Good News for Little Miss Pebbles

Took her back to the Vet today to see how the meds are working, and this time the Surgeon checked her out. He said she's doing very well, and he thinks that maybe (fingers crossed) she just sprained or twisted her leg causing the injury, rather than actually tearing the ACL in her right hind leg.

And in spite of not getting her daily walks on the nature trails, she's lost about 8 ounces due to our diligently watching her food and limiting her treats.

So we'll continue with the Gabapentin for pain until it's gone, and he'll switch from Rimadyl to a much less expensive generic when what we got from him is used up.

She's definitely feeling better, and wanted to play last night, so we played a bit in the den with a squeaky toy, but I didn't toss it around the room like I usually do because I didn't want her zooming around and getting all worked up.

The lightning detector project is coming along now that my neighbor loaned me a couple of Arduino project books. One of the projects uses the same AS3935 sensor, and has the code I needed to read out and display ALL the registers in the chip instead of just grabbing the "Lightning Detected" and "Estimated Distance" registers. It also uses a different display that isn't limited to 2 lines of 16 characters, and it also includes the calibration routine to properly set up the sensor. It's a far more sophisticated project than the little "kit" I bought, and was pretty much what I was looking for.

The enclosure and Proto-Shields for the Arduino arrived today, along with a "BrutusBot" tracked vehicle semi autonomous "robot" that The Little Guy should get a kick out of as it scoots along avoiding obstacles.

Waiting for some penetrating oil to soak into the splines on the Supra's wiper arms. I may have to go buy a small puller to get them off after being rather firmly attached for the last 34 years!

Collings Foundation "Wings Of Freedom Tour" Is In Town

And I found out about it by hearing and seeing the P-51 and B-24 fly over today on their way to the Northern Colorado Regional Airport down by Loveland.

BUT...we have a birthday party on Saturday, and I'm sure Sunday will be a zoo there.

Maybe next year!

Rub-A-Dub-Dub, Ms. Swan Got A Scrub!

And man, was she dirty. I used the pressure washer with just water to wet her down first, then switched in the tank of Turtle Wax Max soap, and soaped her up good.

Yeah, I know.....sounds kinky!

So after scrubbing her with a big wash mitt, and a good rinse, she almost shines again!

However, before those festivities began, I pressure washed the engine bay. I'd applied a full can of Gunk to all the problem areas the night before, and another can right before I backed her out. And since the pressure washer has two tanks, I had the #2 tank for of some degreaser/cleaner, and switched to that before I blew all the Gunk, Grime, and Grunge off the engine.

It still needs a bunch of hand detailing in there, but at least all the crud I missed the first time is gone, which will make it much easier to do the planned mechanical work.

Next project is to remove each fuse, clean the contacts with DeoxIT!, and put the fuses back with a dab of silicone dielectric grease, something I've been doing to every connector pair I've had apart. Should probably do it to all the connectors, but these are high-quality, O-Ringed connectors, and every pair I've separated has been very clean inside. Anyway, this is brought on by the fact that when I started her yesterday, the voltmeter indicated 12.8 Volts, rather than the 14.1 Volts considered 'normal'. I figured great, the alternator went AWOL over the winter, but today it was indicating 13.8 Volts, and would go to 14.1 with some revs, so that kinda points to a connection problem that "cured" itself with a bit of vibration and/or thermal cycling. I was planning on replacing the alternator with an upgraded one from a 1992 Camry V6 that has 100 Amps output compared to the 60 Amps of the OEM unit. They're about $50 more than the OEM alternator, and are 100% compatible with the car. These cars all have a trait of weak alternators that dim the headlights at idle, and this cures the problem, and provides plenty of extra current for the electric fan(s) I want to install so I can delete the engine-driven fan and free up a few HP.

And cleaning up the garage yesterday really helped with locating stuff that was misplaced. I found several boxes of things I was going bonkers trying to find, and they turned up buried under some stuff on the totally wrong shelf from where they should have been. When I shelved all the "Garage Items", I wasn't too careful where I put stuff, and it bit me.

Now to get started on that FUGLY front bumper. Sorry, Ms. Swan, but you really need a "Nose Job"!

Garage Cleanup Time!

So this afternoon I cleaned a winter's worth of stuff from around my poor old Supra, and backed her outside.

Then I took stock of what had to be done with the shelves, and set to it.

Before:

 

After:

Doesn't look like four hours worth of work was accomplished, but since half of the stuff on the shelves was just tossed up there to get it off the floor when I built the shelves, there was a lot of sorting going on as I emptied the shelves.

All the antenna/radio stuff is now on specific shelves, all the car parts have been sorted and shelved according to what they are, several boxes of stuff that should have been in the basement are now down there, numerous boxes were consolidated with the empties flattened and tossed, and (once again!) I found a bunch of stuff that was MIA.

Tomorrow I'm going to Gunk the engine again, and give her a bath and pressure wash of the engine bay.

For now, she's back in the barn sleeping.....

Coaxial Cable Entrance Box est Finee!

Yeah, I know....."The Older I Get, The Better I Was" and all that. Time was, though, when I could have terminated these four connectors, and had my tools all put away in under two hours.

Today? Not so much. Took me a total of four hours, start to finish, to get the connectors installed and the tools put away.

Of course that includes going out with the dog twice, going to the basement and/or garage numerous times to retrieve tools I thought I had in my "Connector Installation Field Kit" (they're back in the tub where they belong now), finding the new tips and installing one in my 40 Watt Weller iron, moving the wife's car into the garage after hearing the weather/hail report (BTW...the weather reporting station at the Fort Collins/Loveland airport went down Tuesday afternoon and is still down!), and briefly stopping for a hot dog and some of that great macaroni salad my wife made.

ANYWAY......the connectors are installed:

And sweeping them from 3~600MHz with a dummy load on the other side showed.....a nice, flat, 1:1 VSWR over the range, just as it should.

I put the cover on it, and I'll call it completed until I decide to modify it!

Coming up next is where I get off my duff and plant the posts. I'll get a hold of my ham neighbor and see when he has some time to help me this week.

I'll sure be glad when this project is wrapped up and I can get back on the Supra!

Think I'll back her out tomorrow and hose her off..........

Happy Independence Day!

Lawnmowers are running, people are gathering, and soon mass quantities of hot dogs and hamburgers will be consumed.

BBQ?

CHECK!


Fuel State?

READY!


Colors?

Proudly Displayed, SIR!

And it's a gorgeous day today in Northern Colorado. Partly cloudy, 82*, 44% relative humidity, light variable winds.

And as I used to hear years ago in my headset, "Altimeter Two Niner Seven Zero".

But we have a Tornado Watch until 2200, and a possibility of severe thunderstorms with hail, so I cleared the garage out so my wife can get her car inside tonight.

Y'all have a Safe And Sane Independence Day!

Another "45 Minute" Job Takes How Long?

Almost three hours, and it was a comedy of errors.....

When I mounted the box and drilled the holes through the wall the other day, I used a 'minimum size' hole. And seeing as the holes on the two boxes aren't perfectly aligned, their effective size is lessened. The first time I tried to push the bales through the wall was no joy. The cables never made it to the other hole, and wound up coiled inside the wall.

I grabbed my drill and a 1/2" paddle bit, and bored out the holes. Then I used a length of #10 wire from my scrap box as a fish tape, pushed it through the wall, taped the coax to it on the outside, and pulled them both through the wall. Between going back and forth to the garage to get stuff, and shepherding the still lame dog in and out (she's much better with meds), this simple little job took waaay longet than it should have.

The outside box:

Connectors were given a squirt of silicone dielectric grease, and torqued down snugly. A drop of green "penetrating" LocTite was applied to keep them snug through the temperature fluctuations they'll see. I'm going to cut up some styrofoam to fill the box with for insulation, one of the main reasons I wanted to keep the through holes as small as possible. Probably should have drilled one big hole dead center in the box, but oh, well....20-20 hindsight. The loops in the cable are for stress relief.

And on the inside:

Yeah, three hours futzing around to get this far, and I still have to install the connectors on the cables.

At least they're adequately long. I would have been pretty upset if they were an inch too short.....

Lots 'O Lightning!

The little lightning detector has been going off constantly for the last couple of hours, indicating lightning discharges anywhere from 5km to 17km away.

And they're getting hammered up in Bellvue and Laporte, where the kids live.

Down here? Not so much, so I just spent a couple of hours watering the lawn and getting sprinkled on while doing it! Last year I tried to rely on Mother Nature, and she doesn't always cooperate when it comes to rain. We're in a "Precipitation Shadow" here, and while it can be coming down in buckets 8~10 miles away, we might get sprinkles. So rather than watch the grass croak again this summer, I'm watering it every 2~3 days, and only skipping those days where there's rain coming down.

And it's sprinkling again.....

Coaxial Cable Entrance Box Installation

Plans are still on to bore the holes either Saturday or Sunday, weather permitting.

It was 96* here today, and the NWS is forecasting 94* on Sunday....BUT.....There;s some weather forming up right now, the winds have picked up, the temperature is falling, and the barometer is 29.85 and rising. The lightning detector has been going off sporadically, indicating distances of 15~30kM, and I've seen lightning in the distance. So we'll see!

There's still plenty to do, and one of the tasks on the punch-list was getting the cable entrance finalized, and installed. It was originally going to have a single connection to the wire antenna, and have the Choke Balun/Line Isolator inside. and the control cable for the autocoupler.

It looked like this, before 'mission creep' set in:

WELL.....one the things I learned in getting the wire antenna up, and reading tons of books on antennas and transmission lines, is that the choke balun/line isolator MUST go at the antenna. It's entire purpose is to keep currents off the outside of the shield, and since those currents originate at the transmission line/antenna interface, that's where you put it. Now I've read this for years, but didn't understand the exact mechanism of how the currents got on the outside of the shield in the first place. Like a lot of Hams, I pretty much assumed the currents on the outside of the shield were induced on the shield by the radiating element's RF field.....WRONG! The currents get on the outside of the shield At The Feedpoint. It's a subtle thing, but the RF energy not only "sees" one side of the antenna as a conductor, but also "sees" the outside of the shield as another parallel path, and unless you choke the current at the feedpoint, the outside of the side becomes part of the antenna, and can cause a lot of mischief.

SO.....the Line Isolator has been removed from the outside-of-the-house enclosure, and has been relocated to the enclosure for the SGC autocoupler, as close to the input of the tuner as possible. The "permanent" 20 Meter vertical was also being put through it's paces and measurements during this learning period, and it has a Home Brew choke balun that looks like this:

Quite simple, almost 'free', and very effective. Just a coil of coax, nicely wound (NOT "Scramble Wound"), and secured to the antenna as close as practically possible to the feedpoint.

So the vertical is proved in, and will get mounted to it's new 4x4 post in the next week or so. It'll just get removed from the tripod, and attached to the post as-is. It works. It ain't broke. I don't need to "fix it", and the only way to "improve" it would be to raise it higher and add another radial or two.

The new wire antenna has been fabricated, the enclosure and mounting structure for the SGC autocoupler has been fabricated, and it'll be ready-to-install as soon as the quickrete sets on the post.

So the whole question of the cable entrance box gets easier, as I now have the outside box pretty empty, except for connectors, and inside box was always going to be pretty empty, except for the connectors.

Well, I got off-the-dime last week, and finished making some more back-up plates to support the connectors in the box.

Here's a pair of Type UHF bulkhead connectors installed using the home brew aluminum plates:

Lather, rinse, and repeat until both boxes have four of these connectors in them. Oooops.....didn't take any pix of them before I mounted them outside and inside 'cuz I was on a roll!

Outside box, solidly mounted:

From a bit further back:

And on the inside:

The connectors are on the bottom of the enclosures for weather proofing and appearance reasons, and wonder of wonders.......I was within 1/8" of getting things to line up perfectly.

So this item is pretty much crossed off. I still have to make four RG-8X 'jumper cables' to pass through the wall and a few dozen other things to do, and the poor Supra still has the winter dust on her.

Gotta get back on that car! Winter caught me off guard last year, and now I have to get that Supra Swing back.....

Got the Auger Started for the First Time

After returning from the DVM yesterday, I went out and put gas in the Jeep, and filled my little two gallon gas can. I already had 11 ounces of oil and a half-ounce of StaBil "Marine 360" in the can, so it gave me two gallons of treated, 25:1 two-stroke 'premix'. My neighbor's snow blower is a two-stroke, and he just buys the little cans of premix. I looked at those, and all the ones I could find were 40:1 or 50:1, which is way too light on the oil for this engine. They make a HUGE deal about 25:1, stabilizer-treated fuel in the operating manual for this thing, so I got another gas can, a quart of Lucas semi-synthetic two-stoke oil, and a small bottle of StaBil, and dedicated them to the auger engine.

I put about half a tank of fuel in it, and pulled it over a few times to get fuel into the carb and priming bulb, then set the choke to "Start", turned on the ignition, and gave it the pumps on the bulb. I pulled it over a few times, and nothing. Checked everything again, and pulled it over some more. Still nothing. I fiddled with the throttle and choke, pulling it over with the choke set to "Run", and still nothing.

Well, between giving it a few more shots of gas with the primer bulb and fiddling with the choke, I flooded it. I could smell raw gas, so rather than get a can of Ether and risking a muffler explosion, I just put everything back. Tonight I vowed to "Get It Running or Take It Back", so I started by pulling the spark plug out and looking at it. It wasn't soaked, but it definitely looked wet, so I blew it off with some brake cleaner and checked the gap, which was OK. Making sure the ignition and choke were OFF, I pulled it over easy to clear the cylinder, and see how it felt. As expected, it pulled over very easy with plug out, and while I didn't see anything like liquid come blowing out of the plug hole when I cranked it (yep, I've seen that), I'm pretty sure I flooded it last night. So, I put the plug back in with a dab of anti-seize on the threads (NEVER put a steel spark plug into an aluminum head dry! Just don't do it!), checked everything again, flipped the switch ON, but left the choke OFF (hey, it's 80* here today!), and gave it a pull. It popped a bit, so I gave it another pull, and it came to life with a nice, smooth idle. I ran it for about 20 minutes at various throttle settings to break it in a bit, and then grabbed a handful of throttle.

This little thing SINGS! I haven't owned a two-stroke since my last Yamaha RD-400, and I'd forgotten how responsive they are.

So it runs OK, hardly vibrates at all, isn't really too loud (I'll still wear ear muffs, though), and doesn't appear to smoke very much, even at 25:1 oil mix.

I predict hole boring and post setting for this weekend!

Back From The DVM.....

And it looks like Pebbles has a partial tear in her right rear Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL), similar to what many athletes suffer during their careers.

We have no idea when or how she injured herself, but a good SWAG is she was chasing something in the backyard, and hit one of the divots or bare spots at full chat twisting her right rear leg enough to injure it.

So, since it appears to be a partial tear, the DVM has recommended we keep her on the gabapentin for pain, and prescribed her carprofen (an NSAID) to reduce the inflammation.

We take her back in two weeks for a follow-up to see how the treatment is working, but for now, he said to keep her on "Rest and Relaxation", and to clear the yard of rabbits and squirrels before we take her out, lest she pop into Attack Mode, and attempts Warp 9 trying to catch a critter.