Low Flow Situtation

We rented a big house during the weekend of my sons wedding. It was great and we filled it up with friends and family. A problem developed with toilet. Modern low-flow toilets tend to get plugged up more easily it seems to me.

So we kinda needed this to work again and I could not find a plunger. Since it was flowing a little, I decided to try the following. First, I filled up a trash can with hot water from the shower, then I carefully filled the bowl with this water up to somewhat near the brim. Next, I added a lot of liquid dish soap, maybe about 6 ounces. Then I left it alone. Here is a photo.


About 15 minutes later, I heard a whoosh sound. Problem solved. This may not always work but this time it did.

Rick

Suspenseful Story

All the groomsmen, plus the father of the bride and I, the father of the groom, were putting on our tuxedo finery when we had a problem. Understand that we all had clear instruction to wear suspenders. Some asked "Why suspenders?" and the rest of us explained "Because the bride said so." We also added that it makes the slacks straght and flatter. No argument from me since I was in favor of anything that makes me look slimmer.

Back to the problem. The father of the bride had defective suspenders! Gasp!

So I fixed them with a pocket knife.

The metal clasp part was bent over kinda backwards, so I bent it back. Oh, I used my son's old Boyscout pocket knife and the Bestman took this photo with his iPhone.

Rick

Laptops

Fellow Rotarian's arranged for the donation of a quantity (more than 80) of used corporate laptops. None had disk drives or power supplies and there was a mix of models.

I took the project of getting them back to operating condition. It has been quite a project. About half were the same manufacturer and model (Toshiba M2) , so I started with those.

Some have swappable parts and others are hopelessly broken. All the steps to get these working again is a long story that involved a local used computer store, ebay, and a lot of trial and error.

It turns out that there was a way to get these to work again after all and so for I have completed 10. Shown below are units 7 through 10 that I completed just this morning.


Through connections in our Rotary club, we are getting these to El Salvador. Shown below is a scholarship student with one of the earlier laptops that I completed a few months ago.


I set these up with an "English" and "Espanol" user logins. I used OpenOffice 3.0 with a Spanish language pack for word processing and spreadsheets. It automaticaly switchs languages by the login type. I also installed the Spanish version of the Firefox internet browser. They turned out rather well. Time to make more.

Rick

Major House Repair - One Option

The house across the street was sold a couple of years ago. It needed a lot of repair. Actually, the house had been moved to the lot from another location about 50 years ago. The house was old when it was moved and it has been maintained but not improved much since.

The new owners liked the location but not the house, so they elected the following repair option.


Crunch and dump.

Though old, it was not historic. The new house will meet modern energy efficiency and structural safety codes. At this point, the old house can now be officially called "dumpy" since that is where it is at.

Rick

Overheating Engine

This is a post about a project from the past. A year and a half ago, a College Kid (CK1) I know had some engine overheating troubles with his 96 Subaru Outback. It had overheated on the way home from college on Thanksgiving morning.

We did some web research and made some phone calls and determined that it had all the symptoms of a leaky head gasket. It turns out that this is a classic problem for this particular engine from this time period. Specifically, a leaking head gasket allows combustion gas from the cylinders to pass into the cooling system. Air in the cooling system messes up the flow of coolant and the transfer of heat. Result, engine overheating and a slow stream of air bubbles in the coolant reservoir tank. This car had both of these problems so it seemed conclusive.

The bad news it the cost and time of replacing the head gasket. So, I recruited a second college kid (CK2) to help with the project. CK2 LOVES to work on cars and his winter break started earlier than that of CK1.

So, starting on a Tuesday afternoon in December, we pulled the engine.


Doing this involves a lot of steps and tagging of parts so you can put them back where they belong. It also involves getting greasy and problem solving when things don't come apart as easy as expected. This car started out in Vermont so some corrosion from the road salt made it hard to separate the engine from the transmission.

On removing the head gasket, it had this small area with inadequate sealing and you can see evidence of a bad seal and condensed exhaust gasses in the photos below.



That is all it took to fail. Subaru has redesigned this gasket a couple of times since 1996 due to this problem. The old gasket used a combination of metal and fibrous gasket material (a very standard design) and the new gasket used multiple layers of thick and thin metal with sealing compound applied in a detailed pattern at certain edges. The replacement gaskets looked very, very robust.

So working almost daily in the afternoons, we put it all back together and finished on the Tuesday evening a week after we started. The car has not overheated since so it looks like we succeeded and we saved CK1 about $900 by doing this in my driveway. CK2 and I also had fun and we had no leftover parts. Success.

Rick

Check Engine Lights

Two weeks ago, while on his way home from school, a college kid (CK) I know called me to ask about his check engine light. He wanted to know if low oil could cause it and should he keep driving. Good questions. I didn't think low oil could be the reason it came on and asked how the car drove. Since the car was driving fine, I suggested he can drive the rest of the way.

The car got CK home and he came by my house so we could check it out. He has a 1996 Subaru wagon so that means that my code reader would work. Since 1996, all cars use a OBD2 code reader interface. (I think OBD means On-Board-Diagnostics.) Mine looks like this and it cost about $70 at my local cars parts store.

I have used it several times and it has more than payed for itself. The hardest part of using this is finding the plug location on the car. So far, it has always been inside the car and somewhere under the dash. Sometimes it is easy to find, sometime it is under a cover, sometimes it is out in the open and sometimes I have to fish around while upside down under the dash. The plug is standard but the plug location is not.

CK's code number translated to misfire on spark plug number one, so he bought some new plugs at Walmert for about $10. By the way, changing plugs on a 96 Subaru is not easy due to the small space between the cylinder heads and the cars frame. On removal, the old plugs had a way out of spec gap, more than .06" instead of the specification of .044". Plug gaps increase over time as the metal wears off and if has a negative effect on spark quality. Here are the old plugs.

They all look about the same, which is good. If one was fouled or very different in appearance, it would suggest the existance of some other issue.

Using the same code reader, we cleared the codes from the cars diagonistic system.

CK took the car on the spring break camping trip the next day and he later reported that the gas milage improved from about 21 to about 25 mpg and that the check engine light did not come back on. The improved milage means that even at $2.25 a gallon, he saved $10 on fuel costs in about 500 miles of driving. Wow.

Mirror, mirror on the car.
What's the best tape by far.



Duct Tape!

Rick