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practical use for snow angel technology
Tuesday, March 1 2011
Gretchen had to drive the Subaru down to the prison today because the Honda still had a noisy emissions chain. The weather was sunny and not too cold, so I decided to fix it. After driving the front of the car up onto a pair of plastic ramps, I attacked what looked to be the problem: a loose connection between two sections of the emissions pipe. I packed the connection full of furnace cement (I love that stuff), tightened a wormscrew hose clamp around the cement, and then tightened the nuts of the bolts passing through the flanges. Since these bolts were ones I'd installed years ago, they were stainless steel and not corroded at all. If the entire emissions systems of both our cars were just made out of stainless steel, it would save me from having to clamber under a car every eighteen months or so. Such a system would be expensive, but it would definitely be worth it.
After I finished, I fired up the car. But the skank-magnet rumbling from beneath the car was undiminished. It turned out that I'd fixed the wrong thing; the real problem was that the pipe directly in front of the muffler had rotted away completely, completely disconnecting it from the intermediate pipe. Fixing that problem wasn't going to be anywhere near as easy.
For starters, I had to find a way to back the car up onto the plastic ramps, which is always more difficult on a front-wheel-drive car, particularly when nearly all of the driveway is covered with layers of dense ice. I ended up having to work on the car out near the road, where the sun has been able to melt away all the ice. Unfortunately, this particular winter it has also been the preferred crapping location for Sally. I had to use a snow shovel to scratch away several dogpiles, though I couldn't remove them completely, even after using snow as a cleaning agent.
The old muffler was one I'd installed four and a half years ago (and patched with Corten steel 20 months ago). That doesn't seem like a long life for a muffler, but you get what you pay for, and I'd bought it online for cheap. After I had it detached from the car, I could see that it was completely shot (aside from the Corten patch, Corten evidently being another good material for use in emission systems). So I installed an essentially brand-new replacement, the muffler I'd salvaged from the Honda Civic hatchback that Gretchen had totalled back in 2008. (I'd installed that muffler only a month or two before Gretchen wrecked the car.)
After I'd fixed up the Honda Civic, I leaned back against a snow pile and rubbed my back so as to dislodge any nuggets of dogshit adhering to my jacket. Had the snow been softer, the impression I made would have been a standing snow angel. It seems I'd finally found a practical use for snow angel technology. (Here I'm using "technology" in the infantile L. Ron Hubbard sense of the word.)
A reader sent me an idea the other day for how I might measure the level in the household heating fuel tank. He suggested I build a capacitance probe that would act as a variable capacitor depending on how much fuel lay between its two electrodes. At first I couldn't understand how this would work, but this was because of a flawed assumption: that air has a similar dielectric constant to that of fuel oil. But it doesn't. It turns out that if you have two identical capacitors except that one has a dielectic made of air and the other has one made of fuel oil, the latter will have four times the capacitance. That's a huge difference! Yesterday I'd tested this with a small mock-up of a capacitance probe made of two short sections of copper pipe, a half inch piece nested inside a three quarter inch piece with plastic spacers. Using this as a capacitor in half of a 556 timer circuit, I'd been able to vary the frequency based on how deeply I'd submerged the probe into a jar of cooking oil. So the proof of concept was in place.
Today I decided to make a full-scale probe long enough to reach to the bottom of our 250 gallon fuel tank. This meant it had to be at least 44 inches long. I used the same nested-electrode method, taking care not to seal the void between them pipes. Once I'd made the electrode, though, I was a little nervous about actually installing it. I decided I'd need some proper hardware first, including a galvanized steel 2.25 inch-to-three-quarter-inch pipe adapter. I don't want crap falling into the fuel oil or fumes escaping from it.
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