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wooden donut for an axle
Sunday, October 21 2018
Before spending much of the rest of the daylight hours gathering and processing firewood, I spent some time working on the acursed Subaru. Gretchen had taken it to a mom & pop auto repair place that had managed to extricate the old bent oxygen sensor and replace it with the good one I'd bought, and this had returned it to the state it had been in before all my resistor and capacitor hacks. This meant that it eventually threw a P0420 OBD2 error, so I had to re-install my hacks. What better hack than the one that had been working (until it all got caught in the axle and destroyed). But while I was doing that, I noticed that the small end of my split-boot CV joint fix was now completely open around the axle; the pipe clamp had loosened and was now rattling around the axle near the wheel and there was no sign of anything that had been between the boot and the axle except for some black electrical tape. Clearly I needed another solution! So, using a hole saw and a spade bit, I machined myself a little donut-shaped piece of wood to fill the void between the boot and the axle. Using silicone as an adhestive, I stuffed the tight-fitting donut into the void and then clamped down the pipe clamp. This time it felt like it was never going to come apart. (For those wondering why I needed to fashion a donut at all, let me assure you that the boot itself refused to be clamped down to the size of the axle.)
As for the hack, again I went with a 330 kilohm resistor, though I figured I had more flexibility when it came to capacitors. So I went big, choosing a 100 microfarad between ground and one side of the resistor and 330 microfarad resistor between ground and the other. (I've been salvaging these electrolytic capacitors from the mainboard of Gretchen's old stereo, which was last in use in 2010. It's one of a number of scrap boards I keep handy just to salvage small electronic parts from.)
In the cause of firewood harvesting, I made repeated visits to the large fallen oak at the escarpment a couple hundred feet southeast of the house. I went once with a wedge and a splitting maul so I could split up some of the already-bucked pieces (which were too big to carry home intact). I also cut pieces our of the trunk until my big battery-powered saw ran out of juice. The cuts were through so much wood that I could maybe do four of them before the battery was exhausted. Fortunately, the battery recharges after only an hour or so and it's ready to go again, so I was able to use it through two charges today. I ended up bringing home two backpack loads as well as a fair amount of miscellaneous wood from both the north end of the Stick Trail and from under the powerlines west of the Farm Road. Some of this wood went directly into the woodshed, where I am building up both the second and third tranches (depending on the length of the pieces of wood).
This evening, I made a pot of three different kinds of noodles with chunky red sauce (it had onions and soy curls but no mushrooms, since we didn't have any). I'd collected a number of small warty puffballs from under the pines just east of the house, and after confirming that they were indeed puffballs and not deadly amanitas in their button phase, I fried them up separately and added them to my pasta. But I started having doubts about those puffballs after reading that they can make you sick if you eat them after they've turned yellow. I don't know if it was psychosomatic or what, but I started feeling sick in my stomach and even a little out of sorts in my brain. Fortunately, though, I felt better after climbing into bed, and I was able to fall asleep relatively easily.
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