Category: Greg’s Stuff (Page 5 of 12)

Trains, buses, and cars, Chicago Style..

May 25, 2009 / Greg / 0 Comments

train

We went up to Chicago for a small vacation just before Memorial Day. My wife didn’t want to fly, because getting in those cramped tin cans has been freaking her out lately. Me too. So into the car and off we went with map and Google in hand.

I plotted and planned this trip so not to be caught off guard by a new city. However things don’t always go as planned. (Actually they never do..) Of course, the first problem is road construction. I thought last year was the worst, but with stimulus money floating all around, I fear this year will be the winner. Luckily we didn’t get hung up too bad, and got into Chicago, sailing up Lake Shore Drive, but missed a turn because a bus was sitting in front of the sign, and drove all over Chicago to find my hotel..

Since there is no place to park in Chicago, we used mass transit. The idea is pretty cool.. every bus and every train run about every 10 minutes. So we’re off to a play, and are waiting by the bus stop. Forever. Then I notice this paper tacked to the bottom of the pole. This bus isn’t running today because of construction. But it did suggest another a couple of blocks up.

The next day we thought we would ride the Blue Line train up to Wicker Park. Sorry, the train wasn’t running because of construction today. Where have I heard that before? But luckily they found a bus to haul us up there.

So then it was time to go home. We’re all packed up and headed over to Lake Shore drive for a scenic ride home. Nope. Today they are having a biking event on Lake Shore Drive, with thousands of bicyclists, and the road is closed for the day.

This stuff can be extremely frustrating, but, as with all human plans, oft go awry. However Chicago is one fabulous city, and we’ll be back

greg

Swine Flu.. early warning indicator

May 10, 2009 / Greg / 0 Comments

The swine flu is the latest pandemic threat facing the human race. What makes it bad is it can be transferred from human to human rather than getting it from some animal. The human to human spread is the killer.

In order to protect myself, I’ve devised an early warning indicator. Catholics.

communion

Catholics have some very bad habits. They are completely hands on. If you go to church and sit through a Catholic mass, one of the first things you have to do is shake everyone’s hand. This is called the sign of peace, and you share it with all your neighbors. Then if you live through that, when communion time comes, a Priest lays a wafer in your mouth, (with his bare hands) and offers you a drink of wine from the communal cup. (Which everyone drinks out of)

Yes, when all the Catholics start dropping dead, I’ll be heading for the mountains. Preferably mountains that don’t have any Catholic Churches in them.

greg

Auto Info… The way it should be done…

April 29, 2009 / Greg / 0 Comments

I had to fix the boss’s toy yesterday, a chinese go-kart imported by Manco in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. The boss wanted a new tire, a new kill switch, tuneup and all fluids changed. And he doesn’t have any owners manual, etc, to go with it.

gokart1

A quick internet search got me everything I needed. All the parts lists and repair manuals and anything you could possibly want to or need to know about this little machine are all wrapped up in PDF documents and free for the asking. Everything is available here.

Admittedly this is just a cheap gokart but why hasn’t the car business done this? Manufacturers of all kinds of stuff do this for their customers, any kind of computer equipment has drivers and support info online. What do you get from Ford, say? Thousands of documents that don’t pertain to anything useful.

I know, there is a large industry grown up around this need, and you’re fooling with their jobs. You can get this information online, but at quite a cost. If you want online access to major american car info, it’s about $2500 dollars a year. You can usually get a big paper manual on a specific car for one or two hundred dollars. That really is a lot of money, especially since the father of a normal family has about 4 or 5 cars laying around, and they all need to be fixed occasionally. And it’s not like you didn’t already pay a ton of money for these cars in the first place. But it seems to the manufacturers that your just paying to rent them not own them.

Anyhow, my hat is off to Manco for doing it right, and not to Ford or Chevrolet who want to keep their info to themselves and their clique.

greg

The Liberator Files.. Concealed Carry

April 28, 2009 / Greg / 0 Comments

I’ve chosen a new carry gun. The requirements were a) Something small and concealable, b) Large caliber preferable 45 caliber c.) Simple and not prone to jams or breakdowns. I’ve almost found the perfect gun.

The Liberator.
liberatorpistol

This gun fulfills all the requirements. It was a gun made by the US during WW2 to be dropped to the partisans in France. It was made cheap, with few moving parts, 10 rounds in the butt of non-marked brass (I guess we didn’t want anybody to know we made it. Like anybody else used 45 Auto..) a stick to poke the used rounds out and a cartoon to show the Frenchies how to use it. I guess we didn’t have anybody around at the time that could write French.

I got a little holster and it carries quite well.
liberator

But a few problems did crop up. If I carry it loaded and cocked, there is a small issue of accidental discharge. So far it’s been pretty good. You hardly know it’s there. The other problem is the second shot. I like 45’s because you don’t usually need the second shot.. but what if 2 guys jump me. Now reloading quick is a problem.

But I’ve been working on that. With a little work I’ve managed to change the mechanism to full auto, and worked a 30 round mag into the butt. Now it is fierce!
semi-auto-lib2-copy

Now there are new problems. Once you light it up it just empties the magazine. Also reloading the magazine is tedious. I shouldn’t have welded it on. But I think all these problems are fixabe. I really should rifle the bore for a little more range. The bullets keyhole immediately after leaving the muzzle, but that’s not really a bad thing.

Next I’m working on a Liberator sniper rifle!

greg

And you thought you knew about Vampires…

March 22, 2009 / Greg / 0 Comments

Just saw Twilight. What a movie.. Everything I thought I knew about vampires just went belly up. You thought a stake through the heart would kill them? Not so. You have to rip them to shreds and burn the peices. You thought sunlight would burn them up? Not so. It just makes their skin shiny, giving them away. It seems that the rules change, unlike the physical laws of nature, so it’s hard to get a handle on dealing with vampires.

And these are great guys! They like baseball, classical music, and high end Euro cars…. how can you hate people like that. They are also vegetarians… not that these vampires eat at all, but just that these particular vampires won’t feast on human blood, but Bambi is another thing. This bunch looks like a Norman Rockwell family, but with a slightly haunted look.

There has been a lot of vampire movies and shows lately… They all seem to deal with romance and the ultimate bad boy… But for me personally, I think I’ll stick with a normal warm blooded human. Vampires around would make me a nervous wreck…

greg

As the mechanics world turns.. some more..

March 15, 2009 / Greg / 0 Comments

I think the economic downturn is starting to accelerate some changes that have been coming anyway. GM and the American auto manufacturers are going to ditch the unions. Maybe not right away but soon. It’s kind of a shame too, although I never got to be in one I can see where they sort of invented the American middle class. I work on Saab vehicles, a division of GM, and they’re gonna get ditched too. It makes you wonder how all this is going to shake out.

Years ago, the auto manufacturers went on a buying spree, buying up all the brands they could. It’s funny now that they can’t get rid of them fast enough. And not only the foreign brands they bought, but they want to get rid of anything thats not absolutely their core business. As far as GM goes, that means getting rid of everything that doesn’t say Chevrolet or Cadillac on it’s nameplate.

I’d like to think Saab will come through all this ok, but nothing is for sure. There is talk of the Swedish Government buying into the company, or the company going out on it’s own. If GM hadn’t bought them when they did, Saab already would have been history. I don’t know if a couple of hundred thousand cars a year can prop up a manufacturer or not. (last year 2008, Saab probably sold about 95,000 cars, not great, but their best year was around 250,000)

I would think that if downsizing the number of models and car lines is good, what about economies of scale? Doesn’t that count for anything anymore? A lot of parts on Saabs come straight out of the GM partsbins, so with a divorce this will hurt Saab greatly. But if GM survives this crisis, and get back to being profitable again, I can see the day when they start thinking about rounding out their offerings by buying up some of the competition….

greg

As the mechanic’s world turns….

March 9, 2009 / Greg / 0 Comments

Since the Great Depression of ’09 happened, I have a lot of free time at work. Some ways to kill that time, in time honored mechanics fashion, is to play cards, drink beer, or pitch pennies against the wall. Or you could catch up on your training, which I opted for since I don’t drink anymore.

I noticed that GM is going through another training metamorphosis. Back in the 80’s the American car manufacturers were contemplating how to reduce the amount of money that mechanics made. I guess this was because they didn’t want to pay us so much for warranty work, which they don’t pay much for anyway. They’re big idea back then was to hire some experts, and make them available to mechanics for assistance if they got bogged down in some technical problem. This morphed into (in GM’s case) the Technical Assistance Center or TAC.

The idea was simple. You could hire a bunch of minimum wage guys and turn them loose on customers cars, and if they needed help it was just a phone call away. Needless to say, this didn’t work. You can see how good guys with no experience are by how many motors get lunched that just got their oil changed at well known cheap oil change places. And since cars got more complicated, they can’t even get rid of the TAC center now. They need every brain they can get their hands on to fix modern automobile systems.

It came home to roost in the preamble to the latest GM training guide. They don’t want mechanics to follow a repair procedure by rote anymore… they want them to think outside the box, use their own initiative, get down and dirty and figure the problem out.

This is what Americans have traditionally done best, and have always done, and it is about time GM and the other American car manufacturers acknowledged it.

greg

Guns in the modern world…

March 4, 2009 / Greg / 1 Comment

Just read the paper today… a 13 year old kid shot a 10 year old kid over a tv show. I don’t think I’m alone in wondering just what happened to the world over the last 60 years.

In this country we’ve always had guns. Until the last 20 years almost everybody in the country grew up with guns. Gun violence wasn’t a problem (Except for the criminal elements…) But it is now, and it’s mainly young guys. You can get shot in Cincinnati for just looking at some guy wrong. They think you don’t show them enough respect. Used to be that was something you used to earn, you weren’t owed that.

When we were kids we had guns to play with. BB and pellet guns were common, and even some 22’s. The worst that happened was some windows would get shot out once in a while. We were sufficiently afraid of what our parents would do if we got caught.

The best story was from my mother. She was in High School during the second world war, and one day they had a school play. It was about the war in Europe, and she was going to play a soldier. They told her and the other ‘soldiers’ to bring their guns in the next day for the play. She crawled under her bed, where she kept it, and carried it on the bus to school. Also rode the bus on the way home. School Bus! Nobody got shot, and no one was even afraid that anyone would get shot.

Do that today!

greg

My short lived time as a short order cook…

February 20, 2009 / Greg / 0 Comments

Back in 1969 I lost my draft deferment when I graduated from a local two year college. While I was waiting to get drafted, I realized that no one would hire you. Who wanted to invest training or whatever in some guy that would be in south east asia in 3 months. So when a friend who worked in a restaurant told me they needed a short order cook, I jumped at the chance.

What I knew about cooking at the time (and now) could be summed up in two words. Fish Sticks! I could cook anything at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. Or so I thought.

Things went along kind of OK till the night of the Green Mayo. I didn’t realize at the time that mayonnaise had to be refrigerated and that green wasn’t it’s normal color. The next night the proverbial you know what hit the fan. About 25 people had called in wanting us to pay their hospital bills for food poisoning. Needless to say I got reamed pretty good.

About that time, My uncle Fred and aunt Boot dropped in to support their nephew and get something to eat. Pretty bad timing. The waitress told me they were there and wanted to see me, and see about what was best on the menu. I couldn’t take it. I confessed my abilities were a little less than stellar and convinced them to eat somewhere else.

They did… and I was drafted soon after that anyhow. Somehow I never got around to learning to cook. Its intricacies have always eluded me.

My wife is a pretty good cook though. Thank God!

greg

Pioneer and the aftermarket radio industry…

February 20, 2009 / Greg / 0 Comments

radio

I heard in the news recently that Pioneer is getting out of the flat panel TV business and returning to it’s core business of selling aftermarket car radios… I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not.

Cars have been undergoing a transformation lately, and one the the things being transformed is the audio system. Traditionally, the car radio occupied a hole around 2 by 8 inches in the dash. This is called a DIN opening. Some upscale cars at first wanted to put more stuff in their radios, which led to the double DIN opening, or around 4 by 8 inches. Companies that sell aftermarket radios have traditionally made their wares to these sizes.

But, car companies being what they are, and progress being what it is, this is all over. The audio system now is spread all over the car. (This is not true for all cars, but increasingly so..) The picture above is a 2005 Saab 9-3 dash. At the bottom of the picture are the radio controls, and just the controls. The radio display is the other module at the top of the dash by the windsheild, and the radio itself in buried deep in the dash. (There actually is more, The Woofer amp is under the drivers seat, and the other amps are in the trunk.) No DIN openings here.

And it’s spreading. The current trend in radios is a control head that you see in the dash, and this usually incorportates the HVAC controls also. The guts of the radio is buried out of the way, and the display is also separate. This is not good news for the aftermarket radio industry. The DIN and double DIN openings are slowly disappearing. And so far, I’ve seen no response from the aftermarket radio industry. They have no solution to this problem so far.

The other loser in this scenario is the guy who bought the car. So far his audio options are pretty much fixing what’s in the car. You can use your ipod and whatever, but that solution relies on the factory radio working. The factory audio systems have proved to be pretty durable, but if a replacement unit is necessary, your going to wish you had those DIN openings in your dash….

greg

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