june 2018

sat june 2
You’ll recall, from a month or 2 back, that in the spring and the fall, water flows from the conduit where the power main comes thru the wall into the basement. And it’s not a trickle, either. Somewhere between the house and the pole, there’s a leak in the buried conduit, and I decided to find it.
It’s 120′ of buried wires, and they cross under my buried propane line, so I was hoping to get lucky by being smart about where to look for the leak. My first guess was that it had to be just outside the house foundation, where a lot of special backfilling and frost heaving takes place. I dug up my gravel walkway, exposed the conduit, and filled the hole with water.
It stayed dry in the basement, though. Bad guess.
That took the wind out of my sails, so I slept on it, and then rented a metal detector, hoping to locate the propane line before digging much more. To get a feel for it, I went out to a survey stake in the woods, where I’d lost a brass lens cap last year, but couldn’t find the cap. No surprise there, but the survey stake itself (a big piece of re-bar in plain sight) barely registered a blip on the detector. Needless to say, I didn’t have any luck finding the propane line with it.
My second guess was that the leak might be near the power pole, so I exposed the conduit on that end and … there it was!! A big gap where the sweep had pulled out of the pipe. Victory!!
I fixed it, filled in the holes, and I feel like I’ve started the month off right.

sat june 9
For 7 weeks now, I’ve been rambling on and on about my struggles with carbon fiber fabrication, and I’ll bet that nobody that’s read about it has a clue about what the heck I’m trying to accomplish.  To review, I need a very stiff, very light ‘forearm’ for c3pr, so that a reasonable-sized motor can move the shoulder axis fast. What I decided to try to build was a conical, corrugated carbon fiber housing. Earlier this week, I finished the inner, corrugation layer, and friday, I added the smooth outer layer. In theory, what you get is a group of triangular donuts, and a light, stiff structure.
This morning, I crossed my fingers, fired up my power washer, and blasted the calcinated plaster out of the mold, leaving a web of RTV rubber and PVA film. I let it soak for awhile, and the PVA began dissolving, and I was eventually able to remove the entire lining. The final forearm is a thing of beauty. Woohoo !!

Mowing the lawn is a pain in the butt, and what makes it especially so are the many obstacles you’ve got to mow around. Trees, piles of rock, a fire pit, and a couple of places where buried drainage pipes emerge from the ground.
It’s been backhoe weather, and I’ve been putting it to good use. I took out 2 useless trees and moved a pile of boulders over to my “rock collection” where they belong. That was a big improvement, but those damned drainage pipes were driving me nuts, so I decided to get rid of them. Like everything I do, this turned out to be a bigger project than I’d planned, and I ended up burying 310 feet of 4″ and 6″ pipe, moving the out-flow way down the hill and off the lawn.

sat june 16
The last auction I went to was the estate of a Model A enthusiast. Today, I went to an auction of the estate of a Jaguar guy.
The marquee items in the advertisements were his 2 restored XKEs, which sold for $23k and $85k. Sadly, I don’t have that kind of coin to spend, but I scored an EDM machine for $50 and a metal cabinet for $27. I passed on a compact sandblasting unit, a leather jacket that fit me perfectly, and countless other goodies that I wish I had room for.
After I settled my bill, it turned out that there wasn’t so much as a handcart nearby to help move the big stuff, so I jimmied my metal cabinet to the edge of the concrete slab and then backed the truck up to it. My depth perception in the rear view mirror is pretty bad, and I rammed it, knocked it over, and every head in the place turned my way. I flashed a smile and a Victory sign, loaded the thing, and got the hell out.

fri june 22

sat june 23
We are very anal about our garbage.
There’s ‘plain old’ garbage, compostable garbage, recycleable garbage, and then there’s stuff like fish skins, meat bones, gristle, cat barf, and the like that we stick in the freezer in a plastic bag, where it won’t stink up the house and collect flies. Every month or so, we accumulate enough trash to warrant a trip to the dump, and today was the day. I loaded up the truck, collected all the lumpy plastic bags from the freezers, and dropped it all off at the dump in Stowe.
Coincidentally, we’d also been invited to a party today, and our potluck assignment was to bring a couple quarts of ice cream. Mary did the shopping and stored the ice cream in a plastic bag in the freezer just before I did my collection for the dump run. I suppose I should have opened the bags and checked, but apparently I took two perfectly good containers of ice cream to the dump. Sorry about that!!
The strangest six degrees of separation at the picnic:
My wife’s friend’s son is engaged to a girl whose aunt is the lady who used to be a cashier at the IBM cafeteria (and who used to “trust me for a day” when I’d load my plate with more food than I had money in my pocket). She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her until she asked whether I used to work at IBM.

tue june 26

wed june 27
Never trust a deaf mechanic.
If I didn’t have the Kawasaki, I’d be proudly riding the Suzuki around town, thinking to myself: “This baby purrs!” But with two bikes, I can’t help but notice that the Kawasaki is waaaay peppier than the Suzuki, and I eventually had to face the hard truth: something is wrong with the Suzuki.
When I google “hesitates before acceleration,” it tells me: check the carburetor and the ignition. And since I was pretty sure the carburetor was good (and because I was tired of adjusting the points every 2000 miles), I upgraded it to electronic ignition. I got it back together, took it for a test drive, and … the Kawasaki is still waaaay peppier.
So WTF should I do (besides put a bullet through it)?
The way to tune a carburetor, I’m told, is ‘by ear.’ Lot of good that does me, huh? I kept digging, and eventually stumbled on a thingy called a ‘colortune,’ which is basically a transparent spark plug, so you can see the color of the flame within the cylinder while the engine is running, and then turn the knobs until it’s blue. I bought one and – long story short – found out that cylinder #3 is fine when running fast, but not burning at all at idle. So there’s something wrong with the pilot circuit! I removed all the carbs, cleaned all the jets, and found that (yesss!!) some idiot used the wrong spring on the air pilot screw. I fixed it, put the carbs back together, put the bike back together, fired it up, and … It’s still fucked up.
God damn. I am in a black funk.

fri june 29
Sometimes, I start off by saying “If I were smart…”, but I think we can all agree: I am not very smart.
It turns out that my cylinder #3 problem was caused by an un-capped vacuum line. The regular gas tank operates on a vacuum line tapped from cylinder #3 and, since the tank is in the way, I replace it with an auxiliary tank while I’m working on the bike. This leaves the vacuum line dangling, and I forgot to cap it.
No vacuum –> no gas –> no combustion.  Duh.
The aux tank hangs from the ceiling and looks a lot like an IV bag, which led Mary to mention that “It looks like your motorcycle is on life support.”  True that!
While I was up on a ladder hanging the aux tank, I managed to pull apart a barbed fitting on the fuel line, and gasoline was pouring all over the bike and the floor. I scrambled down the ladder, slipped in the spreading puddle of gas on the floor, flailed my arms and legs to stay upright, and managed to pull a muscle in my groin before I could shut off the gas and mop the floor. Could have been worse, but not much! I finally got it back together, tuned it, took it for a test drive, and ran some errands. Everything seemed to be OK, so I went out again to get groceries and … it sputtered and died at the top of the hill half a mile from the house. There’s gotta be nothing more embarrassing than pushing your motorcycle down a hill back home, while cars slow down to gawk and pass.

sat june 30
Marshall turned 80 a few days ago, and Charon threw a party for him. He’s the oldest one in the clan and not getting any younger. All the relatives were invited, and 29 of them showed up. It was the first day of what’s expected to be a brutal heat wave (for Vermont) and Charon had a tent set up in case it rained or the sun shined (neither happened). Usually it’s just the kids whose names I can’t remember, but this time I managed to mix up Kate and Julia. Very embarrassing. As usual, the food was really good.