Weekend Projects

It has been an incredibly busy weekend, and yet nothing was really done. Completed, I mean. Lots of things started.

Like the engine thing.

It is a big deal to me, this engine. I mean, it's our engine, right? And the shop was going to just toss it away, this huge hunk of metal.

Couldn't let that happen now, could we?

Not in this pack-rat of a household. I mean, there's boxes of electronics around here that can be traced back to that mess of a room I kept back in 1977. Can you believe it? Dragging around that old junk for thirty years. But it's my junk, man.

And this engine - well, it's gone three hundred thousand miles! Without a major overhaul! Sure, it was blowing oil and a few things here and there weren't working (like the carburator heat, which made it stall out in cold weather); but she's a sweet little 1.6L engine, steady and dependable. And I figured on keeping her around awhile.

Gonna rebuild it. Gonna give the boys a chance to learn the same things my Dad taught me, how to work on engines. See, my Dad was (and probably still is) able to pull out a Volkswagen engine on a Friday night and have it rebuilt and running again by Sunday afternoon. And he taught me how to do it, too. All except the machine-shop stuff. We had to send out for that work.

The guys at the shop were a bit surprised that I wanted to keep the old engine. Most customers don't care to ever see 'em again (assuming they ever saw 'em in the first place). Sorta like asking to keep your old tires, I suppose. But they didn't argue with me. Just asked me to come by on a Friday to pick it up so they wouldn't have to move things around to clear a path. So I came by with the van on Friday afternoon and picked it up - and the transmission, too - and happily hauled it back home. Naturally, I'd removed the seats from the van and put a tarp down so it wouldn't drip oil or other fluids all over the carpet.

Hmmm. I noticed that it took three guys to lift it into the van.

Got it home and - OK, smart guy, how are you going to get the five hundred pound engine out of the van by yourself and move it around?

I had already figured out where the engine was going to stay once it got in the garage. Went to this 'Harbor Freight' store earlier on Thursday and picked up an engine stand for forty bucks. {Also picked up a cheap radio control airplane for forty bucks, but that's another story.}

Anyway, got the engine home and was preparing to figure out how to get it out of the car and onto the engine stand when it occurred to me that the engine mounting bolts were missing. Well, not really missing; I suppose they needed them to install the new engine. That's the trouble with keeping the old stuff - you can never be sure which parts come with it. So how can I man-handle this engine onto the engine stand without the bolts? I gotta have bolts to secure it to the engine stand, right?

In the meantime, I didn't want to drive around town looking for the bolts with the engine rolling around in the back of the van, so it needed to come out. And the two of us couldn't lift it - and being a guy, there ain't no way I'm going to go knocking on doors asking a neighbor to come help me lift the engine out; that would be admitting that I ain't smart enough to figure a clever way of doing it by myself.

So I got clever. Stacked some two-by-fours on top of a couple car jacks, supporting the other ends on my ladder, and made a ramp that came right up to the tail end of the van, and just slid it right out of the van and onto the ramp. Had to stick a couple two-by-threes underneath one end of it to steady it, but at least now the seats could go back in the van, and it was possible to run out to the store to look for bolts.

Tried to find the bolts at Home Depot and Lowes, but they didn't have 'em. In fact, it seemed they had every size except the ones I needed. Naturally.

So back home I went, empty-handed.

The problem was, see, that the weather is going to turn cold and windy pretty soon, and the van needs to be in the garage. I'm not in the mood to go out every morning and scrape the ice off the van. And the engine on the ramp was in the way of the van. {Yeah, I shoulda thought of that before I made the ramp right up to the van; shoulda backed up the van into the garage at an angle so it would've been out of the way, but that would've just made things too easy.}

OK, there's this perfectly good engine stand here, but it needs a little help. Can't mount the engine onto it without the bolts, so I'll have to come up with something to give it a little help. And since the engine weighs a lot more than I do, it's gotta be something that is stable so the thing don't fall on my foot and send me to the emergency room.

Well, there's a few more two-by-fours sitting around in here; oughta be able to do something with those ...

Took me most of the evening to finish up, but finally put together a little platform for the engine stand, sorta like a little wooden cradle for the engine to sit on so it's still on the stand but not bolted to it. And since the engine stand is on wheels, I can still move it around the garage.



Got the engine put on it, then moved it out of the way so the van could fit into its normal spot in the garage.

Mission accomplished!

See what happens when I have too much time on my hands?

***

My next project was trying out that R/C model airplane. Obviously, it's not one of those high-end deals, not for forty bucks. In fact, it's a cheap piece of foam attached to a plastic body with a multiplexed single-channel radio pretending to be a two-channel. And it has no steering other than speed control over two separate motors.

I don't have a circuit diagram, but I suspect it's merely a pulse-width modulated signal that determines which engine gets the higher cycle time, so you 'steer' it by running either the right or left engine at a higher speed than the other, and since the engines are mounted on the wing pod, it's basically pushing the wing left or right.

Because of this, there's no 'up' or 'down' control, either. That's done by careful control of the engine speed. If you max the throttle, it climbs. If you drop the throttle below a certain level, it dives.

It's an odd way to control an airplane, but it's efficient given the cheapness of the design. And it's going to take a lot longer than the twenty minutes of practice I got today to master it.

At the end of twenty minutes, I'd broken the canopy and the tail skid and shredded the front edge of the wingtips. Other than that, it seemed to be in pretty good shape.



Can't wait to try it again later. But there won't be any time the rest of this week, between work and all the other activities. And it's supposed to snow on Tuesday.