This was given to me by a family member.

If you are a scatter-brained blonde and would like me to post something equally disparraging toward all other people please comment below and I will give you equal space to respond. :)

Ferdinand Porche's Magic Smoke

The Beetle is coming along slowly. I have been spending my time in the engine compartment tuning the engine so it likes the new carburetor I just installed. Tuning the engine is nothing like tuning a piano. It’s much louder and requires standing over the non-emission controlled exhaust pipe while I rev the engine -probably not the best thing for my health.

The engine's mechanical components are behaving relatively well but while it was in storage for the last couple of years a new problem developed. Humor me a bit while I give a little lesson about VW’s…

There are two a total of six lights on my dashboard.

• One is so I can see the speedometer and fuel gage at night.
• A second is on the radio (which had the serial numbers filed off).
• A third tells me when I have turned on my turn signal (in either direction).

Since VW didn’t design the dash with separate left and right turn signals you would be correct to assume they didn’t waste the other three lights on reminders for routine maintenance items. Of those three lights:

• One means that half of your brakes have failed. (not all your brakes though, the sensor only measures the pressure differential between the front and rear brake cylinders. VW assumes any idiot can figure out that all the brakes have failed so it doesn’t need a light)
• Another light informs you the oil pressure is less than 10% of what it should be. When Ferdinand Porche wasn’t designing the Panzer and Tiger tanks for Pre-War Germany he was put to work on “the people’s car.” Porche thought a radiator would be excessive for the practical German Folk and put in an extra-big oil cooler so the engine’s own oil would be its coolant. If this light comes on for more than a split second in a turn when the oil is sloshing around it means the engine has no coolant and is about to turn itself into a block of Aluminum-magnesium alloy.
• The final light tells the driver that the generator has stopped generating power. The generator recharges the battery so if this light comes on it tells you the battery is the only thing running your spark plugs and the engine will stop running once the battery runs out. In his enthusiasm for liking systems together Porche also extended the shaft that turns the generator through the generator and installed a big as fan on the other side to blow air past that extra-large oil cooler I mentioned. The generator light coming on can also mean the belt that turns the combination generator/fan has broken and there is no air cooling that oil which prevents the engine from to turning itself into a block of metal.

It was the final light that came on. Luckily for me the belt has not broken so Porche’s monster lives, for now.

A test with a volt-meter confirmed, however that the generator is not charging the battery so if I want to drive it anywhere other than my driveway I’m going to need a battery charger and an extension cord.

Another aside: If you know cars you will notice I didn't say "alternator" before, until 1973 beetles got their electricity from a DC generator. Most cars today use an AC alternator with a rectifier to turn the power back into DC. If you are intrigued by the generator/alternator debate there are lots of pages about it on the internets; I will spare the rest of you.

Anyway the generator has a charged coil of wire, which is rotated through a magnetic field that is created by a stationary coil of wire. Changing the voltage in the stationary "field coil" changes the strength of the field and the power output of the generator. A voltage regulator underneath the beetle’s back seat (next to where I stow my jumper cables) controls the field voltage. Right now it isn’t sending any voltage to the field so I don’t get any energy out of the generator.

The regulator isn't solid state, it has two electro-magnets with spring loaded contacts and resembles an old telegraph. With a constant field generators create more power as you spin them faster so when the regulator is working and I rev the engine it quickly opens and closes contacts to reduce the average current flowing through the field coil. This has the side effect of creating a clicking sound under the back seat when I rev the engine which is very assuring to my passengers. :)

The reg seems to be broken so I disconnected the car’s battery and tore the cover off last night to poke around inside and see if anything was obviously wrong. Everything seemed good with the power off so I cleaned off all the contacts reconnected the battery and tried poking it with a screwdriver while the car was running. (Poking at live circuits is probably not the smartest thing in the world to do but it’s a 12V system so in theory it can’t hurt me too much) For once I was glad all this electrical stuff was under the back seat since I could play with it while the engine was running and still see the generator light on the dashboard.

A continuity test showed me one contact is suspiciously closed no matter where it is positioned. I didn’t touch that one in this test. Instead I closed the other contact which was normally-open. There was a mild blue spark but it did get the generator light to go off. Impressed by my initial success I shut the engine off.

With the engine off, however the generator light was still on and magic smoke seemed to be finding its way out of the regulator. Having read the generator light being on when key is off means the battery is trying to turn the generator like a motor, and knowing magic smoke getting out is always a bad thing I pulled the negative strap off the battery again to kill all the power in the car.

Post-mortem examination revealed closing the contact by hand allowed the contact to weld itself shut. It was easily opened again but at present I am not any closer to getting the regulator to work; if it was kind of dead before it’s probably really dead now.

Luckily new regulators are only about $30 but I would like to figure out how this thing is supposed to work. If anyone finds wiring diagrams for electro-magnetically controlled 12V generator voltage regulators let me know. In the mean time I hope your summers are going well.

No Worries

Warning: oddball campaign ad

Since I’m making a few posts today I figure putting up one political related one won’t hurt anyone:

http://vernonrobinson.com/twilightzone.shtml

As I understand it, this is being run by a real candidate in North Carolina. He doesn’t really say what he is going to do about anything he mentions in the ad but but I give him credit for making an ad that looks different than other campaign ads.

Rude Awakening/ magic VW smoke

Normally it would just be a figure of speach but today I actually was awakened by an ant crawling into my ear. It took me quite a while to get it out, stabbing it with a q-tip didn't work and eventually I had to wait patiently while it grew tired of made loud noises by walking across my eardrum and worked its way back to the surface. I felt no remorse for crushing it when it did finally come out. *disgusted shiver*

Right, so while I'm not getting insects out of my skull i've been working on getting my deployment paperwork ready for Antarctica, working on my beloved, but still moody air-cooled VW beetle and catching up on my reading.

Someone posted a comment on my last post about internet "on the ice." The NSF still warns the connection is primarily for uploading scientific data but I should be able to push some bytes back and forth periodically. I even hear McMurdo station (aka. Mac-Town) recently had wireless installed in the coffee shop so I can have a Starbucks-like experience while I am drinking my hot fluids to thaw out.



I dug this picture out of the pre-deployment handbook of what our end of the internets will look like. Since I am a "general assistant" it may be my job at some point to go knock the icicles off.

I started writing a description of how my adventures with the VW have been going and the books I've been reading, but each is probably a post unto itself so I'm going to post those sepparately in the interest of your attention spans.

No Worries

Poked and Prodded

Poked and Prodded

While getting undressed in an exam room on Monday I heard the nurse telling someone outside the door to “give the guy in there everything but a pregnancy test.” I was free to go from my Antarctic medical exam after two hours but only after I had been plugged into an EKG, had numerous reflex tests, was asked about every scar on my body (and why I only have freckles on half of my neck) had given a urine sample and lost five vials of blood; which, by the way is fun if you haven’t been allowed to eat anything in the past 12 hours. There were a few other more routine things but luckily for me I’m under 40 so I got to skip the prostate exam.

That paperwork is now all filed and sent in. Now I just have to wait for the test results and a dental exam and I should be cleared for departure to “the ice” in August.

I got my computer re-imaged last week so this week I decided to go for the FullGoogle and installed the Google Pack with all of its wonderful options for indexing my personal data. The scary feature I saw was sharing information on what websites have been viewed across computers. I know Google had stood up for privacy but I don’t really want a list of all the websites that I’ve been to kept anywhere, much less a server that could be in a foreign country. Guess I’ll have to stop looking at those anarchist-weapons-of-mass-Pr0n sites.

I probably wouldn’t have thought too much about the data aggregation if I hadn’t just signed a paper three days ago saying I waved my rights to privacy in the mail being sent to me through the US Air Force while I am in Antarctica. So please refrain from forwarding me any copies of Anarchist-Weapons-Of-Mass-Pr0n Monthly.

In other news this week I was volunteering at the Hospital where I got to deliver all the flowers from the loading dock to the patient rooms. Being the “flower guy” has its perks since everyone is instantly happy and grateful when you walk into the room. (unless, of course, they are comatose) It beat the job I had a couple years ago of bringing people to the morgue.

The hospital also seemed to be having a special on newborn babies. I must have gotten to every room in the maternity wing. One person got a bleeding heart hanging plant that was more like a bush and took up half of the elevator on the way up. A couple of neo natal rooms had multiple deliveries. (of flowers that is)

I have a job on Monday as a “patient” for medical technicians and nurses who are being tested on caring for bed-ridden patients. Apparently I have to lie in a bed and seem grumpy and in pain while they try adjusting the bed, changing bandages and being tested on other skills for dealing with people who can’t move very well. Should be fun. :)

Heroic Computer Dies To Save World From Master's Thesis | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Trying out my "blog this" button in Firefox:

Heroic Computer Dies To Save World From Master's Thesis | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

I've been in Boston for the second half of this week getting some repairs done on my laptop and just generally hanging around. The "official" reason for my being here is to tell the summer students who took over my team's SCOPE project the nuances of how things work on the tractor and the stories behind "Why the hell did you do that?" Hopefully it was helpful for them.

I stayed up too late last night watching funny videos on the internet and now it's time to get up and be a functional human being.

P.S. This is something else that was on randomness.

GOP takes aim at PBS funding - The Boston Globe

``Dick Cheney and the Republicans have decided to go hunting for `Big Bird' ...once again," -Rep Edward J. Markey , a Malden Democrat

You should see this

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2078944470709189270&q=al+gore

A trailer for the new Documentary on global warming called "An Inconvenient Truth"

Critic Roger Ebert says: "You owe it to yourself to see this film" In the same review he likens the "debate" over global warming to the "debate" tobacco companies created between the 1960's and 1980's around the reality that smoking increasing the risk of cancer.

Despite the "debate" around smoking many smokers did get cancer.

I acknowledge some may see this as political because of the name on the documentary but there is a lot to back up what is being said. Peer reviewed journals overwhelmingly acknowldege what is going on. Climatic scientists unfortunately do not have the advertizing budgets to get their message on for-profit news channels which are sponsored by oil company commercials.

Please at least watch the trailer and if you are an over-achiever go see the movie. At the very least you will be better informed. I for one think it is time to stop branding everyone who talks about the environment and conservation as a liberal.

It started with a railing…

My grandmother’s neighbor injured her knee and needs a railing to make it up her way- too-steep garage stairs. Two days ago I offered to help and while I was building it someone else in the neighborhood stopped by and asked if I could build them one. Today while building the second railing I was asked by another person to paint a room and fix a door handle. If I'm not careful I'm going to end up with a full time job as a handyman.

This part of Vermont has had some amount of rain fall for 24 out of the past 26 days. So when I saw there weren’t any clouds in the sky today I decided it would be a good time to try out the new hiking pack I bought over the weekend. After finishing the railing I went into the mountains. Even with a full pack I did 2000 vertical feet up and down in just over 4 hours which is pretty good since I haven’t hiked in months. My legs are going to be angry tomorrow that we already drained the hot tub for the summer.

Tomorrow looks like more working on Antarctic deployment paperwork and a little reading. Hopefully I will make it to one of the Burlington Jazz festival performances this week.

For now I am going to go take a shower.