Flyinfool

OK @cowpuc, back to school again. WARNING - Educational material to follow.......... What a reed switch is. It is a coil of wire wound around a glass tube (the reed switch) that has a wire sticking out of each end. The way it works is that the power to the light bulb flows thru the coil of wire. When power flows thru the wire it creates a magnetic field, think electromagnet. Inside of the glass tube are two thin iron strips that are not touching. When they get magnetized by the electromagnet the magnetic force make them attracted to each other and they pull together making a contact. It is this contact that the CMU uses to tell if a bulb is out. If a bulb is out the power will no longer be flowing thru the coil so the magnetic field goes away and the two iron strips are no longer attracted to each other so they separate. So jumping is literally connecting a wire from one end of the reed switch to the other so that the computer always thinks that power is flowing thru the bulbs regardless of whether it is or not. The reed switches are "tuned" to open and close at a specific amp draw. that way with the 2 bulb tail light if one bulb goes out, the amps will be half as much so the switch will still open, even though there is still some power going thru.

After a flight lesson and some ground school time a thunder storm had blown up as it was time to leave. It was not raining yet but it was real close to hitting. My P/U truck was the only thing in the middle of the airport parking lot. About half way between the building and my truck all the hair on my body started to stand up. I knew that this meant that a lightening strike would be close and SOON. I beat feet as fast as I could run and dove into my truck only a second before it hit, the door was still open. The truck had to go home on a flat bead but I was fine after I changed shorts. The front wheel bearings were all welded solid (rears were fine) and every piece of electronics had to be replaced, including my digital watch and the aircraft radio in my flight bag, and a half inch hole burned in the roof had to be repaired. I hate to think if I had been 1 second slower to realize what was happening or had one second less of top foot speed. My younger brother was hit by lightening in a local park, a storm brewed up and he took cover under the biggest tree in the park. Guess which tree got hit. At least the tree took most of the hit, the 100 year old tree did not survive the hit. Fortunately for my brother, a RN saw him go down and did CPR till the paramedics got there to get his heart restarted. Lightening is nothing to mess with, forget all of the rules you know, if it your time there is not much that will stop lightening. That bolt just traveled a mile thru the air, do you think it really cares about another 4 inches from your rim to the ground, or the 1/8 inch of plastic or fiberglass on your head, carbon fiber is an electrical conductor so that is less than no help.

A few years back I made a couple of runs of valve shim tools. I think I might have 1 or 2 left to sell. I will have to do some digging in the basement to see if i can find them.

I don't know if you can modulate the LED headlights? Before you try it would be good to be sure that the LED bulbs used in there are actually dimable. Many LED bulbs made for 12V use a built in voltage regulator to drop to the 5 volts that the LED actually uses. If this is the case then when the modulator reduces the voltage to dim the bulb the regulator will try its best keep it burning bright and you will have 2 systems fighting with each other. I do NOT know the answer to this but it is a good thing to ask before you buy and then go thru the effort to install something that might not work.

The RLU has nothing to do with the headlight warning on the dash. To fix that you have to jumper the 2 headlight reed switches on the back of the dash display. There are 4 total reed switches on the back of the display, if you are doing a full LED conversion you will want to jumper all four of them.

I know the feeling well. I get every time there is a family get together and all of my kids, grand kids, and great grand kids all have to go home wondering just how that old fart could make them all look bad while playing volley ball, foot ball, or even just wrestling on the floor. What I do not ever let them know is just how crippled up I am for the next week afterwards while they all feel fine the next day. At least you do not have to impress the car, it don't care......

Or is the lesson to convert your car to LPG so you can drive and BBQ at the same time. If you pull the taxes out of the cost, eth gas is cheaper, but only because the govmnt is subsidizing the cost to offset the reduced fuel mileage to try to get it mainstream enough that there is no such thing as eth free. In reality if the govmnt was completely out of the picture the eth fuel would cost more than the eth free and no station would even carry it. Every study that compared pollution per mile has shown that eth free is cleaner than eth gas. If you only look a ppm of the exhaust gas then the eth is cleaner, but that fails to consider the reduced fuel mileage that you get with eth so you are burning more per mile.

I do have an anti rag filter built into the nozzles. when they get plugged up it does not reduce the snow production, the pressure just builds untill it finally lets go and you get a big dump that comes really fast and furious, as opposed to the gentle dusting that would have sent. Ya might be shootin yer own foot there Puc. You know that I have told ya that you can swim over here and play any time you want. Yes it is in the basement. Compared to moving the 3400 lb mill into the basement, the 1500 lbs of grinder was easy. There is really nothing to take pics of just yet. There are pics of the machine in the other thread that I referenced in the first post for those that do not know what a surface grinder is. I did get the first controller in last night, BUT it was shipped in a padded envelope and got crushed in route. It is now on its way back to Amazon and a new one should be on its way here. Smaller flakes but a LOT more of them......... I do not think that I have used it for any airplane parts as of yet. But when I did my valve job I ground the shims to inbetween sizes to get them all perfect, not just in tolerance. Some day someone will go in for the next valve job and have to do some head scratching as to where I got the shims from. I did mark the new size on all of them so there is no misinformation. I use the grinder the most while making custom tools that will then be used to make other parts that may go on an RC airplane..

First thing is to see where you are starting from. These bikes run amazingly well on 3 cylinders, we have had members that went for years not knowing that they were only hitting on 3 and still thought the bike was running great. With the bike cold, start the engine and keep checking all of the exhaust pipes to see if they all heat up at the same rate, the slow to heat one is the cyl with the problem. Don't burn your fingers. Check for spark on any dead cylinders. If you have spark then it is mot likely a carb problem. Seafoam is also very popular for these bikes, dump in a full can to a half tank of gas, and ride it like ya stole it, let it idle for 10 minutes and shut it off till tomorrow to let the cleaners do there work. Do this every day for a few days. You can also look up vids on YouTube for "shotgunning" the carbs. It is often associated with the V-Max that basically the same engine. The shot gunning is a more aggressive method of cleaning the carbs with out tking them apart. If these 2 approaches do not work then the only option is to do a rebuild. With the proper idle RPM the voltage situation should be better. I always liked mine at 1,000 RPM. I do NOT want to be trying to sound like a hardly.

As mentioned in the vid, IF you remove the ethanol from your gas you will also have lowered its octane rating, The ethanol has an octane rating of about 100. If you are thinking of separating out the ethanol, I would start with a mid grade gas, then the octane will drop to about regular.

I thought this might be fun for some of the more mechanically inclined / gear heads that are in this group. I have a Brown and Sharp #2B Surface Grinder with a 6 X 18 Magnetic Chuck, that I acquired back in 2012. Some research of the Serial No. shows that it was likely built around 1904 to 1910. It was originally belt drive powered, at some point in its history it had an electric spindle added and all of the belt drive parts removed. Of course it is all manual control for everything. Here is the thread from when I got it. https://www.venturerider.org/forum/showthread.php?70813-My-new-to-me-toy Since I had a Pace Maker installed, One of the explicit things in the manual under things to avoid is a surface grinder with magnetic chuck. SO I am going to add some stepper motors to convert this thing to an auto feeder. One stepper will run the table back and forth and the other will advance the wheel across the part. and they will need to work together to make the moves at the correct times in relation to each other. It will not be CNC controlled but it will also not be far from it if I ever decide to go that route in the future. By making all of the motions automatic and electronically controlled I can start it up and then move a safe for my PM distance away to watch the sparks fly. As every project that I dive into this will also be fairly slow for progress. I have no clue what I am doing at this point, I have never played with stepper motors and / or their controllers. So I am proceeding slowly so as not to waste a lot of preciously scarce funds on parts that will not work. I have found a forum for Hobby Machinists that has a very good group of people that are as helpful as those on this forum, Even though I am a newbie on that forum someone sent me a box of 6 stepper motors for just the cost of shipping. I think that these freebies may be just enough power to run this machine. if not they are the basic size needed and I would just have to get the next bigger size (longer) with the same mountings so all my brackets would still be good. I just need to come up with all of the other needed controllers, drivers, and power supplies, and then figure out how to mount the steppers on the machine and connect them to the hand cranks that are on the machine. So at the beginning there is a lot of just staring at things and thinking. Not real exiting for a forum, but I will try. So far I now have in my grubby little mitts the motors, the power supplies, and USPS still has my controller out for ransom (I hate waiting for toys/parts) I only ordered one controller because I am not sure that I can modify it enough to do what I want it to do. This controller will be the one to run the table back and forth. I will need a bigger and fancier programmable controller for the traverse. I am going to do the table drive first. I have finally picked out the driver that I will use. it has a range that will be fine for these small motors but still have the oomph in case I need to go to a bigger motor. I will order them later this week. OK this is long, so I will take a break for more staring and thinking.......

Just a quick update since I have now had this new tuner for 6 weeks. The purpose of me getting the tuner was to hopefully make me have fewer episodes of Afib. Prior to the tuner I was having an Afib episode every 13-15 days. Just like clock work. My last episode prior to the tuner was March 20, the day before installation. I was pretty disheartened when I had a quick episode April 15, at least that was more than my "normal" 14 days later and it was less severe. Then another full blown episode May 4. Since May 4 I have NOT had another episode, so maybe, HOPEFULLY, it is now finally starting to help me. One full month with no episodes is a long time for me. Hoping to add to the string by a lot.

His results were pretty close to right on. The efficiency should have been closer to 5% but he was still withing rounding distance. The simple fact is that ethanol has almost exactly half as many BTUs as gasoline. So you will have to put in more fuel to get the same HP output. That means that you throttle will have to be slightly more open for a given cruise speed. As far as the carbon build up, I would expect the ethanol to have slightly less carbon build up but I doubt that it can be seen in his short test, as he noted. Any time I have an option I buy non ethanol gas. The non ethanol gas will also give a slight boost at WOT.

Back when all those writeups were done it was not known that there was a error in the printed wiring diagrams. this results in the blue hi beam and the white headlight action being reversed. If you still have it apart the easiest fix is to just switch the bulb sockets between the blue and white locations on the back of the dash. I will have to look up which wires to switch at the RLU connector to make the switch. I think that info is in one of the how to threads.

even if you do not want to spend the money right now for the 4 brush, which is the best option. Cleaning it out as Puc mentioned and doing the ground wire mod are basically no cost options to make the 2 brush better than it was. Regardless of which starter you use it is a big help to change the stock power and ground cables from the wimpy stock #8AWG wire to a #4AWG welding wire. It would be a lot easier to snake the new wires thru now with no engine in the way.

Silly boy........ You underestimate the will power of a hungry deer....... My maters are almost 3 feet high already. I have the ladders in place to let them climb up over the gutter height of the house again. Even have blossoms already. The peppers are doing good too. Don't forget the fertilizer

Right NOW!!

You got it Puc. Erika and I are so saddened by the loss of such a wonderful person.

Bigger is better. I can load more "stuff". My extended cab with 8' box is still to small, I keep running out of room.

@Freebird, You misunderstood, I am not against tech like monitors, cameras, adaptive cruise (never had it but I think I would like it) and such, as long as they can be turned off when I don't want them. I am against any system that can actually take control away from me and leave my life in the hands of a computer. Like steering assist or automatic brakes, traction control and stability control. If it were not for the fact that the factories no longer make any attempt at building properly balanced brake systems, I would also be against anti lock brakes, but with the new lousy brake systems you need the anti lock to maintain control in a maximum effort stop.

Neither one is a full size pickup with an automatic. I should have been more clear, It is the full size truck automatics that do not hold up. One of my hunting buddies got a Dodge 3500 dually set up for a 5th wheel so he could get a big camper. After his 5th trans in 2 years the dealer said that they would no longer honor the warranty because he was "way overloading" the truck. He had not yet bought the big camper, he was only pulling a little pop-up a couple of times a year, and then less than 300 miles. Maybe 1200 lbs when fully loaded. I would love a truck with a manual trans, but everything I have looked at you can only get the stripped down base mode with a manual. I do like some of the creature comforts. I have never looked into what is available with a diesel. I haul things that are big, not heavy. I can not justify a diesel.

For me it come down to available options, My truck has to be a truck. That means a full size, extended cab, 8 foot box, and 4x4, with a V8. Right now that limits me to 3/4 ton or bigger, Ford, Chevy/GMC, and Dodge. None of the overseas trucks can fill this bill. Until I start regularly seeing 100K mile Dodges That are still on the original transmission I am limited to GM and Ford. I am kind of in the market for a new truck right now, but I do not like ANYTHING that is available, or the price tags. They have all turned into cars designed for idiots that think their phone is the most important thing in life. I do not want lane warnings or assist, or self activating brakes, or internet access or any of that crap. Even if I turn it all off and/or disable it, it is still there, I still had to pay for it, and when it malfunctions I still have to pay to repair it it it will likely take out something that the truck NEEDS to be able to move. The last thing that I want is a computer that can take control from me I think I am a much better judge of what is down the road that the computer that is reacting to what is nearby. Now granted that my years as a professional stock car driver (including several track records) may have my skill set a touch higher than the average person on the road. As the modern cars get closer and closer to to being self driving, it is only a short matter of time before the hackers will start causing BAD issues. ANY system that can be accessed by anyone, can be hacked. Period. NO exceptions. Heck Jeep was hacked to where someone was able to take control of a car doing 70 on a public highway, Jeep had to recall 1.4 million vehicles.

That is as bad as me going into a fast food restaurant and ordering a half dozen chicken nuggets. The order taker says "we can not do a half dozen, we can only do 6, 9 or 12 nuggets". I replied "so you can not give me a half dozen?". she says "NO!". I think the guy in line behind me wet his pants.

Here is the thread where I built a receiver to replace that plate, This is why I had that part laying around. There is a pic in the thread where you can kind of see the brackets going up from the tabs. https://www.venturerider.org/forum/showthread.php?52757-Trailer-hitch-project-for-this-winter

The diagram in post #3 is for a 1st gen MK I. The mounting is completely different for a MK II. If you look under the fender of your bike you will see 2 bars that run for / aft. these are the bars that the tabs of the hitch will connect to. I no longer have my bike so I can not take a pic of the setup.