Here’s a great study.. lots of people living far off the grid, and only a few seem to understand they ‘are’ off the grid. Will this Island make the right decisions, and what are the right ones?
My thoughts, here’s a place that really needs a nuke..
http://olelo.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=30&clip_id=33347
GB
A mouse in the House?
Over the many years, I’ve written articles about the ST head and some of the simple things you need do, one is flip the unit over on it’s back and notice the large open holes under each bell end.
You might not hear it, but these holes are the same as sirens. Do you remember Homer’s account of the sirens that called sailors onto the rocks? Well these holes call field mice, and they find your ST to be a nice and safe home. One of the first things you do is cut metal fabric and wire it in place over these holes. Yes, you should know Murphy by now, and you know he’ll make it happen if you take no precautions.
But let’s add.. some of us who know far better, don’t get around to doing what we should, and I have been so guilty at times… So, I don’t dare poke fun at Dave, as I know I have neglected a good many chores of my own..
Here’s Dave’s Mail:
From: dave s
Subject: st head inop
George: Dead st head after winter setting. Vermon got into doghouse. Moved twice, can’t find cd or wiring diagram for st. Want to check with vom and if necessary flash field. 12v, engine off ok? Point me in the right direction. For the first time in 7 years Lister had air in supply line took 3 bleeds to get it to stay running. When it rains it poors. Good to get fixed before you need it, right? Again 7 years of crank, fire, power, and now this. Thanks, from the 60 + club.
George’s response..
Dave, if the mice stayed in the dog house, that would be a good thing.. where they really like to be is in those bell ends, and of course, where they do the most damage is via their urine and rotting out insulation and converting metals to ooozing piles of oxides. And it’s amazing to see the bits of things they find to drag in for insulation after they strip what they can from the wires.
OK Dave and others.. Here’s an old ST page, with lots of links that should be helpful.
And just for the record.. I was the first to know the Yak Fat man! Do you know Yip Man, How about SW Lee? The world should know them all.
Dave, we’ll all be greatful to know what you find, and I’ll help in any way.. let’s leave bread crums here under comments, so others can follow.
GB
The Repair Shop’s Diagnostic Tool?
Subject: power tech diesel – RV
from: Angela P.
Message Body:
My boyfriend is first time owner of a 99 Dutch Star RV. We’ve read owner’s manual together, trying to figure everything out, but not much on generator. It runs for about 30 minutes to hour, then shuts off. Repairman says it’s “some kind of” sensor but can’t locate problem. Wants to send us to a dealership. We’ve already paid the repair shop so much already and have decided to try and figure out ourselves before going to a dealer. You advise buying a manual, so we will do that, but can you give us an idea of what the problem could possibly be? Ever heard/seen this problem before? Thanks for any help
Angela,
___________________________
George’s response.
Hats off to you for doing your own thinking, as you may have read here; it’s all too easy to pay for shop labor and receive a guess at the problem. As another bus owner found, an RV outfit was using the WRONG manual to diagnose his problem, and charged him a tidy sum.
In my opinion, I could have guessed from here and charged you way less.. or you can do your own guessing with this crystal ball off ebay..
Behind every good man is a woman so much of the time, and you are exactly on the trail of a cure for way less money. The repair manual for the gen set is a very nice thing to keep in the vehicle..
First Step is to know who made the generator and the model and serial number. This is usually found on a name plate, and is often in plain view where you check the power plant’s lube oil lever, change the lube oil filter or air filter.
Once you get the manual, you will normally find a ‘theory of operation section’, and this is generally easier to understand than you might think. easier than learning how to sew, that’s for sure!
In this section of the manual, the sensors are often discussed, and generators can have more than engines. It’s all pretty simple >AFTER< you know where the problem is 🙂
Here’s what you do..
Make a list of what the Engine/generator need do. I give you some likely things, you will read the manual and learn what yours does. And do know… ‘YOU’ can fix it!
What we know, the generator starts and runs, but shuts down.
Is there an over temperature sensor for the coolant? Is it air cooled, or water cooled? Is the coolant level low? Is the sensor only bad?
Is there a lube oil pressure sensor, is it faulty or the pressure too low?
There may be other things monitored, like over voltage, under voltage, or the generator may be running too far off frequency.
Remember, every generator owner should have a ‘Kill A Watt’ cheaper than dirt, and a good monitor, regardless what your generator panel say, it’s always nice to have a second opinion, that be the kill a watt.
Your post did make email of the day.. and we’ll all be grateful if you use comments on the blog, and share with us. We all learn that way. There are friends of utterpower who are in the business of repairing generators and small engines that might offer you more advice, once we learn what generator you have.
A very common practice is to strap across a sensor that opens on fault, or remove the wire on one that provides a ground on fault. You only run long enough to prove the sensor is the reason it quit running, and then the next step is to determine if the sensor is good or bad.
When you do fix it, and you will.. I’d be very inclined to post your letter to the repair shop for their effort to guess at the problem and bill you. It’s all too common, but I thought they hung people outside of Austin, Texas for such offenses, so maybe you live there?
All the very best, and God bless Texas.. a lot of people don’t know it, but this IS the DIYer capital of the world!
GB
Short Term Views
Today, I borrow a snippet from an email, in my attempt to remind you just how much damage ethanol can do to our older engines.
Certainly, you’ll make up your own mind as to the dangers, but I do remember the conversation I had with a man driven half crazy with the management of a fleet of small engines in the hands of employees. How to keep them all running on this fuel was a challenge. Here’s the email snippet..
George,
I have a gas generator for backup use. Ever since they began putting ethanol in gas, I have been having problems. I have a 1939 John Deere and it is hand crank. It used to start on the first crank. Now I have nothing but trouble getting it started. I had to replace the rubber gaskets in my push mower carburetor and my old garden tractor wouldn’t start. When I took apart the carburetor on it the gas had turned to slime.
So while getting cans of gas to have in case we lost power due to an upcoming storm, I thought this is stupid.
End of snippet.
As discussed on many pages, there ARE indeed advantages to diesel, in fact a lot of advantages, but in case you need live with gasoline fuels, and you want to avoid damage, or increase the likelihood this fuel will provide you service when you need it, an important link follows.
But first a note: Rabid Lisa grew fat at the hog trough, and now she’s moved on.. no doubt they’ve found a person even more of an activist to run the EPA. Expect diesel engines to be so expensive you can’t afford them. You will never see the EPA ever ask what pollution they create forcing people to create emissions related to earning another $7000 more to buy that pickup they need! Or the emissions they make in the persuit of making enough to replace that lawn mower that dies such an early death because their short sighted and all too enept designs don’t allow us to perform simple maintenance as we once did, instead we toss it all on the pile. Do they think that extra $7000 for the pickup is made through prayer alone?
Here’s the link, keep this close, and if you have a smart phone, load the app! Buy gas without ethanol for your old engines, and for chain saws, snow mobiles, and more… OR pay the heavy price.
Have a great weekend, and do remember, there’s free cheese in a mouse trap, and there’s insanity at the head of the EPA. Politics drives most decisions there, and there seems so little interest in all the damage done by their short sighted decisions. If you piled all the engines destroyed long before their time via EPA mandates.. the snow would never melt from the top of the heap!
GB
She wasn’t part of my life such a short time ago.. and she is reason enough to grow old I think.
JRR Tolkien, a man who saw so much in real life… Do we now re-live his prime years?
And then a simple meal in the food court, who’d have thought I’d find decent Chinese food at Panda Express? The Bejing Beef was excellent, and then my wife reminded me.. “you must open that fortune cookie even if you don’t eat it”. Inside I read. “Expect good advice from a child”.
After I got home.. skype sounded, and it was Grandson Zach 3 years old. Sometimes it takes a bit to decode those cryptic bits of advice.
And today.. I open my eyes another year older, and having lived through a mountain of solicitations! If you don’t know already.. “the entire planet is informed when you will turn 65 years old, and if your 8th cousin sells Insurance, you’ll hear from him too. And of course, your old medical plan might send you a birthday card….. “Good bye, so long, we were so glad to get to know you.”
But this morning, I savor that second cup of coffee… and ask.. how is it… as of this very day…. I’ve been married for 38 years to the same woman? Of all the things I’ve done wrong, I did marry right. And just now, the sun breaks through the clouds, it wasn’t my day till it was given.. it’s another gift, and I know it!
G
I need a translator… something about a sexual encounter?
And this Obama drone thing.. Will Dennis be groaning after a dronin?
Kiss and Tell
But what’s the point you say?
I suggest that Dennis Rodman is NOT so different than many Americans that THINK they are well versed, and well educated.
Dennis is proud to call a Man who runs some of the largest prison (slave) camps of all times “his friend forever”.
But what about Andrea Mitchell? I really think she’d leave her Husband for Castro if he were a younger man 🙂
The point? How many of us volunteer to march in parades… behind banners held high…. and never having a clue as to what our new masters really have in mind for us?
Have a great day…
GB
Do we really need a crystal ball to know the future?
The time has come and this will happen, it’s only a matter of time, could it be part of your new online business? Will there be a Yahoo forum focused on the DIYer Rifle? And how many followers would the development of such a project gather? Matters not what you think, we need think about the natural evolution of ideas and machines, and have some idea when they take a new direction.
Feinstein, the Mother of invention?
Yes it’s just a muse, but I think the incentive is there to design small arms that could be made and maintained regardless of who might not want you to have them. Who votes to keep an Old Senile Battle Axe in power? Those with their hands stretched out, and wanting your American dream? People so focused on gifts from their Government that they would give up any freedom in exchange? Will they scurry across our border when the free lunch is gone? Can we learn a thing from Canada? All those free lunches they served during the Viet Nam era? I don’t suggest a right or wrong, I just wonder how many who were ‘taken in’ scampered back across the border when it was convieient for them? How many Canadian Farmers would have rather spent that money on loyal Canadians?
As I’ve said before, whether we like guns or not, we owe much of the machining potential that we have now to the manufacturing of guns. So much in the way of lathes, Mills and other machines were developed and refined in the pursuit of gun making, but now, with CNC, and with a new design, we may need very little in the way of machines to make a rifle that meets every need.
Many if not most DIYers have an appreciation for firearms because they are machines, and often built with great precision and mechanical poetry.
At age 65 I’ve seen a lot of things change, the Vietnam Era brought into service a new class of military rifles, they looked more like toys made by Mattel. Many asked.. who in their right mind would arm our (kids) soldiers with lowly 22 caliber munitions? If you do the research, you’ll note that these rifles were also deployed with known faults, and some of the Chief Scientists of the day who studied the situation say so. Of course, the decision can be traced to money, power, and influence at the time.
Today we know the AR15 is pretty much the same rifle, having both civilian and military models, both with the same wimpy little bullet. It’s an example of something many thought would never be popular… how wrong they were.
I’m fairly certain that recent events has caused a lot of people to rethink what a firearm should be, and how they might be redesigned for easy manufacture. There are some key components that have been targeted in the past as things that might be controlled in one way or another by people in Government.
It was the Obama administration that attempted to have all military brass destroyed instead of putting it up for sale to be recycled ‘reloaded’ as has been done for many years. There’s been other efforts to control primers or even pass laws as to how they would be made to degrade an become useless over a short period of time preventing civilians to store ammunition for times of need.
Now is likely the time to rethink the entire rifle, and design the DIYer model. How easy could it be to design a rifle that doesn’t need any proprietary components? To make a repeating rifle that doesn’t use hard to make brass cases, no need for primers, able to fire in any mode you choose?
The rifle that comes to mind makes use of reliable electrical components, and with the risk of using these components, we ‘make simple’ the rifle. Instead of primers, we use an igniter and an onboard lithium battery with a backup pack. Instead of reloading cartridges, we reload round cylinders that function as magazines. The cylinders are quickly changed out when emptied, not all that different than popular magazines today.
An operator would reload these cylinders by placing them on a reloading machine that would drop a measured amount of powder and a projectile into each hole and seat the bullet and seal it to the weather. Simple hand tools would allow these cylinders to be reloaded in the field at slower rates.
The cylinders would be made up of metal tubes that hold the projectile and propellants, and the rest would be made of durable lightweight composites. The trigger would be no more than a switch, the cylinder would be advanced and locked by a redundant electrical system, rates of fire to be controlled by another lever or series of buttons on the forearm, easy to make ‘safety’ switches in series where a forearm grip and grip behind the trigger housing were necessary to fire the rifle.
What we might end up with is something as simple to reload and maintain as a modern black powder rifle, but even simpler as per the ignition system. No percussion caps, and potentially a dozen different recipes for propellants that would be all but impossible to keep from the public.
So close your eyes and visualize the DIYer rifle of the future. Could that cylinder hold as many as 20 rounds? Can you see those short stubby pieces of metal slipped over locating pins in the Jig, and depending on how far underground your operation, you’ll either use a plastic injection machine, or maybe even a two-part epoxy to form this cylindrical magazine.
As for the most simple version of the DIYer rifle, if you place a smoothbore barrel in the Jig, add a half a dozen components, and sandwich it all inside a composite stock and fore arm, who could stop you when we can make durable composites in so many ways?
And how does this cylinder turn? The cylinder is also the armature of a stepper motor where full auto and three shot bursts are possible, and certainly a manual system is easily applied for back up. And legal you ask? Imagine a strap in a recessed hole, if you insert a knife tip and cut the strap, it enables full auto and three shot bursts. You don’t turn it on till you really need it.. As I say, once you focus on these components, things begin to blur.
For those paranoid of electrical components like batteries, one could have a magneto that worked like a ‘spring gun’ Cocking it and pulling the trigger could produce a spark like that of a welding arc!
I can close my eyes and see that auto re-loader now. Why reload brass when we can reload the magazine? Some might think there would be a lot of metal in that composite magazine, and maybe that will be the case for the first generation, but later generations might only require a thin wall to be wrapped in threads of carbon fiber and then encapsulated in lightweight plastic. We might even be able to carry more of these rotary magazines than the traditional ones now in use?
Why wait for a Government to make it hard to get certain components, and to disrupt the supply line of ammunition as will happen this summer and possibly into hunting season? Why not get started in developing arms that will be near impossible to keep from the public. We all know the real goal of the far left.. and that is to disarm us all.
As I write, I think of the call I got from a friend, yesterday it was the first time he got really good performance out of his new homemade gun powder, and of course he’s casting his own bullets now. Others are resurrecting some of the same tools and methods that kept hunting and other sporting events alive during WWII. Sportsmen made their own jacketed bullets, and even powders, today we have CNC, and far more automated tools.
Those who think about the hard to build components and propellants have the ability to work more safely than ever before. It’s all so easy to automate processes, and work with small batches remotely. Consider making Nitro based powders, we know the ingredients are so simple that Governments will have trouble controlling the feed stocks, but who will take the risk in making the stuff? Working remotely behind blast shields and making use of smaller batches, guided by simple robotics and measure will likely allow hunters, sportsman, and people interested in home defense to do their own thing. Even the manufacture of black powder could be automated easily, and once we add the ingredient that makes it far less stable, the manufacture could be carried out behind a blast shield, and in small batches for safety. Yes, we know that peeing in one spot could help in the manufacture of black powder, those Sana cans of the future? Why not keep the liquid separate from the urinal? Collect it all for the manufacture of the nitrates you need if your government wishes to attempt to control it?
Is it time to develop the new Freeman 50? I personally think people like Feinstein have threatened enough, and I think the president has made it clear, the game is to keep whittling away until our guns are kept in lockers down at the police station, and we are only allowed to check them out for weekend use. Sure, he says different, but we only need keep track of his deeds, who has noticed his promises are most empty?
Making Nitro safely at home? A new online business renting out molds to make carbon re=enforced lower receivers, stronger than steel? Lay it all up per the instructions, and bake it till it cures?
New composite barrels made around a thin wall insert in tension? An inexpensive CNC machine designed to lay in the carbon fibers? Just where is the world headed, and are we young enough in heart and mind to follow it? Will we do it from the arm chair, or the hobby shop? It’s my muse for the day…
Added March 5:
As I say.. reading comments are of value, it helps us understand a shift in the wind direction. Check this thread, and think about the replies.
http://www.thefirearmsforum.com/showthread.php?t=85455
I do note one senior at this site pointing out that electronics >IS< more reliable WHEN properly designed. I believe this is true. The ignition system that free men need to develop is NOT a means to fire the typical primer, but a replacement for it. And I’d bet it is only a matter of time before you see a rifle where the magazine is reloaded, not a brass casing.
GB
Home Depot Lights My Fuse
Home Depot, you really pissed me off yesterday. But once I did get to the check out with that all too expensive hand full of Chinese made parts, and can of spray paint, you made me wonder why I’ll ever come back?
When you demanded I show my ID and prove I was over 18 to buy that can of spray paint. I look in the mirror and see all of my 65 years. Anyone who doesn’t see at least 18 of them needs to be put out of their misery.
And to think, some of the same Dim Witted minds that made this policy think it’s OK to vote without showing ID! When your store is on fire, don’t suspect that I was the one who torched it.. But do know I was thinking about it when I walked out to my car.
Yes, yes, you’re thinking this may have been the Clerk’s idea? She greeted me with a smile, and of course I returned the smile, and politely told her it was nuts. She said, “we’re on camera, and when I ring up spray paint and don’t ask for ID, I can get reprimanded”. How amazing. I live in a society where denying spray paint is far more important that assuring my vote isn’t distorted with fraud?
Is this just another reason for you to develop your self-reliant skills? I think so. If there ever was a good time to be handy, it is right around the corner.
GB
My thanks to Russell for sharing his Question of the day.
Subject: Help on MSDS
Message Body:
Good Morning George,
I was wondering if you could help me out, I have bought 6/1 Lister diesel on UK e-bay few month ago. If I only knew how much work it was going to be to get it to USA I sure would think about it twice. Finally I have paper work in place and engine was picked up by my shipper. Shipper is now asking me that the carrier is requesting that I provide an MSDS, Material Safety Data Sheet for the 6/1 do you have any idea where to get this information?
Thank you
Russell N
Comments from George:
The Carrier is only attempting to cover their Ass.. they don’t care much unless flammable materials, acids, or other things are on the list..
I’d get hold of any MSDS sheet.. .. copy the format..
List steel, cast iron, brass, rubber, copper.. and get it to them ASAP, so they can’t charge you expensive storage fees..
others, please comment, you may have a better answer..
GB
Today I received and interesting email about an ST head that would not self excite.
From: Rick S.
Subject: ST Head
Message Body:
Hi George,
I bought your Utterpower Cd a few years ago and had trouble free running a Lister with the ST head, But now I have a problem with the head not self exciting.
If I use the battery method to reflash all is ok and generator works perfectly no problems at all, but if I stop and restart the generator It produces no current until its reflashed again.
Whatever is happening its not holding any residual magnetism at all.
Have you ever had this problem before?
All ohm readings at the beginning are still the same today so I know all is ok apart from the problem I mentioned.
Look forward to your reply
Best Regards
Rick
Rick,
Great topic! As you know, the ST head works exactly like so many hardware store generators, the source of field power comes from the harmonic winding in the stator, and is then routed to the rectifier to be rectified to DC and then onto the field via the brushes.
For the sake of others who follow, the generator normally holds some residual magnetism, and will start on it’s own. when it doesn’t there may be a combination of troubles, and there’s a reason to check things out..
I never trust the factory wiring, I check every brush lead, and every connection, I don;t trust the chinese rectifier, and I replace them with a western 30 amp unit with a 1000 volt PIV rating.. way overkill, but it’s what I do.
the battery flash may be temporarily healing a bad connection.. check them all, and do put as much load on the generator as it will carry and leave it there for a bit.. check the field voltage against the name plate and report back.. please..
This is a simple system, and it will be a simple problem.. when you bring the generator upto speed, take an AC reading at the AC side of the rectifier..
George B.
