I read about the coming demise of Pontiac the other day and it got me to thinking. Not about the loss of the brand, or the loss of all the really cool future Pontiacs that will never be made, but about the disintegration of the Pontiac team: all the people who worked on designing Pontiac cars will be cast to the winds.
The idea of a car is pretty simple. Actual cars are very complicated. Using a car requires only very limited knowledge of how it works. Cars need fuel, you purchase fuel at gas stations. Tires need air. If the air leaks out, the car doesn't go so well anymore. That's about it. Some people spend the time and effort to learn more about how they work, and use that knowledge to take better care of the machinery or even to effect repairs themselves, but that's their choice. It isn't really necessary.
The more you learn about cars, the more you realize how much you don't know. For instance, inside the typical internal combustion engine you have pistons sliding in cylinders, both of which are typically represented as being circular. Cylinders might be, but pistons are actually slightly oval in order to wear better and last longer. If you were rebuilding an engine yourself, you might be checking the dimensions of various parts to the nearest thousandth of inch. Manufacturers typically measure parts to the nearest ten-thousandth of an inch, and they do it with automatic machinery.
And then there are the materials. Cars used to be built of iron and steel, but I doubt there is any simple iron or steel in a modern car anymore. Every part is made from a specific alloy designed for that specific use, from fenders to gears, from seat frames to axles.
There are cars these days that cost a million dollars, should you want to spend that much. What you may not realize is that just about any modern car, if it was built in limited quantities like very expensive cars, would cost just as much, even your lowly Yugo. There is a tremendous infra-structure in place devoted to the mass production of automobiles. Volkswagen recently spent a billion dollars to build a new automobile factory in Germany. If they only built a thousand cars using that factory, the overhead alone would be one million dollars each.
Likewise, there is a tremendous amount of engineering and design work that goes into designing a new car, and even more that goes into designing the equipment and factory used to produce that new car. Putting together a team that can work together well enough to produce a good product can take years. And here we are dumping them on the street. Ah, good ol' American business sense. (Whoops, that was sarcasm. Bad me.)
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Monday, May 4, 2009
New Starter, Or Not
Got in my truck last Sunday and turned the key and was rewarded with a resounding click. Click? That's not good. Truck is ten years old, the battery has been replaced once, and with the way batteries fail these days (One day they are fine and the next they are kaput. It's not a gradual process any more.) it's probably time for a new one. I try jump starting it, but no help. Let the cables stay connected to the car-car's battery for a minute while it is running just in case, you know, the truck battery is really dead. No help. Get the VOM (Volt-Ohm-Meter) out. Battery shows 13 volts. Wedge the leads in the battery cable fittings and turn the key. Big fat click and the needle doesn't budge: rock steady at 13 volts. Okay, it's not the battery, it must be the starter. I suspect the contacts in the solenoid are probably shot. Give it a few more tries and it finally starts. Take it down to the shop and leave it with them.
They get around to sorting it out a couple of days later. Turns out it was just corrosion on the battery terminals. On one hand I am really embarrassed, I saw a bunch of green corrosion growing around the positive terminal, but I didn't figure it was a problem. Used to be (30-40 years ago) corroded battery terminals were the number one cause of starter problems with cars, but I haven't seen a terminal that was corroded enough to cause trouble since I don't know when. On the other hand, it doesn't make any sense. The meter was connected on starter side of the battery terminals, it wasn't connected to the posts, so the corrosion was between the meter and the battery. When I turned the key, the voltage should have dropped to zero, but it didn't. Something funny going on here. But it's working now, so I guess I shouldn't worry about it too much. Bugs me though.
They also fixed the flakey turn signal. The left blinker started flashing very fast a couple of weeks ago. Both front and rear bulbs are working, so I'm thinking there is a short in the wiring, either in the dinged front fender or in the tilt steering column. I read about that last one on the internet. The mechanics tell me they replaced a couple of bulbs and now it's fixed. This is another one I don't understand.
The blinker is essentially a resistive bimetallic strip. As current flows through it, the resistance causes it to heat up, the heat causes it to curl, and when it curls it breaks contact, the flow of current is interrupted, the light goes out, the strip cools off, it uncurls and finally makes contact again and the cycle repeats. The making and breaking of the contact is what gives you the tick-tick sound that goes along with the blinker. (Oops, wrong again. No bimetallic strip, simple heat expansion of spring steel. Should have known the auto industry would find a cheaper solution than using fancy bi-metal strips. Or at least that's what HowStuffWorks claims .)
If a bulb is burned out, less current will flow, and the blinker should blink slower. If you have a wire that is shorted to ground somewhere, more current will flow and the blinker will blink faster. Both lights were blinking much too fast, they changed the bulbs and now the lights are blinking at the correct rate. I don't get it. Changing light bulbs should not have had any effect.
Lastly, the automatic transmission needed two (!) quarts of fluid. There is no sign of a leak, so where did it go? I had another car that did this and it was caused by busted diaphragm in the vacuum operated downshift control. The engine was sucking the ATF up the vacuum line and burning it. No leak, but the fluid was disappearing. That's my suspect right now, but after these other two problems, I am not so sure I know anything about cars anymore.
They get around to sorting it out a couple of days later. Turns out it was just corrosion on the battery terminals. On one hand I am really embarrassed, I saw a bunch of green corrosion growing around the positive terminal, but I didn't figure it was a problem. Used to be (30-40 years ago) corroded battery terminals were the number one cause of starter problems with cars, but I haven't seen a terminal that was corroded enough to cause trouble since I don't know when. On the other hand, it doesn't make any sense. The meter was connected on starter side of the battery terminals, it wasn't connected to the posts, so the corrosion was between the meter and the battery. When I turned the key, the voltage should have dropped to zero, but it didn't. Something funny going on here. But it's working now, so I guess I shouldn't worry about it too much. Bugs me though.
They also fixed the flakey turn signal. The left blinker started flashing very fast a couple of weeks ago. Both front and rear bulbs are working, so I'm thinking there is a short in the wiring, either in the dinged front fender or in the tilt steering column. I read about that last one on the internet. The mechanics tell me they replaced a couple of bulbs and now it's fixed. This is another one I don't understand.
The blinker is essentially a resistive bimetallic strip. As current flows through it, the resistance causes it to heat up, the heat causes it to curl, and when it curls it breaks contact, the flow of current is interrupted, the light goes out, the strip cools off, it uncurls and finally makes contact again and the cycle repeats. The making and breaking of the contact is what gives you the tick-tick sound that goes along with the blinker. (Oops, wrong again. No bimetallic strip, simple heat expansion of spring steel. Should have known the auto industry would find a cheaper solution than using fancy bi-metal strips. Or at least that's what HowStuffWorks claims .)
If a bulb is burned out, less current will flow, and the blinker should blink slower. If you have a wire that is shorted to ground somewhere, more current will flow and the blinker will blink faster. Both lights were blinking much too fast, they changed the bulbs and now the lights are blinking at the correct rate. I don't get it. Changing light bulbs should not have had any effect.
Lastly, the automatic transmission needed two (!) quarts of fluid. There is no sign of a leak, so where did it go? I had another car that did this and it was caused by busted diaphragm in the vacuum operated downshift control. The engine was sucking the ATF up the vacuum line and burning it. No leak, but the fluid was disappearing. That's my suspect right now, but after these other two problems, I am not so sure I know anything about cars anymore.
Swine flu perspective
From Iowa Doc:
phones ringing off the hook at the clinic this am....seems a mother had visited Mexico, then brought her 5-yo son to a birthday party over the weekend . . . ...whoo-boy, panic central. I hear nice voices talking on the phone explaining what's in the news patiently... . . "Yes, Ma'am, only one death in the entire United States...yes ma'am....no ma'am, we are not recommending quarantine at this time..." Yet Iowans are reasonable people, and the din was limited to a few yahoos who boarded up their windows and are hunkered down, shotguns in hand, for anything that moves in the grass. The police have been dispatched to diffuse the situation.
Microphonic
For maximum performance and longevity, vacuum tubes should always be stored and transported in a safe and secure fashion. The TubeCube and the TubeCube Pro provide a customizable shock-resistant environment for your tubes and helps prevent them from becoming microphonic or damaged.Okay, "damaged" I understand, but microphonic? What the heck is that? From Wikipedia:
Microphonics describes the phenomenon where certain components in electronic devices transform mechanical vibrations (ringing) into an undesired electrical signal (noise). The term is derived by analogy to older microphones where that behavior is inherent in the design, while with modern electronics it is sometimes an intentionally added effect.Sometimes this technical stuff just comes out of left field and whacks you upside the head. It's perfectly obvious now how vibration could cause problems for vacuum tubes, but it's something I never heard of before. Weird.
When electronic equipment was built using vacuum tubes, microphonics used to be a very serious design problem. The charged elements in the vacuum tubes would vibrate and the motion would change the distance between the elements, producing charge flows in and out of the tube in a manner identical to a capacitor microphone. A system sufficiently susceptible to microphonics could experience feedback.
My son isn't the only one with the vacuum tube bug. Witness this new car radio, now with a vacuum tube. Update: it's not new, it dates from at least 2005.
And no discussion of vacuum tubes is complete without this video from Claude Paillard:
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Anti-Aircraft Fire
Talking about people shooting at blimps got me to thinking about people shooting at aircraft with small arms. I remember hearing something about how small arms fire was ineffective against aircraft. This always seemed pretty thin to me, but then I've never been in a position to actually try it.
I remember hearing a story about a couple of guys who were goose hunting in Colorado one year. Normally, goose hunting is done with a shotgun. Hunters shoot at low altitude when the geese come in to land. These two guys had been sitting in a blind waiting for geese to come in and land in the field where they had deployed their decoys, but no geese came. They could see the geese flying overhead, but they were too high up to reach with a shotgun. I imagine anything over a couple hundred feet would be too far. So one of them pulled out a rifle and took aim on one of the high flying geese. They pulled their triggers together, one the rifle, the other the shotgun, hoping the sound of the shotgun would mask the crack of the rifle, which was, after all, illegal for goose hunting. And they got their goose. So you can hit flying objects with a rifle.
I was just reading a book about Iraq and they are flying a C-130 Hercules from Kuwait to Baghdad at altitude of 200 feet. They are flying that low so as to avoid small arms fire. Just before they land they go up to 500 feet to deploy flaps and landing gear. This would seem to be the most vulnerable portion of the flight, but as it is near the airport, possibly also the most secure. The flying at 200 feet doesn't make sense to me. Anyone with a gun who was ready should have been able to hit the plane. If they were flying at even 10,000 feet of altitude I would think they would be out of reach of small arms. Perhaps high speed and low altitude does not give people on the ground enough time to get ready. You hear the plane coming and think, "it's American Imperialists, where's my gun?" and zoom, the plane has come and gone. Also, if you were flying at a high altitude, it would take time to descend and you would be doing that over the Baghdad, in full sight of a city full of people with guns.
So I'm looking on the web for information and I come across this document:
It's written by a couple of guys from China. The Chinese may not have stinger missiles, but they do have rifles and machine guns. Who said: "you don't go to war with the army you want, you go to war with the army you have"? (It was Rumsfeld.)
I remember hearing a story about a couple of guys who were goose hunting in Colorado one year. Normally, goose hunting is done with a shotgun. Hunters shoot at low altitude when the geese come in to land. These two guys had been sitting in a blind waiting for geese to come in and land in the field where they had deployed their decoys, but no geese came. They could see the geese flying overhead, but they were too high up to reach with a shotgun. I imagine anything over a couple hundred feet would be too far. So one of them pulled out a rifle and took aim on one of the high flying geese. They pulled their triggers together, one the rifle, the other the shotgun, hoping the sound of the shotgun would mask the crack of the rifle, which was, after all, illegal for goose hunting. And they got their goose. So you can hit flying objects with a rifle.
I was just reading a book about Iraq and they are flying a C-130 Hercules from Kuwait to Baghdad at altitude of 200 feet. They are flying that low so as to avoid small arms fire. Just before they land they go up to 500 feet to deploy flaps and landing gear. This would seem to be the most vulnerable portion of the flight, but as it is near the airport, possibly also the most secure. The flying at 200 feet doesn't make sense to me. Anyone with a gun who was ready should have been able to hit the plane. If they were flying at even 10,000 feet of altitude I would think they would be out of reach of small arms. Perhaps high speed and low altitude does not give people on the ground enough time to get ready. You hear the plane coming and think, "it's American Imperialists, where's my gun?" and zoom, the plane has come and gone. Also, if you were flying at a high altitude, it would take time to descend and you would be doing that over the Baghdad, in full sight of a city full of people with guns.
So I'm looking on the web for information and I come across this document:
THE TEST TECHNICAL RESEARCH OF SHOOTING PRECISION
ON ANTI-AIRCRAFT MACHINE GUN
ON ANTI-AIRCRAFT MACHINE GUN
from the:
23RD INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON BALLISTICS
TARRAGONA, SPAIN 16-20 APRIL 2007
TARRAGONA, SPAIN 16-20 APRIL 2007
It's written by a couple of guys from China. The Chinese may not have stinger missiles, but they do have rifles and machine guns. Who said: "you don't go to war with the army you want, you go to war with the army you have"? (It was Rumsfeld.)
My Near Brush With Infamy
Fifteen years ago, when we decided to build a new house in Hillsboro, we put our house in Beaverton up for sale. We talked to three realtors. The first guy wanted to list it at $135,000. He claimed he could sell it in a day. He had big, fat three ring binder full of deals he had closed in days or even hours. Thanks, but no thanks. The second was a lady from Coldwell Banker who wanted to list it for $145,000. That probably would have been the smart thing to do. Then we talked to our local neighborhood realtor lady, Maxine. She thought she could get $155,000 for it. As we weren't in any particular hurry, after all, our new house is just starting construction and won't be ready for six months, let's give her a shot. Maybe she will come through.
Well, time went by and nothing happened. Months go by and we are starting to wonder. Finally she puts together a deal for the full price, but we will have to carry a second mortgage for $20,000. This isn't something I was looking for, but it gets us out from under our mortgage, so we agree. The idea is the owner will make payments for a few years until his credit rating improves and he can refinance the whole shebang and we would be paid off.
All goes well for a couple of years and then he stops making payments. Disaster hit this guy. His father dies, his son contracts brain cancer and dies, and he has a heart attack. He recovers from his heart attack, but now he is not well enough to continue running his carpet cleaning business, so he falls back on his former profession of accounting.
I talk to him, and I talk to a lawyer. I could foreclose on him, but first I would have to buy his first mortgage from the bank, which means I would have come up with a 100 and some odd thousand dollars. This gives me pause. I decide I will let him slide for awhile, and it's a good thing I do.
The next week this guy is the subject of Margie Boule's column. Margie is our local paper's official bleeding heart columnist. That's all I would have needed: to be portrayed as the black hatted villain in the heart wrenching tale of woe. I could just see the headlines: hard-hearted local man casts hard working immigrant family out into the street.
Eventually, after about a year or so, he got back on his feet and resumed making payments. A couple years after that he got a new loan (with a lower interest rate) from a local bank, and paid us off. And Margie never called me on the carpet.
Well, time went by and nothing happened. Months go by and we are starting to wonder. Finally she puts together a deal for the full price, but we will have to carry a second mortgage for $20,000. This isn't something I was looking for, but it gets us out from under our mortgage, so we agree. The idea is the owner will make payments for a few years until his credit rating improves and he can refinance the whole shebang and we would be paid off.
All goes well for a couple of years and then he stops making payments. Disaster hit this guy. His father dies, his son contracts brain cancer and dies, and he has a heart attack. He recovers from his heart attack, but now he is not well enough to continue running his carpet cleaning business, so he falls back on his former profession of accounting.
I talk to him, and I talk to a lawyer. I could foreclose on him, but first I would have to buy his first mortgage from the bank, which means I would have come up with a 100 and some odd thousand dollars. This gives me pause. I decide I will let him slide for awhile, and it's a good thing I do.
The next week this guy is the subject of Margie Boule's column. Margie is our local paper's official bleeding heart columnist. That's all I would have needed: to be portrayed as the black hatted villain in the heart wrenching tale of woe. I could just see the headlines: hard-hearted local man casts hard working immigrant family out into the street.
Eventually, after about a year or so, he got back on his feet and resumed making payments. A couple years after that he got a new loan (with a lower interest rate) from a local bank, and paid us off. And Margie never called me on the carpet.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Inflatables
I was talking to a blimp guy the other day and he mentioned that the blimps they built use a special low-permeability skin, and I thought that's what we need in inner tubes for bicycle tires, especially for road bikes. I mean, how many times should you have to pump up a tire? You need to inflate car tires maybe once or twice a year, if that. High pressure (100 PSI) road bike tires have to be pumped up durn near every day, or at least once a week. So maybe this blimp material would be good for bicycle tires.
Probably not, blimps don't run high pressure, they have enormous volume relative to surface area, and the skin doesn't need to be flexible. Actually, the less flexible the better. Still, you would think someone would have come up with a better material for bicycle inner tubes. This is one of the big bug-a-boos of high technology. We can build carbon fiber frames that weigh next to nothing, but we cannot build an inner tube that will hold it's pressure. I put this in the same category as shoe laces: places where high technology has fallen on it's big fat face.
The blimp guy also mentioned that the military had been looking at using blimps for aerial reconnaissance. Wouldn't they be easy to shoot down? Well, yes, if you have a weapon that can reach them, like anti-aircraft missiles or fighter aircraft, but regular small arms are not much of a threat. You don't have to be too high up to be out of reach of even a high powered rifle. WWII Bofors 40 mm anti-aircraft gun was effective up to about a mile and a half of altitude. Using our old reliable physics formulas, a bullet fired with a muzzle velocity of 2500 FPS (feet per second), could theoretically reach an altitude of 18 miles , but that's without considering air resistance. And air resistance is crucial. A high velocity bullet traveling horizontally initially loses one FPS of velocity for each foot traveled . So being a mile high should put you out of the reach of small arms, and still put you close enough to the ground to be able to see what's going, especially with most any kind of optics.
Bullet holes by themselves are not a big problem. The holes they make are small, the volume of the blimp is so large, and the pressure so low, that a single bullet hole poses no real threat. The promotional blimps you see flying around sporting events seem to act as bullet magnets for any yahoos in the neighborhood, so the blimp people are very familiar bullet holes.
The big problem with blimps is not with flying them, but landing and launching. A steady breeze they can handle, but when it gets really windy, you also tend to get gusts and changes of wind direction, and those kind of things make a blimp's life miserable. So small unmanned aircraft seem to be the military's preferred method.
Probably not, blimps don't run high pressure, they have enormous volume relative to surface area, and the skin doesn't need to be flexible. Actually, the less flexible the better. Still, you would think someone would have come up with a better material for bicycle inner tubes. This is one of the big bug-a-boos of high technology. We can build carbon fiber frames that weigh next to nothing, but we cannot build an inner tube that will hold it's pressure. I put this in the same category as shoe laces: places where high technology has fallen on it's big fat face.
The blimp guy also mentioned that the military had been looking at using blimps for aerial reconnaissance. Wouldn't they be easy to shoot down? Well, yes, if you have a weapon that can reach them, like anti-aircraft missiles or fighter aircraft, but regular small arms are not much of a threat. You don't have to be too high up to be out of reach of even a high powered rifle. WWII Bofors 40 mm anti-aircraft gun was effective up to about a mile and a half of altitude. Using our old reliable physics formulas, a bullet fired with a muzzle velocity of 2500 FPS (feet per second), could theoretically reach an altitude of 18 miles , but that's without considering air resistance. And air resistance is crucial. A high velocity bullet traveling horizontally initially loses one FPS of velocity for each foot traveled . So being a mile high should put you out of the reach of small arms, and still put you close enough to the ground to be able to see what's going, especially with most any kind of optics.
Bullet holes by themselves are not a big problem. The holes they make are small, the volume of the blimp is so large, and the pressure so low, that a single bullet hole poses no real threat. The promotional blimps you see flying around sporting events seem to act as bullet magnets for any yahoos in the neighborhood, so the blimp people are very familiar bullet holes.
The big problem with blimps is not with flying them, but landing and launching. A steady breeze they can handle, but when it gets really windy, you also tend to get gusts and changes of wind direction, and those kind of things make a blimp's life miserable. So small unmanned aircraft seem to be the military's preferred method.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
