Key Our Cars

I’m back from my self imposed exile away from any real computer access except through my phone for the last two weeks.  Will get something up soonest after I get caught back up with life, work and everything.

This is a little off site topic but I thought I’d post it as I had trouble tracking down the information.   The condenser fan motor on my AC unit went out.  THe sympton was the fan that sits at the top of the outside unit wasn’t spinning but the compressor was on.  With the AC off the fan was hard to spin by hand, or rather a stick, I value my fingers.   These fans should be freely spinning and free of friction under normal off conditions.

Obviously it needed to be replaced.

First a disclaimer for our sue-happy society -

WARNING!!!  This information is for informational purposes only.  Serious harm or death could result if you attempt to perform these repairs without proper training, preperation and equipment.

Okay with that said I didn’t find it all that difficult to replace the motor.  Google was my friend when I ran into situations like the wires were different colors, there were more of them than I started with and the old fan was sharing a capacitor with the compressor.

I undid the sheet metal screws holding the top of the unit, the part that the fan is attached to and lifted it up and checked the data plate on the fan, writing down all the information, horsepower, voltage, amperage, speed, everything.  Going online I found that these fans (mine was 1/4 HP, 1100RPM) typically run $70, the most recommended brand was AO Smith.    Oddly enough the slower speed 850 RPM quieter fans cost considerably more.

Quotes to have a HVAC professional come out and replace it run from $400 to $1000 and research online seemed to bear those prices out based on people asking, “They only replaced a little fan and it took a few minutes, did I get screwed for $500?”

Given that little difference in price this became a no brainer to try myself.  Let me state I have no experience with HVAC equipment at all.

I had my lovely wife pick up a replacement motor from Grainger.  They’re not supposed to sell to the public but the counter man asked her where she worked and as it turns out her employer has an account there so they were able to sell it to her.  There was some *wink wink* going on as in the guy knew he wasn’t really supposed to sell to her but a sale is a sale so he did.

She was also my Tool Monkey and emergency standby to call 911 if I managed to electrocute myself.  Highly recommended to not try these things by yourself in case you accidently brush up against the hot lead on a capacitor with a sweaty arm.

WARNING!!! Remember to pull the fuses!  Mine were located right next to the units and there are also circuit breakers you trip.

Fan in hand along with the necessary capacitor I removed the old fan, clipping the wires to get it out easier.  The old fan had three wires, Black, Yellow and Brown, (Current, Current, Capacitor).   I removed the fan blade, it was easy just loosen a set screw in the hub where the blades attach and slide it off.

Next I disassembled the side of the unit, the big non-finned side, taking out the outer cover piece I was then able to open the actual junction box.

Inside I found the old fan’s black and yellow wires going to the junction bar attached with spade connectors.  I removed those, noting where they were attached.

WARNING!!! Capacitors can hold a charge, in fact that’s what they’re supposed to do.  These things can still shock the everloving crap out of you and even kill you.  I only had the crap shocked out of me obviously as I’m still alive to write this.   Treat this thing with utmost respect, use rubber gloves and don’t touch it if you don’t have to.

The existing capacitor was a big one and handled both the fan and the compressor.  It’s what is called a Split Capacitor I think.  It had one ‘hot’ or yellow lead leading to the power strip (the big junction bar where the live current comes in from the house and gets split up among the various leads).   It had one blue cable leading down to the compressor and a brown wire leading to the fan.

Since the new motor has 5 wires, its own capacitor I pulled the brown wire from the old capacitor and tossed it.   You have to leave the yellow and blue (or whatever colors you might have) attached so your compressor will continue to work.  The one for the fan is actually marked Fan on the capacitor by the way.

Unfortunately the new motor fan leads were too short to reach so I ended up using wire nuts to splice the old fan’s black and yellow power leads to the new fans black and purple power leads.   I then plugged those back to their original locations on the junction bar.

The two brown leads from the new fan went to the new capacitor, one on each side.  It makes no difference apparently which one goes where but remember I’m not a trained HVAC person and maybe I just got lucky, I had a 50/50 shot of getting them right regardless.

I then zip tied the new capacitor into the unit so it couldn’t accidently shift around and short out.   Obviously some metal clamp and screw mount would have been better but I had no such thing.

Next came to mounting the fan.  The replacement fan has screws so that it can be mounted either face up or face down depending on your preference.  I needed it face down and I would bet that most of them do.  These were way too long and I had to use a hacksaw to come them in half so the acorn nuts that hold it to the fan mount would screw all the way down.

The ones on the bottom were also way too long and I used a pair of vice grips to crush them off as near to the motor as I could.  Vice grips were faster than hacksawing and I didn’t need to save the threads at all.

The ground wire that came with the new fan was short and there was only one place that I could see to put it.  Over one of the fan mounting screws so it would be grounded against the unit’s case.  I removed the paint to make sure it had a good solid connection.

I then tested the conditioner to make sure it worked and voila it did.   Except it was running backwards.  But luckily they thought of that and there was a little white plastic plug thing on the motor that you can pull apart, spin 180 degrees and plug back together to reverse the motor.   This accomplished and voila, it was working 100% correctly.

Then I screwed everything back together and it’s worked since.  And I saved a minimum of $340 dollars and spent an hour of my life.

Now that I know what needs to be done I don’t see this taking more than 20-30 minutes.  I had to stop and research the changes in coloring on the wires and sealed it up once and then decided to go ahead and shorten the underside screws as much as possible.  Technically I sealed it up twice and forgot to put the side piece in first which you can’t attach after you put the top back on.  So I wasted a lot of time unnecessarily.

WARNING!!!  Attempting the above yourself may result in you killing yourself.  Please use utmost caution when playing with electricity.

Firefox may not be winning the war for the world but I’m happy to see that it’s winning the war among my visitors, at least among those that were able to be deciphered.  From a security standpoint it’s mo’ betta’.  And if you want even more security IMO you’ll switch to Google Chrome.  There’s just something about a browser that if one tab dies it doesn’t take all the other tabs down with it and if a plugin dies on the tab it doesn’t take the tab down with it that I have to like.

My visitor stats for the last couple of months -

April 1 2010 – May 31 2010
Basis:  88795 results from 167829 unique visits of which 79034 unknown/could not be evaluated.

1	Mozilla	30843	34.74%
2	Internet Explorer	25371	28.57%
3	Google Robot	9815	11.05%
4	Safari	7998	9.01%
5	Yahoo Robot	7314	8.24%
6	MSN Robot	4104	4.62%
7	Opera	1814	2.04%
8	Netscape	869	0.98%
9	Ask Jeeves Robot	314	0.35%
10	Alexa Robot	155	0.17%
11	Java	142	0.16%
12	WAP Mobile	36	0.04%
13	Camino	9	0.01%
14	Wget	6	0.01%
15	Konqueror	4	0.00%
16	HTTrack	1	0.00%

Well after quite a while I finally got around to ripping out the carpet (original) in my 67 Mustang. And as you might expect it’s rusted through.  Ford never intended the mustang to last more than 5 years, 10 tops and as a result when they built they didn’t really pay much attention to things like primer and sealer and anti-rust etc.  Not that the industry paid a lot of attention to those things then anyway.  But with the mustang they were put together with quite a bit of bare metal on the internals.

It looks like both sides will need new floor pans, full length and a firewall patch on the drivers side at least.

Luckily they’re not very expensive, they’re just stamped sheet metal and $100 should get all the pieces.  It would in theory be possible to go scavage some sheet metal from an ‘you pull it’ place I’m sure for someone with mad auto body skills and do it for free but that person isn’t me.

Personally I’d like to replace the entire floor pan including the tranny hump but that’s like $500 and if you don’t know what you’re doing (*raises hand*) then you run a very real risk of throwing the body out of true.  Not to mention you have to take the engine and tranny out or you risk folding the car in half since the floor pans provide a lot of the strength of the car.  The wonders of unibody construction.

On the plus side it doesn’t look like the cowls are rusted through yet. But as the most likely source of issues it’ll need to ripped open and repaired.

Also the floor support and frame bits through the holes looks in good condition. Floor pans I’m willing to tackle. Replacing major structural pieces would worry me.

Ah well my plan is to have it ready for Ryan to be the coolest kid in school driving up in a muscle car that’s as old as his father and having the 289 hi-po reverberating the windows. That gives me 8 years more.

FYI the image isn’t my specific car although it’s what mine looks like, down to the lack of insignia and emblems.  I just don’t have a image of mine handy and it’s up on jack stands and the doors are off of it waiting new window regulators.  Sadly the previous owner had it painted black.  The original color was Ivy Gold.

Had some left over chicken and rooasted potatoes in the fridge so I made soup.  We had a curry coconut soup at a so-so ‘asian fusion’ place yesterday and it wasn’t much of a leap of deduction to go “I could do better than this with leftovers.”

So, since I had chicken and potatoes already cooked and waiting their turn in the leftover plate I came up with the following -

Dennis’ Chicken Potato Coconut Curry Soup

Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a saucepan.

Add 2 tablespoons of flour and stir make a roux. Â  Let it cook a minute or two to cut the raw flour taste.

Pour in one can of chicken broth and whisk smooth.

Add one tablespoon of -

• Chopped Garlic
• Minced Ginger

Add in 1/4 to a 1/2 teaspoon of -

• Ground Cardomon
• Tumeric
• Curry Powder
• Red Pepper (ground or flakes)
• Onion Powder

Pour in 1 can of Coconut Milk, whisk smooth.

Add in 1.5 grilled chicken breast

Add in 1 cup roasted potatoes

Simmer till slow boil stirring to rotate the potatoes on top to the bottom and cut back the heat and simmer as long as you can stand the smell and not eating it.  About 30 minutes for me.

Salt to taste and spoon up in a bowl as a thick soup (my preference) or ladle over steamed white rice (Laura’s choice). Â  Top with a dash of red pepper flakes and spoon a dollop of coconut yogurt in the middle.

Try it, if you don’t like it then you’re just weird.

Just a quick note to say I’m voting with my wallet on this one and refusing to buy Bioshock 2.  Three different DRM systems are installed to get this thing to work properly.  I’m appalled. Until I get the stupidity to set up a game machine that’s JUST a game machine that I can reghost after every game to start over clean I’m not installing something that loads down my WORKING machine with this much crap.

In a year or so if they remove the DRM (and the price drops subsequently) I may consider it.

I have a ‘friend’ who bought Bioshock Uno and didn’t even unwrap it and instead downloaded a cracked version to avoid this bullshit.  My ‘friend’ refuses now to continue to support and pander to this kind of thinking.

<rant off>

Just a reminder, 12/20/2012 is less than two years away.  Is your pantry loaded?

I really don’t have much to say in regards to another year down and another year in the future.  I’ve had better years and worse years than the proceeding one and I’m sure this cycle will continue to repeat.  Without the downs there are no ups; you just have a flat line.  And flat-lined is generally not a great place to be.  A little cardiac failure humor there.

But I do wish for you a better year regardless of how good the past year was.  Or good it was not.  Just try to remember that People as a ‘whole’ generally suck although a Person can be the best thing about and in your life.  And Life really is out to get you.  And it’s going to get you in the end, the best you can do is fight a delaying action and hold onto it as long as you can.  Anything good that comes to you in spite of that should be that much more enjoyable as a result.

Anyway, best of luck to your and yours in the upcoming months -

“All good that a person does to another returns three fold in this life; harm is also returned three fold.”

Image Credits

I’ve added mobile phone formatting to the site so if you hit it with your mobile (palm, windows, htc, iphone etc) you’ll get a pretty sweet way to view it. I’m using WPTouch which is braindead simple to installed.  Just upload the plug in and activate and voila, you have a way nice auto format when someone hit’s your WP site with something other than a PC. (And before someone brings it up, Mac’s are PC’s in the strict and original sense of the word before it became the shorthand for IBM based PC running Windows).

If you run into any problems let me know.

Just wanted to post a quick review of the SnowBall microphone by Blue.  You can find them on Amazon or Newegg if you’re interested. Â  Right now it’s cheaper at Amazon.

It’s a USB mic so you’ll need a PC of some kind to use it and you won’t be able to feed the input through a mixer or anything like that.

Previously I was using the mic on a Logitech Pro 9000 webcam as my mic.  If you’ve listened to the podcast you can tell the quality isn’t all that and that’s after extensive cleanup and tweaking.

I think you’ll find the next podcast release to be significantly better in quality with everyone audible and without overload.  Probably doesn’t hurt that I parked the mic in front of me on the gaming table and put Temple at the far end of the table.

I’m not an audiophile, I don’t really know cardioid patterns or impedance or pickup sensitivity.  I do know that the recording with this mic is very acceptable to me and although I cringe at the price, its worth it IMO.

D

I just monitored page hits and my Contact Me page gets flooded with hack attempts.  I’ve made it password protected, using KOC as the password.  Or you can simply view any post individually and use the contact link at the bottom of it.  I hate spammers, they f*ck up stats, consume huge amounts of bandwidth and in general cause the internet to be a craptastic experience.

Honestly, the only reason it works for them is the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent that wonder about the benefits of \/1@grA and would rather risk their money, credit card information, identity with someone who needs to send a billion spam emails touting their security and confidentiality than use their common sense.  It costs them $0 to send the emails.  If even a single person gives them money?  It’s a huge profit deal for them.

So think of the children trying to surf Nickelodean the next time you start to click a link to some chinese web site to get a little blue pill or some russian site that’s going to guarantee your high pagerank on google and just remove your hand from the mouse.

That is all.

I’m going to be making some dice towers in the next week or so and will probably have a couple of spares.  If there’s interest I could make these available for purchase.

As they’re ‘alpha’ bare bones basic designs I’m thinking $25+shipping ($5 to $10 depending on zip for USPS) for them, its roughly $12 for materials counting waste and the rest is for my time which works out to well below minimum wage on an hourly basis FYI.  You’d need to have a Paypal account in order to pay for them as that’s the simplest and least risky for me and it’s strictly as supply is available on a first paid for, first served basis.

If the $12 seems high for materials well you try cutting 3/16″ slots in 2′ boards that are straight and uniform using nothing but a circular saw and see how much waste material you end up that’s good for nothing but template spacers.

The tower will include a catch tray that will be of a size that tower will nest into it when you’re not using it.  You could line it with cork, rubber, foam or felt to reduce the clatter noise but I’ve found personally that the noise isn’t too bad and anything but hard polished wood just causes the squarish (d6′s, d8′s, d4′s) dice to tend to pile up at the mouth of the exit hole.

They may be unstained or stained with black walnut or golden oak depending on what I want to try and will be coated with two coats of polyurethane (either gloss or semi-gloss depending on my on hand supply of poly).  The plexiglass will probably be left clear although I’m going to try a frosted look using an orbital sander on the inside portion and see how that looks.

If you contact me while I still have unfinished towers then you can try requesting specific finishes and stains. Â  As mentioned the only stains I have on hand are black walnut and golden oak (I might have a honey oak somewhere) and for finishes I have semi-gloss and gloss in polyurethane and I might have a  semi-gloss in crystal coat which adds very little coloring to wood unlike poly which has a tinge of yellow.  Really on matters for unstained wood in either case.

If you’d simply like a more detailed photo log of  the process I use to make them so you can build your own I’ll be happy to post that if there’s any interest pending me getting more raw materials as all the material I had on hand I cut already over the weekend.

Use the contact form to send me an email or you can send it to my anti-spam account which is spam at armsnake dot com.

Upgraded to WP 2.8 and lots of issues.  Bear with me.  Of course if you’re getting the 500 internal server error then you won’t see this so it might not help much.

UPDATE – I think the worst of the bugs from the upgrade are taken care of.  I need to figure out why the RSS feed from Wizards is fubarring my CSS but other than that I think we’re okay.

Just some screen shots of the double decker gaming table topper (DDGTT?).  This is after painting although the top needs another coat or two but unfortunately I ran out of green paint.  I only had one can and that was a fluke that I’d bought for another project several months back. Â  Otherwise it would be solid white.  But since I’m going to be puting a big sheet of plexiglass on top of it I thought I’d use the green since it could be slimy dungeon floor or a grassy meadow or something else that’s green in color.

That’s one of my sons, one of the twins actually, in the background on his bike.  Ignore the mess, my garage is always in a state of semi organization.  I can usually find what I’m looking for so it’s not as haphazard as it looks.  The black car doors my son is in front of belong to my mustang, 1967 coupe, that I took off an embarrassingly long time ago to rework the innards of and haven’t put back on as of yet as I’m going to strip the interior to replace the dash and wiring etc. Some day.

Anyway, I didn’t have much else going on that I’m willing to share but I thought people might be interested in the status of the new gaming table.  Well the top to it.

Just a quick pic (poor quality due to using my blackberry as a camera) of the double deck addition to the gaming table. That’s my wife holding the light in place for the picture purposes as it all needs to be actually assembled and finished before I can screw that down.

It’s constructed of two sheets of 1/2 ‘smooth one side’ or rought craft grade plywood.  I went cheap here for a couple of reasons, one they didn’t have 1/2 oak or birch plywood at the store, I’d of had to order it special and I didn’t want 3/4″ as it was too thick. Â  Two, the top piece is going to be covered in something with a plexiglass mapping sheet on top of that so good wood would have been wasted. Â  The bottom piece I’m going to paint white for light reflecting purposes so again we’re wasting good wood under paint.

Now the center piece that separates the two pieces of plywood I did make out of oak, primarily for strength and just because I was able to get precut pieces that are perfectly square which makes the parts go together stronger.

The two sheets of plywood are exactly 35″ by 64-3/4″ and fit inside the well in my gaming table with about a 1/16″ gap on all sides to allow for expansion and easy removal.

I’ll be screwing the center divider down onto the lower piece of plywood.  The top will be attached to the divider by a peg and wedge system so that I can take it off easily just in case.  I’ll attach some 2x blocks of oak to the underside of the top that will fit inside the divider snuggly and then drill a hole through the divider and into the blocks and use pegs to affix them to each other.

The reason I want to be able to take it apart is I’ll be mounting a power strip inside the divider and running the wiring into it so there’s only one cord coming out of everything to power the lights.

The light is a cheap little 24″ flo I got at Lowe’s for $9-$10 as a test to see if it works well enough.  It’s not actually that ‘hot’ a light, the picture just contrasts it that way but still I’m not sure if I’ll be adding one to each location or one to each side.  (4 lights versus 6).  6 would work ‘best’ but not sure if it’s necessary until after I get the wood painted white and see how it all reflects.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing with my evenings the last couple.  Working with wood is a slow process as you’re always waiting for glue or stain or poly/varnish to dry before you can continue working and those generally run into the 24 hour blocks for best results.

Okay after experimentation with some scrap and taking some measures and the like I’ve simplified the map topper for the table.  This is the second iteration.

The topper will be constructed of 1/2 plywood probably oak but maybe birch.  One piece will fit into the existing playing field indent to bring it level with the rim of the table. Â  I may leave it ‘unfinished’ i.e. just sanded, stained and then a few coats of poly on it to protect it or I might use some poker ‘speed’ cloth on it since it doesn’t pill up.

The bottom will be screwed and glued to the stand which will be 8″ high.  The stand will be cross braced and corner braced (I hate fragile things) on the interior.  This will then have another sheet of plywood screwed and glued on top of that.  I’ll then cover that most likely with green felt that I have left over from another project that will wrap around the edges.  The stand and underside portions I’ll sand and prime and then paint a bright white for light reflecting purposes.

For lighting I’ll put in a 40″ (ish) inch florescent fixture on the sides and a 16″ (ish) fixture on each end and mount these under the edge.

And that should give me the functionaly I’m looking for.

In the interests of not throwing out the work I did on my current gaming table I’m thinking of making an addition to it, see the image in this post.  It’ll be an insert that fits into the existing playing surface that adds a map deck about 10″ or so above and then is inset a bit in the bracing so that there is more room for the players to put their character sheets, power cards, etc.

Right now there’s just too much contention for map space from player’s paperwork for any encounter room of significant size. This gets their items off the actual map field and if nothing else adding lighting directly over their bits and pieces makes them easier to read. Â  And it’ll give them a creature’s eye view of the battlefield which might be interesting.

It’s going to be damn heavy though.  I build things tough so there’ll be something like three sheets of hardwood plywood there.  1/2 inch minimum.  I want it to be removable you see so it has to be tough enough to handle being taken off and put back for when I want to use the table as a board game table or card games etc.

Anyway, just thought I’d share.

I have to say that Facebook is not very intuitive and this from a 20 year IT professional with more flipping acronyms at the end of his name and experience at the lowest and highest tiers of support and implementation than you can shake a stick at.

In the paraphrased immortal words of Loomis – “Please god! I need a feedtool!  One lousy fuckin’ feedtool!”

But I persevere.

My wife and children are out of town for Spring Break with the kids grandparents and for that and other reasons I’m trying to keep busy around the house.

One of the things that’s bugged me about our house is the the cabinet doors and drawer fronts are all this heavy old world solid oak, literally an inch thick with a lot of recessed areas.  I’m sure it was ungodly expensive when the house was built back in the late 70′s, the story is our house was the development owners house and I do tend to believe it, it’s got a lot of high end woods in it and is the biggest house in the development in terms of rooms and square footage (3200) but still it’s not very attractive to my eyes.  The 30 year old vanish/lacquer is not in the best shape in the lower cabinets/drawers in the kitchen from water splashes over the decades and general bumps and bruises.

Longer story short I’ve started taking off the doors and drawers and I’m using a fine grit pad on an orbital and hand sanding on the convulations to get the top layer off and then restaining it with golden oak stain.  I wasn’t really sure what it would do, the first one was an experiement as I really want to replace them all anyway.  But to my surprise they ‘healed’ right up very well.  The stain recolored the wood where the old coating had worn away and you literally cannot tell the difference.

I’m also going to be painting one of the downstairs bathrooms, the ‘public one’, which still has the old texture paint from the prior owner.  Her idea of painting was heavy faux finish done really badly.  I can only guess that she did this bathroom last because it was only ugly, not OMFG THAT’S HORRIBLE LOOKING!!!?! ugly.

When we moved in I repainted everything except that one bathroom.  By the time I’d gotten to it I was just too tired to care and it didn’t look so bad after painting 4 bedrooms, kitching, dining, two living rooms, halls and a playroom as well as multiple ceilings which as far as I can tell have the original %R@)*%!*& popcorn from 1978 and coat of paint.

Anyway, I’ve fixed the horrible job of patching they or someone did in covering up screwholes for towelracks that had been yanked out of the wall and taped all the edges off and hope to put a coat o’ primer on tonight and a nice Misty Lake tinted premium which is a pale foggy green aka greenish grey.

DnD news has been pretty light of late.  I guess everyone’s just doing their thing rather than talking about it.  I still don’t have a copy of the Players Handbook 2 but the Avenger class that Wheaton aka Al played in the Penny Arcade Podcast sounds interesting and worth a look.

It’s just rather disheartening to see the power creep that keeps on edging in.  But I guess it’s inevitable.

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I’ve implemented a Widget Cacher to the site here, that along with WP-Cache significantly reduced the page creation size.  It’s typically sub 1 second to create the page now and there’s only around 20′ish SQL queries per page hit which is pretty good.

What does this mean?  Nothing much, it’s a geek thing but for the end users (you and your brethren) this means the page will load faster.  Of course you still have to pull in all the images which if this is your first time here can be costly.  1&1, my host, recently screwed up something and now my thumbnail generation doesn’t work so all the images for the last few posts are resized full size images rather than actual thumbs.  This isn’t the first time they’ve screwed this up.  We’ll see how long they take to fix it…

Image Credits

Darnit, I was hoping to catch the fifty thousandth visit closer than 50,064.  Oh well, it’s still cool even after the fact.