Site Navigation:
Archives:- April 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- 2012
- 2011
Craig's twitter feed:
I took a work trip to Pittsburgh, PA last week. It was for a computer training seminar, so I spent it indoors without much chance to take photos.
I noticed a rather odd thing driving up. All the way across eastern Ohio, there are signs for the city of "Wheeling", which is a small-ish city on the east end of I-70 within Ohio. Just across the border into Pennsyvania is the Pittsburgh metro area, which is much larger and would make a much more logical choice for "this highway to" signs. I presume some Ohio administrator decided at some point that they didn't want to point people to a city in aother state, no matter how large or prominent.
It was a rather dreary cloudy day, so my phone camera wasn't coping
very well with the low light. That coupled with the fact that take
these photos use-the-force point-and-shoot style meant that I didn't
get very many usable photos at all. Here are a couple from the drive
up:
My purpose for this post is this photo. I'm told this buildin in
central Pittsburgh is called "The Cathedral of Learning"; I think it's
a building in the University of Pittsburgh. It's really quite
something. I hope I get a chance to go inside sometime.
The late lamented RS "Bob" Hoover (the VW guy, not the famous pilot) was fond of saying that "your'e the mechanic in charge". My take on what he meant was that no matter what any expert may tell you, you're the person on the spot who has the ability to see what's what. You're ultimately responsible for your work, not the people on the internet trying to give you advice.
I try very hard to keep those words in mind when I work on my vintage VW. The problem with any vintage vehicle is it has a mix of old and new parts, and both sets have been maintained by different people with different levels of skill and care. ANY time you install or replace anything in a vintage car, it's vital that you don't just slap it on, you must work mentally work through what that thing is going to do, and how it relates to the parts around it. You need to anticipate what might to wrong and investigate it (by moving the part, or checking the configuration, or whatever). If you just fasten it on and don't think about it, if it turns out to be NOT an identical replacement, it will fail or jam at the most imopportune moment. Then you'll be faced with digging out the error and figuring out what you did wrong and then put it back.
My case in point was carburetor floats. I assumed they were all the same. I've dis-assembled and re-assembled carbs at least a dozen times since I've owned my vintage VW, and up until last year, the float wasn't something I ever thought about. Last year, I did a few hundred miles of test drive in my car. In preparation for doing so, I assembled a carburetor, just like I had many times before. I drove it on several test drives, ending with a 200 mile drive that included about 30 miles on the interstate. The next time I drove the car, a few days later, I backed it out of the garage, it died and wouldn't start. I spent the next week fighting with the carburetor and fuel pump. I'll use a more recent carburetor to illustrate what happened.
Here's one of the recent carburetors that I've built. Although the
float bowl is dry, I'm holding it up at the hinge so that it sits
about horizontally, where it would sit if there was gasoline in the
bowl. You're looking down at the float bowl; the top half of the
carburetor is removed. The float is the dark colored rectangular
piece; its upper corners are marked with green dots.
The float can slide a little bit to the right and left on its hinge
pin, but it's in no danger of scraping the sides of the float bowl
(marked with red dots). The float can ride up and down freely (fit
and function).
The trouble I had last year with the carburetor build was it seems
there are multiple sizes of carburetor floats of this type in the
world. The float of the carb that I had a problem with just just a
teeny bit longer (about 1.3mm longer, IIRC); its far edge was about
where the red line is marked on the same photo:
You'll notice that the upper left corner is very near the edge of the
float bowl. What had happened was I'd put in a slightly larger float
without realizing it. I didn't thorougly check its range of motion.
I then drive the car several times, including a long trip, and had no
trouble. Suddenly, one day, the float drifted to the left a bit,
scraped the edge of the bowl and sort of wedged there. When the float
is in its upper position, it closes the needle valve so no gas goes
in. So the engine wasnt' getting gas.
I have no idea why there is a different size of carburetor float; maybe its for a completely different carburetor, but someone happened to put it in a VW carb, and so it ended up in my parts bin. But I didn't carefully check its fit, and that could have stranded me somewhere.
And now an excuse for some pretty pictures.
For those who don't know the specifics, a carburetor is a fuel metering device. In a carbureted car, the air coming into the engine goes through the carburetor before going to the cylinders. The carburetor mixes fuel mist into the air stream so that the air/fuel mixture that arrives in the cylinders has the proper ratio to burn and drive the engine. Carburetors are sort of complicated in their design because they must provide a proper fuel/air mixture over a wide range of temperatures, engine speeds, throttle settings, and other parameters.
Modern cars put fuel into the air with fuel injection systems, which decide how much fuel is appropriate for each situation using an electronic look-up table. However, a carburetor does this by mechanical parts that change their behavior depending on the conditions.
One behavior in particular that engines have is that when the engine itself is cold, fuel going into the engine tends to condense on the inside of the intake manifold, which means some of it doesn't get to the cylinders. This causes a "lean" running condition (not enough fuel per volume of air) and the engine doesn't run as well. Carburetors typically compensate for this using what's called a "choke". It's a flapper valve at the entrance to the carburetor. When closed, it restricts the air flow going through the main part of the carburetor. It doesn't actuall "block" air from going through, but it does create suction in the middle part of the carburetor so that more fuel is sucked into the air stream.
Here are a few photos of what we're talking about. Here's a few down
the throat of a 34PICT-4 carb.
Up on the photo is toward the front of
the car, right is to the right. The forward (top of picture) part of
the carb is the fuel bowl; it's marked with red dots on this photo.
The thing on the right marked by green dots is the part that controls
the choke; we'll talk about that in a bit.
This air passage that goes from top top bottom in the carburetor;
we're looking down from above.
Closest to us is the choke, shown here completely open; the shaft is
marked with blue dots. Farther down the throat is the venturi (green
dots), which is a restriction that causes air flow to drop in pressure
and suck air out of the fuel nozzle, which is marked with red dots.
At the bottom of the carburetor, farthest away from us, is the
throttle, which controls how much fuel/air goes into the engine
(that's connected to the accelerator pedal). The throttle shaft is
marked with yellow dots.
Here's the same view, showing the choke closed.
One question is how is the choke controlled. Well some vehicle/carburetor combinations have a manual choke; there's a control that opens and closes it. You'll see manual chokes on things like chain saws or small gardnen equipment with gas engines, or early carbureted cars. After the 1950s or 60s, most cars had an automatic choke of some sort. It would start with the choke mostly closed, and then open it slowly. The carburetors in air-cooled VW engines used a thermo-electric choke.
Here's the electric choke element from a 34PICT series carburetor
The middle of the choke element is a bi-metallic spring. When cold,
the spring holds the choke closed. When the spring heats up, it
slowly opens the choke over a period of a bit over two minutes. The
spring hooks the end of the choke control arm right where it's marked
with a red dot.
The bi-metallic spring in this carburetor doesn't respond directly to the heat of the engine. It's heated by an electric heater element, indicated by the green arrow in the above photo. When you turn the ignition key to "on", battery voltage is delivered to the heater element through the tang on the outside of the choke element (marked by a blue dot). So the thermo-electric choke basically acts as a timer, opening the choke steadily.
I got a bunch of carburetor work done this weekend. I installed a 34PICT-4 in my vintage Beetle and ran it on Sunday. I realized on Saturday that I'd put in the throttle plate upside-down, so Sunday I fixed that. The carb's not running right, but perhaps good enough to be an on-the-road spare. Later Sunday I spent time deciding if I could resurrect one of the other 34PICT-4s that I have to replace it.
A quick illustration so that people can see what I'm on about. Here
are two carburetors, a 34PICT-3 on the right (that's the most common
carburetor for the dual-port aircooled engine), and the 34PICT-4
(one-year-only California spec carb) on the left.
You're looking at the left side of each carburetor. The forward part
of each carb (to the left in the picture) is the float bowl, where the
gasoline sits. The 34PICT-4 on the left has the thermostatic valve
circled, and an arrow points to the corresponding point on the right.
Pangur feels about the same way as most mechanics about carburetor
work.
Here's the engine running with the 34PICT-4 on Sunday.
You can just barely see the tell-tale brass plug that is the external
part of the thermostatic valve.
I've spent a lot of time digging up test equipment to use on my
vintage Beetle. It turns out that there's a modern tool that has the
tachometer and dwell functions and ALSO is a timing light. It's an
Equus
5568 timing light, but it has all the other functions built-in.
Here's mine in use:
I'm trying to rehabilitate a couple of the old 34PICT-4 carbs that
I've bought. I tried running them through the dishwasher; that
cleaned them up a bit, but not dramatically.
The problem with all the carburetor's I've had to some degree is that air leaks into the carburetor around the throttle shaft. This messes up the fuel-air metering and makes the idle unstable and difficult (or impossible) to adjust. The 34PICT-3 that is currently my one good carb has had its bushings replaced. I had the 34PICT-4 that I'm attempting to use re-bushed as well, but perhaps it wasnt' done correctly, or something went wrong.
So what I'm doing now is I'm cleaning up one of the used 34PICT-4
carbs I have and I'm going to see if I can re-bush it myself. Long
ago I bought a set of solid brass throttle shaft bushings from someone
in England who had some. I'm goin to try installing them into the
best 34PICT-4 that I'm cleaning up. Here's a pic of dry-fitting the
bushing into the throttle bore.
So hopefully next weekend I'll see how much of a difference I can make
with that.
I'm certainly not unique in having had posters of Lamborghini Countaches on my walls when I was a kid. I'd probably still have at least one around, if I hand't lost a bunch when got some water in our basement in 2005.
The design is frankly kind of crude. It has very little aesthetic sense whatsoever. The body is all flat panels; like the designer started with clay base and then whacked off facets witha matchete. It's a bit like a formula-1 car stretched sideways sot hat it has two seats.
I've had a re-surgence of interest in high-end cars in the last few years, watching Top Gearon BBC TV, where they drive those types of cars all the time. Interestingly, a lot of their take on the Coutach as a car to own is negative. Jeremy Clarkson is the mouth of Top Gear (he's described himself as the "bombastic one" among the hosts. Interestingly, he's written an editorial on why NOT to buy a supercar at all; that it won't improve your love life, and so on, which is very interesting for someone in that business. His article includes this:
This is because, when you are in a supercar, you can resist stabbing the loud pedal for very long periods of time but eventually, you'll think, "Hang on. This bit of road looks appropriate, I'll open the taps." And that's a mistake, because no road is appropriate really for the savagery that results. Quickly, then, you will soil yourself.There's also a segment of Top Gear in which Jeremy basically lays it out that the Countach "was never a good car" at all.
And I know all that. And I probably wouldn't like driving one
anyway. And given that only slightly over 2000 were ever made, and
they still sell for not less than $120,000, and insuring one is
astronomical, there's no way I'd ever be able to afford one. And yet,
I still find them compelling. I bought a couple of books on them
recently, because I was buying stuff on Amazon.
The cover picture is the LP500 prototype, of which only one was ever
made. It's a fairly photogenic car if you like that sort of thing:
Now many years later, what this book has pictures of that I haven't
ever seen is the incredibly integreated drivetrain:
It's technically a "mid-engined" car, which means that the engine is
between the transmission and the final drive. I'd alwyas imagined
(and drawn) that the transmission had a piece that stuck out to the
side and the drive shaft ran back beside the engine. Well that's not
the case; the transmission/engine oil pan has a passage at the bottom
for the drive shaft to pass through. This means that the
transmission/engine/final drive system must be removed from the car as
one massive piece, with special jigs, rather than being able to remove
and work on one of the three in isolation.
Coming full circle--the REAL reason that the Counatch is part of the furniture of my mind is less because of the car itself, and more than it was in a bad 1980s TV show called Automan. The show was sort of a reversal of (and ripoff of) the ideas of TRON; a computer character comes into the world (and fights crimes and solves mysteries and the usual stuff). In addition to Automan himself, he had a "cursor" that could create physical objects, including vehicles. Vehicles that weren't specifically desguised to make them look "real" were basically physical wire-frame models. The (cursor-created) car that Automan drove was a Lamborghini Countach LP400 with the wire-frame treatment. The car was super-powered, and could make instant 90-degree turns at any speed; a standard gag was to show the interior of the car during these turns, which didn't effect Automan at all but the human occupant got slammed sideways.
I got some time to work on the new carburetor for my vintage Beetle
over the weekend, so that's nice. I cleaned all the small parts that
have gasoline in them; there they are set out to dry.
Keep an eye on
the thermostatic valve at the top just right of center; we'll be
seeing that again.
During the assembly process. Judging by the look on Pangur's face,
I'm obviously doin it wrong.
To me, it seems like it actually starts to become a carburetor rather
than a collection of parts when the float is in the float bowl:
The reason that I'm assembling a fairly rare 34PICT-4 carburetor rather than the much-more-available 34PICT-3 is that the -4 has thermostatic valve that increasess the amount of gasoline that comes out the accelerator pump when the carburetor body is cold. I'm hoping that makes the car work better when the engine is cold, particularly when the weather is cool out.
For that to happen, the thermostat valve that I install has to actually work. I ended up buying a couple of 34PICT-4 carbs, so I have three thermostatic valves. On Sunday I basically decided that none of them worked. I did some digging on the internet, and e-mailed some people, and posted on forums, and came to the conclusion that all three of the valves I had were broken.
The part that's supposed to move is down inside the valve, but you can
get at it with a punch. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I put one of
the valves in my bench vice, stuck a flat punch down inside, and hit
it with a plastic mallet.
(The arrow points to the thermostatic valve.) No change. I hit it really hard with a
plastic mallet; again no improvement. Finally, I hit the punch really
hard with a steel claw hammer, and it gave. I was able to break the
ball valve free of its seat. So I know have what seems to be a
working thermostatic valve. When I get back from my work trip I'll
try and assemble the carb to see if it will work.
My wife and I took a short weekend vacation over the winter to the
Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg area of Tennessee. While we
were there, we visited the
Hollywood Star Cars Museum in
Gatlinburg. It has some interesting cars from movies or owned by
movie stars. It also has some other interesting artifacts, like the
Batcomputer from the 1960s Batman series:
They have a neat array of props from James Bond movies, including
a Golden Gun prop from "The Man With The Golden Gun":
Among its vehicles, it has one of the motorcycles used in "Terminator
2". It's a 1990 Harley Davidson Fatboy. I took this image of the
overall bike:
And then one quick shot of the instrument panel
Because my wife really isn't into car museums.
I late found myself looking at the second photo a lot on my phone,
looking at the speedometer and light panel:
The bottom of the panel, just below the key switch, are very clearly
warning and function lights. The red light in the lower rightis
probably the oil pressure warning light. The green one in the center
bottom is probably the "neutral" indicator light. The lower left blue
one is probably the high-beam headlight indicator. But are the other
colored things in the next row up lights, or just trim?
It took me a while to figure out why this one photo of this motorcycle was obsessing me so (meaning a couple of hours for an evening googling photos trying to find better depictions). My revelation was--I'm obsessed with instrument panels of vehicles. I'm not sure why this was a revelation. Whenever I got on a trip I take pictures of my own instrument panel, or particularly of the rental car I'm driving. One of the things that facinates me about my vintage Beetle is the extremely austere instruments: one speedometer dial, which an embedded fuel gauge, and two warning lights. When I look at an airplane for sale, I want to look at the instrument panel more than pictures of the outside of the airplane.
I found an few interesting depictions with Google image searches: an article on howstuffworks.com on the Harley Fatboy, and another specifically on the "grey ghost" on harley-fatboys.com.
Then I started doing some searches on YouTube, and ran into some interesting stuff. Here's a couple of videos featuring someone starting and running a Fatboy where you can see the instrument lights when they turn on the ignition: here and here.
After I ran into those examples, I did some more thorough searching for images, sometimes including for-sale sites. Here's a for-sale ad for a 1992 Harley Fatboy in Tennessee. If you click on the "more photos" link, the middle photo has a nice view of the speedometer/instrument cluster in bright light.
I found
a very nice image of the tank and speedo by Carl Johan on flickr:
I found some other photos on flickr,
including
this one by Stacey Warnke, which I think is the very same
motorcycle. The other photos near it in her photostream are of other
cars in that same museum. The image shows the odometer milage of 727
miles, and the page says the photo was taken on July 31, 2008. The
odometer in my photo, taken January 2012, lists has 732 miles:
My vintage Beetle is running really well. The carb is performing consistently, and the electronic timing has been completely trouble-free. Now I'm just waiting out the winter and building up a supply of spare parts before I take it out on the road.
So in addition to the one in the car, I want to have a spare carburetor to take along, just in case. When I'm making a thousand-mile trip, I don't have to stop in the middle somewhere and have to rebuild a carb. I have a spare distributor, and fuel pump, and some other stuff, but I only have one carburetor at the moment that runs well.
I have a 34PICT-4 carburetor, which I had re-bushed but when I put it on the car last it didn't idle right. I suspect there's something crusty down inside somewhere. I bought a can of carburetor dip, so I'm goingo dip the chassis to see if I can dissolve whatever's in there and get the passages cleaned out. It's an original German one, which I'm told are very good quality and shouldn't have manufacturing defects.
First the carb all together.
The major pieces, dis-assembled.
All the bits that came off.
The jets and stuff in a bowl ready to be soaked in carb cleaner.
The main hull again.
I'll grab one of the other carbs first and dip them, just in case the dipping compound attacks the material of the carburetor body.
The juxtaposition of these two (of our) cars in a resteraunt parking
lot amused me greatly, so I snapped a photo. When my wife and I are
out of the house in different places, we're usually each in a car.
When we go somewhere together, we usually ride in the same car (no
surprises here). So it's very unusual for us to be driving two of our
cars and have them parked next to each other somewhere other than the
house. This was us having dinner at the local mexican resteraunt; and
she had a meeting to go to afterwards.
So I took a (business) trip in January flying my club's Cessna 182...and I got stranded nad had to play the I-hope-the-mechanic-can-fix-it waiting game. The club reimbursed me for the repairs, but it ended up being a long weekend nonetheless.
On the flight up, it amused me greatly that my heading for the flight
was 315 degrees; I had echoes of The Hunt For Red October goin
through my head.
Flightstar at Willard Aiport
treated me very very well--they had a red carpet on the ground when I
landed:
The weather got snowy while I was there, so I had them put my plane
inside (for an extra charge). Here it is, in good company. The plane
I flew is the closer one.
I had been there during the week riding the bus. When I went to take
off Saturday morning, I had a bad magneto check. So I ended up
staying over. Since it was basically going to be a three-day weekend
(MLK day), I rented a car to make it easier to get around. I once
again ended up not getting the car that I thought I wanted. I ended
up driving a Chevy Cruze. A nice little car, not as quiet as the
Malibou. Here's the dashboard at startup for the lights test:
And once it's running:
The center console had an aux jack for a radio and a USB jack (for
power--don't know if that would connect to the radio too):
The mag got replaced, then a weather delay, but Wednesday morning I
was finally on my way. It seems like most of the time when I'm
flying, I end up with a head wind, so I fly around 6 or 7 thousand fee
to maximize forward airpseed to fight the wind. On this trip I had
something like a 20 knot TAILwind, so I flew higher to take advantage
of it. I don't think I've ever cruised at 9000 feet before.
Here I am, with Louisville passing off to the left. Notice the
manifold pressure gauge on the right is only indicating 21 1/2 inches
of pressure (it's about 30 on the ground) because the air's getting
thin. That's with the throttle
wide open. At lower altitudes, you try to cruise at the top of the
green arc at 23 inches.
6 more hours of cross-country time, and 6 more hours of high-performance time. Despite the annoyances, a nice trip. Many playoffs watched.
I've been really busy at work for the last part of 2011, but I have
been moving forward on getting the defrost installed:
The vent is taped to the air circulation box at the right. The three
defrost hoses are installed here. The hose to the center defrost vent
is makred with magenta dots. The yellow dots are the hose to the main
right side vent (that I just installed). The green dots show the
white hose that go to the side defrost vent.
Looking down into the A pillar:
with all the hoses hooked up, you really can't see the splitter.
New year's resolutions? I have a few. I may articulate them here at some point. I plan to organize my stuff in the house much better. Happy New Year, everyone!
I took a road trip this weekend (including Monday) bewteen two weeks of training. I drove 526 miles up and 538 miles back today. It seems like a long way to drive just to sit on a couch.
Getting on I-39 where it begins at Bloomington. Driving dead
north--NOW we're getting somewhere!
There are a couple of big wind farms along I-39 in northern Illinois.
Here's a side shot. The camper is a random occurence; the "bend
backwards" stance amuses me. I presume it's because of the way the
camera raster-scans the image.
For quite a while here, it looks for all the world like the road is
goin to go between those two wind turbines, like the Gates of
Argonath from the Lord of the Rings.
But the road turns eventually.
Some closer shots of turbines:
This is either a Unicycle built by B.S. Johnson of the Discworld
novels, or else a new power line pillar with wheels for running the
new wires.
I love the mural on the back of this truck.
In Wisconsin, I-90, 94, and 39 run together for a while. I-39
continues to the north, but I branch off to the west with I-94 to head
towards Minneapolis/St. Paul.
It's been cold farther north. There's still snow on the ground.
And finally, at the end of the drive up, here's the river as I cross
into Minnesota. Yay!
The primary reason for going on this trip was to surprise my brother
by showing up to his 30th birthday party. Here's photographic
evidence. I'm on the left, my brother Dave is on the right. Would
you trust your computer to these guys?
The other reason I went was I visited Chippewa falls Monday (today).
One of my stops there was the
Chippewa Falls Museum of Science and Technology, which contains an
extensive exhibit of vintage Cray hardware.
I'm sitting on serial number 1 of the
Cray 1 Supercomputer. The
computer parts are in the tall cylindrical section behind and above
me. The wider part, that I'm sitting on, houses the power supplies.
It was awesome seeing this museum. The early Cray systems defined the
very idea of a Supercomputer, and were marvels of engineering and
computing design.
(At the left of the picture is a display with three floppy disks
illustrating how storage has gotten bigger over time.)
The end-of-trip obligatory speedometer shot.
I bought this car just about exactly 2 1/2 years ago, and I've already
put almost 55,000 miles on it. In a bit over 5,000 miles from now, it
will have passed even the extended warranty that I bought for it.
I have a post about a car, that's not mine and not even a Volkswagen! I rented it on a recent trip to the San Antonio area and I have to say I was intruiged and impressed. The car was a Chevy Malibou, which is not certainly not a car that I would gravitate to, but I picked it with my usual Zen method of car picking. It wasnt' even the model that I'd picked when I did the paperwork, but that's what I ended up with.
The first thing, which was surprising and neat, is that it was so quiet. I think it's close to the quietest driving car that I've ever ridden in. It was just whisper-quiet. I liked the way it drove...it was nice and smooth.
But that's not what I wanted to write about. The car's intstrument
panel was...different than any I've driven before. The numbers come
from lights inside the dash, and aren't illuminated when the car is
off; then the dials are just blank:
When you turn on the key, the dial nuumbers slowly fade in, like this:
where you can see the numbers are still dim. And here the self-test
is done; the numbers are fully bright.
Oh, and it has a USB jack on the radio for power:
And I have to say--I've always liked the status displays that tell you
that you've just engaged the cruise control:
Aaaaaaaand...if that wasn't neat enough, the dash status display will
give you the pressures in the tires. Awesome!
The Beetle's running great. I haven't assembled a second carburetor yet, but other than that my set up spare parts is getting close to done. Once that's done, I'll start working on taking it out on longer trips.
The heat's working great. I haven't measured it, but I suspect that driving down the highway I can get a 30 degree F differential above the outside temperature. To slightly imprive that, one of the things I need to do is get the rest of the air handling stuff finished in the front end in the luggage compartment. I worked on the gas tank a bunch last summer, and I really never got the rest of the trunk stuff re-assembled.
While I get a lot of heat out of the engine, the worst thing you can
have in a forced-air system is an open exit that doesn't go anywhere
useful. Most of the air tends to leak out there and mostly not go
where it's supposed to. Right now, on each front side of the car, two
of the defrost hoses are hooked up, but not all three:
What's missing are the vent assemblies that go from the vent box in
the middle top of the trunk area to the dashboard vents. Fortunately,
I was able to find the vents in their box that's been sitting around
the garage for a year and a half.
There's a box at the top of the luggage compartment that takes outside
vent and pipes it into the dash vents. It has valves to turn that air
circulation off, or a fan to blow the air if you're sitting still.
The fat tubes (blue dots) on the sides of the vents connect to the air
box. The end slots connecto the dash board and put air out into the
passenger compartment (green dots). The reason to connect these up
for winter is that the remaining defrost hoses also connect to the
vents (red dots).
There's going to be salt on the roads soon, so I don't know that I'll really get to driving it much more than I already have until spring rolls around again. However, this coming year, I should be able to start seriously using it and taking driving load off of my new Beetle. There aren't any significant maintenance items that are upcoming. The only one that I really should do soon is to lubricate the CV joints on the drive shafts, and that's something that can be done one at a time, fairly non-invasively. It's just messy.
[It's always mystified me that people talk about having lists of blog posts that you have to write. I've always thought that if you have a post to write, you write it. Well, now I'm having to take a dose of my own medicine; this is a blog post I've been trying to put together for six months.]
My philosophy of phone buying up to this year had always been to buy a relatively old phone that was just about to be discontinued. It's cheap, all the bugs have bene worked out. I had a Palm Treo and then a Palm Centro under that philosophy. However, I'd always wanted to have a phone that had an ssh client, so early this year (February, I think) I went shopping. My critea were I wanted a phone that had an ssh client, and one that could plug into usb. My friend Wayne was confused, and said that they were all like that (the usb part).
Well, I ended up getting my first nice new phone ever, a Droid X. As
I was told, the charging power suppy for it looked like this:
It plugs into the wall, and has a USB port, which supplies power to
the phone, or it can charge with a computer USB port. So I got that.
Slightly later in the spring,
I got an iPad. The iPad came with a USB-output charger too:
These two things together rang a bell. Douglas Adams wrote an article about this once. He talked about eliminating "dongly things"; discrete separate power supplies for gadgets (he was rather a gadget freak). He suggested that there should be a more common standard that just everything could plug into. I thought, with these two gadgets, that the power standard that Adams talked about has arrived, and it's USB!
Well...not only did someone already think of that, but they posted that fact to the relevant page that has his article. Among other things, apparenlty the European Union decided having different chargers for everything was silly, and set up an initiative cell phone companies to damn well compromise on USB as a power standard (I'm paraphrasing here) for mobile phones. So much so that new European-style power outlets are to have USB outputs built into them separate from the power plug. Here's Douglas Adam's article about "dongly things", complete with references to USB as a power standard.
So that's the article that I wanted to write in March, but I hadn't taken the time to take the photos and write the text. I got all excited at the time, though, about the whole USB-as-charging standard thing. I mentioned this to my pal Alex, that charging iPad and phone (he has a nice Droid phone too) via USB was great 'cause you dont' have to bring as many chargers and stuff. He said "Yeah, but the iPad charger puts out more current". I told him that was preposterous, USB has a power limit and surely the wall chargers respected that. He shrugged, but assured me that was the case.
As in all things, and I should have known this, it turns out that Alex was right. I'm not going to go into the details, but Wikipedia's article on USB has a good power section. The important bit is that devices are allowed to draw 500 mA under USB 2.0 and 900 mA under USB 3.0 (all at a nominal 5V). There's also a "Battery Charging Specification" under which USB devices can draw 1.5A, and up to 1.8A from a "dedicated charger" (presumably like a wall charger). A later section also lists devices that don't follow any of the specifications, which concludes with "The iPad and MiFi 2200 are two devices that draw even more power (10 watts or 2.1 Amps) than the Battery Charging Specification allows via USB ports."
So apparently, there are fairly normal USB chargers, and "high
power" USB chargers. The specifications on my charging devices bears
this out. Here's the charger that came with my phone:
It can source 850mA. This charges the phone in a few hours. But the
iPad charger widget says:
Ye hah!
Those are dedicated charging devices that come with their parent
device. However, that means that stand-alone USB chargers have several
variations, including normal ones and "high power" ones. It turns out
that's the case. Since then, I bought this charger that I like to
take along on trips. It draws power from the wall OR from a lighter
socket in a car, and its output is a (high-power) USB socket:
The most recent chapter of this story happened recently, although I'm
sure it's not the last one. I flew down to San Antonio, Texas, a few
weeks ago and rented a car and drove to Kerrville. The car that I rented,
through my usual Zen method of car selection, was a Chevy Malibou.
For the very first time in my experience, this car had a USB power
charging jack in the dash board:
