The Spechtacle

A site for sharing information, dropping dimes and plotting overthrows...

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Auto Info… The way it should be done…

April 29, 2009 / / 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 / / 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

Ubuntu upgrade to Jaunty Jackalope 9.04

April 24, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Last night, I took the plunge and upgraded from 8.10 to 9.05 Ubuntu. This has been the smoothest upgrade of all. I only had to add the boot parameters for menu.lst for my windows drive. Sweet. Everything works, video, sound, etc. Everything. Things do get better with age!

Bill

Switched to LINUX

April 21, 2009 / / 1 Comment

About two years ago, I switched to UBUNTU LINUX on my work machine at home. I also loaded the server version onto a couple boxes in the basement. I switched because I wanted to try something new, and I saw the programmers that I worked with use LINUX for everything. I was also paying about $400 bucks a year for a Microsoft Action Pack subscription to get copies of the latest and greatest software, that I used less and less.

So how has it been? Fairly smooth, with some caveats. One less than smooth spot early on, was the Nvidia driver chase every time the kernel and headers were updated. Usually I had to go through a short but irritating reinstall of the correct driver, to get my high resolution back. Lately this problem has disappeared. Now, I am running two monitors off the same card, using twinview, and it rocks.

I have a couple programs that I haven’t swapped for LINUX equivalents. For that, I have a dual boot option in GRUB, the boot loader, so I can also boot into a WINDOWS XP system if needed. This was another rough spot. Searching discussion forums to find the correct combination of parameters to boot the windows drive was lengthy. The windows drive was IDE, and the LINUX drive was SATA, which was also tricky initially. I also found my motherboard wouldn’t support SATA and IDE together, even though the documentation said it would. I had to install an additional SATA controller card to fix this.

The latest rough spot was when they last pushed out a kernel and header update. My machine failed to find the boot drive. Once again, after searching discussion forums, I found the correct delay parameter to put into GRUB. Now it boots reliably.

I seem now to have experienced all the big problems with a LINUX UBUNTU system. Bear in mind, I have relatively old hardware, such as the Athlon XP 3200 processor. Installs on newer hardware have all gone perfect, and so have all the updates. I have even installed Simply Mepis and Damn Small Linux on systems, and they are working flawlessly. I can place DreamLinux on a thumb drive, and take it with me anywhere.

I use OpenOffice applications for general business, and it integrates well with MS Office. For the one windows program I haven’t migrated to this point, I use VMWARE to load a copy of windows XP, and run the program in there, rather than booting to the old Windows Drive.

Now I just have to put up with my coworkers telling me ‘I told you so”. I’ll pay that price.

Billrad

And you thought you knew about Vampires…

March 22, 2009 / / 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 / / 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 / / 0 Comments

general-motors-logo

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

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