Hi. Die!

So my wife's Neon has been having aches and pains lately. Ever since some asstriscuit in a Civic rear-ended us on our way to a visit with her folks (Idiot: "You started moving and then stopped again." Us: "Not our fault you weren't watching the road and didn't leave enough room for that error." Nevermind the fact stick shift cars tend to move a bit after you let off the brake before you engage the clutch.), the coolant temp gauge has been having seizures. Her theory was the accident caused the fault. Mine was it was merely the proverbial anti-camel straw.

I looked under the hood after finding out where the sensor was located and found that the sensor wire insulation had severely deteriorated. I didn't know how far up the harness branch the effect had gone, but I knew that was the problem. After riding around for a couple of hours and having the sensor cause the car chime to warn of no temperature reading and then go into a seizure thinking the car was overheating, I had had enough. It was time to do something about it.

First thing I did was buy a new set of tools. I have several small sets, but they are of dubious quality and seem to be missing most of the stuff I actually use so I decided spending the money on a good set was better than tracking down sockets and such that may no longer be around. With that accomplished, I hit Auto Zone.

At Auto Zone, I tried to figure out how best to divide my purchases up to get maximum points on my card. I have two more now after buying a bottle of Seafoam, a can of white lithium spray grease, a set of Allen wrench style torx wrenches (for tomorrow's project of fixing the damned passenger side power window in my car), a new set of plugs for Alli's car, a plug gapper, anti-seize, plug boot dielectric and a roll of 3M molding tape for both cars, but mostly to reattach the piece of trim that came off of my car in like February and put the GTP emblem back on the driver's side after I refinish it.

The first thing I did was get down to work replacing the spark plugs. Oh dear God was that new territory. I had never seen spark plugs sitting six inches into the engine. Must be an overhead cam thing. Good thing I did have a six inch extender from an old tool kit because my new kit only had a 3" one. The second cylinder from the left was a weird one in my book. There was what looked like oil down in the pocket where the plug was. I don't know why it was there, but it was clean like straight from the bottle so I didn't figure a leak was to blame.

The old plugs were obviously done for. The two right plugs had the center electrode worn almost down to the insulator while the ground electrodes were worn back pretty far as well. The gap was probably .07" where .035" is said to be normal for that car. The two plugs that weren't so bad were still due for replacement for sure.

The new plugs are Bosch Platinums. I noticed that the plug wire for the second cylinder from the left didn't "click" into place on top of the plug. This concerns me a bit. I'm going to buy a new wireset just to be safe. The two left plugs probably weren't as worn out because they weren't getting as strong a spark to begin with.

After the plugs were replaced, I started work on digging out everything that needed to come out in order to reach the sensor. That was interesting. I had been thinking that the heater core pipes would have to come off, but that was not the case. I could reach everything well enough by removing the bolts that held the heater core pipes to the engine block and taking out the battery. I got chemical burns from that. There was a lot of electrolyte in the area of the battery. I neutralized that with baking soda water, rinsed, neutralized again and rinsed again. I will do another neutralize and rinse tomorrow before I put it all back together.

I was able to get the coolant temp sensor wire out and cutting the covering sleeve away confirmed my suspicions. The insulation had been completely eaten away. Not melted, eaten. There was no solid plastic left that I could see for most of the length of that branch of the harness. Maybe half and inch remained. The rest was shiny copper. Whatever had eaten the insulation wasn't corrosive to copper. I didn't see much of the telltale green corrosion anywhere on the wire. It's not going to be a fun wire to repair. I'll have to figure out how to reuse the same connector and jack the new wiring into the large harness trunk. Protecting the new wires is going to be difficult since heat and whatever dissolved the previous insulation needs to be avoided.

[singing] Bicycle, bicycle

For years now, I've wanted an electric bike. I guess it's like the whole Power Wheels phenomenon from when I was a kid. It's just fun to make something move under power that's not your own.

Now that I'm doing for a living what I've been obsessed with since the age of eight, I can get into my craft a lot more without it being a pastime. Hence, my new project.

I'm kind of a treehugger at heart so I try to be environmentally conscious as much as possible without being penny wise and pound foolish. When I saw that a bunch of defunct big rig data recorder boxen were going to scrap, I jumped at the chance for salvage. The expensive satellite modems and venerable flash drives were saved, which was a good thing, but that's not what I was after.

Those particular units used a backup battery inside, one that's rated at 9.6VDC with a capacity of 2100mAh and uses the wonderful nickel metal-hydride technology in AA cells. Interesting to think that such a capacity would have required rather exceptional C cells, were it nickel-cadmium technology like most rechargeable cells were when I was a kid.

I've managed to salvage a total of sixty of the packs and a few charging boards. Far better they be reused than go to a recycler. I can't imagine the batteries would be easy to recycle, much less make the recycler any money.

Although it's unusual to power anything big off of so many cells, I find it kind of funny. It's like the electric cars that use hundreds or thousands of cells in their battery packs.

After careful consideration, it looks like I'll be keeping the packs as they are and just linking them up. I will be running four packs in parallel for each battery bank and three banks in series for 28.8VDC nominal with 8.4Ah capacity for each battery brick. Each brick will have a rather hilarious 96 cells inside.

Each battery brick will have a relay to disconnect each bank for charging. I will be using the charge boards I salvaged, but I need to see if I can bump the charge current up from the .5A setting they currently have. Even at four times that, I'm still in the C/4 range on charge rate, which should be fine much of the time. The charge boards, luckily, run off of a standard 12VDC supply, but appear to have a wide range of input. That's freaking easy to come by, even with solar. I'd really like to see a solar charger for this system.

The motor of the bike hasn't been decided on just yet. There's a company selling motor kits on ebay out of Seattle. I like what they have, but there's still the question of fit and whether I want to give up my three speed front gearing for a single-speed freewheeling sprocket.

In the meantime, I do have a test platform for all of this. A year ago, I bought a Pukka mini-bike for $50 and have had it in storage almost ever since, due to the lead acid batteries being expensive and the fact I look lame riding such a small bike. It will make a decent test bike since it's a 24V system and has a decent motor. I'm sure I'll be posting updates about this project a lot. Now I just need to figure out photos.

I plan to build at least five battery bricks and two charging systems. The idea is to have the ability to keep one brick torn apart for repair while one set is installed on the bike and another is charging. The two charging systems will allow two bricks to charge at the same time. Maybe I should build more than just two, in order to have a spare.