Truck stuff 01

Back for the first time in a very long time. There's a lot that's happened, but one of the big things was that I got a truck! It's a nice red and white Ford F-150.
Photos:

So far I really like it, but it does need some work. I got it for $800 though, so I wasn't expecting anything else.
It was a bit of an adventure getting it. I went to buy it, and took it for a spin around the block and on the highway. Ran beautifully, though a little rich. I told him I'd buy it if it would pass a safety inspection, and it did*, so I got it. About a mile and a half down the road the motor cuts out, so I pulled into a gas station. Couldn't get it started again despite quite a number of attempts, so we had to get it towed home. Off to an interesting start. (* 'safety inspection', but I have current stickers, and that's all I need)

After a bit of fiddling, I got it running pretty nicely, but very rich. Good performance, but I estimated I was getting 4 mpg. I'm not expecting 30mpg from a 1980 truck, but 10-15 should be reasonable.
The problem with this truck as it came is that it was from the period just before fuel injection, and right around when computers were introduced. So it has a carburetor and computer, the worst of both worlds. I can't easily adjust much without throwing the computer off, but I need to because it's so rich...

What I'd like to do is convert it to a DuraSpark II ignition, which is very simple. I went to the junkyard and got a carburetor, ignition module, wiring harness, and distributer for about $70, which is great considering just a carb off ebay probably would have cost me at least that much. I put it all in (in pouring rain no less, here are more photos)

I fired it up, it ran, a little rough, but adequate for the time being, so I was happy with it and left it for the weekend. I come back a few days later, and can't get it to run. It cranks, but immediately dies. I adjusted timing and was able to get it to backfire, but not keep running. It's possible I was too tentative with advancing or retarding timing, but unfortunately I haven't been able to get the Duraspark system running reliably.

Another thing I've tried is swapping the feedback carburetor for a non-feedback carburetor. It ran great, much better fuel mixture and milage until the computer realized that it didn't have control of the carb anymore and went into limp home mode (stupid computer).
Currently I'm back to the EEC-IV / TFI-IV system for the time being, and my current plan is to put in a non-feedback carburetor for better gas milage and try to trick the computer into thinking that it can still control the carburetor. Otherwise I might clean up the duraspark terminals some more and give that another shot. At any rate, hopefully with a little luck I'll have this driving regularly soon.

Life

Figured I'd combine a few posts here.

A little late, but Christmas lights!

Classic warm white is my favorite type of Christmas light. I'm not a big fan of LED Christmas lights. There are some good ones,  but they're hard to find. Flickering electric blue really just isn't the feel I want for Christmas. Sorry for the poor quality photo, little handheld camera without a tripod, so I had to boost the ISO a lot to keep it from getting blurry. It's a pretty good point-and-shoot, but shots like this need a tripod. Good OIS is a wonderful thing, and my camera does have that.

Speaker progress:

Sides are on. Now I just have to make the front tweeter module,
cut, bend, and mount the curved back pieces, and put the sides on.
Crossovers are wired, (need to be rewired though) separate high pass and low pass. I've already been wiring it up just for fun, and it's very efficient. A Walkman can drive it to a comfortable general listening level with ease.

Computer stuff:

When a GPU doesn't fit... I think I'm going to build an external GPU box for it so it's not exposed. Another option would be cutting a slot in my hard drive cage so it would fit, but I only have 5 hard drive mounts, so I don't really want to give up any.
(There's usually 4, and I don't even want to think about how many partitions...)
Or I could get a new case, but I like this case, so I don't really want to do that.
I've been running external GPU's a lot recently simply because for various reasons, mostly because they're just too big and don't fit. Note the PCI-E (2.0) extender.
Why hasn't NVIDIA released a single slot 750 Ti ? It would be perfect for a multi-purpose server.
Dual graphics cards are great. I can set one to render, and one to display so I can do other things while it's rendering, and it hardly slows down any! Or if I want maximum speed I can set them both to render.
Projectredwall.blogspot.com for recent work.

The shed's almost done. Waiting for a thaw.

Speaking of snow and cold and all that, I usually don't mind cold much, but 30 degrees and 15mph constant wind can get cold really fast when you're not dressed for it. At work two rooftop heaters went out the other day, and I had to go up and check things out, also replaced the filters while I was up there. The snow and ice had gotten into something, so once things warmed up they came back... Seems like that's how things often work.

Break has been good, but I'm looking forward to getting back to college and seeing my friends. My schedule is going to be tough though. I have classes at 08:30 every day, and I'm not a morning person... Oh well, I'll survive.

In other news... How does a battery terminal get that corroded !?

When I was cleaning it up, the clamp was so corroded it just snapped, and I had to replace the whole thing.

Speaker progress 01

As mentioned recently, one of my projects is building a horn loaded speaker.
The design is a BillFitzMaurice DR250.
http://billfitzmaurice.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1099 (SPL charts)
I have one DR250 already, and once I finish this one my sound system will be much more complete.
Right now I'm running 2 Gemini 1204's (Cheap 12" mains) They put out sound, I won't say good sound, but adequate for most people's taste.
The DR250 sounds far better though, and if I didn't need to run in stereo I would use the one I have instead of the two others. It's also noticeably more efficient, which I care about more than most. For more on that, here's one of my favorite technical writers who can explain it much better:
http://sound.westhost.com/articles/pwr-vs-eff.htm
He has many other good articles too.

Anyway, I've been taking photos, and I've got a few here:
Sorry for the terrible photo quality, I left my good camera at work, 
and while I really like my cell phone, its camera is not a strong point.

Lots of tweeters! I'm not a big fan of pizeo tweeters. They usually sound awful, but I'm using them because 1, they actually sound pretty decent when arrayed and properly EQ'ed. And 2, the horizontal dispersion is worth it. I have at least a 160 degree field of coverage on my working DR250 with no noticeable high frequency loss. My other speakers beam like crazy, probably covering 40 degrees.
I'm not really that unhappy with my mains, considering what I paid for them, I knew what I was getting, and they've held up reasonably too.

Custom jig to cut the tweeters:

 Marking the speaker mount for a center point. Pretty symmetrical.

Speaker mount finished cutting. I had to make a router jig for this too, as you can see in the photo below.

All marked up and ready to cut!

Partly cut, just need to get the middle section.

Figured I'd go with the scroll saw, it's easy to drill a hole big enough for the blade, and I think it actually cuts straighter than our jigsaw.

One more piece finished! Hopefully there aren't any mistakes, I don't want to have to cut this piece again!

This post probably wasn't of as much interest to other readers, but I wanted to have it on here kind of like a journal entry that I can look back at.

Just Projects

I'm glad to have a break, but I have plenty to do over the break.
My breaks always seem to be doing something else instead of not doing... Not that that's necessarily bad.

A couple of my projects:
Build a shed, 3 wardrobes, a horn loaded speaker, and A guitar tube amp.
Besides working on the Redwall Project, cleaning up my lab, and work.

I actually have some photos, so here are two:

Can anybody familiar with a compound bow spot the problem?

Second unrelated photo just because. It's my blog, so I should probably put some more photos of myself on here every once in a while, and I happened to have that one on hand.

More posts soon. I'll probably do one on the speaker next.

What can Blender really do?

For any people wondering how powerful Blender really is, it can do this!

Project London: Official Trailer from Phil McCoy on Vimeo.