2001 Chrysler Sebring Water Inlet

Car-car started getting hot and steaming. I had dealt with the cooling system before. I would have tackled this repair myself except that I have not figured out a simple, easy way to bleed the cooling system. Last time I ended up getting sprayed with coolant and I wasn't eager to repeat the process. Take it to the shop.

Picked it up this afternoon. $200. Seems the water inlet housing on top of the motor had cracked. It's not a very big piece, maybe the size of your fist. It's made of plastic and it cracked, a common occurance according to my mechanic. It's a dealer-only item and it costs a hundred bucks, which is beyond ridiculous, except that it comes with a sensor. Oh, that makes it alright them. <begin sarcasm> Right. <end sarcasm>

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Nuke the Oil Spill?

A long time ago there was some concern when the Red Chinese got the bomb, as in nuclear. Not to worry, because even if they have the bomb, they have no way to deliver it: they don't have a missile that could do the job. But they don't need a missile, they could just ship it over as cargo and no one would find out until it was too late. Or they could just take it down to the Gulf of Mexico and drop it over the side, let it sink to the bottom and then detonate it. When it went off it would send a tidal way 200 miles inland on Gulf Coast of the US.

And now we want to use a nuke to try to and stop the BP oil leak in the Gulf. Hmm. Wonder if that is such a good idea. Of course, this is all just rumor and speculation. I guess we will just have to wait and see if any facts emerge.

The New Jim Crow

I just read a column by Leonard Pitts Jr. in our local paper, which prompted me to start writing this. At first I thought it was a column by William Raspberry, but then Wikipedia points out that William retired in 2005. So I got them confused. They are both black, and their columns sometimes show up on the opinion page.

Anyway, today's column (Google found it here) is about how the justice system is effectively persecuting blacks. The civil war was, what? 150 years ago. Since then there have been several landmark bits of legislation that have attempted to make blacks equal with whites. I suppose the last one was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I am beginning to wonder if we are fighting a loosing battle against human nature.

I like to think that I am not a racist, but then I live in an all white suburb in all white city in an all white state. I would have to go pretty far out of my way to discriminate against a black person. Now there are some things that are associated with blacks that I don't like (that whole gangsta / hip-hop thing mostly), but there are also things that are associated with whites that I don't like (opera, symphonies, art museums). Mostly I don't discriminate based on color. I mostly like people I know, and don't like people I don't know, never mind what color they are.

America is founded on certain principles, and they have served us very well. Well, most of us anyway. Some blacks have been able to succeed in our society, but apparently most haven't. Every time you turn around some one has uncovered another concerted effort to screw the black man. So I am beginning to wonder if we aren't trying to push big a rock up a hill, and the rock just doesn't want to go. Maybe it would be better if we were separated.

Then again, part of human nature is to wage war on our neighbors. The biggest sport among the South Seas Islanders was attacking neighboring tribes. Same with American Indians. Western Europeans did the same thing, but they did it on a bigger scale, and we made up some speeches full of fine words to justify it. We weren't simply slaughtering our neighbors, we were showing them the light, or the error of their ways, or more likely, eliminating heretical vermin from the earth.

So maybe we just don't have enough outlets for violence, especially for the police, who are trained in all sorts of violent techniques, but then are told never to use them unless circumstances warrant, and then they are supposed to pull these techniques out and dispense violence at a moments notice. Maybe that's why we still have laws against drugs. It provides an excuse to wage war on your neighbors. But we have a rule that lets people be excused from playing. If you aren't dealing drugs, we aren't going to bother you, but if you are, you are fair game. And if you hang with people who deal drugs, well, hey, we thought he was a dealer, that's why we shot him.

Top Gear - Bugatti Veyron

Top Gear must be my kind of show. I can sit and watch the whole thing all by myself, something that I cannot say for most of what is on TV. Today I watched an episode about the Bugatti Veyron, possibly one of the most amazing/wonderful/ridiculous cars ever built. I mean they took the Bugatti name, shoot they didn't just take it, they had to dig it up from a French graveyard and now they've stuck it on a car designed and built by Germans. They even stuck a character of the original Bugatti radiator grill on the front of the car. Why? Is it supposed to make it look like a Bugatti? But never mind all that, it's just me frothing at mouth, and it doesn't have anything to do with the car itself. The car itself, hmm, well, it's something else for sure. Based on it's price and performance you could call it ridiculous. I mean, where are you going to drive something like that? I suppose you could build a private road from your beach house to your mountain chateau or something. Then you might make good use of it.

On the other hand it is quite a feat of engineering. If you can find the right road, it can go 250 MPH, and it does it smoothly and comfortably. At that speed tires will last 15 minutes, and fuel will last 12. 12 minutes at 4 miles a minute will get you 50 miles down the road. That is pretty impressive. I'm thinking with that kind fuel economy, maybe a jet engine would be a better deal. Tires might last a little longer, too. Kind of rough on those following you around town though.

Let's just think about this for a minute. 250 MPH. LA to NY is 2500 miles. At 250 MPH you could be there in 10 hours, and no hassles with the airlines or terminals. Of course you would need an adequate road, and you would need to do something about fuel. But think of it. Just get in your car and drive. I could be in Seattle in 35 minutes. SF would only be about 3 hours. Of course, if you could afford this car, you could afford to hire a private jet to take you where you want to go.

My Aunt Margaret

I came across this while filing some pictures.

This is from a long time ago, probably in the 1940's.
She lived in New Mexico for most of her life.
First in Los Alamos, and then in Albequerque.
She passed away in October of last year.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Dream

As usual, the only significance of this dream was the level of detail and how much I remembered.

I was at my dad's house, a white clapboard bungalow with a detached single car garage in back. He had some kind of work surface, just an old board maybe two feet by three that had a piece of Formica on it. The Formica was held on by a single stove bolt in one corner, and it had come loose. The screw goes in through the Formica and comes out in a slot cut in the end of the board. The board has been around, the opening to the slot is well chewed. Getting the nut onto the end of the screw is no problem and it tightens up okay, except for that last little bit. It just won't snug up. I need a wrench, so I ask my Dad. He gets a screwdriver (I was using the screwdriver blade in my pocketknife) and a wrench. He puts the screw between his teeth in the side of his mouth and applies the wrench to the nut in the slot in the board. I apply the screwdriver to the screw he's holding in his teeth. Everything goes well until we get to that same point I was at before. There must be a burr or something on the screw and it is going to take some torque to get past it. I put my other hand on the screwdriver blade near Dad's mouth so that if it slips off the screw I won't jam the screwdriver all the way through his mouth. (Yes, I know, it doesn't make any sense. It was a dream. What do you expect?)

Now my mom shows up. She's going out and I ask her how long she is going to be gone. As usual I cannot get a straight answer from her. It's going to be few minutes, a couple of hours, five or six hours, what difference does it make? It makes a difference to me, I want to know whether I should wait, or whether I should just go now.

Don't you just love Looney Tunes?

1952 Chevrolet Pickup Truck

1952 Chevrolet Pickup Truck

Mine looked something like this (if you squinted your eyes). Mine had numerous flaws, but this gives you an idea.

I found this disaster when I was living in Houston many years ago, probably around 1975. I needed a cheap car and I found this thing advertised for $400. It was night when I went to look at it. The six cylinder motor was knocking. It had new red paint and good, late model bucket seats. I talked it over with my girlfriend at the time, but she didn't have a clue. I may have known something about mechanics, but I sure didn't know what the heck I was doing. I bought it. It must have been in a flood. The entire floor of the cab was rusted out, and the wood in the bed was half gone. The engine was a GMC 270 straight six that someone had transplanted into this vehicle. I pulled the engine and rebuilt it in the single car garage attached to our rental house. I think it must have cost me close to $600 in parts and machine shop work.

One of the first things to do when reassembling the engine was to put new freeze plugs in. These are little sheet metal cups that are a press fit in holes in the side of the block. The idea is that if someone doesn't put anti-freeze in the coolant, and the engine coolant ever freezes, the expansion of the ice will force these plugs out and save the block from cracking. The auto parts store didn't have the right size freeze plugs. They were some weird size like 1 21/32", only used on this particular engine. I didn't have time for this. I got the next size up, put a punch in the center, and beat on them until they were cone shaped and the diameter had shrunk enough for them to fit. What a pain.

I was trying to be methodical when I put it together. I even went to the trouble to plasti-gauge the main bearings on the crankshaft. This is a somewhat involved procedure:

• guess-timate the amount of clearance there should be,
• obtain the correct size of plasti-gauge,
• cut a length of plasti-gauge slightly shorter than the length of the bearing journal (not the diameter),
• assemble the bearing and cap,
• torque down the bolts to their specified values,
• take the bearing back apart, and
• compare the width of the now smushed plasti-guage to the chart on the package.

They were all a little on the close side. Now what do I do? I hadn't thought this far ahead. Well, phooey, I'll just bolt it together anyway.

Got the piston, rings, connecting rods and bearings all assembled. Now for the head. Everything goes well until I try to torque down the last head bolt. It's stripped. Great. That's just great. Pull all ninety zillion head bolts back out. Lift the hundred ton cast iron cylinder head off. Go to the auto parts store and spend another $20 for helicoil kit. Drill out the hole. Retap it with the special heli-coil tap. Screw the magic helicoil into the newly rethreaded hole. Put it all back together again. I suspect I used my new head gasket a second time, even though proper protocol says otherwise.

Helicoil

Cutaway of Helicoil installed in an aluminum casting

Helicoil Kit

Get down to the very end, and I have two bolts left over that screw into two holes at the bottom of the timing chain cover. Problem is, they don't hold anything together. The threads are in the cover itself. The holes behind the cover have no threads. I already had the oil pan on or I might have figured out what the problem was. As it was I left it, and it leaked, which was no big deal. All of my vehicles had always leaked. It was just a fact of life. It wasn't until a couple of years later that I figured out that the bolts were supposed to be inserted in their holes from inside the engine. The clear holes were in the front main bearing cap. The bolts went through these holes and screwed into the special tapped holes in the timing chain cover and pulled the bottom of the timing chain cover up against the front main bearing. Once I did that, which required removing the oil pan, the leak stopped. Huh, imagine that.

After I got done putting this monster back together, I painted the whole thing Caterpillar yellow. It was sort of impressive, if you are impressed by that sort of thing. I also hooked it up and ran it while it was sitting there in the garage. Just to make sure that it was going to work, you know. Here's a picture of a real Caterpillar engine, so you can get some idea of what it looked like. Getting the right shade of yellow on a computer monitor is a bit of a trick. I think this one is pretty close, at least on my screen. 

Caterpillar Engine

This page has some good illustrations of old Chevrolet 6 cylinder engines, both external, exploded views. They are very similar to my GMC engine.

Eventually got it back in the truck and got it running, which was great, for about three minutes. I figure that's how long it lasted before something else failed. I ended up replacing or repairing the:

• wiring
• transmission
• rear wheel bearings
• front wheel bearings
• steering joints
• tires
• front springs
• support frame for seats

I think I must have had to do something about the brakes because at one point I was having to fill the master cylinder with brake fluid every day. I left work one day in Austin and didn't have to use my brakes until I came to a stop sign at a major street and then I suddenly discovered I didn't have any brakes. That was exciting. I managed to slow down enough to make a right hand turn onto the street. Fortunately there were no cars coming. Eventually I was able to pull off the road and come to a stop. I must have fixed it because I kept driving it. I am pretty sure it wasn't the master cylinder. The master cylinder is mounted on the frame underneath the drivers feet. Crawling underneath wasn't a problem, it's a pickup truck after all, put the whole thing was completely corroded. Getting it apart would have been short work for a cutting torch, but I didn't have one of those. But evidently the master cylinder, in spite of being really ugly, wasn't the problem, because I didn't have to touch it.

The transmission was another learning experience. The first problem was the column shifter, never great to start with, it was completely hosed by the time it came to me. Fine, replace it with a floor shifter. The floor of the cab has plenty of holes, one more isn't going to make any difference. That worked for a bit, but then it started popping out of third gear. So I dropped the transmission and took it down to the junkyard to get a different one. Got one and put it in, and, great. This one pops out of first gear. Well, that sucks, but we can live with it for a bit. At least this stays in gear on the road.

I took both of them apart and reassembled them a couple of times, looking for something wrong, but never could find anything. I got to be pretty good at it. Manual transmissions are relatively easy, except for this one bearing in very center of things. It is an uncaged roller bearing, meaning the rollers are just in there loose. They are just enough to completely fill the space so they hold each other in alignment, so to speak. When you pull it apart these rollers fall out all over the bottom of the transmission. Putting it back together is a bit of a trick. The loose roller bearings that ride in a cup in the aft end of the input shaft and on the forward end of the output shaft. The trick is to pack rollers into the cup in the input shaft using really thick grease. The grease holds them in place while you slide the input shaft into position.

 
The problem with these transmissions was that the corners of the engaging teeth were just too worn. If I had both of them I could have probably made one good one, but I had to leave mine with them or pay the core charge. I never found out just what that was.

A year of two later I glommed onto a four speed from a friend who had an old Chevy that died. I took it to a shop and asked them to swap it out. I fully expected them to have to cut the driveshaft and weld it and balance it and all sorts of mystical stuff, but they just bolted it in. The U joint didn't even fit the yoke on the axle, they just tightened up the caps until it was secure. I was surprised. It worked fine.

This truck had a rear bumper made out of an old roadgrader blade edge. I needed a trailer hitch at some point, so I got an 18" long piece of 6" angle and welded it to the vertical face of the bumper. Some old geezer told me it wasn't going to work, the grader blade was hardened steel and would snap when I put a load on it. Yeah, sure, old man. Turns out he was right. Fortunately it didn't turn into a disaster, just another minor annoyance in everyday life.

Update: a couple of items I forgot that show just how old this truck was.

Timken Tapered Roller Bearing

Ball bearings in the front wheels. I wasn't long after this that everyone had changed over to Timken tapered roller bearings. The rear axle used rollers, but the front still had ball bearings.

Single Leading Shoe Drum Brake

 
Single leading shoe brakes. It would be decades before disc brakes became standard, but I thought all drum brakes had always been double leading shoe. With drum brakes, if the actuator pushes the shoe in the direction of rotation, then there is a kind of wedging action that makes the brake more effective. Going in the opposite direction you do not have this advantage. The brake had fixed pivots for the shoes at the bottom, so only one brake shoe got this mechanical advantage. Not long after this, the fixed pivots were replaced with a floating link, so both shoes were pushed in the direction of rotation.

Worm and Sector Steering Box

I suspect the steering gear was a simple worm and sector (above), not the fancy recirculating ball (below) that was the standard for a long time before rack and pinion took over.

Worm and Nut Steering Box

Update July 2015: Replaced original with copy from Google Drive that still had pictures.
Update November 2016 replaced missing pictures.
Update January 2022 replaced missing pictures.