Sometimes I make things that actually work.

I haven't posted, but I've been busy.

Today, for example.

Continued work on converting my milling machine to Computer Numeric Control.  It will be done soon, and I'll be able to produce much higher quality parts on the mill.

I also tore down the rear brake caliper on the Turbo Maggot.  It was incredibly gunked up, so I'm letting it soak in the parts washer for a couple of days to clean it up.  Once it's done and working, I'll do the same on the front brakes.

I did some work in the garden today.  The mint is taking over, so I broke out my trusty sickle and hacked it back to a stump.  It'll be back...

I've also been planning to build a Turbo Encabulator.

I finished the welding on the rain barrel platform today.  Now I just need to get some wood to make a top and sides for it.  It's going to double as a small storage area underneath.  I'll probably put a hose reel in there so that the whole setup will be nice and clean looking.

I leveled the ground under it so it won't be on a tilt.  I still need to hook up the new downspout and block off the old one.

And I need to find one more rain barrel that matches the two I already have and it will be complete.

I got the rain barrels together, but was disappointed by the trickle of water that they produced.

Part of that is the valves I bought, which just don't flow a lot of water.

The other problem is that the barrels are on the ground.  So I'm fixing that.

At the moment I'm taking a break from welding together a platform out of my favorite material, disused bedframes.  The basic shape of it is done, but there's more to do.

One gallon of water weighs 8.35 lbs.
Each barrel holds 55 gallons.
Three full barrels will weigh 1337.75 pounds.  That's close to three quarters of a ton.

So it's important that this platform be very strong and sturdy.  To improve the strength of the basic table shape that I have now, I'll be adding a lot of angle braces.  The way that something like this would collapse would be for a leg to begin tilting, which puts more side force on that leg, which bends it further, and the whole structure rapidly collapses.  And then 165 gallons of water either crashes onto the air conditioner, spills onto the ground, or goes through my bedroom window and floods my house.

I'll be overbuilding this structure to prevent that.

Yesterday I spent three hours tilling the garden to get it ready for the fall planting.  I know, I'm a little late, but so was the rain.

I put in snap peas on the trellises and lemon cucumbers on the ground.  Since I only spent a couple of bucks on seeds, it won't be a great loss if this harvest fails.

Today I set up the soaker hoses for the one day a week that I'm allowed to use them.  The rest of the time I'll have to hand water, which I dislike because I don't believe I'm saving any water at all.

Don't get me wrong, the watering restrictions do save water, because the selfish twits who leave their sprinkler running all night now have to stand in their yard and hold a hose.  THEY use less water.  But since I never water my lawn, and had the garden irrigation on a timer, and did the minimum watering I could, the restrictions don't change much for me.

I did lay out the hoses to be much more efficient.  Before they were just back and forth in rows across the garden.  With the cucombers, which root in a single spot, I was able to have two to three turns of hose around each plant, and then a straight run to the next plant.  In a quick test, this worked very well to soak the spot where the roots will be without wasting much water on the rest of the dirt.

I also made a berm around each circle of hose, so the water will stay in place instead of running off somewhere else.



Tonight I started converting my two disused jalapeno barrels into rain barrels.  Once the glue and sealant is dry, I'll have to cut and move my downspouts so that they'll fill the barrels.

The biggest dilemma I have is that 90% of my roof drains at a single downspout right by my front door.  If I put a rain barrel there, it would mean that it would be blocking the walkway to my front door.  I think I have a solution for the problem, but it will take some work.

Stay tuned.

Last week I posted about Toffee Balls, my neighbor's cat, being hit by a car.

Tonight I went over to visit and noticed that unseelie_sidhe was petting a cat.  I looked at it for a minute and then said,"Huh?"

I've never been quite so shocked and confused.  It was Toffee Balls, BACK FROM THE DEAD.  He'd been waiting for them when they got home this afternoon.

We don't know where he was, but he was sporting a new flea collar, so somebody had taken him in and probably kept him inside.

There are some unanswered questions now.

Where was he?

Who took him in?

And who's cat did we bury?



Toffee Balls sleeping off a long two weeks of adventure.

Update time!

Day 6.  Fixing the fuel leak.  I love the simple repairs.  I was all set to repair the petcock, but instead I just had to buy a couple feet of fuel line and put it on.




Day 7.  Taking the clutch apart and maybe finding the problem.  What do you think of my diagnosis?  What's the solution?




Cheers,
Fred

I just heard about this website today, and I'm well and truly excited.

http://smartflix.com/

This is like Netflix, but all the videos are instructional.  Do you want to learn blacksmithing?  Cooking?  Carpentry?  How to fly a plane?  They've got videos for that and more.

Unlike Netflix, you pay a rental fee for each video, and the video has to be returned in a week.

I think that this is going to become a very cool resource for all sorts of hobby minded people.


On to the CX turbo.  I fixed the fuel leak.  It was just a cracked fuel line.  A couple of feet of new fuel line and ten minutes of work solved it.  With that done, I was able to run the bike without fear of a fire.  I warmed it up and gave it a good listen.

It sounds...horrible.  There's a rattling sound from the engine that sounds like somebody's shaking a box of rocks.  I thought I might have a bad cam chain tensioner, which these bikes are known for.  If so, it would have meant a complete engine removal to fix it.

But then I pulled in the clutch and the sound went away, leaving a smooth running engine.  So the problem is either in the clutch or transmission.  Hopefully it's the clutch, since that's very easy to get to and take apart.  I'll be getting into it this weekend and am hoping it will be a relatively minor problem.

Looking at the reed valve in the intake and being confused.

Poking at the turbo with a stick to see if it'll try and bite me.

Adding fuel and hitting the starter.

I've got some questions about the bike.  Hopefully I'll get answers.

In this segment I repair the electronic fuel injection (EFI) with using a medium sized hamster, two fistfulls of basmati rice, and high pressure cottage cheese.




I also bled the brakes until they worked the way they are supposed to.  You gotta be able to stop before you can go.

Fred

God damn it.

thingswhatimade.livejournal.com/2008/12/15/



We'll miss you, Toffee Balls.

In this segment, I get the ignition system back into working order using nothing more than some scrap wire, two spark plugs, wire cutters, and the amazing power of my brains.

For a while now it's been clear to me that a lot of what I write about is lost on people because they cannot visualize what's going on.  The few youtube videos I've posted, however, have been quite popular amongst a certain demographic.

The shed-dwelling, grease monkey demographic, that is.

I've decided to up the ante as I get this second turbo bike working.  I'm making a video blog of my work so that you can watch as I make progress on this bike.  Here's day 1.




Enjoy!

I've been sick all weekend with swine flu, black plague or some other malady.  I didn't go to work because of it, but even so, I couldn't sit still.

So I went out and picked up a cart for my latest toy, an acetylene oxygen welding rig.

A little backstory here.  I met Joe H, father of lisastrawberry  and snortleypie , a while back.  He's quite a craftsman, and still produces some impressive woodwork.  But he'd decided to pass the torch on metalworking.

And he literally passed the torch to me.  He gave me an absolutely smoking deal on this setup.  Two tanks, regulators, a regular torch and a Dillon MKIII torch  To explain what a good deal this was, and what a good guy Joe is, all I have to say is that he took no money at all for about $800 worth of equipment.  Instead he asked me to make a donation to the food bank, which I was glad to do.

I got the decades old regulators rebuilt, bought a new hose, replaced some old dry o-rings, and today I picked up a rolling cart to hold the gas bottles.  With everything in place, I sparked it up.

It all works well, and I can already tell that I am going to absolutely love the Dillon torch.  It's ergonomic, it's very fuel efficient, and it produces a lovely little flame for both welding and cutting.

A normal torch, like this one will weld or it will cut, but to change over you have to break out the wrenches and swap tips.  With the Dillon, you just squeeze a trigger and it goes from weld to cut.  It's very impressive.

My next step will be to set up a work area for this in the back yard.  Unlike the TIG machine that I already own, an acetylene system should not be used indoors.  It makes too much smoke and would stink up the house.  But it's going to add a new level of capability to the Pirate Machine Shop.  I've got projects in mind as soon as I get my torch welding skills back up to par.

What's better than having a turbocharged motorcycle?



( Can't solve the riddle? Click here. )

I rode the bike to work today, and got to experience how it behaves in traffic.

Feature 1.  Sometimes while sitting at a light and idling, the bike's engine will slow down and then die.  It will restart easily enough, but this is not fun and is rather embarrassing, especially since I had just pulled up next to an R1 the first time this happened.  Turning up the idle seems to prevent this from happening, but that's not a good solution.

Feature 2.  Coming home, I pulled into the driveway and put the bike in neutral to let it idle and cool the turbo down.  It began to run rough, and I saw that cylinder #1 was no longer firing.  (A triple EGT gauge is great here.  I can look and see which exhaust pipe is cold.)

Revving the engine didn't bring cylinder 1 back, so I suspect that I fouled the spark plug.  I'll get into it this weekend.  I need to put the laptop on the bike and see if I can get a data log of the problems happening.

I put on a new battery, so hopefully that will fix the sensor spikes that I've been seeing in the datalogs.  Battery voltage would fall and all the other sensors would shoot off to infinity, then the system would rapidly recover.  The bike would not even stumble when this was happening because it all took place in a hundredth of a second.  But it is a problem.  I've been hoping that it was just the old battery acting up.

And I think the throttle position sensor may be bad.  That's an easy replacement, so I'll do that as soon as I get some more money back in the bank.



Thus Sunday I'll be going to www.airheadsalvage.com's site to rummage for parts, and to pick up the owner's Honda CX650 Turbo.  I'm hoping that I can get it running for him in exchange for bike parts.  Stay tuned.

I've been continuing the tweaking of the Black Bike.  It's run quite well after throwing far too much money away on a dynamometer tune.

It's still had a nasty stutter when I roll on the throttle, so I've been chasing that down by dialing in the acceleration fueling.

Last night I changed two values and now the bike is quite happy.  No more stutter at low throttle movements. 

The values?  One was the Accel_Time, which controls how long the computer adds extra fuel after the throttle is opened.  It went from .2 to .1 seconds.  The other value was the extra fuel amount for low throttle movements.  It went from 4ms to 3ms.  (Add four milliseconds to the fuel squirt, changed to three milliseconds)

The bike managed to scare me a bit last night when the first gear acceleration was more than I was ready for.  I thought I was going to slide off of the seat and land crotch first on the rear wheel.

The brakes are not adequate for the power it has now.  They'll stop it, but after riding my FZ6 with its four piston calipers grabbing floating rotors, the two piston Brembo units on the Black Bike are just not good enough.

I'm on the hunt for parts.  A 17" three spoke front wheel, either from a K1100RS, or an R1100 R, RS or RT.  Brake rotors to match, as well as calipers and a master cylinder.  This will give me modern brakes and front tire.  I may pursue a front suspension upgrade as well.

The bike's finished, but it's not "finished."

I'll be down at Lovejoy's later today to watch Moto GP, and naturally I'll be parking the beast in front to show it off a bit.  Hopefully it won't choose that moment to break down and embarass me.

Do you know how when you fry onions in butter, the smell is overpoweringly good?

Somebody, somewhere, with an IQ of about eleventy-billion, noticed this wonderful smell and said,"I bet I could make a pie out of that."

And onion pie was born.  It's like a quiche, but with a lot less egg and a lot more onion.  It may not be healthy, but damn is it yummy.

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/onion-pie-recipe.html

There's other variations of this, so hunt around and try it.  It's good.

I've gotten in the habit of doing this once a month.  It's really simple.  You just download BitPim and get a Bluetooth adapter for your PC.  You can connect wirelessly to the phone and save every bit of data from it.  I just did it, and my phone wasn't even in the same room.

Losing your phone sucks.  Losing your contacts, notes, pictures, mp3s and calender info really sucks.  So the ability to make a backup of that data is a useful skill.

Since my Glorious Victory, I've been keeping my head down and not posting to LJ.  It doesn't mean that I haven't been accomplishing things, though.

I've kept busy on the bathtub.  Making the skirt to cover up the motors was more complicated than I thought, since I will accept no less than perfection.  It needs to look like the removable panels are not actually removable.  So I'm working on that slowly but surely.

The Black Bike has been getting ridden around and tweaked.  It still have some issues with acceleration, so I'm going to keep plugging away at it.  I bought the new fork seal, but have not installed it yet.

I found this neat gadget that will let me convert the MegaSquirt from serial communication to USB.  Right now it has a serial port, then 6 feet of cable to a USB serial port, then more cable, then finally the netbook.  That's a lot of garbage to carry around.  This gadget will simplify things down to a single cable.  I'll be ordering it as soon as I have money again.

I'm on the hunt for a new front wheel for the Black Bike, as well as upgraded brakes.  The old 18" front wheel just doesn't look all that good, and I can't put a modern tire on it.  Ideally I'd like to find the complete front end of a BMW K1100RS, and that will bolt right on.  As a second best, I can get a wheel from a K1100RS, R1100RS or R1100RT, as well as the brake rotors, calipers and master cylinder.  I believe that this will be a bolt-on modification, but I won't know until I try it.

The matching wheels will be good.  The modern tires will be great.  The brakes should be fantastic, and possibly a lifesaver.  The K bike's stock brakes are less than impressive.

There's a local guy who does BMW salvage, and I've had good luck with him in the past.  He takes them apart, I fix them.  I got the Paralever rear end in exchange for getting his K-75 running.  I'm hoping that I can repair his CX Turbo and earn credit towards more parts.

Once I finish the wheel swap, I'll have two complete sets of K-75 wheels that I can sell off.  That should pay some bills.  In fact, I need to have a BMW parts shed clearing.  I have lots of bits that I don't need anymore.

I've decided that my next major project will be the Calico M-950 pistol.  I want to make this ghetto POS gun work properly, and I think that I can do it.  If it doesn't work out, I can always sell it to a gang banger for a couple hundred bucks.  "It jams sometimes, but it holds 50 rounds.  There's no warranty and no returns."

I figure that selling a non-working gun to a gang member will actually make the streets safer.

The garden is FUCKED!  This drought will never end.  The only garden bed showing signs of life is the herb garden, and only because the air conditioner drains its water into the center of that bed.