| updates |
[Feb. 9th, 2013|10:00 am]
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So, since October, a lot has happened with the 2000 Civic, but basically, bugs were ironed out, it was listed in December, and eventually sold in January for a little less than I had hoped, $2200. Adding up all the bills, I probably lost about $100 from beginning to end, but learned a great deal in the process, so consider it well worth it. With the investment in the 2000 Civic liquidated to cash, I bought a clean-titled (but collision rebuilt) 1993 Mazda mx-5 miata with 143K as well as a miata hardtop that needs a new glass rear window and some resin repair work. It's well worth it to me, I think that miatas with matching hard tops look fantastic.
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[Sep. 30th, 2012|09:03 pm]
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It's been a steady week of running headlong at projects, spurred perhaps by the sense that cold weather is just around the corner here in the foothills.
Finally spent some time cleaning and then reassembling the Honda Civic D16Y8 engine cylinder head camshaft and assemblies. Each individual piece came out of its marked ziplock bag and back to its original position in the assembly. It's honestly just a relief to reduced the number of loose pieces to only the assembly itself. :)
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 23rd, 2012|09:57 pm]
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Went out to Glenwood Springs, CO, to meet up with Cereal from SL and hang out for a few hours. He was passing through via Amtrak/rail, of which I'm somewhat envious. Glenwood Springs is a pretty neat slice of mountainous Colorado, more or less everything I love about mountain towns, but also alive and well (thriving) thanks to tourism. On one side of Hotel Denver is a brewpub with decent brews. On the other The Pullman restaurant, highly recommended.
Restored a piece of Internet that has been offline for several years.. There was some problem moving it from one server to another, and at the time, I just never got back around to figuring out why it was down. Sad, I know? Anyway, I give you back the Planet-Zero wiki:
http://www.planet-zero.org/wiki/index.php?chromal
In addition to essentially being my homepage a half-decade or so ago, it was also where I was documenting some synthesizers:
http://www.planet-zero.org/wiki/index.php/chromalsGear
Funnily enough, I still get hits on these. The rest of the web never fully forgot; now they're back up for posterity. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 1st, 2012|01:52 pm]
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The 2000 Honda Civic EX work continues; everything was running splendidly for about twenty miles, and then the engine spun a rod bearing without warning.
Presently, the engine and transmission are out of the car. Specifically, the engine has been stripped down with the crankshaft, rods, and pistons at a machine shop, and then the block and cylinder head at another shop being jetwashed.
There's not a whole lot for me to do while waiting for the various shops to complete their assigned tasks, but if everything goes well, I'll re-assemble the engine, rejoin it to the transmission, remount it in the car, and do some break-in while holding my breath to see if it is going to run reliably. Before I'm done, the following will be renewed: cylinder head bolts, cylinder head gasket, valve cover gasket and seals, rear and front main seals, main and rod bearings, oil pump seals, water pump, timing belt tensioner, timing belt, oil pan gasket, and intake manifold gasket (third time!).
To kill some time, some friends (michi, liam, kitfox) and I went on a circuit of thrift stores in the Denver region, each person finding things suitable to their own interests. I picked up an Onkyo tape deck ($13.00) and an old Walter Carlos vinyl LP ($1.50).
Why pick up a tape deck, you ask? Yes, it was arguably a defunct medium over a decade ago, and today in 2012 it's positively archaic. Still, it was so well-established by its end, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't own a cassette player of some sort. I guess in the end, I probably don't have a good answer, other than, "Why, to revel in a defunct medium and make mixtapes for my child-of-the-1990s Honda and SAAB audio cassette tape players!" The SAAB even supports Dolby-C NR, which actually pushes analog cassette recordings into good enough territory for a high noise-floor listening environment such as a car. :) Perhaps it's also a small taste of nostalgia, though in all honesty I was making mix CDs (CD-R) as far back as 1996...
Wanna check it out? Here's a MP3 programme of the entire tape: 2012-07-01 - Electronique Pop (63m31s 72MB 160kbps MPEG2-l3). |
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| auto-blog |
[Jun. 10th, 2012|10:26 pm]
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Hard to believe it's been a month since the last update on the 2000 EX project (start with post #29), but most of that time was spent waiting for either disposable income for a salvage tranny or luck with craigslist/upullandpay sourcing on a cheaper one. Luck didn't pan out, so I wound up paying the full going rate for a pulled B4RA 4-spd AT from another 2000 EX, this one with 136K and totalled in a rear-end + front smash accident, acquired at Media Auto near Sante Fe for $450 with a 30-day warranty.
The tranny had a broken mount point for the front torque mount, but was otherwise clean looking. Naturally, I hauled it home in the back of my hatchback civic, and dived into mounting it on the engine, a tricky one-man job when done using a single floor jack. I wound up sliding the replacement transmission under the elevated engine bay, and then rocking it forward and backwards, inserting 2x6 or 2x4 boards each time until I could fit the jack under it, and then continued the process using the jack and still more boards until I could start bolting on mounts. It was a pain and a half keeping the torque converter from sliding off... But I got it up, mounted fully (sans the broken bolt-up point on one of two tranny torque mounts), driveplate bolted to torque converter, and so on.
Then the gradual build-up process of wiring harnesses, the new radiator, the intake manifold.. which I screwed up multiple ways. (Incomplete mount, wrong gasket needed '99-'00 specific unique one.. Third time was a charm.) Fuel rail and pressure regulator and injectors, air intake and coolant hoses, throttle cable. Finally got everything in place, refilled the engine oil and ATF, then fired it up and let the various disassembly/assembly solvents burn off the engine.
Taking it for a test drive, it was clear this tranny had no problem locking up 2nd, 3rd, and 4th gears, but there was still very poor power and it was hard to hit more than 20 mph going uphill. Throttle past 20% didn't add power, only intake noise. Flooring it in neutral, the RPMs crept slowly up, cresting around 4500. I checked some usual stuff-- distributor cap and rotor, spark plugs and gaps, timing belt / TDC marks, even ran some seafoam thru. The compression check read 120-120-120-125 (sounds low, but I think being at 8700ft has a lot to do with it-- every compression check on every car seems low up here. Main thing was, they were consistent from one cylinder to another) No biscuit, I kept searching for the problem.
This led to another two days of diagnosing various vacuum leaks (see above intake manifold commentary), a bad primary HO2S, and ultimately a badly clogged catalytic converter that was probably a lot of what the previous owner believed was wrong. Holding it up to the sun and peering through, easily over 95% of the grid ports inside were opaque to light. Instead of pulsed exhaust out the tailpipe on idle, it slowly wafted very hot gas. I removed the cat and test ran the car, obviously it was loud, but full power.
Unexpectedly, I was able to 'fix' the cat by removing it and blowing 150 PSI air through it backwards, causing billowing grey dust to fly out. I continued this until no more grey powder came free. Now, maybe only 15% of the grids are opaque and the car runs happily. Rear O2 seems OK; the catalyst in the converter still appears to be whole and functional (knock on wood). |
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| yawp 2012 |
[Mar. 13th, 2012|01:13 am]
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Wow, has it really been this long since my last post?
Uh, let's see. I bought a very inexpensive 1996 SAAB 900 SE turbo hatchback in November. I've been gradually fixing it up. You can read all about it here (with photos).
Here's a neat music video:
Another:
One more:
I'll try not to be a stranger here... |
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| car, house - updates |
[Sep. 25th, 2011|10:59 pm]
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It's been five or six weeks since I last posted an update here, I guess I'm past due!
Car and house mini-projects abound as the warm-weather days wane and signs of winter materialize (saw the first frost appear on Wednesday morning last week). My roommate has had a handful of projects of his own, which I've watched or lent a hand with to varying degrees. Their $800 craigslist '92 Audi 100 CS Quattro (V6 2.8l 5MT AWD sedan) has been an interesting progression of engine, brake, and fuel system work. With the right tires, it should make an awesome winter car.
The old chimney and masonry in the entrance room has been largely removed with the help of a sledgehammer, a bucket, and a shop-vac, though I can only take credit for a fraction of the manual labor. There's a large pile of cracked brick and mortar outside the house, which will eventually be mixed into the landscaping and removed as seems appropriate. It appears that a leak in the chimney flashing above caused some concealed water damage below, one of the exterior knee walls in the A-frame was rotten and soft enough to remove by hand, as are sections of the subfloor nearby... another structural project!
Finally installed a small 70w high-pressure sodium parking lot light over my driveway near the house, again with help. Having a nighttime flood light has been long overdue, it's a welcome thing to be able to see whether or not there are critters between you and your house or cars as you come and go! The plan is to run some buried wiring conduit to a weatherproof outlet below it, hopefully before winter sets in. For the moment, it's powered when needed via an orange outdoor extension plug.
Around the beginning of the month, it was necessary to take the Mazda3 to the dealership for warranty service on the front wheel hub bearings. The problem appeared around 18K as rotational grinding sort of noises when turning right or coasting along, but was mostly quiet when accelerating or pedal braking. Very strange to have happened at such low mileage, but it's been resolved.
Honda Civic projects continue; recently purchased a full set of 14" steel wheels with mostly worn summer tires on craigslist. I was after the wheels, and for $40 they were a bargain. Finally also replaced the broken A-pillar radio antenna, which was damaged by a friend way back in 2001, about two weeks after I bought the car, when they bent it while climbing out from the 2nd row seat. It eventually broke off, and I had gone a few years without good radio reception before finally ordering a replacement. Fishing the wire from the roof down the pillar to behind the dashboard was as much a pain as you'd expect, but it's definitely an improvement in reception over no antenna! With a little help from my roommate, I tackled a front disc brake pad replacement project, installing new brake pads and bleeding/flushing all four corner brakes of old fluid.
Finally, today, I purchased a blown engine (D16Y7) for $80 from a craigslist posting. I drove down expecting an engine block and cylinder head, but also got a 5MT transmission, some engine mounts, an alternator, a starter, a wiring harness, and what appears to be a D16Z6 throttle body and intake manifold. I'm told the engine has 156K on the clock and a spun bearing. It was also missing its oil pan. Naturally, I picked it up in the '98 Civic hatchback that it may eventually go in; I never tire of the utility of the hatchback! :) I spent the evening pulling things off the engine block before it became too dark to continue. It will basically need to be rebuilt, with new pistons, rods, bearings and seals, and possibly a crankshaft. I'll know more once I've got the block and head pulled apart. The condition of the transmission is unknown, but everything is a little suspect given the engine was a) boosted with forced induction and b) blown. |
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| more bandwidth = happy me |
[Aug. 22nd, 2011|12:13 pm]
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For the past three years, the fastest-available Internet delivery to my home has been 1.5mbps ADSL. The main limitation there had been twofold: My address was serviced by a RSDLAM with limited backhaul bandwidth, probably a T3 (45mbps) for the entire subdivision of 300 houses, and also fairly old line cards providing an old ADSL format.
I was excited to see them stringing fiber optic lines along the road from Evergreen to my neck of the woods this summer. The line fed right to my neighborhood's RSDLAM, and sure enough, the modem began reporting higher attainable data rates in mid-July. At my request, they checked the analog loop and apparently moved my line splice from a split pair to a twisted pair trunk, and the analog line parameters were greatly improved, enough so that they were able to move me to their 12/1 ADSL2+ tier, with happy results:
Latency has also dropped, from about 55ms to about 28ms, so multiplayer gaming is also much-improved. All this for an extra $10/mo. I'm happy with this progress! |
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