There, I Fixed It!

I have a chair in my office that has one of those pneumatic height adjusters. I've had the chair for I don't know how long and it won't hold it's position any more. So I fixed it. I was thinking of submitting it to the website (There, I Fixed It.), but I thought it's really not Rube Goldberg enough to be worthy, but my blog? Heck yeah! That's a u-bolt clamp for an antennae I found in my junk box clamped onto the seat post cylinder rod. The chair is on it's side.

I always thought these pneumatic cylinders were just begging for a come down. I mean they depend on the seals and valves ABSOLUTELY NOT leaking. This requires a perfect finish on the piston rods, the valve seats, every portion of the device were air could leak through. And then you need plastic/rubber seals that never wear out. It just seemed to be too much much to ask for. But this is only the second failure I've encountered. I replaced the gas lift struts on my wife's SUV last year.

Before we had pneumatic cylinders in office chair posts, we had the big metal screw with a collar that you twisted to adjust the height. The collar contained a bearing that allowed the chair to swivel, and some kind high drag internal threads that insured that it would not rotate on the big screw and change the seat height. They were kind of a pain to adjust. You had to tip the chair on it's side, or get down on the floor in order to reach the nut. On pneumatic chairs, you simply pull the little lever on the side of the chair that you can easily reach from where you are sitting.

So it looks like automated machining (CNC) has reached the point where it is cheaper to make a simple high precision piece than a simpler, cruder device.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture. Also, the clamp did not really fix the chair, the surface of the chrome shaft was too hard for the clamp to get a purchase, so it slide down a bit, not as much as before, but it didn't hold right at the top either. The clamp is still there and I am still using the chair. Not bad for a $40 chair from Office Depot.

Radio

I've been driving my son to school the last two weeks. Parking is atrocious the first two weeks of the term. For some reason, things settle down and it then becomes possible to find a parking space. At least I hope that's what happens.

John brings his iPod and we play it through my truck's stereo using one of those MP3-to-cassette adaptors. Once he left his iPod in the truck and I was able to listen to it on the way back. It was great, much better than listening to the radio. I am almost to the point of getting my own. Why are radio stations so terrible? I hear nothing over the air that sounds anything like the stuff my son has on his iPod. Is his taste so exotic that there is no market for it? Or are radio stations just so locked in some alternate reality that they cannot comprehend something different?

Anyway, I was on my way across town this afternoon, sans iPod, and I did not find anything on the FM dial that appealed to me, so I punched the button and tried AM. Here at 550 we have a couple of people talking about criminal websites (darkmarket.com for one), and the basic idea is trust. Now where I have heard that before? Oh, that's right, yesterday, right here on my very own blog.

In reply to that post Iowa Andy sent me a picture of his closet full of fake gold:

I am like so jealous dude!

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.

Airplane Story

Marc retold an old airplane story at lunch. I don't recall recording it, so here goes. Stop me if you've heard this before.

Many years ago a guy he knows takes off from the Hillsboro airport in a Cessna 172. He has reached an altitude of 100 feet or so when the tip breaks off one of the blades of the propeller. The tip flys straight to the ground, bounces off the concrete runway, flies back up, hits the plane and punctures the gas tank. Meanwhile the unbalanced propeller has caused the engine to start vibrating madly and before our hero can shut it down, it has broken loose from it's mountings and has fallen off the front of the airplane. Normally, this would be the prelude to a fatal plunge to the ground as the complete airplane is balanced, and without the engine it is unbalanced and unflyable. Fortunately, the engine doesn't fall completely off, it is hanging on by some wires and cables. The pilot is able to turn the plane and land it in the parking lot. He walked away, and as we all know, any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

Update: I got to wondering about just how fast the tip of that propeller was going, and then I remembered that airplane engines need to turn slower than you might want in order to keep the tips of the prop below the speed of sound. I checked out the numbers and for this plane it comes out to 785 feet per second or 0.7 Mach, so it's well under the speed of sound, but still moving at a pretty good clip. Matter of fact 785 fps puts it in the range of a bullet fired from a handgun. So, yeah, wango!

Tungsten

We were talking at lunch today about the morality of walking away from a home loan when you are underwater, financially speaking. I'm of the opinion that morality doesn't play into it. It's like in the gangster movies where the one mob guy tells the other mob guy just before he plugs him: it's nothing personal, it's just business. Banks are amoral as they come. It's always just business with them, or at least you hope so. So if it's just business for them, it shouldn't be any more than that for you.

Which got us started talking about trust and how so many things that we take for granted operate on trust. Like grocery stores. Don mentions that three or four hundred years ago things weren't like this. Marc points out that they are not like that right now down in the Caribbean. If you found a store like an American grocery store, someone from the store would follow you around as you made your way down the aisles. People were only admitted on a limited basis. The hoi polloi were kept out by an iron curtain.

Shoot, you don't have to go to the Caribbean, you can find this kind of thing in downtown Chicago: 7-11's where everything is locked up. You want something, you ask for it.

I remember a lesson in grade school about the advent of self serve stores and how it was a great boon. Used to be everything was behind the counter and you asked the clerk for what you wanted. At the time, it was presented (or I understood it as) a better, more modern idea had supplanted an old, out dated one. Now I think it was our society had reached a level of trust were a self serve store was a viable idea. Evidently there are some places in our country where the level of trust has not reached this level. Or perhaps it is falling.

Now while we are talking about trust and money, Don trots out a new one: the gold in Fort Knox is fake! All those bars of gold are actually bars of tungsten covered with a thin veneer of gold. This was discovered when the US had to make a payment to China and China insisted that the gold be tested. This sounded both plausible and outlandish, so I did a little checking. I found the same story repeated, almost verbatim on several web sites. This one seems to be the original. No reports about it from any recognized news organization, but then if this were a real conspiracy, there wouldn't be, would there?

You know, if you think about it, it does make a lot of sense. I mean what's the point of keeping all that gold locked up in a vault? Any material is only really valuable if you can use it for something, and using it to keep the floor of a vault flat does not really sound very valuable. I mean I could say I have a ton of gold in my basement, and who's to say I don't? Because I wouldn't do that, I would sell it off and invest the proceeds in something useful, like building a factory, or buying a Ferrari or something. There is just something wrong about keeping gold locked up.

Anyway, while I was poking around looking for info on this story I stumbled across these photos on a Chinese Tungsten site (where they are extolling the virtues of fluorescent and LED lights. Huh? You are panning your own product? Do I smell big brother?) I believe these are tungsten elements going rapidly up in smoke. Kind of cool I thought.

Oh yes, the tungsten for gold substitution? It might actually work. Tungsten & Gold have very similar densities. A bar of gold weighs about 33 pounds. A similar sized bar of Tungsten would be about one ounce lighter. As I suspect each bar is weighed individually, this would not matter so much. Only if you actually did an accurate measurement of the volume and calculated the density, or actually drilled a hole in it, would the deception be discovered. And why should anyone suspect anything? I mean the bars have all the authentic marks on them, and they're locked in US Government vault. The Government wouldn't lie, would they?

Update January 2017 replaced missing pictures.

Spider for the Day

I think this guy was a bit chilly. He was out in the garage.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.

Clouds

It's been kind of windy, gray and rainy today. Driving home this afternoon I saw this patch of blue. Kind of cool I thought. The cream colored clouds are not very high up. The white ones are much higher. It was very apparent as I was driving along. The cream colored ones were sliding along relative to the white ones.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.

Honda & Rube Goldberg

Marston sent me a link to a wonderful video of some skydivers spelling words in the sky. They weren't in English, so I went to Google to translate them, which mostly failed, as usual. But another click and I found a site that reviewed the ad, which is what it is, and translated the words as well. And on that site I found this video.

I generally don't care for Honda products. I think they are overpriced for what they deliver, but evidently a lot of people disagree with my assessment. Seems like there were a spate of these Rube Goldberg type videos last year, but this one has got some extra clever bits in it. I especially like the power window and the windshield wipers. And I do have to agree with the sentiment at the end.