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vegan cupcakes and scratched pistons
Sunday, December 21 2008
This morning Gretchen had the idea that she should send cupcakes to her father for his Boxing Day birthday. She had some recipes she wanted to try from a book called Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, so now the chief obstacle was as follows: how does one ship decorated cupcakes without them being destroyed? At first Gretchen thought she could use a wine box having twelve rectangular compartments, somehow slicing the hash-arrayed compartmentalization cardboard into two layers to provide for 24 cupcakes. But I knew this would be impossible; the compartmentalization cardboard fitted together using mated slots that cut them halfway through. They would have fallen into bits to have been sliced into two stacked pieces. So I used the wine's compartmentalization cardboard as a model to make two sets of half-height compartmentalization units from other cardboard. Later, after Gretchen had made her gorgeous cupcakes, I arranged them on two flat pieces of carboard, attaching their cups to the substrate with Elmer's Glue-All. We then wiggled the compartmentalization units into the space between them and lowered the assembled stacks into the box one at a time with the help of a red ribbon, that classic undertaker's technique.
Gluing cupcakes to the cardboard substrate.
Vegan cupcakes take over the cardboard substrate.
Inserting the compartmentalization cardboard.
Preparing the lift with a ribbon.
I'd tried rebuilding the carburetor on my Stihl chainsaw, and though I dramatically improved its ability to pump gas, I still couldn't get the chainsaw to start. I'd begun to wonder if there wasn't something very wrong with the engine. I'd had the muffler off and had looked at the pistons, but they'd seemed well-lubricated and in good condition. But what do I know about the way a chainsaw piston is supposed to look? So, after removing the muffler and getting a flashlight, I did a Google image search in hopes of finding pictures of damaged pistons. But it seems it has never occurred to anyone to take pictures of their scratched pistons.
With a better look at my Stihl's piston, I could see it did have scratches, but I couldn't tell if these were just artifacts of the way it had been machined. Oddly, there didn't appear to be any piston rings on its exhaust side, so they were obvious on the spark plug (ignition side). I stuck my finger into the exhaust hole to feel the piston and I could feel those scratches. That couldn't be good! Besides, whatever technique had been used to manufacture the piston would not have left scratches parallel to its stroke. The engine must have experienced some sort of lubrication failure. Either this was a result of my inexperience with the proper mixing of oil and fuel in these types of engines or it reflected a flaw in this particular saw, which has never worked particularly well.
I tore the saw apart, removing the piston head from the crank case so I could look at the piston itself. Interestingly, the lubrication failure seemed to have only affected its exhaust half, causing the rings to seize against the piston and then get ground level therewith. Here are some photos so others won't have to wade into this with the ignorance I'd had.
The two-stroke Stihl chainsaw engine piston showing the scratched part (left) and the good part.
Terrible scratches on the piston, nearly obscuring the rings.
We have a friend who is in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and every year he gets a vote when it is time to give an Academy Award. In that election, no vote is taken for granted, and, as with all votes, electioneering of some sort is always ongoing. Consequently, every year our friend is showered with gifts and schwag from various publishers and media companies. The most valuable of these are DVDs of movies that have not yet been released to DVD. We'd been loaned three or four of these with strict orders not to "burn" any of them. Supposedly they'd been encoded with special digital watermarks traceable to their recipients and there would be hell to pay if the Motion Picture Association of America were to get their hands on a bootleg of any of these films bearing this watermark.
This evening we started out watching one of these special pre-released DVDs, Quantum of Solace, the latest James Bond flick. But it was terrible! It was nothing but a series of chases and fight scenes strung together with shoddy dialogue and no much-needed exposition. We'd had enough by the time the scene came where James Bond has just bedded the sexy British Consulate operative sent to retrieve him. We switched to Wall-E, the latest over-the-top manifestation of Disney computer firepower. Wall-E takes place in a dystopic future Earth where a trash-compacting robot has been left alone with a single cockroach and mountains of trash to compact. He falls in love with a space probe sent by the human race (whose members have grown fat from hundreds of years of low-gravity leisure onboard a heavily-corporate-branded space craft), and all sorts of zany antics ensue. This premise could have been mined for some seriously mind-blowing pathos, but Disney chose mostly to go with an anachronistically-syrupy presentation full of cutesy sound effects in the manner of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I'm still waiting for the day when a wild-eyed outsider filmmaker gets his hands on a CGI studio.
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