Shattered images

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This guy makes Norris style hand planes and his work is top notch. The photos I've seen of his planes show the high standards he has and his quality workmanship. I'd never be able to afford one, but it's nice to day dream about having one. Through another blog I found this toolmaker's blog. I started reading his posts and was marveling at the photos showing how he makes his planes. Then, while reading the post I posted the link to, I saw a photo of him closing some dovetails with a hammer and punch. Scroll down until you see that particular photo. Did you see the size of the mushroom on the punch he's using? Anyone who's taken a shop class in junior high or high school knows that having a mushroomed head on a punch or chisel is a big no-no. When a punch or chisel starts to develop a mushroom you take it over to the grinder and grind a slight taper on the head. It's a safety thing. When a mushroom develops there's a good chance that one of the pieces can shoot off while striking the tool with a hammer. You'll never see a mushroomed head on my chisels or punches. Ever. But I know how much it hurts when a chip flies off of a mushroomed head. A coworker was holding a large punch while I was swinging the hammer and his punch was mushroomed pretty bad. I thought about grinding it for him, but the job would "just take a minute." Well, a chip flew off and hit me squarely in my left thigh. It went deep enough that I had to dig it out. Since that incident I will never, ever use a punch or chisel with a mushroomed head. If someone gets a punch or chisel out of their tool box and it has a mushroom growing on it, I'll ask them if I can grind it down for them and then do it. I only ask for permission as a courtesy. If they say "no" I'm grinding it anyway. Back to the plane maker. After building up a favorable image of this tool maker, I was really disappointed to see him using such a poorly maintained tool. He should know better. I'll bet he doesn't wear eye protection either. Have you ever read a woodworking magazine? They preach safety all the time, but you'll constantly see photos of people operating machinery without eye protection.

About biodiesel

I've seen too many discussions about bio diesel that aren't about bio diesel at all. There's a lot of people confusing bio diesel with recycled fryer oil. Bio diesel is processed from vegetable oil (soy beans mostly) and ends up being, for the most part, like petroleum diesel. Fryer oil is a different story. The people burning old fryer oil (it has to be vegetable oil and not animal fat) are essentially burning it as it is. Of course, it has to be filtered properly and there's usually a fuel heater involved. Can fryer oil be filtered and then processed into bio diesel? Yes. Can vegetable oil be dumped straight into a fuel tank? Yes, but keep your mechanic on speed dial and don't bitch when he hands you the repair bill. A diesel engine will run on just about anything that's combustible. It won't run reliably, or for very long without breaking down, but it will run. A diesel will even run on the engine's lube oil. Just ask someone who's experienced a turbo charger failure about that one. If you're thinking that bio diesel is a wonderful thing and the answer to all of this countries oil dependency and environmental problems, you might be wearing rose colored glasses. Firstly, the manufacturing capacity for a major switch to bio diesel isn't up to the task. Yet. Secondly, 100% bio diesel does NOT mix well with winter in the northern climates. It CAN perform well in cold temperatures, but it has to be treated properly. Truckers are used to treating fuel in the winter, so this wouldn't be a major issue in big trucks. The average Joe (and I'm being honest here) won't treat the fuel. Average Joe wants the convenience of pulling up to the pump, swiping a credit card, filling the tank and driving off. Lastly, bio diesel when it appeared on a large scale, blended in with petroleum diesel (B5, B10, B20) it got a bad rap. Bio diesel also has the image of being a "tree-huggin' hippie fuel" (I actually heard a truck driver say this) and not a "manly-man" fuel like petroleum diesel. The biggest problem that I have seen with bio diesel is that the average Joe didn't bother to learn anything about it. Had they picked up a trade magazine or had done some internet searches, they would've found out that bio diesel is an excellent solvent. 100% bio diesel (B100) all the way down to a 20% bio/80% petroleum blend (B20) is going to cause some initial problems for the first few fill ups. Fuel systems using petroleum based diesel are always a bit grungy, especially at the bottom of the tank. Switching over to a B20 or higher blend is going to scrub the fuel system clean. Guess where all of the crap ends up? That's right, in the fuel filter(s) right where it's supposed to go. The catch is that the filter(s) have to be changed more often until the fuel system has been cleaned out (the switch from "low sulfur diesel" to "ultra-low sulfur diesel" caused a similar problem). When you mix alarmingly frequent fuel filter changes with a notoriously technology-fearing group like the majority of truck drivers out there, the fuel itself makes for a convenient scapegoat. The last thing I want to mention is cost as it relates to the people producing their own bio diesel. You can't realistically expect to produce bio diesel at home for personal use and expect to spend less money than you would if you purchased your fuel down at the corner Qwik Stop. At least not until Billy Mays starts selling the "Home bio diesel" kits for $19.99 on some info-mercial. My closing thoughts are these. Bio diesel is a good thing, and I'd like to see more people using it, even if it's only one of the blends out there. The manufacturers of both bio diesel and diesel engines will have to get things working well in cold temperatures without much, if any, involvement from drivers. Reliably. Finally, the general public needs to be educated about bio diesel.

Take a trip to www.biodiesel.org and read up.

Buses and claustrophobia

I had to go on a service call Thursday evening to repair a bus that was leaning severely to the right. No mechanic in his right mind likes working on buses. Just look at them. They're so low to the ground that a person can barely fit under it, if at all. Throw in an air suspension problem and the bus is even closer to the ground. I was the only mechanic available in the shop at that time and that meant I got stuck with this service call. We spoke with the owner of the coach and he told us what needed to be done. Apparently they've had this same problem with most of their coaches, so this guy new the fix for it. There's a leveling valve for each side of the bus which, in a primitive sort of way, gives the bus something like independent suspension. Most trucks have only one leveling valve to control all air bags (or air springs if you prefer) and it's adequate for the job. A bus on the other hand, is all about ride quality.

A leveling valve, properly called a "ride height control valve" or RHCV, is a very simple thing. The valve has (mounted to the vehicle's chassis), at the minimum, three ports. One port delivers an air supply to the valve, a second port will supply air to the bags, and the third port is an exhaust port. Sticking out of the valve will also be a shaft to which a lever is attached. Moving this lever moves the internal parts of the valve and either lets air flow to the bags, or exhausts air from the bags. There's also a neutral position that neither supplies air nor exhausts air. So, we have a lever with one end connected to the valve, but what about the other end? The other end is connected to a linkage rod. This linkage rod is connected to whatever axle the leveling valve controls ride height for. So how does it all come together in operation? It's very, very simple. Air bags are filled with, no surprise, air. Air can be compressed and when a load on a vehicle is increased, the air inside the bags gets compressed. As the air in the bags compresses, the chassis of the vehicle starts to lower towards the ground. Now since an axle (axles aren't considered a "sprung" component) will remain stationary and the linkage rod won't flex, as the chassis lowers the linkage rod causes the valve's lever to move, in turn the lever operates the valve. As the valve shaft turns it uncovers (in this case) the supply port allowing air to flow into the bags. Not surprising at all, as air flows to the bags, the air pressure inside the bags increases. As the pressure increases, the bags will raise the vehicle back up to a pre-determined chassis ride height (set with the linkage rod.) Are you confused a little bit? If you are, it's okay. To understand the principles of how a leveling valve works, just go to your bathroom. Seriously. Pull the lid off of the toilet's tank and look inside. Think of the valve inside the tank as a leveling valve and think of the float as the linkage rod. The water in the tank is like the air supply to the leveling valve and think of the toilet bowl as the air bag. Now, flush the toilet. Notice that the float drops as water in the tank drains away. When the float drops, water flows through the valve into the tank. When the tank reaches the full mark, the float shuts off the valve, stopping water flow into the tank. That's how a leveling valve works :) Got it? Good.

Anyway, this bus I was out fixing had a common problem. The owner told me to disconnect the air lines from the valve and look for debris blocking the ports. This would be a simple job if it were a truck, but it was a bus with all of the bags on the right side deflated. It looked like the leaning tower of Pisa, believe me. Guess where the leveling valves were? In between the drive axle and tag axle where there was a lot of room to work? Hell no! They were in front of the drive axle, above some really big air tanks. I thought I'd crawl in between the drive axle and tag axle (the tag is to the rear of the drive BTW) wiggle through some torque rods and be able to get at the offending valve. Nope, didn't happen. I could see the valve just fine, but I couldn't reach it. Hmmm, now what? I called the owner again and asked him how I could get at this valve. His suggestion was obvious, but I hadn't thought of it. Buses, usually, can be raised and lowered manually if the need arises. Sometimes a bus needs some extra ground clearance to clear, oh say, a steep driveway entrance. The driver can operate a valve which bypasses the leveling valve and inflate the bags to maximum capacity. It's not really safe to go down the road like that, but it's okay for low speed maneuvering. Back to the story. The driver raises the bus as high as it will go and as I looked in from the top of the right drive tires, I could see the leveling valve I needed to fix. There was one small problem though. With the bus raised I could fit between the top of the drive tires and the bottom of the bus's body, but disconnecting the leveling valve lines would cause the bags to deflate. If the bags deflated, the bus would lower. Crushing me like a rotten tomato. So, I had to find a way to do this job without ending up dead. I found that I could stack some blocks between the drive axle and the chassis. After doing so, I had to driver lower the bus. Of course with the blocks in place, the bus didn't go down, but the air bags deflated and I still had the clearance I needed to crawl in. Now I could get a wrench on the air line fittings. I couldn't, however, get my hand on the air line fittings. Not a big deal when removing the air lines, but I had to be able to get my hand on them to reconnect the lines. Twenty bolts later I had the fender flare removed and could put my hand on the leveling valve. After disconnecting the lines I used a blow gun to blast the leveling valve's ports and, sure enough, some big chunks of debris came shooting out. Not sure what it was, but it was white so I'm thinking it was pipe thread sealant. I reconnected the lines to the valve and had the driver start the engine to build air. After we had enough air pressure, the driver raised the bus and I removed the blocks I had put in. With the blocks removed, the driver lowered the bus and put it into "travel" mode. Woohoo!!! All of the bags inflated as they were supposed to. I bolted the fender flare back on and had the driver drive around the parking lot to make sure the leveling valve was still functioning. It did and that made me very happy. The service call ended on a high note because the driver paid in good 'ol cash! No comm check systems to deal with, no credit card hassles... cash is always nice. After a handshake and a "Have a safe trip" I was back on the road, heading for the shop.

I started to shake a little bit on the drive back because my fear started coming to the front of my mind. I have mild claustrophobia and being under a bus like I was scares me. Mix in the possibility of being crushed and things border on sheer terror for me. But the job isn't going to take care of itself. Trucks don't bother me because they're an "open air" environment you might say. Not buses. When I face situations like this I would rather be doing just about anything else, but somehow I manage to put my fear aside and scrape up enough courage to get the job done. I'll just have to deal with the fear later. Maybe one of these days I'll have a nice office job...

Hand cut dovetails

I spend a lot of free time on woodworking projects of all sorts. I find it relaxing (most of the time) and it's a great way to de-stress after a rough day of fixing trucks. Last summer I started to do more work with hand tools and it has been quite a learning process. I've been concentrating on getting better at cutting dovetails and, for the most part, I'm improving. Slowly. If you go to YouTube and watch videos of a pro cutting dovetails or read about it in a woodworking magazine, it seems to be a very simple process. It is an easy process, but the execution is much more difficult. You'd think that something as simple as sawing to a line wouldn't be very difficult but it is. Another thing that can make dovetails frustrating is not knowing what a sharp tool is. Cutting dovetails with hand tools involves many different skills, and those skills don't come without some practice. For example, the previously mentioned sawing to a line. I thought it would be a simple matter of buying a backsaw, marking a line and then following it. As I found out, there's a lot to learn. It took a lot of practice to finally see that I consistently deviate from the line in one particular way. After more practice I learned how to prevent that deviation. I'm still not great at sawing, but I'm a lot better than I was a year ago. Oh, the saw itself plays a key role. I've found that a Japanese style pull saw (without a back) works well for me versus a traditional western style back saw. There's one style of western saw I've yet to try, but money is short and a new saw isn't in the cards at the moment. In the photo (it's a tailboard) you'll see the tails marked out. The shaded areas are the waste which needs to be removed. I use the pull saw to make the vertical cuts and then use a coping saw to make the horizontal cuts. If you are like me, you would probably mark a line and saw right down that line. That method doesn't make for nice fitting dovetails. The vertical cuts are made on the waste side of the lines and the horizontal cuts are done in a similar fashion, but I leave a little more waste. After the waste piece is cut free, I use a chisel to pare the wood down to the horizontal line (it's called a base line I believe.) Chiseling, there's another skill that didn't come naturally. The biggest problem with chiseling is having a properly sharpened tool. When I bought my first hand plane (a Record smoothing plane) and first set of chisels, I had no way to sharpen them. Hell, I thought they came out of the box ready to go. They don't, trust me. A trip to the "Big Orange Box" for a sharpening stone and I thought I had it made. Nope, not yet. After digging through the stacks of old woodworking magazines, I learned that the back of a chisel needs to be flattened before working on the bevel. The same goes for plane irons. After a few hours flattening chisels and plane irons, my arms felt like Jell-O and my fingers were raw. But, I had flat tools. Next it was on to the bevel. I used the side sharpening method on the bevels because it was easier for me to hold the tool in the proper way. Two hours later I had what I thought were some razor sharp chisels. Any professional woodworker would have declared them dull. I didn't know it at the time, but the cheap sharpening stone I bought (the only one I could find locally) was pretty shitty. I also had a hard time keeping the chisels in position while sharpening them. Mail order to the rescue! I bought a honing guide which eliminated my problems with holding the chisels, but I still had a crappy stone. The chisels were sharper than before, but not much. Last weekend I finally decided to give the "Scary Sharp" method a try and wish I would've done it years ago. It is nothing more than putting various grits of sandpaper onto a reliably flat surface (i.e. plate glass, marble, granite etc.) with spray adhesive. You start with the coarse grit and then work your way through the grits in succession until you reach the final one (2000 grit in my case). The combination of the honing guide, flat glass and the many grits of sanpaper yielded a mirror surface on the first chisel I sharpened. I gave that first chisel the age-old test of trying shave some hair off my arm. Shave it did, and cleanly at that. My plane has also been a joy to use. Right now, all of the skills I've been working on are beginning to come together and are yielding better work. I put the dovetailed box together the other day and it looks very good (for me that is) with only a couple of really bad gaps. Those gaps are because I cut on the wrong side of the line on a pin board. Stupid mistake, but I learned from it. I'm looking forward to getting the box glued together and using my razor sharp plane to trim the joints flush. That will have to wait. I got sick of my workbench racking and squeaking so I disassembled it (I didn't build it) and decided to renovate it with mortise and tenon joinery. I plan on building a new bench in the near future, but reworking my old "squeaker" is turning out to be a good learning experience. But, that's a whole other story.

Oh yeah, I have a blog :/

Let's take a look at my blogging activity, shall we? Yep, it was 8 December, 2008 when I posted the last blog. My computer's power supply failed and toasted the hard drive and I lost everything. Including the bookmark to this blog. I guess you might say that I simply forgot about it until now, which is true. I have a lot to write about if you can stand reading a long post. Let's start with the work-related stuff.

Winter at the shop was as expected. Lots and lots of "my truck (circle all that apply): gelled up, won't start, has no power, is stuck, won't build air" service calls. We had some long days in the early part of January and I think my longest day was sixteen hours of constant work. Mostly service calls. I had to climb on top of trailers at the scale, change more fuel filters than I can count, bypass air dryers and other similar crap. I was colder than I have ever been during one of those long days. The coldest day we had showed some of the inefficiency of our shop. The shop's owner doesn't like to give up on a truck with gelled fuel. One of my coworkers spent seven hours on one service call! I'm not sure if I've talked about this before, but I'll describe the fix for a truck with gelling fuel. First of all, diesel fuel has paraffin in it. That's right, the wax. When temperatures get low enough, that paraffin starts to solidify and, of course, solid fuel doesn't flow very well. The first thing that happens is the fuel filter/s clog and the engine loses power. Smart drivers get off the road as soon as possible and try to keep the engine running because even if the engine isn't producing enough power to pull the rig, as long as it's running, it's creating heat. The lucky guys have fuel heaters in the tanks, which is nothing more than a loop of pipe inside the tank which is connected to the cooling system. They work very well, but not all trucks have them. Regardless of whether or not the truck has fuel heaters in the tanks, the fuel is always circulating in a loop. There's more fuel going to the engine than the engine actually needs and whatever doesn't get used returns to the fuel tanks. Now, having been circulated through the engine, the fuel returning to the tanks is warmer than the fuel being drawn from the tanks. This warm fuel helps prevent gelling. So, if the driver can keep the engine running, he stands a greater chance of having fewer problems for a mechanic to solve. When diesel gets cold enough to start causing problems it will become cloudy. You can duplicate the look of cloudy fuel by pouring a beer into a glass (Budweiser, Miller etc. are good diesel fuel colored brews to use) and let it go flat. Once the bubbles are gone put a splash of milk into the glass and stir it up. That's what cloudy diesel fuel looks like. Beyond this cloudy state, the fuel will, quite literally, turn into a gel. Once it's in gel form, don't call a mechanic. Call for a tow truck. Anyway, back to my coworker's adventure. He showed up at the motor lodge where the customer was staying and found a truck that was shut off the night before and the block heater hadn't been plugged in. The driver had put an anti-gel additive in his fuel at the last fill up, and this prevented his fuel from gelling. The fuel, however, was very cloudy. My coworker started "the process" that all of us in the shop know so very well. Fire up the generator, air compressor and run to extension cords to the truck. Pull out the battery charger and hook it up to the truck. Take the extension cords, plug one into the block heater and the other to the battery charger, turn the charger on. Next, put one gallon of "911" fuel liquifier into each tank. Disconnect the fuel supply line from the first fuel filter and stick the blow gun into the line. Blow air into the line, which mixes the 911 and diesel fuel. Reconnect the fuel line, remove the fuel filter/s, fill the new filter/s with straight 911 and then install them. Remove the air filter and stand by with a can of ether (starting fluid. We call it "liquid choke"). If there's enough power in the batteries at this time, the driver cranks the engine and the mechanic sprays a good shot of ether into the intake system. If you're lucky, and the driver hasn't stopped cranking the engine, you'll get the engine to sputter a bit. If it does, a series of short, continuous shots of ether get sprayed into the intake until it starts. If/when the engine starts, the driver holds the accelerator to the floor until the engine starts running smoothly. A cold engine will smoke like a motherfucker until it warms up, but God help me, I love the smell of burned ether and 911. It smells like success! Occasionally we get a stubborn son of a bitch that requires more work to get it running. Sometimes we have to put on another set of fuel filters because the first set got clogged with paraffin. It's not uncommon to change filters again. My coworker did everything I have just described and got the engine running. Barely running. It wouldn't accelerate so he put more additive into the fuel tanks, mixed it up and put on another fuel filter. Then another filter, and another, and another. After six hours of fuckin' around, we towed it back to the shop. Sometimes the only way to get a truck going is to put it inside and warm the whole thing up. My coworker spent the seventh hour of this service call dropping the driveshaft for our tow truck operator. Can you spot the inefficiency yet? If you haven't, I'll point it out. The way all of us mechanics in our shop see it, if the situation goes beyond a second set of fuel filters, the truck needs to be towed to the shop. By the time the second set of filters get put on we're averaging about three to four hours on that service call. Wasting more time by continually changing fuel filters is no better than banging one's head against a wall. Not to mention it's a waste of the customer's money. The service call I just described lasted seven hours and STILL ended up with a tow. That's just stupid. At the busiest part of that day, every mechanic was out on the road and we had eighteen(!) additional service calls lined up. My coworker wanted this truck towed after the second set of filters, but the shop's owner told him to stay there and keep spinning filters on until it ran properly. Think of all the service calls that my coworker could have done if this truck had just been towed when it was suggested. Once this truck was in our shop, it had to sit inside overnight before it would start and run properly. Normally they only have to sit inside for about four hours. It's madness I tell ya! But that's winter for a diesel mechanic. That whole week was rough, but we made it through and made a whole bunch of money.

Since I've rambled on and on about gelling fuel, I'll save the other events of the past months for other posts. I have to hit the sack.