Wagonlicious

So, I stuck an old 600 Holley (not really old, but also not in use) on the truck today. It runs pretty well now – after replacing the primary bowl and metering block gaskets, as well as the accelerator pump diaphragm. A 600 is a little small for the 454 in my truck, but it’ll just have to do while I finish figuring out what the heck went wrong with the 750 double pumper that was on there. I’m pretty sure some passageway got clogged, since I didn’t do a real rebuild. But it runs well enough with the vac. secondary 600 to drive it up here where I can actually work on it.

Actually, the throttle response is great with the 600, the electric choke is convenient, and I don’t really need a race truck. I might just try the 750 on the Chevelle and see what it can do with some real airflow…

In any event, it ran and performed well during the test drive.  The tires ride well, the brakes brake well, and the new fuel tank doesn’t leak.  Plus, I had actual heat coming out after a short ride.  So, I’m hoping to con someone into riding down with me later this week so I can drive the truck back up here.  Volunteers are welcome. ;)

So, I finally have most everything recovered after the gate.com debacle which was their vps migration. Their support’s not bad, and their prices are great – but there’s always a tradeoff in low-cost hosting… :) In any event, I’m glad to be back online.

So, I have a few UPSs laying around.  Well, they’re actually in use.  Today I decided to set them up to actually cleanly shut down machines connected to them if the power’s off that long.  Because it’s not trivial (but also not difficult), I’ll document it here.  I’m using nut to manage this all – mainly because it works over the network.  One UPS powers two machines in one case, and I want to monitor them all from one workstation, so networkability is important.

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So, I joined the Amazon affiliate program.  I occasionally talk about products I use here, and I usually lik to them on Amazon, so I figured it’d be worthwhile to provide links that might actually make me some money.  I get a few percent of the purchase price, so if you’re gonna buy the things anyway, why not help me out at the same time? :)

Beyond the inline links within posts, I’ll try to remember to aggregate them in my Amazon store.  Go to the store at http://astore.amazon.com/wagonlicious-20 and buy stuff.  It’s run through Amazon, and they’ve got a pretty good track record.  I’ve always been happy with them, anyway.  The link will also be over there in my sidebar, when this post eventually gets rotated out of the front page. :)  

So, on Wed, I got a few new routers.  Since Buffalo’s able to sell wireless routers again, I bought three of their WHR-HP-G54 Wireless-G routers from Amazon.  Amazon has a good price on them, I’ve had really good luck with these routers in the past (been using one for several years now, actually), and I like the long range for my goals here.  I pulled them out of the box, and flashed them with dd-wrt before doing anything else.  BTW, the Buffalo’s drawback is that you have to use a tftp client to flash them – Buffalo encrypts their firmware, and it’s a pain to re-encrypt the open firmwares to install through the web page built in to the routers.  It’s no big deal; the procedure is detailed all over the web.  I’ll put something up shortly about how I did it anyway, though.

Anyway, dd-wrt is cool.  The OLSR support might be cool as well, but the wiki documentation isn’t very good (yes, I’ll fix it if I figure things out on my own) and it’s generally not apearing like it’ll be an easy thing to set up.  Besides, it’s looking like BATMAN might better serve what I want to do.  In any event, I’ll keep things updated here.

I like this quote.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

Feynman is cool.

I’m excited about this.

http://www.hotrod.com/techarticles/chassis/hrdp_0411_wheel_alignment_guide/index.html

A week or so ago, the exhaust cutout stopped working. I thought maybe a wire had broken, but hadn’t gotten around to checking Tonight, I got the multimeter out and verified that I do, in fact, have power all the way down to the motor (well the connector outside of the motor). Since I just bought this thing a few months ago I called Summit up to see about a warranty. The tech was helpful, and immediately volunteered to send me a shipping label so I could return it. I asked to cross-ship the part, and that was also fine. So, I’ll have a new cutout probably Thursday, and it won’t have cost me anything but a few minutes of time to replace the thing (it’s just three bolts).

I approve of Summit’s return policy. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to exchange things, and it’s always gone smoothly. Summit Racing rocks.

Update: the new cutout arrived on Thursday, two days later.  It bolted right on and worked fine.  Yay Summit!

So,I’ve got this UPS that’s about 15 years old. It hasn’t worked for a while. Tonight, I came across an extra battery that exactly matched the specs for the original. I installed the battery, and lo, it actually turned on. I was excited.

Then the UPS failed its self-test and when I unplugged the UPS, the alarm went off and it switched to battery power. “Cool”, I thought – “this is how it’s supposed to work”. For a moment.

There was almost immediately a really loud bang, a bright flash, and more buzzing. I quickly yanked the wire from the battery, and surveyed the scenario. The circuit breaker on the UPS had tripped, and a semi-big disc capacitor had exploded.

So, I guess I’ll call to see if the lifetime equipment protection warranty covers this. Seems plausible, if unlikely…

Update: As it turns out, the BackUps VS450 has a two year warranty.  Because mine was manufactured in 1996, that warranty has long since expired. :)  Apparently it would’ve been covered if I had it plugged in and the damage came over the power line, but not if it damaged itself.  That’s peculiar, but I suppose acceptable.  Maybe I can solder a new capacitor in place, reset the breaker, and magically have things work again…  We’ll see.