, and their reasoning (if you can call it that) behind it.

Great quote from the show..."When you pry the AR-15 from my cold dead hands, please don't grab it by the barrel as it's HOT.....", to which I'll add "And don't trip on the huge pile of smoking brass surrounding my body".

Enjoy.....

Getting Back In The Saddle

Now that I've got the garage to some semblance of 'usable functionality', I broke out some of the smaller subassemblies for the Supra that need work. I have all of the passenger side mirror, minus the M5x.8 screws that hold the mirror to the car (new ones on the way), so I started scrubbing away on the 'rubberized' mounting bracket that holds the plastic mirror housing to the door.

Hot, soapy water, a toothbrush, and some Scotch-Brite for that "really ground-in!" dirt. Then after it was completely dry, I scrubbed a heavy coat of Mother's "Back to Black" trim cleaner and reconditioner into it with a new "99cent Store" toothbrush. Several hours later, the complete mirror mounting assembly looks great, and the rubber is nice and supple again. And it's a beautifully clean matte-black finish, too.

At one time, several years ago, the mirror housing was ready for paint, and then Field Day or something came along, and here we are again. I scrub the mirror down with some denatured alcohol, and then a cycle of prime/sand/prime on it until the surface finish is "good enough", and paint it a nice epoxy satin black. I'm no good at painting gloss black surfaces with a spray can, even on something as small as these mirror housings. I've seen other people rattle-can them with amazing results, and I can do it with a spray gun, but me, gloss-black, and spray cans just can't quite get our act together. So satin black it is.

And then I can do it all over again on the driver's side mirror......

Lots and lots and lots of time gets spent just sitting at the bench cleaning and refurbishing small parts and assemblies like these. It's time consuming, sometimes boring work, but it has to be done.

And people wonder why it costs $50k, $75k, or much, much more to properly restore a car.

RYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRY

Which stands for....nothing. It's the "Idle Channel" sound of radioteletype meaning there's no traffic being sent.

And that's what I've been doing the last several days....sitting here "idling", and taking care of my wife who tweaked her back somehow while dogsitting at The Kid's Place, a.k.a The Country House up in Bellvue.

Now this is a BIG freakin' house, almost 3600 sqft including the basement, and it's spread out over four levels. It's an open floor plan downstairs, and sound echoes around in here like crazy. So, how do we keep in touch here? Simple, with RADIO! The other day when I was on a(nother) Home Depot run, I found these little Cobra "MicroTalk" GMRS/FRS radios on sale for $30.

GMRS stands for General Mobile Radio Service, and requires a license. FRS is the Family Radio Service, and is license free, like a UHF version of CB, but with FM used instead of AM or SSB, resulting in much clearer communications.

Ironically, the original Citizen's Radio Service (ALL FCC licensed radio bands are considered "Services") was in the UHF band.

So why on Heaven's Earth did I buy two more hand-held radios when I have four of them, and my wife has two of her own? Convenience, Benjamin, convenience.

With these little guys you just pick up the radio and talk. When you're done, you put the radio down. Using our Amateur Radio Service radios would entail using our callsigns, following the regulations, and finding a clear simplex frequency. That's a bit of overkill for "Honey, bring me some more Ovaltine" comms.

Both cars, which were in the driveway yesterday, got through the hail without any damage that I could find today. They're both plastered with the leaves that got blasted off the trees and blown around, but no hail dents. The backyard is a mess, with lots of leaves and branches from the neighbor's cottonwood tree, but no damage. And while the 33' vertical antenna was whipping back and forth about 45*, it, too, got through unscathed.

Pardon me while I go back to my Idle Channel Mode......

First Big Spring Storm

Well, pretty big compared to what I've been living in for the last 35 years.

This is not snow. It's hail, a whole bunch of it.

We had a pretty good size storm cell roll through here from about 1800 to 1830, and we got dumped on. The mix of rain and hail formed little islands of hail in the street, and the rain water swept clear channels on it's way to the gutter.

And the backyard had quite a bit of hail in it, forming one 'deposit' that's stained by all the dirt it stirred up in one of the several large bare spots in the yard.

Knocked the petals off the tulips in front, too, and beat the snot out of my little maple tree.

The iris' made it, probably sheltered by the house. These also bloomed about two weeks ago, like the tulips, so the blooms were getting a bit 'tired' anyway before Mother Nature decided things needed a little pruning.

My wife was dog-sitting last week at the Country House in Bellvue while the kids were visiting their maternal Grandmother so  Great-Grandma could meet the three new little ones.

The house is the one that got battered last year about this time by a big hailstorm.

The roof got through that storm, but the siding looked like somebody opened up on it with an M-60. Anyway....the siding has been replaced, and the roof, while it was still "OK", also got replaced, but this time with a steel roof. My said it was pretty loud when it was raining there last week, so I can imagine what it was like getting hailed on.

This wasn't a particularly big storm, but it developed very fast, and came roaring up the I-25 corridor. This morning we were at a "10% chance" of thunderstorms, and by early afternoon it was a 40% chance. I'm not sure what time they posted the Severe Weather advisory, but by 1730 it was up.

I grew up with fast developing, fast hitting storms like this, and when I got out of the car from a grocery run, I looked South, saw how dark it had gotten in about 20 minutes, and chuckled about the "40% chance".

I'm waiting for Summer, when the Super Boomers come up out of nowhere......

A Little Music For A Rainy Night....

Well, it was supposed to be rainy tonight. More of a drizzly, 45* night. Looks like we should be drying out Saturday, and then more drizzle is expected Sunday night.



So, with the garage getting pretty much finished, I'll be getting back to scrubbing the color back into the right side of the car. AND.....when I did the hood I used the blue "no scratch" Scotch-Brite, which took the stuff that was stuck to the paint off the paint, but did nothing to remove the top layer of dead paint, which is still there in all it's stained glory, and really jumps out at you when you close the hood and see it next to the clean fender and nose panel. So I'll have to spend a couple or three hours recleaning the hood. I was hoping to be able to live with it, but geesh...the hood on this car is freakin' YUGE compared to the other panels, and it really looks bad.

The Dark Side of the Garage

a.k.a., "Her Side".

I pretty much finished cleaning up and organizing the far side of the garage, killing several birds with one shot.

The Honda generator is out because.....Field Day! It had old gas in it, and the oil hadn't been changed in several years because I didn't use it. I'd still pull it over by hand every other month, but today was the first time it got any time on the meter in at least three years. I let it run in NON "Eco Mode", which is akin to running it at a fast idle. It responds much better to big load swings this way, as it doesn't have to accelerate very far to get up to full power. My Field Day load requirements are pretty minimal, so I always ran it in "Eco Mode", and I'd use about 1.5 tanks of gas from Friday morning until Sunday noon. It didn't run that whole time on that much fuel, but that's how much fuel I used at Field Day every year. ANYWAY....ran it out of fuel, changed the oil, put fresh gas in it, and she started right up on the second pull. I just loves me my little Honda generator!

So here's the rebuilt "1950's Era" steel shelf unit, all snugged down tight to the wire rack next to it.

Came out nice and square after spending an hour replacing bent and tweaked parts with stuff from the 'donor unit', and screwing it all together tightly, correcting a few errors in the original assembly of it along the way.

I've had these two shelves 'left over' from when I built all the wire rack units over on my side of the place. One I left out deliberately, and one got left out accidentally. They're nice quality, and I just couldn't toss them, but seems like every way I tried to store them, they were in the way.

Hmmmm...maybe they just need to earn their keep. I stood them up, turned them sideways, and attached them to the wire rack on their side. This not only gets them out of the way, but they act like side walls on three levels of the rack.

Yep, cable ties, three per side, holding them on. They're pretty much unstressed, and the breaking strength of six 1/4" cable ties is nothing to sneeze at, so I don't think they'll come clattering off to the floor.



My wife came out just as I was sweeping up the space, and stopped dead in her tracks. She looked at me and said "Is this what a real garage is supposed to look like?". My reply was something like "Yep, a real, functional, working garage looks a lot like this.".

I know she understands how much I was looking towards having a dedicated shop, and seeing what I've done here so far, she understands it's something I'm willing to work fairly hard at building, or at making what space I have as functional as possible. She was delighted she now has her "own" area of the garage, and she has plenty of shelf space to keep her tools organized.

I have to make a(nother) Home Depot trek tomorrow to get the hardware to hang the bigger tools, like the shovels, up on the wall. That'll open up some more foot space to ease access to the passenger side of her car, which was pretty good as it was. And I'm going to pick up another 48" LED fixture, and some electrical supplies to neatly wire them in.

GAD....I'll be happy when this workspace is "finished". Then I can get back to working on the car, and get started on building up a bench/work surface on the "Maintenance & Repair" side of the Radio Room.

Oh, and Field Day is next month. I'll be running "1E, CO" on the satellites this year.

Tom Wolfe Passes Away At 88, and So Much For "Free" Shelving Units.....

Bummer.

One of my favorite authors, and writer of the amazing work "The Right Stuff". The first work of his I read was "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby", which my sister bought for me when I was a Senior in high-school, and I found it fascinating, as I was just "getting into" cars at the time. And in College I read "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" for one of my English courses.

He was quite a guy, and a terrific writer.

R.I.P., Mr Wolfe. Your kind doesn't come along often, and I'm glad I got to see you "live on TV" a few times.


As far as the "Free Shelving" goes.....well.....at least I tried.

Here they are right after I finished the Harbor Fright workbench and got it in place.

I got busy last night trying to square up and straighten out the right-hand steel shelving unit in the picture. The legs were two sections each, overlapped by one screw hole and bolted together. In the process of loosening things up, it got really flippy-floppy, so I took the 'top' section off, and then squared up the bottom half of the legs and two of the four shelves.

The fun began when I tried to get fully assembled, but with all the nuts and bolts loose, top section onto the bottom section. Every which way I tried, the thing would NOT go together in anything approaching a straight, 'square' configuration. I used a long tapered punch to ensure the holes were lined up before I tried to insert a bolt, but while I could get one hole to line up, the other was so far off that even driving the punch in with a soft hammer wouldn't line it up.

Huh....wtf?

Realizing I had another shelf unit about 5 feet away, I scooted my little rolling stool over there and looked at it.

OOOPS!! Big error, Jim. The legs are meant to be butted together, and then bolted with a clip that this shelf unit didn't have. If you look carefully in the first picture at the shelving unit on the left, you can just barely make out the clip about half way up the left front leg, where the diagonal brace comes down.

And if you look at the out-of-focus rear leg towards the bottom in this picture, you can see how the assembler overlapped the legs and pounded in a bolt. The tilt of the leg is caused by it being forced into a position it doesn't want to be in.

A trip to Home Depot was negative with regard to replacement hardware, so instead I came back with another HDX "cake rack" wire shelving unit. It looked so nice I went back today and bought another one for the other side of the workbench.

Here's the finished result:

And we have tunes!!

That's my very first, official, "Home Theater A/V Receiver" that I held on to for quite a few years. 100 Watts per channel @ .08% THD to the left, center, and right front speakers, and 100 Watts to the left, center, and right surround speakers. Add a subwoofer output, and it's a "6.1" channel receiver. Just feeding some Pyle mini bookshelf speakers for now. I've got some nice carpet-covered portable "P.A." speakers that will eventually be the front speakers, and the little Pyle units will get mounted to the walls about half-way towards the garage doors.

So I'm close to finalized on the garage configuration. Ihave a goodly amount of shelf space to support both my automotive and Electronics/Radio hobbies, and it's all neat, clean, and organized.

Even my wife is impressed. Next is to attack "her side" of the garage to get it organized enough to provide ready-access to her gardening tools, and hang the bigger things like the shovels, spades, and rakes up on the walls. I was able to build one good full-height 4-shelf unit, and one good half-height 3-shelf unit out of all the bits and pieces from the two full-height units. The full size shelf will go on "her side" of the garage to store her garden chemicals, potting soil, pots, and other stuff, and the half-size unit, along with another one that was here, are going to either our Handyman Guy or one of the relatives, first-come, first-served.

Oh, this is the "Bubba Job" that powers the garage door openers:

I'm going to run a single cord to a central point on the ceiling, and split it there to feed each door opener. And I'll use the right type of wire hangers to make it look nice and neat.

Doing all this work out in the garage, and making as many trips as I have to Home Depot, has given me ideas to build-out the electronics workbench down in The Dungeon, a.k.a., the basement. Rather than spend $1500~$2k getting a custom one built, I'm going to get some drawer units for end supports, and mount an 8' countertop to them. Gee...just like the Ikea stuff I had in Long Beach, and she made me throw away....

Probably do something similar for the radio desk/console, but that's still undecided.......

Rainy Day Radio

So what's a guy to do on a cool, rainy day? The grandson is playing with Grandma, and I think I'll connect up the antenna and play radio!

Well...this was actually kind of planned. Today is the day for the "Armed Forces Day Cross-Band Test" where various shore stations, museum ships, military bases and vessels will transmit on certain military frequencies, and listen for replies on Amateur Radio frequencies. Naturally, I wanted to try and contact the Iowa, which is why the vertical was put on-the-air yesterday.

Made my big mug 'O Joe, connected the antenna to the radio and the control cable to +12VDC, turned everything on, and tuned to 14463.5 kHz, where the Iowa was transmitting as NEPM, and there they were, with my buddy Doug at the mic, no less.

After a few minutes of listening to him work a bunch of stations, he announced the Iowa was listening on 14261 kHz, so I enabled the "B" VFO, set it to 14261, went back to the "A" VFO, entered "Split" mode, and started calling NEPM. After he worked a few stations he asked for "The stroke zero only, please", which means he heard me, so I called him again, and we had a short chat. The object of the Cross Band Test is to make sure that Amateur Radio stations have the capability to communicate with U.S. military forces in time of need, and not to carry on long conversations.

Or, as the official announcement states:

"The Army Military Auxiliary Radio System will host this year’s Armed Forces Day Crossband Test, scheduled for May 12, 2018. This annual event is open to all radio operators, and will not impact any public or private communications. For more than 50 years, military and amateur stations have taken part in this event, which is only an exercise scenario, designed to include hobbyist and government radio operators alike.

The AFD Crossband Test is a unique opportunity to test two-way communications between military communicators and radio stations in the Amateur Radio Service (ARS), as authorized in 47 CFR 97.111. These tests provide opportunities and challenges for radio operators to demonstrate individual technical skills in a tightly-controlled exercise scenario that does not impact any public or private communications."

So it's really more of a fun thing to do these days than serving any actual purpose other than getting off their duff and actually operating their radio gear.

And after the contact, I decided to get the temp station here in the sunroom full "Digital Capability" which meant hooking up my SignaLink interface box, installing some software, and then getting it all configured to play nice.

This is all stuff I've done numerous times before, but it was fun digging out the bits and pieces I needed to give my little Elecraft K2 much more capability.

And I even discussed installing a cable penetration into the sunroom with my wife, so I don't have to have the door cracked open to run the cables through. Be pretty easy to do with a short section of 2" PVC pipe and a couple of 90* elbows, painted to match the interior and exterior.......

AND....I broke down and bought a Harbor Freight 48" workbench. Which took two days to assemble and position, including moving a bunch of stuff around in the garage. Now that it's all put together it seems sturdy enough, but I wouldn't bolt a vise down to it....the top worksurface is some kind of particle board with a plastic skin on it, about .6" thick, and I don't think it would take too kindly to having a 6" swiveling vise bolted through it. It came with a 13 Watt (?!?) light above it, but I'm going to replace it with a 36" LED that draws about 34 Watts producing 3600 Lumens. Should be nice and bright on the worktop.

See these old grey steel shelves? They're identical to ones my Dad bought back in 1957 when we moved into the house I grew up in.


Gee...even have the square nuts and slotted screws holding them together!

I was going to buy some of the wire rack shelves like I have along the sides of the garage, but these old things are here, so they're free, and I know from growing up that if I unload them, set them on the mythical "Hard, Flat, Level Surface", loosen the hardware that isn't already loose, square them up, and retighten all them funny 'lil nuts and bolts, and they actually work pretty well. And I'm going to anchor them to the wall with some Really Heavy Duty wall anchors, not for seismic safety, but because it's a work area, and stuff gets banged into. Sometimes it gets knocked over. Makes a big mess. I don't like cleaning up a mess I caused when if I would have spent an extra half hour screwing the shelf to the wall it wouldn't have happened.

I shudder to think how I'd feel if it landed on the Supra......

Did I mention they're free?

SO.....since I'm still negotiating with the electrical guy over a greatly reduced installation, what I'm going to do is mount the 48", 12 outlet plug strip sitting on top of the rack down to the rack, and plug it into the duplex outlet that's now located right smack dab in the middle of the pegboard but behind it, and take advantage of the one 15Amp circuit I have. Two of the outlets will go to the garage door openers. That's a very low duty cycle load, so it can pretty much be ignored. My big LED work light draws "93 Watts" per the nameplate, and that less than an Amp. The new lamp for the workbench is "34 Watts", which added to the worklight makes the running total just about an Amp.

Add two more 48" LED fixtures at "50 Watts" each, and I'm at maybe two Amps. That's the beauty of LED lighting...you can get a lot of Lumens for not too many Watts.

The two orange cords crudely stapled to the wall carry the 120VAC to the garage door openers. Two cords terminated with ONE plug.....really Bubba'd up good! I'll clean all that up, but the first time I saw I saw it I busted up laughing, our real estate agent thought it was pretty funny, too.