Go big or go home Part 2

Caris the Gypsy – The Bus – Air Conditioning

By Sylverstone, on August 30th, 2010

speaking of keeping things cool…

the playa gets hot…

and caris, well, he can be a bit sun addled and it’s ok

… but his companion sasha…

well, she’s a bit more arctic wolf than prairie dog, so we got her some air conditioning…

this unit pulls 607 watts, and was the most efficient we could lay our hands on locally, for less than $rape…

frigidaire has a great reputation, and this one has a timer, so we can schedule it, and a remote, so he doesn’t have to climb up to fiddle with it…

all in all a good choice…

*especially* considering where it’s going…

this panel was a pain in the butt to get off, and i have no idea what it was originally for, but i know what i’m going to use it for

since the location is up high, where the air is hottest, and cold air falls to the floor, it’s the best place to mount it in the bus…

convenient that…

so first comes the base frame, made out of bed frame of course (if you have any laying around, i’d love to take it off your hands) …

then we weld it in place…

looking good so far…

the back wall of the bus is 1 1/2″ square box tubing where that hole is, so the fleet engineer is welding it down like he means it… (thanks chris

and then come the side braces, cross drilled for lightness an aerodynamics…

just kidding, the holes were already there

note that the hole is wider than the brackets, so the side braces angle out a bit, giving a bit of side to side reinforcement as well…

here’s the left side going in…

as you can see, we’re building it to be tough.

last thing we want to do is jettison 50 lbs of steel on the freeway after hitting a big bump…

so then i load tested it…
(bright lights are in my eyes)

once the welding was finished, some flap disc work, and we put the unit in…

yes, that’s a pair of 200 watt solar panels on the roof…

then i added a couple of jbolts and a cross brace to keep the ac unit in it’s frame, and called it a night…

in testing, the solar panels here in washington, in 95 degree heat, could keep the inside of the bus at 70 degrees, all day long. basically, it discharges the batteries at about 25 amps when the compressor is on, and it charges at 20 when it is off…

at the end of the day’s heat, the batteries were at 12.8 volts, and that’s very livable.

if not, he’s still got the 12 volt generator we built for him here: modern day gypsy, v.009 to bulk charge the batteries with… (generator puts out way more than the ac draws), but the idea here was to be able to run it just off of solar. so far it is a success, we will see what lies in store for caris at burning man…

i think 2 more panels and another charge controller would make me happy

to be continued…

-stone

Caris the Gypsy – The Bus – Autometer Gauges

By Sylverstone, on August 29th, 2010

so caris, my fleet jeweler, was back in town hang out for a bit…

of course, this means more work on the bus…

so, with the burning man festival on the horizon, we got to work…

step one, a rack of gauges to keep an eye on the vitals…

being very fond of the autometer sport comp gauges from back in my racing days,

i chose them for this build as well.

i was rather disappointed when i found out that autometer apparently does not make a sport comp differential temp gauge in 2 5/8″…

we decided we would rather have them all the same, so we went with the 2 1/6″ as our gauge size, and went from there.

(1) autometer sport comp #3349 electric differential temp gauge:

(1) autometer sport comp #3351 mechanical transmission temp gauge:

(1) autometer sport comp #3332 mechanical coolant temp gauge:

(1) autometer sport comp #3341 mechanical oil temp gauge:

(1) autometer sport comp #3321 mechanical oil pressure gauge:

the “a” pillar gauge pod is an autometer.

before i forget, if you intend on doing this kind of installation, save your coin and use abs plastic pipe and a hot melt glue gun. (i’m not happy with the quality control on this piece)

anyway, moving right along… so first, i had to trim the gauge pillar to fit, and then, since the bus is going to be upholstered, i used a hot melt glue gun to fasten the pillar to the original one:

and now you can see why if i have to do this again i’m just going to scratch build it.

then i installed the gauges in the pods…

and the pod into the bus…

mechanical gauges have a capillary tube between the gauge and the sender…

and while they are more accurate(sometimes much more) they are kind of a pain in the butt to install, because the senders are big and you need to be careful with the lines…

here’s the pods where they belong… note that this is during the “warm it up and check for leaks” test…

*just in from caris*

southbound interstate 5, highballin’ for burning man…

transmission temp 170

water temp 190

oil temp 200

not bad for a 7.3 liter turbo diesel in a 14,000 lb bus.

i think it has a 190 degree thermostat in it, which makes those numbers pretty much “as expected”…
of course, mounting the gauges was the easy part…

then i had to route all those senders… in the dark…
the water temperature sender was a pain in the butt…

took me half an hour to thread that in there, due to the clearances being so tight.

i could get my arm in there, but i could only use my fingertips…

there really wasn’t a good way to mount the oil temperature sender into the engine block, so i mounted it on the remote oil filter block adapter…

you can see the oil pressure sender above and to the right of it…

the transmission temperature sender had nowhere to go, so i removed the plastic splice in the transmission cooler line… (plastic? in this application? really? and replaced it with a brass “t” and a few other bits…

so by now our more eagle eyed readers have noted that we finally got around to installing the remote filters, the permacool oil cooler, and the gauges mentioned in
modern day gypsy, v.003…

the oil cooler is sandwiched between the air conditioning condenser, and the radiator, on the right side (the rapid cool transmission cooler is in the center, and depending on burning man, we may add a second oil or transmission cooler on the right side…)

the remote filters are mounted above the bottom of the frame rails,between the drivers door step and the frame, where they are very easy to get to, but are out of harms way…

this should make oil changes (4 gallons!) easy, and help to keep things cool in the black rock desert…

to be continued…
-stone

talkin’ bout my benzo… (during)

By Sylverstone, on August 8th, 2010

so stone got a shiny new grocery getter…

you remember, the slightly beat up Mercedes in the above picture…

Recently I made a screaming deal on a set of 19″ axis shine’s and Pirelli PZero Corsa Direzionale’s for the front, and PZero Corsa Asimmetrico’s for the rear…. looks good with the new shoes eh?

Note that I finally managed to get it licensed. I don’t wanna talk about what it took to get this document:

what a pain in the ass. note the dept of homeland security stamp.

love the shiny bits

so the next day it goes into the body shop and gets torn apart…

thankfully the front aluminum hoop isn’t damaged…

turf the back bumper cover (going with the amg one)

thankfully the frame is straight…

looks pretty pitiful now doesn’t it?
I was told the circles on the hood are from people slamming the hood, you’re supposed to just hold it up about a foot and drop it….

the doors fixed, the lower amg rocker panel being test fitted in place…

looking pretty swoopy
I’m going to put coil overs under it and lower it an inch in the tail and 2 1/2 in the front there’s nothing in the trunk, it’s just how they sit…

smooth as a baby’s butt

the amg front bumper is a totally different piece. way bigger air intakes for the radiator, the intercooler, and the brakes… looks sharp

and here we are, out of paint and ready for reassembly… notice the color matched door handles… was going to shave ‘em but I’m going to save that for the trans am…

I’m incredibly happy with it so far, but it’s going to need another 20 hours or so of reassembly, then the fun starts (coilovers, sound system, etc.)

I’m excited
-stone

the long awaited shop (part 1)

By Sylverstone, on August 8th, 2010

So once upon a time i built a hydroplane in my high school wood shop class.

Then i built a couple serious boom cars…

Then i built a couple hot street/strip cars, a street rod, several utility trailers, a triple axle van, and a 20 ft trailer that unfolds into a 20×20 commercial kitchen, and i’m working on a ’56 greyhound scenicruiser that’s going to be steampunked within an inch of it’s already 5,000,000 mile life…

space, they say, is the final frontier…

it’s also a major problem when you like to work with your hands, and your medieval event pavilion is 3 feet longer and 23 feet wider than your mundane 5 bedroom home that sits on a tiny lot…

my friend looked at me, over a bottle of rum we were sharing years ago, and said “if anything happens to me, you need to do for them what i do…” and i agreed.

i can’t fill those shoes. no one can.

it’s been a bit over 2 years since he was taken from us.

*raises a glass to master mishka*

my friend, i am not much of a teacher, but i will try.

it is my hope that others will be interested, and will be willing to teach.

what i can do is provide a place. a place that you my dear friends are about to see.

being out of space, and needing to keep some promises, i went and bought myself a duck.

he came with a lot of random stuff:

and what, when finished, is going to be a seriously epic workspace.

i’m standing about 10 feet forward of “directly under the duck”, facing the front doors in this picture… the rig in the background is an f450 turbo diesel dually with a 12 foot bed on it, towing a 20 foot horse trailer, and it’s sitting 10 feet inside the doors. yes, the shop is *big*. 4500 square feet worth of big…

as you can also see, it’s absolutely *loaded* with oak furniture… most of it is quite nice, but heavy :/

so carol, aiden, doug, and christoph and i built a big pile of 3 drawer chests by the front door to free up a lot of floor space…

and then lianor, raerae, and pattycakes made an even bigger pile while my brother and i sorted out the power, so i can run the building off the generator until the power company gets the electrical sorted out. (i have to move my power meter outside the building first)

yeah, that’s a big pile…

it’s pretty easy to lift one.
the first time.
even the 10th time…

but after 200 of them… :/

it get’s kinda exhausting.

the tentative plan is that the room under the duck is going to be the sewing/leather/jewelry/etc. room, the end one on the right is going to be the metal shop/forge/etc, (bay 6) and the one in front of it (also has a roll up door) is going to be the wood shop… the wood shop bay is the last one in this pic, (bay 5) the bays further forward in this pic (2,3,4) are are full of random sca and household gear, the mustang and the trans am and so on are going in there. the x1/9 is in bay 1, along with several spare engines, etc.

and the bus is going between the duck and the stack of chests.

have i mentioned how much i hate moving lately?
i’m sure i have..

so i have about 50 of these secretariat hutches with the fold down desk bits.
i’d like $100 for ‘em, but i’ll make you a deal if you want more than one. i have a few damaged ones’ i’ll be taking apart for the oak, so if you just need parts, yell.

they’re actually pretty slick, and the desk folds up:

and of course i have a couple (for epic amounts of “a couple”) 3 drawer oak chests.

i have 2 sizes.
19 1/4″ W x 19″ D x 29 1/2″ H
or
18″ W x 18″ D x 29 1/2″ H

they have a $200.00 price tag on the back of them, and i’m thinking that $50.00 each is fair. you want more than 5, i’m willing to wheel and deal.

yeah, so for those of you who wondered what i was up to, now you know.
-stone

talkin’ bout my benzo… (before)

By Sylverstone, on August 7th, 2010

So once upon a time, a friend of mine told me they had ended up with a car that had been abused a bit, but that I may be interested in…

So it’s a “C” class Mercedes.

It looked pretty rough, but the price wasn’t bad, so I figured what the heck, why not?

Now keep in mind that for the most part I had no experience with the marque at all, and the plan was buy it, do the bodywork on it, and sell it, because it had very low miles for it’s age.

For the most part I never understood why someone would spend that kind of money on a car they didn’t build themselves, or didn’t have “Hemi Cuda Convertible” in the name somewhere.

Yeah, that whole “I don’t get it” thing lasted until the first time I drove it, and the whole “I’m going to sell it” thing vanished when the girl at the espresso stand said it matched my eyes.

Later that day, two other women that I love and admire told me the same thing, cementing the “I’m keepin’ it” for good.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to my new grocery getter…

These are the before pics:

some of the scuffing is sorta explainable, but the dent in the passenger door boggles me a bit.

and then of course you have the front bumper cover that no longer fits properly, due to impact, and a thumbprint sized missing paint / rusty spot on the hood a couple inches from the ornament… (yeah, I have no idea either)

and the bottom of the passenger side doors for the entire length of the car are scraped up pretty bad… but surprisingly not as bent as they look…

the guy who owned it was an idiot apparently (not the folks I got it from, the guy who bought it new)

see what I mean about the dent? it’s *deep*.

and that’s just from being careless in a parking lot, or hitting traffic barrels… dunno.

every single corner on the car is screwed up somehow.. I’ve seen drivers ed cars and new york city cabs that are treated better… but hey, at least the maintenance got done on time all the time. (wouldn’t have believed that except I have the records of it)

at least the trunk lid isn’t messed up…

oh wait, till I get rear ended by a 67 chevy pickup by ft lewis… tempted to kick in the rest of the panels myself.

scuff…

and more scuffs…

of course, there’s some fun bits to all this… it’s a eurospec car, so it’s damned fast, but importing it is going to be a pain in the ass, and the part where my girlfriend’s roommate asked her who she’d spent the night with, since the Canadian plates were still on it, gave me giggles for weeks…

tires are shot, interior is filthy, computer is complaining about all sorts of things…

(to be continued)
-stone

root your sprint htc hero (android 1.5)…

By Sylverstone, on July 15th, 2010

note: these are the instructions for android 1.5. android 2.x rooting instructions are [here]

this operation will require the android SDK (software development kit).
you can download it [here]

extract the files to c:\droidsdk

save yourself some pain and after you extract the files, make sure your tree looks like:

c:\droidsdk\tools (and all the other folders) because it doesn’t unpack that way sometimes.

on your phone, click menu > settings > applications > development and make sure usb debugging is turned on.

plug your phone into your computer via usb.

it should install the drivers automagically.

once you have the SDK installed, open a command prompt (click start, click run, type cmd, hit [enter])

type cd\droidsdk\tools\ and hit [enter]
type adb devices

it should reply with the serial number of your phone.

if it doesn’t, reinstall the drivers.

if you are rooting to flash a custom rom you now want to go [here]

otherwise, download the as2root file [here] and save it to c:\droidsdk\tools\

in your command prompt window type the following lines, hitting [enter] after each one:

adb push asroot2 /data/local/
adb shell chmod 0755 /data/local/asroot2
adb shell
/data/local/asroot2 /system/bin/sh
mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
cd /system/bin
cat sh > su
chmod 4775 su

and you should now have root.
-stone

backup your sprint htc hero…

By Sylverstone, on July 14th, 2010

so when i was running android 1.5 on my sprint htc hero, my phone was being retarded, and saving all the contacts to the phone, as a “phone contact” and not actually backing them up to google contacts.

having had sprint lose all my contacts once (samsung instinct) I wasn’t about to play this game again…
(i got lucky then, i have a friend in their netops section that retrieved them from the server for me, but it still pissed me off)

anyway, so here we go…
plug your phone into your computer via usb cable, on your phone tell it “mount as disk drive”
on your computer, open windows explorer (or view contents in windows explorer if windows asked)

make a folder on your harddrive, call it !_hero_backup_! or something equally appropriate.

make sure you can see that folder in the left pane of windows explorer, and in the right window you want the contents of your sd card.

click on the right side, press “control a” (hold down the control key and press the a key) to highlight all, then click your left mouse button
on the highlighted area, holding the left mouse button down, drag it to the !_hero backup_! folder you made, and let go of the left button.

this should copy your entire sd card to the computers harddrive.

hold down the shift key when you do it if you want to *move* the files.

your pictures live in \DCIM\100MEDIA\ if you’re looking for just them.

once that’s finished, login to your gmail account and compare your contact list with your phone.
if they’re all there, great, you’re done

if they aren’t, it means your contact sync isn’t working.

if your phone is running android 1.5 (settings / about phone / software i think) chances are all the contacts in your phone are not “google” contacts.

contactsync from happydroid (it’s in the app market, and free) will fix this for the most part. download it and run it, then resync.

if, after you run the app, it still doesn’t do it, go take a hard look at the *first missing entry* as you compare your phone with google contacts.
it is most likely the culprit, and you’ll probably have to delete it from your phone to get the rest of them to go.

this worked for me.
-stone

disable double notifications when using handcent sms

By Sylverstone, on July 14th, 2010

Handcent sms kicks serious ass all over the stock messaging app on a droid, but for some reason you have to disable the stock app by hand.
Here’s how you do it and get rid of those annoying double notifications.

1. open the “messaging” application.
2. push the “menu” button.
3. touch “settings”.
4. uncheck everything related to notifications and auto retrieve.
5. exit the application.
-stone

makes me wet…

By Sylverstone, on June 15th, 2010

so i’m currently in Valparaiso, Indiana, hanging out at my aunt’s house.

well, kinda, at the moment i’m sitting in the car, soaking wet, on the laptop because the power is out…

how did i end up in the car?

well…

first we drove back to my aunt’s house…

then we heard the tornado warnings and the sirens go off and the wind pick up…

and up…

all the while the rain is falling harder and harder…

within 10 minutes, this was the street out front…

people are stupid…

i’m in shorts… standing in the middle of the street, this is about 20 minutes into it…

that’s a trash can on it’s side, sucked down against the storm drain…
there are only two on this street, one on each side, and they are your basic 12″ pipe. they move a *lot* of water, and the suction is immense…

deep enough that it’s climbing driveways now…

30 minutes in, far side of the dip, the van won’t start…
(already pushed out two other cars)

and the water rises…

and rises…

…at this point we are frantically pulling debris out of the storm drain grates, of which there are only two, and they are deeper than “arms reach with your head above water”, and it’s a matter of “use one hand to pull crap out, while using the other hand and both feet to keep yourself from getting sucked into it, while holding your breath”…

yeah, not fun.