Good morning!!!!

[RedNeckGeek]

Today's opening act was certainly worthy of a snapshot...

Very nice sunrise, wng. Hope the day continues as beautifully as it started.

 

[rswyan]

57.5F and cloudy, with intermittent rain, and occasional strong gusts of wind @ 10:30 ...

P. R. came over yesterday and we (he mostly) worked on bending the retaining ring for burner stand. Got that about 50% done, he took all of it home to check the fit with the kettle before finishing it up and having me weld it up.

Swapped out the run cap on the compressor with the one he brought over ... yup, that was it. Nice to have it be a less than $10 repair rather than a: "... you need a (X hundred dollar) new motor (on a 30+ year old compressor) ..."

Ran over to the attorney's after that to pick up some papers ...

As I was heading out of the driveway to do that, I ran into a young man riding a Polaris 330 four-wheeler coming in the other way. I stopped and motioned to him and explained that although the property wasn't posted on this side, if he was coming in the opposite direction, it is marked with "No Trespassing" signs ... and I'd prefer that he didn't ride here as I'd had some problems with stuff coming up missing.

After a little more conversation he mentioned that he had just had three people screaming at him, apparently for crossing their property. Seemed like a nice young fellow, kinda quiet and reserved. Being the old softie that I am, I relented and told him it would be ok for him to ride on our property.

As I pulled away he was cranking his machine over ... didn't seem like it wanted to start.

When I got back from the attorney's, he had only made it about 150' to the other side of the shop. We tried some starting fluid but my can was almost empty ... nada ... So I ran down to the local gas station and picked up another can ... still nada ... We pulled the plug and checked for spark ... nada ... Took plug inside shop and checked it for spark with the Echo blower ... good ... So it appears that there was no juice getting fed to the plug from the coil/ignition. Told him we'd put it inside the shed overnight until he could get someone to tow him home so no one would rip it off.

He's a potential candidate for an extra set of hands - seems handy, knows his way around internal combustion engines, likes to hunt, sophomore at the local HS.

Front must be coming thru now, winds are howling.

Today's task is to find a LFS that has a top frame for the 55 gallon, or failing that, just go ahead order one online.

 

[sodamo]

69°F and 2.94 inches rain last 24 hours.

Be safe
Have a great day

David Sent from my iPad Air using TractorByNet

 

[sodamo]

Today's opening act was certainly worthy of a snapshot...

Surely so!!!

<NSLock: 0x16ff2110>{locked = NO, thread = 0x0, name = nil}

 

[Eric Salop]

There are quite a few references on TBN to a book called "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy". That's not too surprising as it has a certain appeal to people who don't take life too seriously and that seems to be a common trait amongst many of us on here. I must have mentioned to my daughter that it was a long time since I had read it and she bought me an audio version so I could hear it again on long journeys.

On the way home last night I got to the part where the improbable travellers find the mythical planet of Magrathea, a place where legend says they once had a specialist industry, assembling custom made luxury planets for the wealthiest men in the galaxy. It described the beauty of seeing the sunrise on a planet with 2 suns. The sunrise wng captured was worthy of any custom planet designer.

 

[txdon]

I'm am not touching anything else today. Everything I touch breaks. I would go into detail about the club car golf cart but it's a long story. It basically started to fall apart and bolts breaking as I was trying to find the problem. When the motor fell and broke that was the final straw (batteries and tires were needing replacing also and maybe the controller) so I loaded it up and sold it for parts. And then to make matters worse the trailer lights did not work and the truck had a flat.

. . .And tomorrow is Friday the 13th

 

[300UGUY]

Good Morning! 39F @ 3:45AM. Abundant sunshine. High 61F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph.

Two evenings ago the alarm system started to complain about something by beeping very, very loudly at about 10PM. At that point I was able to get it to tell me it was a failed smoke sensor (yes, it talks), but since the sensor is located 15' up a wall, there wasn't much I could do about it at the time except push the reset button and go back to sleep. That kept it happy until 2AM when the same five beeps once again reminded me to fix the smoke sensor, just in case I'd forgotten in my dreams. Oh, and stopping the racket meant another trek across the house to the alarm panel to push the reset button again. At 6AM I got another reminder, but of course since I'd slept so well the night before I didn't mind jumping out of bed to push the reset button yet again, and jump into my work clothes to drag the extension ladder inside to climb the wall. NOT!!! But I did retrieve the smoke detector later in the morning, installing fresh batteries, and clearing the error on the alarm panel. No more beeps, so I started back in on paperwork until the garage warmed up a bit.

With the heads done it was time to figure out if they were the same size with respect to interior volume. I'm trying to build a very smooth engine this time, and one factor is combustion chamber volume, which the experts say should be the same on each side. To measure this one fills the chamber with liquid and measures how much it takes. Since there are two holes for spark plugs, and I had no wish to ruin a pair of them with paint thinner (apparently the liquid of choice), I turned up a pair of plugs from aluminum and installed an o-ring on each to make a seal when they were screwed into the spark plug holes. I even found a scrap piece of clear plexiglass to cover the opening where the piston comes in, and got a hole drilled into the center of it without cracking it into a million pieces. A smear of light grease around the edges provided a good seal to the head, and I was all set to start measuring. I used a big horse syringe to load paint thinner into a graduated cylinder, stopping at precisely 100cc. Emptied the syringe, then pulled out precisely 35cc and loaded it through the hole in the plex into the combustion chamber. Filled the cylinder back up to 100cc and loaded up the cylinder with another 35cc, and now the thinner had trapped a bunch of bubbles under the plexiglass. One more 35cc dose but the bubbles wouldn't clear, so enough thinner was sucked out to drop the liquid away from the 'glass to clear them, and then very carefully and slowly the level was brought back up. The head wasn't exactly level, so the big bubble that formed was located off to the side of the filler hole and I had to tip the head to keep the bubble centered as I pushed the liquid out of the syringe. It was a real test of hand eye coordination, especially as the paint thinner caused the rubber seal in the syringe to swell making it difficult to push the plunger. But eventually I got all the bubbles out and the chamber completely filled to the bottom of the hole. I returned the leftover thinner to the graduated cylinder and found it had taken an additional 13cc to fill the chamber, for a total of 83cc. Not bad for a first try, but the scientific method calls for a statistically significant sample to evaluate experimental error. So all the thinner was sucked back out of the head and everything cleaned and dried with compressed air so the whole process could be repeated. After three tries all came up with 83cc plus or minus half a cc and it was time to move on to the other head. Same result there, and by then my back and shoulders were sore from hunching over the bench, it was getting cold in the garage, and it was time for dinner. Today I'll do a little math to figure out how much difference in compression ratio a half cc makes; then I'll know if my method is precise enough or I have to sharpen my pencil.

Inside a quick pizza and salad was good enough for dinner, but now a new chirping sound could be heard during pauses in the evening news. When it was over I muted the sound and listened and yes, something else was complaining, and it wasn't any of God's creatures. A new electronic devil had come to call. Not nearly as loud as the last one, and only a single chirp that repeated seemingly at random. It led me quite a chase through the hall, into the great room, then into the kitchen, laundry room, and even into the garage. At each place the sound seemed to be coming from somewhere close by, but not quite there. Oh the joys of an open floor plan and lots of hard surfaces perfect for making echos. So after half an hour of fruitless searching, I screened the latest episode of "Somebody's Gotta Do It" making plans at some future point to spend a night in a tree house in Oregon and ride both the zip line and Tarzan swing while I'm there. Tried to get through "60 Minutes" but found myself nodding off during the last segment. The chirps hadn't stopped, but they weren't loud enough to keep me awake and I went to bed.

Which brings us to why I'm updating the Good Morning thread at 3:45AM. At about 10:30PM those five obnoxiously loud beeps rang out again, and sure enough the smoke detector was once again demanding attention. :banghead: No choice but to push the reset button and head back to bed for another four or so hours of sleep before yet another reminder that I'd be back up on the ladder today. But by then I couldn't get back to sleep, so I thought I'd warn you guys to NEVER let anyone talk you into letting a GE Simon alarm system into your life. Having accomplished that, I think I'll try to get some more sleep. But first I'd better go push the reset button again first...

I used to do cylinder head volume checks, but the liquid we used non toxic anti freeze. It has a rust preventative in it, and isn't nasty to have on your hands. Paint thinner sounds bad.

 

[300UGUY]

Another day windy day here, one customer said it got up to 60 mph in some spots. Helped the wife out, then noticed that one sump pump didn't sound right. Took it out, cleaned off the intake, took the cover off removed the impeller, cleaned that off. Somehow it got gunked up. Works fine now. Took a few tries to get it hooked up with spraying all over, but that is par for the course.

Have a good one, guys!

 

[buckeyefarmer]

Wind has cranked up here. hate windy nights, too noisy.

 

[RoyJackson]

2015-11-13, 0245

47 right now...high of 51 and a bit overcast. Rain has passed...
Heating to Connecticut for work...won't be home until about 6 or so.