I had my the lighting in my garage 50% completed when I decided to do something different. I wasn't happy with the amount of light it was putting out and was less happy with how it looked.
Initially I had purchased some very cheap four foot lights that were designed to hang from chains and plug into an outlet. I drilled holes through these and screwed them directly to the ceiling. While researching electrical code for hardwiring the lights, I found out that not only could I not hardwire them, I should not have mounted them any way other than by chain. It appears that the design of the light does not let the transformer cool properly unless its hanging.
The following weekend I purchased the lights I should have bought in the first place, they were five times the cost of the ones I had originally purchased. This is a case of you get what you pay for and I am very happy with the lighting in the garage now.
I have four of the six lights I purchased, installed, I stil need to move the Nova and put the remaining two lights above it. They don't take that long to install, its the decision I made to run the wiring internally that takes a lot of time.
Since we have moved into our new home our internet access has been very poor. In Indiana we had Comcast cable internet and while it wasn't the fastest it did work very well. Moving into our new home our choices were limited to either satellite or Cox cable. The advertized connection speeds through Cox were much faster than Comcast but of course the reality once we were connected was quite different. After numerous service calls, replacement of F-connectors and splitters I felt we had a stable connection. Two weeks ago it quit working again.
This time it appeared to be a hard fault and after a few hours I was able to determine it was our six year old wireless router. After some research and a quick trip to Best Buy I was back home with a new WNDR3700 Netgear Dual Band N-Draft router. The setup was quick and easy although the only real way to do it was manually, the supplied software is not compatible with 64 bit operating systems. My home network speeds both wired and wireless immediately jumped from transfer rates of 2.0mbps to 10mbps, unfortunately my internet access was virtually nonexistent. Feeling good that my equipment was in order I made the call to Cox again and to my surprise they had a tech at my house the very next day, a Sunday even.
The tech could find nothing wrong with the connection he changed a couple of F-connectors and replaced the cable modem as a precaution. The connection was working as he packed up and before he had been gone for five minutes it went down again.
That week it worked sporadically and by that Friday night had gone completely out again. After screwing around with it all week and researching the problem I found I was not the only one having this problem with this router and I was unable to find a positive fix for it. Since I did not feel I should need to spend 170.00 on a router that obviously required a lot of troubleshooting to make it work, I packed up the new Netgear router and headed back to Best Buy to exchange it for another. They of course had no more of Netgear’s flagship so I picked up a Cisco WRT610N which didn't have as good reviews and was 30.00 more expensive.
Once I had it hooked up my internet worked flawlessly and the speeds were better than even advertized by Cox.
Speed achieved with new Cisco N-Draft router
The last speed test was done connected wirelessly. My laptop does have an Intel 5100 series wireless card which supports N-Draft at a connection speed of 150 Mbps versus the draft speed of 300 Mbps. The G connection speed was of course 54 Mbps. I never have seen much of a difference (with the original router) in either internet connection or my home network speeds wither I was using wireless or wired. The best speeds I had seen with the old G router were in the 7Mb/s range, with an average of around 4Mb/s. The disparity between the download speed and upload speed is due to Cox using upload compression.
I'm very happy with the new router, I had not been really looking at them or keeping up on what was available. It has a USB port for ftp,http and network access to a drive. Being dual band my wife’s laptop or Matty’s PSP/PS3 connecting to it won’t drop my connection to the slower G band.
Hopefully I'll be able to get another six to seven years out of it before I need to go through that again.
Over new years the SQL database for my blog became corrupted again and I lost many of my older posts. Because I don't really have the time to figure out what is causing the problem on my server, I have decided to move my blog to Google. It also eliminates the issues with my ISP blocking ports and using redirects.
Tania, Matty and I had a nice Christmas with just the three of us.
Because of the school canceling the orchestra, I wanted Matty to continue playing his bass. To keep his interest active with it we decided to buy him an electric bass and amplifier for Christmas.
It's hard to see in the picture but the Ibanez bass is a dark blue sunburst. The amplifier is a 10 watt studio amp with multiple sound functions. It also allows for music player amplification as well as headphones (very important).
He has played it non-stop for the last week.
Tania is a bit harder to buy for, she normally buys whatever she needs. This year was much easier, her watch had stopped working properly for the last few weeks so I got her a Citizen Eco Drive solar powered watch. Tania has a thing about watches without numbers on the face, so this one fit the bill perfectly
Knowing me like she does, she bought me an awesome stand for my Rigid saw. Something I had been looking at for a while but had not bought because I could not justify the cost versus need.
It is a Rigid MS-UV or Miter Saw Utility Vehicle. It has extensions on both ends which pull out to triple its length and those extensions have support legs that are inside the extension. The entire unit folds up and stands on end with the saw attached for storage. No more kneeling on the floor to cut wood!
Matty had his first concert of the year last night. This is his second year playing stand-up bass in a school orchestra.
The concert opened up with the students from the “beginning orchestra” which comprised of around 25 students that had been playing anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 years. They were all dressed in white shirts and black slacks. They did a very good job and played for around 20 minutes, many of the songs being seasonal and very short.
Following that the “advanced orchestra” went up on the stage and as you can see from the picture it consisted of nine students all dressed in black. I was very impressed by how well they sounded for such a small group of young kids. The concerts he played in Brownsburg were with much larger groups of kids, the bass section alone would have five to six.
I was also impressed by how well Matty played being I never hear him practice at home, the most noise I hear from his bass is when it either slides off whatever he has it propped against or it being moved out of his way.
The total concert lasted about an hour and was very entertaining. Its sad to think that they wont be doing it next year. Due to budget constraints all music has been cut from his school along with sports. I’m really rather upset about this because this is the only chance most people have in their lives to do either.
I guess when Tucson cant afford to pay police and firemen that expecting our children to have extra curricular activities thorough the school is expecting too much.
The last week of October I finished up the necessary claim paperwork for what was stolen during our move. It took me over three weeks to research what is missing, look up values or equivalent values and fill out the 18 pages of claim forms. These forms I submitted to the claim company and a week later they sent me a letter stating they had received the forms and forwarded them to their parent company (Atlas). It went on to state I would be hearing from a claims representative shortly.
Five weeks later and still no word, I contacted the claims department it was sent to. After two minutes of looking I was informed, “there is no record of any claim in your file”. Up to this point I have pretty much taken all of this in stride, I mean it really does no good to get upset. because all of this will take time to sort out. The problem is, every person I have dealt with appears to be either totally inept or completely ineffectual at their job. At this point in time I really went off on some poor secretary that probably is completely capable of doing her job and was only guilty of answering my call. My words were something along the lines of “Just so I understand this correctly, not only has your company lost my personal property, you have now lost the claim forms for that property”.
That was over a week ago, by last Friday everything had been submitted to the corporate claims office once again I was placed in the “someone will contact you shortly” status.
Sahuarita has a “Outdoor Lighting Code” which is to help prevent light pollution. Without going into details on it, there is basically a certain lumen output per acre allowed in residential areas which is so low it disallows the use of street lights. In residential areas at night you might as well be 50 miles out of town, its very dark.
Even though I grew up in the country, when you drove down a country road there weren’t cars parked up and down the sides or people walking around. Driving here at night seems odd, like there is a blackout or something. It doesn’t help that the composite headlight housings on my pickup are hazed and yellow.
A few weeks ago when my brother in law was here, he brought me a 3M headlight polish kit. He had tried it and liked it so well he bought a master kit for his shop. I was a bit skeptical on it working because I had tried using a Dico wheel and some plastic rouge, it appeared to clear the lense up some but I felt the yellowing was not limited to the surface.
Friday night I was doing some reading on headlight housings to see if there was any clear opinion on who made the best clear aftermarket housings when I came across a thread on GM Fullsize Forums about polishing composite headlights. One of the people posting mentioned he had after washing the lenses, wiped them down with lacquer thinner. This not only removed the yellowing from the lenses it melts the surface repairing the thousands of small pits and surface cracks in the lens.
Sunday I decided to work on a few things I had been wanting to do. The stereo in my truck had a whine from the alternator, the most common cause for that is a bad ground. I moved the ground from the factory harness to a good chassis ground under the dash which cleared up the whine. The alarm that I had installed when the truck was new wasn’t working properly and the range of the transmitters was down to a few feet from the truck. I checked the connections to the system and found no problems, changed the batteries in the remotes, no fix. I pulled out the main unit from under the dash where they had mounted it and could smell a faint burnt capacitor smell, so I removed the system.
I had some extra time so I decided to tackle the headlights. I removed the grille because I was not familiar with the headlight removal and didn’t want to mess up the aim. Once it was off, I removed the driver side housing and was able to see how easy it was to pull the pins that mount the housings. I wiped the drivers side housing down with a clean white rag and some lacquer thinner which turned the rag a dark yellow, it looked like I had cleaned off the inside of a car window that had been owned by a smoker for 20 years.
Once the composite lens dried it turned a hazy white but was still relatively smooth. I went over it with my DA sander and some 360 grit paper. I then used the 3M kit and quickly hit it with 500 then 800 grit paper. The kit then stated to use a thin pad that was probably somewhere in the 1000 to 1200 grit range. The last step was to use a sponge pad and compound that I replaced with some mirror glaze. As you can see from the pictures the difference between the polished and un-polished is quite obvious. The park lamps are made out of a different material and did not polish out to a glass finish like the headlamps.
When I finished the drivers side lights it was starting to get dark so I decided to install the grill while I could still see. The garage was occupied by my wife’s project which involves stripping the dining room table / chairs and refinishing them. We were also sharing the DA sander between the two projects. At one point the smelly kid that lives upstairs even came down and helped her for a while. As you can see it looks quite fun, It had just started to cool down for the day and were already acclimated, but you really can’t complain about 60 degree weather at the end of November.
Installing the grille was a mistake, I finished polishing the park light on the passenger side and started to take out the headlamp, the first pin came out easily the second is froze in the nylon insert it screws into. Next weekend I will pull the grille back off and get the light out.
THe difference in the lights performance is amazing, since only the drivers side is polished it over powers the passenger side so much that while driving it appears to be burned out or not connected correctly. Once I have it polished I plan to order a HID kit for the low beams, I found one that has good reviews for 49.00 with a lifetime warranty.
After finding the rear wheel brake cylinders leaking on my truck I decided to look it over a bit more. I had noticed some oil spots on the ground where I park at work and really didn’t want to look at that because Chevy motors and manual transmissions are notorious for having rear main seal leaks. At first glance that’s where mine was leaking from.
Knowing that it wont fix itself and will only get worse I looked a lot closer.
I have changed the oil on my truck myself all but maybe six or seven times. I’ve seen the oil cooler adapter (item 7) where the spin-on filter normally mounts but never really thought much about it. Now I’m looking at it as being the obvious source of my oil leak but not really understanding why its even there. My truck doesn’t have any of the cooler lines, it never has, so why does it have this adapter that serves no other obvious purpose.
Saturday I made a couple calls to some parts stores hoping to get whatever gaskets or o-rings there were to fix the leak, no one I spoke with knew what I was talking about. So I drove into Tucson and went to five different parts stores. Even the old standby NAPA didn’t have the o-ring kit to fix the leak. I stopped off at a self serve car wash and washed down the underside of the truck to determine if that was in fact what was leaking and if there were any other leaks. Once I got home there was oil on the adapter and with the truck needing an oil change I took it off to see if I could determine what was wrong or even fix it. There was one paper gasket (item 5), and an o-ring (item 6). The o-ring was as hard as a rock and cracked, being the obvious problem. I made a new gasket and covered the o-ring with RTV. This of course changed the leak from a random drip to a constant stream.
After cleaning up my mess I logged into rockauto.com and found a Felpro number for a rebuild kit for 2.69. Armed with the part number it was much easier to find the kit locally. The following day after work I was able to pick it up from a small NAPA that was closed Sunday and had the leak fixed in 15 minutes.
Last Monday on my way home from the airport, my brakes felt a bit strange. When I got home I popped open the hood and found the fluid level in the master cylinder to be about 1/8th of an inch. A quick check around the truck led to some fluid on the driver side aft wheel. I parked the truck and Friday morning tore into the back brakes.
The last time I had the drums off the rear axle was 13-14 years ago so of course it took about 1.5 hours each just to get them off. The original brake linings were not even close to being worn out but the drivers side was soaked with fluid and the passenger side had just started to leak. Two hours and 150.00 later I had new cylinders, shoes, hardware kits and drums, the original drums had quite a few heat cracks and I was having a hard time finding somewhere that would turn them so I just bought new ones.
Putting them back together was fairly uneventful, they were more complex than any other drum brake I had ever replaced and the springs were a total pain. I bled 3 bottles of fluid through the system before I was satisfied with the pedal, I will probably end up bleeding out some more this coming weekend. I can’t really complain much 103k miles on brakes is pretty good, they would have probably gone 140k if the cylinders had not gone out.
The sad part in all of this is the state of my truck. When I bought the truck in 93 it was everything that I wanted and I had intended up till this weekend to keep the truck forever. The time I spent on it this weekend revealed just how hard Indiana was on it, there is corrosion everywhere. It’s not like it has huge spots rusting out through the body its more that every single piece on the truck has some form of corrosion. Eventually it will rust out through the body panels and other than completely disassembling it and having every single item media blasted and repainted there is nothing I can do to stop it from happening. I already have one project vehicle and don’t really need to take on another of that magnitude, so my current plan is to fix a couple minor things on it and put it up for sale. I can buy a newer truck that has spent its entire life in Arizona for a fraction of the cost it would be to prevent mine from turning into red powder and blowing away.
I got a last minute offer to go to the “Dickies 500″ at Texas Motor Speedway this weekend.
I flew in Saturday afternoon and was pleasantly surprised by our accommodations, we were staying at the Gaylord Texan in Grapevine Texas.
That night we had great steak and lobster dinner at the Old Hickory Steakhouse Restaurant, one of many at the resort. After dinner we walked across the street to The Glass Cactus Nightclub. The Molly Ringwalds, an 80’s cover band was playing, they were below average and I was very tired so I didn’t stay long.
I woke up Sunday to an overcast morning, the National Weather Service website showed a 70% chance of rain for the entire day, not good for a NASCAR race. Fortunately Texas Motor Speedway has lights for night racing which would give them that much more time to get the race in if it did rain.
It took us a little over an hour to get to the track and another 45 minutes to get our VIP passes and into the suite. The Bombardier suite was awesome, it had a max capacity of 68 people and was just past the start finish line on the front stretch. We had good food, our own bartender, some nice gift packs and “Racing Radios” scanners to use.
The picture does it no justice, it was huge and with the windows canted out at the top it gave the illusion of leaning out over the track. With glass walls dividing the suites there were very few blind spots when sitting towards the back of the suite. We were running a little behind schedule so the people assigned to the suite quickly hustled us out of the room for a pit tour.
I was really excited about the pit tour, I’ve been to a lot of NASCAR races but never had access to the pits. Our guide took us past hundreds of people standing in line to go through the small tunnel to the infield and at the tunnel entrance told us to merge in to line. This probably saved us a good hour of standing in line and once through the tunnel you immediately were able to see the hour long line you would be standing in to get back.
On the infield side we had an ESPN journalist waiting to give us the pit tour. While I’m sure it was interesting it was basically NASCAR 101, so I didn’t hang with the group very long. Because we were running late we had arrived at the infield about 10 minutes before the start of the drivers meeting, thus the chances of seeing one were pretty much nil, so I headed off to find JR’s pit area.
After getting pictures of JR’s pit area I made my way back up pit lane towards where his and Jimmies cars were parked in line. I tried for a good ten minutes to get a clean picture of each from behind the pit boxes, but there were constant crowds around each car on pit lane. One of the people in my group came up and asked what I was doing, then explained to me we were allowed on pit lane as well. After climbing over the wall it was much easier to get a nice shot of both cars.
I quickly got tired of dealing with the shear amount of people and all the fun things that go along with large crowds, so I snapped a couple quick pictures up and down pit lane before I headed back for the hour wait to go back through the tunnel.
After getting back to the tunnel line, I found out that it was closed the direction I wanted to go and wouldn’t open for another thirty minutes, so I put my camera away and two minutes later the Grand Marshals of the race, ZZ Top, drove by on their golf carts. So of course I didn’t have time to get the camera out of the bag to get a picture of them while they were four feet away. Once I was back in the suite I set up a soda can tripod, hit max zoom and got a shot of them on stage. They played for about an hour as the sun started peaking out from the rain clouds.
After the pre-race festivities and the track was cleared a CH-47 Chinook flew by right in front of the suite and touched down on the end of the track. As it was landing the aft loading ramp was coming down and out drove the 2010 Camaro Pace Car for the race. It was very cool and got a great reaction from the crowd. The dropoff happened very quickly and due to where I was sitting and the angle of the glass I was not able to get very good pictures of the drop.
I am not going to go into the details of the race itself, it was actually a very good race. nothing like the yawnfest last week at Talladega. I was very impressed with the traffic control after the race and the ease with which we were able to leave. It was a great overall experience and I look forward to the chance to do it again…. must drive to Phoenix this weekend…. must drive to Phoenix this weekend.
