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bisected car
Wednesday, May 14 2008
I spent much of the morning removing bits of the suspension from the gutted hatchback. Eventually I got out the reciprocating saw, inserted a brand new blade, and began cutting the remains of the car roughly in half. The cut ran parallel to and just in front of the backseat (though I'd removed the backseat itself well over a week ago). There was more metal under the floor than I'd expected, and the layers tended to get in the way and snag the blade, bending it sideways. It's easy to correct a bent reciprocating saw blade just by bending until it's reasonably straight again, but this blade was so hot I had to do the straightening with pliers. Eventually, though, the blade was so beat that it snapped off at its base and I had to replace it.
Once the car was in two pieces, I found the rear half (which was actually more like a third) was light enough to stand up and topple over, overturning the suspension for the first time in the eleven years since the car was manufactured.
At some point I noticed that the rubber hose carrying fluid to the house from the solar panels had sprung a leak at the one spot (the Achilles heel) I hadn't protected from solar radiation. Weeks ago I'd noticed that the hose had developed cracks, but I've been putting off doing anything about it because I've had plans to install a system of valves allowing me to switch from connecting the panels serially (the way they are now) to connecting them in parallel. With the leak, it seemed that project needed a higher priority.
This evening I soldered together the part of the valve-switching system that will attach to where the cracked rubber hose had failed. It was a fairly simple component comprised of two different genders of hose attachments, a boiler drain, and a ball valve leading to a long piece of pipe that will go to another part of the solar deck plumbing. While I was using an air compressor to pressure test it, I realized it might make a fairly effective air gun. So I crammed a cork into the end of the long copper pipe and used the ball valve to discharge air at 60 psi into the space behind the cork. Poof! The cork flew about seventy feet off the laboratory deck, landing in the weeds of the reforesting section of the lawn near the road. That was pretty good considering how random and ærodynamnically-imperfect the projectile had been. (I know from experiences back in Oberlin that a 12 foot piece of steel conduit can, using breath power alone, launch a specially-prepared magic marker 100 yards.)
After cutting it in half: the front of the gutted hatchback.
The back, now upside down.
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