Reminiscences

First car: ‘46 Ford. Never got it running.

First car I actually drove: Black 56 Buick Century tudor hardtop. V8, 4-barrel carb, dual glasspacks. Automatic, hence not quick. Trans died. Installed junkyard trans, it didn’t last long. Back window got broken out, it had other problems as well, I scrapped the car.

Maybe my next car (not sure) was my ‘61 Tempest. It was a nice, tight four door body. Previous owner had stripped the powertrain and rear suspension, cut out a big hole in the firewall and floor tunnel. He was going to make a race car, but didn’t. He gave it to me. I gave it the engine and trans from a ‘53 Olds (a $10 car) and the rear axle from a ‘51 Pontiac (another $10 car). Radiator from some kind of Ford, and odds and ends from whatever. It ran, got me to and from Citrus College. Later I swapped the motor (430) and trans from a ‘59 Lincoln into it. Then an overhauled Merc motor (383). Then the Merc motor and Lincoln trans went into my 57 Ranchero. A few pieces were salvaged for the Toy, and the body went to the dump there on our ranch.

Somewhere along the way, I needed a car while the others were torn apart. I went and found a 51 Packard for $35 and drove it home. That was all the money I had, and fortunately it had enough gas to get home. In was 4-door sedan, with  battleship gray paint that had been applied with a brush. It got used. I towed a friend’s ‘46 Ford pickup over the hill from Phelen with it. In fact the Packard is the only car I’ve ever ran at a drag strip. OCIR, about 68 mph in the 1/4 mile. About 26 seconds? I forget- it’s been a while.

I stumbled across a 56 Stude coupe. I fell in love with the body shape, and bought it for $150. It was a crock, and needed all kinds of work. (U-joints, clutch, brakes, glass, and I forget what all) It was also a salvage job, and I had to get everything inspected and signed off. Brakes, lights, smog, glass. In spite of everything, I rather liked it. It is sleeping over at a friend’s place, and maybe I’ll wake it someday.

While I was in Alabama with the Army, I bought a 62 Valient. It was a crock, but less bad than the Stude. 4-door, 3-speed with floor shift, small six. I rebuilt a 225 to replace the worn-out 170. Ran ok. Didn’t have the money to do any hopping up, just flogged it stock. When I was transferred to Germany, I drove it home from Alabama.

In Germany (with the Army) I bought a 56(?) VW, again for $150. It, too, was a crock. But, I was able to fix the minimum and get it through inspection for pretty cheap.  The transaxle didn’t have any syncromesh at all, but I got a better one for free and swapped it in.  The 36 horse motor blew a head gasket, and I swapped a 40 horse motor in. It was free except for having the valves done before I put it together. I also got a better platform cheap (better because it had hydraulic brakes instead of cable brakes) and swapped the body onto the ‘new’ platform. Lots of sweat equity there. Then I gave it a 1300 motor. The main generator lead was too tight across a flange, and had an electrical fire en route to the Octoberfest at night. Got the fire extinguished, had enough wire and electrical tape with me to get it running and proceed to Munich. Sold the car prior to returning Stateside.

When I came home from the Army, I drove the Tempest a bit. Then I got a Dodge Van cheap, put the motor from the Valient into it.  I drove the van for a bit, then swapped it to my friend for his 57 Ranchero.

The Ranchero (like a station wagon/pickup cross) got the Merc motor (383) and Lincoln trans from the Tempest. Later on, I pulled it and swapped a 240 cid 6 with 3-speed overdrive trans. Yes, I replaced a V8 automatic with a 6 cyl 3-speed. It also got a Cadillac steering wheel and column (tilt-telescope) and the Lincoln rear window (electric).

Somewhere along the way, we (Dad) bought a 74 Merc, It was an ex-CHP car. The motor (a 428) was bad, so I did a quickie overhaul on a 390 and put it in. It ran. It was big, brown, and had no power steering. (tank!) Around that time, we were going to have to leave the Ranch. Dad had pads graded on some property he owned, and we prepared to move some house trailers to the new property. It was going to cost quite a bit to move each one, and we had three to move. (Or four, I forget.) After some thought (perhaps not very much) I chopped the trunk off the car, shortened the frame, and gave it a very strong trailer hitch. Also gave it an electric brake controller, and I used it to haul the three trailers from the Wildwood Ranch down our front road, via surface streets and Highway 66, and up Sycamore Canyon to the East 40.

Actually, it could only get them partway up the gravel road, even with a 40 gallon barrel of water for ballast where the back seat belonged. So, we used some combination of Dad’s pickup and his tractor (skiploader) to help pull the Merc and trailer to the respective parking places. What an adventure!

Anyway, The Merc got retired after I inherited a nearly new Dodge Aspen. Its motor and trans were sold, and the hulk abandoned when we finally moved from the East 40.

Somewhere along in there, I bought the Toy. It had belonged to the owner of a driveshaft shop in Irwindale, and he was tired of it. For $300 it was mine, and I trailered it home. I fixed and drove it a bit, but it was fragile and cantankerous. The last time it broke, I left it sit for a while. The previous owner had started an automatic trans conversion for it, and I went ahead with that. Part of that was my Senior Project at Cal Poly. It ran briefly, but had problems and I abandoned the effort. That was 1982 or so.

In 2003 I re-started the Toy project. I write about that on another page.

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Ok, it is long overdue. I won Adobe’s TCS (version 1) a while back. I’ve played with Frame a bit, writing about the project car. But, I hadn’t touched RoboHelp.
So, I took a small document from a recent project, and pulled it into RoboHelp 7 for Word. I’m learning the interface and the lingo, and have output the doc as Web Help and as Windows Help 4. Looks promising.
I’ll post links for the most helpful sites I find.

Help authoring

Thou Shalt Back Up prior to making admin changes to site.
After happily updating some posts, I thought to revise the site so that Wordpress shows up as laserpubs.com home page.
Upon saving that setting, I got a 404 and the site vanished. Ugh.
Couldn’t login to Wordpress to reverse the change. Went to Lunarpages login > CpanelX >
MySQL > PHP Admin to examine DB and look for a fix. Found and fixed (?) one item, which may have helped.
Got Techcomm displaying as HTML, but not as proper Wordpress with theme.
Restored the MySQL DB from a fairly recent backup, and the site was up and running.
Yay. Re-updated a few posts, did backups.
Internal links stopped working somewhere in there, had to reset Permalinks in Wordpress. As of this writing, they work.
Yay.

Site maintenance

Wordpress tags comments as spam based on whatever parameters- junky usernames is surely one criterion. In cleaning out the spambox, I may have killed a valid comment or two, because I didn’t look at them very closely. If you have real comments, please try again- I will look a bit closer before deleting ‘all spam’.

But please consider a username that looks like something.

Thanks.

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I overhauled an alternator for my project car, and it didn’t work. I may have damaged the regulator by installing it wrong? In the spirit of saving some money (and not destroying another expensive solid state unit), I decided to try an external regulator.  I soldered a wire to the leg of the regulator that fed the field. I ran it out the enclosure, and re-installed the alternator. With the engine running, I energized the field by touching the wire to the alternator post. The alternator immediately started charging, proving that everything was ok except the regulator.

I wired up a Ford voltage regulator (diagram post later) and it seems to work.

Here's where to energize the field

Just need to clean the regulator up and give it a permanent mount.

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I needed to create and edit some graphics on a machine without my favorite graphic editor (CorelDraw!) recently. I’d used Inkscape before, so I downloaded the current beta (0.47 pre3) and gave it a spin.

Now, Inkscape is Open Source, and doesn’t seem to be sponsored by anyone with deep pockets like OpenOffice and Mozilla are. So, we can expect some limitations or shortcomings due to the nature of the development process.

To my Corel-centric view, it has a lot of good features and logical keyboard shortcuts. The interface looks good, and  I like the zoom-pan features.

Inkscape’s native file format is Scalable Vector Graphics. SVG is a standard backed by the W3C, published in 2003. It is XML-based, and it seems to be pretty capable.  Not only is the file format open and standard, it is text based. That means that any XML editor (or even Wordpad) can be used to examine or tweak a file.

It happily opens  PDFs and lets you save them in SVG or any of its other formats. The beta version I tested didn’t seem to save as PDF, but version 0.47 does.

It claims to open CDR (CorelDraw!) files, but that seems to be broken in this installation. Time to get a newer release.

Anyway, this was to generate some illustrations for a manual.  The manual is written in Word, because that what the customer wants. Therefore, I need output files for Word. Word doesn’t like SVG. The best vector compromise (for documents that may be printed from Word to non-PS printers) is EMF or WMF. Unfortunately, this version seems to leave embedded bitmaps out of EMFs and barfs when trying to output WMFs.

Well, if I can’t have a good vector file, what about Raster? It turns out that Inkscape can output a pretty good PNG with all data present. It certainly takes care of any potential font issues!

For now, the summary is: Works well, limited in output formats. Tune in again for updates.
Testing 0.47 release version, PDf works and the rest is the same. Lots of good, but still some major shortcomings for Word users.

file conversion · Open Source · review

Please don’t be bothered if I happen to sign one comment as ‘jay’ and another as ‘jmaechtlen’. As admin and owner, I have more than one login available to me. I’ll try to remember which one to use from now on.

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Subtitle: Stuff that Microsoft officially says you can do, but you probably shouldn’t.

If you use Win XP or newer, you may use the NTFS file system rather than the older FAT or FAT32. (Of course, NT and Win 2000 also made it available).

NTFS  works ok. In fact, it offers some nifty capabilities that the FAT and FAT32 systems did not.

NTFS gives you some real flexibility in how you set up partitions and drives. Rather than re-sizing a partition, you can add another partition and make it look like a folder in the drive that was getting too full.  Sounds cool, right? Here’s a way to add capacity without having a zillion drive letters!  Well, there are some gotchas.

Trouble is, if you want to move stuff in or out of that folder, it might as well be on another hard drive. Even if the partition you mount to the folder is on the same physical drive, it is treated as if it’s on a different platter. You can tell Windows to MOVE, but it will copy and delete.

So, the original partition can fill up, even though you may have a huge amount of available space in that mounted drive/partition.

Also, Defrag doesn’t seem to even see the files in there. All in all, it is a cool idea but of very limited usefulness. Of course, the real Windows and IT guys already knew that…

file systems · NTFS · Windows

A friend’s 1997  Chevy Astro had some understandable problems after 197,000 miles and over ten years of service. It also had some not-so-understandable problems.

In the course of repairing some wiring, I noticed that the coolant in the reservoir looked very different from the coolant in the radiator. The reservoir looked great, the radiator was filthy.

Hmm. There must be an obstruction or problem somewhere.

Check the connecting hose? Nope. Use compressed air to clear the obstruction? Nope.

Look at at the squarish connection between the small hose spigot and the bottom of the tank. When I tilted the tank, the orange coolant would move most of the way up that passage but not all the way. The passage that should have gone all the way through – didn’t.

Remove reservoir and inspect. Can’t get air through passage, can’t identify any contamination or debris in the passage. What ???!!!!

Try drilling through the passageway? I got plastic shavings, but couldn’t make it through due to the way it’s configured. The passage is blocked by original plastic. As far as I can tell, it was made wrong at the factory, and never could have worked.

How many dealer visits and repair shop visits must have occurred in ten years and 190,000 miles? Quite a few. Did anybody notice? NONE of them pointed it out.

For now, the hose just goes into the fill opening, and that works.

pristine coolant in reservoir

ugly radiator coolant

reservoir side passage

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When saving to Word format, a documents using advanced features may break because Word doesn’t directly support those exact features.

Some features Word doesn’t support:

• Xref to contents of text box.
• Xrefs/bookmarks with spaces in names. Tries to fix by using %20 in lieu.

Stuff that Word supports but OOo doesn’t translate perfectly:

• Equations: spaces may be dropped from text in an equation

Symptoms

The converted doc will look OK at first, but any changes or updates will expose problems.

The Table of Contents may not update properly.  Cross-references and links won’t work. Other fields that Word updates will have error messages or incomplete/bad info.

file conversion · OpenOffice