Deja Juju

Five months ago Marc finished overhauling the engine in his Toyota Tercel. New pistons, bearings, rings, the works. Now it has developed a tic. This isn't good. It only shows up when the clutch pedal is depressed. Let off the clutch and the tic goes away.

What could this be? You

• push on the clutch pedal, 
• hydraulically it pushes on the lever 
• that pushes on the throwout bearing, 
• that pushes on the retraction fingers in the pressure plate (assembly), 
• that pull the actual pressure plate away from the clutch disk.

I wrote up an explanation of how a clutch works, just in case you want to know. You can read it here.
  The throwout bearing, the pressure plate and the disk are all rotating with the engine, so if pushing on the clutch pedal caused something to stick out, and there was anything for it to hit, well, that could be making the noise. I give this a low probability because 1) all the clutch parts are new, and 2) I've never heard of such a thing happening.

However, there is another, worser possibility, and that is that whatever bearing(s) are holding the crank in place, that is, that keep it from sliding end to end, have failed. When you step on the clutch pedal, and that mechanical chain reaction starts, it ends with the throw out bearing pushing on the clutch. If the clutch, which is mounted on the end of the crankshaft, is free to move along it's axis, that is what will happen. The bearing will push the clutch, and instead resisting the force of the bearing and forcing the pressure plate to disengage, it will just move away.

Underside of main bearing number three of Toyota four cylinder engine with main bearing cap removed.

So if these suspect bearing(s) have failed, then when you push on the clutch, the crank should slide end to end, and when we tested it, it did in fact move. Marc had cut a three inch hole in the right side inner fender so he could reach the bolt in the center of the crankshaft. If  you push against the end of the crank (we used a two foot length of pipe, engine not running, please) and have someone step on the clutch, you should not be able to feel it move. Mind you, you have to push against the crank pretty hard. The first time I did it I could feel a little tic when Marc stepped on the clutch. Marc tries it and then tells me to really lean into, and when I do and he steps on the clutch I can easily feel the crank move, I would say about an eighth of an inch, which is about a zillion times more than what the spec says.

Once upon a time, about a zillion years ago, when I lived in Austin I had a friend named Ayron who had a Toyota Corolla wagon, and he rebuilt the engine in that car. And sometime later the engine developed a problem, which turned out to be because the thrust bearings had failed.

It seems that on either side of the number three main bearings, there are flat surfaces that serve as thrust bearings to keep the crank from sliding end to end. For these to work properly, the matching surfaces on the crankshaft need to be a certain distance apart. When Ayron first took his crank to the machine shop, they neglected to check this critical measurement, and went and ground the rest of the bearing surfaces as specified. I am afraid this is the same thing that has happened to Marc. Toyota must be the only manufacturer that makes their engines like this.

Revolver Map

I don't know if I trust that thing. Whenever I bring up this page, the only recent hit is Hillsboro. OK, that's enough of that. Time to go do some real world stuff.

To My Commenters

Both of you. I apologize. I just discovered that Blogger has a Spam box where they have been sending my comments. While there were a couple that might have been Spam, it looks like the majority were not. Unfortunately, I don't know what posts they were attached to, and I am not sure I will be able to figure it out.

P.S. Does Spam really need to be capitalized? Yes, if you are talking about the canned meat product (delicious fried), it's a proper name. But if you are talking about advertising sent under cover as being actual communication, I do not think capitalization is warranted. Matter of fact, if I was Spam, I would be perturbed that my proper name was being taken in vain. I think all those spell checkers out there need to be aware of this fact.

P.P.S. Why is perturbed spelled per-, and perogative is spelled pre-?

Enter The BIOS, Part 3 and a 1/2

As I said, we watched "The Good Wife" over the net yesterday evening. We got it straight from CBS, not from one of those pirate sites. There were a few ads, but not nearly as many as you get with broadcast TV. However, the volume on the ads was astonishingly loud. Fortunately I was able to find the mute button (on the remote control, no, not that one, the other remote control. There, down at the bottom right corner). The video quality of the ads was substantially below that of the show, and even the different ads were of different quality.

At the end of the show they offer an opportunity to take a brief survey. Cool, I can tell them what I think. So I point and click and go to the next page. I do this for a couple of minutes, I am several pages into this thing, and I notice the little progress indicator at the top: I am 10% done. A brief little survey?!?! I don't think so. Either I imagined seeing the word brief (entirely possible) or they are big fat liars (also entirely possible). Smoke that, CBS.

Then there's the show. We've been watching it for a while now, a couple of years maybe, and it's been pretty good. [Warning: this may get a little gossipy] At the end of last season we found out that Kalinda (the really hot, female, very secretive private investigator at the law firm where Alicia (the star) works) had a one night stand with Peter Florick (Florik? Alicia's soon-to-be-ex-husband) some time ago, and Alicia goes ballistic (internally). I thought this was a little over the top. Here she has a friend (Kalinda), and she is on the outs with Peter, and she finds out about this ancient history, and she cuts her friend? What do I know? I am a man and a real person, and Alicia is a woman and a fictional character.

The main plot line was considerably more substantial being as it was about Jews and Muslims and murder and arrests and the machinations of lawyers working in the justice system. And politics. Don't forget the politics. Eli Gold is just (how do I say it?) pure gold.

Enter the BIOS, Part 3

 I keep using this title because it reminds me of Bruce Lee's "Enter The Dragon", not that his movies were any good, but because of the attitude he brought to his fights: Intense.

The more I play with the Zbox, the more problems I run into:

• the DVD player won't play movies,
• I can't get audio over the HDMI cable,
• the Linux desktop is just slightly too large for the screen,
• the screen saver turns off the TV (or maybe the TV turns itself off), which is good, but it won't turn it back on,
• some of the video you get over the net is not very good, but whose problem is that?

I don't know, every time I turn around it seems like something else is either broken or just not working.

For instance, in the course of trying to figure out why the DVD won't play, I try to play a music CD. It works fine (of course it would, I used the same optical drive to install Linux off of a CD-ROM), but the player program does not show the names of the tunes, it only shows the track number. Oh, yes, I remember running into this a long time ago on Windows. To find the names of the songs, you need to go to a database on the net, and using the playing times of all the songs, you can find out the name of the album and therefor the names of the various tracks. I think there was one check box or something that had to be enabled to turn this on.

Linux is not quite so wonderful (Linux is Lovely, Windows is Wonderful), you have to jump through a couple of hoops to find the names of the songs, and even then not everybody wants to play nice.

Banshee is name of the music player that comes with the current version (11) of Linux, but it has no capability of naming that tune. For that you need another program. To install the latest one (Picard) requires that you install a whole bunch of other stuff, and while it would be done automatically, I am just a little suspicious. I mean, this is a fairly straight forward proposition, why do you need to install 489 other pieces of stuff (stuff being a euphemism for a more vulgar term which I am refraining from using because I am trying to be civilized about this)?

So I look a little more and I find EasyTag, which doesn't require much of anything. I install it, and ask it to look up the names for the tunes on this CD, and it can't find anything. Grump. Why not? So I do a little exploring using the name of the artist (Leonard Cohen) and the name of the album (I'm Your Man) and I get back literally thousand's of matches. Okay, there's something funny going on here that I don't quite understand. I finally pick one and it seems to work, and now all the tracks I copied onto the hard disk have names that mean something.

And that is basically how it has been going. On the plus side, we were able to watch an episode of "The Good Wife" over the internet last night. I don't think the video was as clear as we used to get using the Frontier DVR, but it wasn't too bad.

Google Feedback

Blogger's editor is a little flakey, has been for a long time. My desk computer is being a little flakey also, so I can't really know whether the problem is with Blogger or with my computer, so I don't really feel I have solid ground from which to issue a complaint.

But now I've got the new whiz-bang Zbox, and while it has numerous problems, I am able to get on the net, which I have been using to try and fix these problems.

Since I am here, I thought I would go ahead and write a post about what's been going on, and since we are all new here: new hardware, Linux instead of Windows, and a newer version of Linux since the last I time I played with it, I would go ahead and try the new version of Blogger.

And what happens when I try to write a post? Blogger is still up to its' old tricks, but now we have a feedback button on the bottom, so let's give them a little, to wit: 

Why is the first line indented just a smidgen? This is not just a problem with the new interface, it's been around for a long time. If every time you pressed the Enter key, you got an indentation to start a new paragraph, that would be fine, but you don't. You only get one on the first line, which is dumb. And it isn't even a proper indent, which should be three or four proper characters (not a narrow character, like a lowercase L or i). If you indented after every Carriage Return, one wouldn't need to put in an extra blank line to separate paragraphs, and you could get more text on the screen. That may or may not be what you want, but this single little bitty indent at the beginning is just wrong.

P.S. What's the deal with "separate"? I swear this word gives me more trouble, or maybe Google is just screwing with me. It does not matter whether I spell separate with 2 a's and 2 e's (separate) or with 1 a and 3 e's (seperate), the spell checker always complains.

And while we are complaining about spell checker, why does it complain about a's, but not about e's?

Quote of the Day

"Facebook is like jail. You sit around and waste time, write on walls, and get poked by people you don't know." - Dustbury on Facebook, who got it from somewhere else.