Different times, same for ladies…
Is it May yet?
Whether The Commies Complete Their Takeover Or Not
One way or another they deserve their fate.
No…
Doesn’t yammer back either…
Old Truck Tuesday
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How To Make Small Molded Rubber Hoses At Home
Small molded rubber hoses have been around a long, long time but they pretty much exploded on the automotive scene in the early 90’s.
Heater hoses, bypass hoses, emission hoses especially, you will find them all over an engine anymore.
For a long time they were a Dealer Only item and really expensive. Eventually regular auto parts stores began stocking them but with so many different car makes and so many different applications, nobody could possibly stock them all and often they had to be special ordered.
Well I just came across this Youtube video of a guy showing how you can custom make virtually any kind you want with these spring kits you can buy, a heat gun, a clean rag and a screw type hose clamp.
It’s pretty obvious that English isn’t his first language but it is quite easy to understand what he is saying.
The Light.
Need the chillin’
Gunday Monday XXXVI
Contributed by Wild, wild West and Don’t mind me.
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Bill in Spokane sent this in, the recent solar eclipse.
Looks haunting and ethereal… Thank you Bill for sending it!
2024 Eclipse Trip
Being amateur astronomers, the carbon based wife unit and I decided to drive 5317 miles round trip to a wide spot in the road, slightly east of Tivydale, Texas. The goal was to witness what has to be one of the most spectacular events a human can see from Earth, a total eclipse of the Sun. The morning of the eclipse started out perfectly clear with a forecast of increasing clouds ….of course. We arrived at the aforementioned wide spot about 8am after driving through seemingly endless fields of blue, purple and yellow flowers. I brought along two 80mm refracting telescopes. Both were mounted on sturdy tripods, one for visual observing and the other equipped with a digital camera.
First contact occurred at 12:15 pm as expected. We watched and photographed through thin and broken clouds as the Sun was slowly devoured by the Moon. We expected it to be thoroughly socked in by 1:30 pm. It’s widely known in astronomy circles that the distance you have to drive multiplied by your desire to see an astronomical event roughly equals the chances you wont see it at all, squared. By some miracle, conditions remained clear enough to see totality which began at 1:32 pm and and continued for the 4m, 26s of surreal and indescribable, coronal light of totality.
I’ve never seen totality adequately described in words. It’s not like morning or evening twilight or even night. To my eye everything looks soft purple in color. The air cools considerably as the sky darkens. Day time birds and insects quiet down and go back to bed as the night time creatures begin stirring and making noise. Totality never lasts long enough. The maximum duration of totality in perfect conditions is only 7m, 32s so these are always fleeting moments we get to enjoy the Moon’s shadow.
Far too soon, but promptly at 1:37 pm the very first rays of sunlight began peeking through the valleys on the edge of the Moon as evidenced by the bright white spots near the five o’clock position of the attached image. This signals the end of totality. All of the now thoroughly confused creatures begin wondering what the hell is going on as the day brightens and warms again. By 1:44 pm the sky was completely socked in by clouds and the eclipse ended for us.
This was my third total solar eclipse with the first being in Great Falls, MT in 1979 and the second in the Sawtooth Range near Grandjean, ID in 2017. If I live long enough I’ll get one more chance in 2044 in the extreme northeast corner of Montana. I’ll be 80 years old! The attached image was taken at prime focus through an old University Optics 80mm f/6.25 refractor with a Canon 20D DSLR camera in aperture priority mode. Liberal amounts of luck and a kinked neck were involved. For a sense of scale, those red prominence’s on the edge of the Sun are 6-8 Earth diameters wide. I’d have preferred no clouds but I think they added an interesting look to the images I got.
Overall the trip was a blast! Far more fun than I thought it would be cooped up in the car across eleven states for eight days straight with my wife of 34 years. On all but the first and last day we encountered extreme weather. Sustained cross winds as high as 70 mph in Utah, a blinding white out snow storm at 10,481 feet in NW New Mexico, a paint peeling rain storm in north Texas and more high winds with hail and snow across OK, CO, NE and WY. The trip allowed me to visit the place of my birth in NM and some of my early childhood stomping grounds in TX, both for the first time since living there in the 60’s & 70’s. I also got to drive some of the US Highways my grandfather bulldozed a path for back in the 1940’s.
I’m Wiped Out
Me and 5 other guys had to go in yesterday and install a huge gearbox that has been under emergency repairs at a machine shop for 3 weeks.
They had been working ungodly hours in shifts trying to get it fixed.
Fabricating shafts with gears, sending them out to get heat treated, hand grinding some gears for proper mesh, getting bearings, setting clearances etc.
They kept having problems setting the end play on the shafts until they discovered one whole side cover was warped so they had to take it back apart and machine it flat.
Meanwhile the Big Wigs at our company were having kittens of course.
This machine is their money maker.
It flattens and cuts those huge steel rolls.
This particular gearbox is for the Large Leveler, a machine with two sets of basically hydraulically operated roll pins that smash the rolls flat and to whatever thickness they need.
That thing weighs 18,000 pounds empty and it holds 350 gallons of 85/140 gear oil.
Bottom left you will see 9 black colored Torque Limiters, the tenth one isn’t on yet. They are basically clutch packs.
When it’s installed in place, there are heavy truck drivelines bolted to them that run across and bolt to the rollers on the Large Leveler.
240 bolts to hold all those drivelines in alone.
There was the three of us from our Maintenance crew, a guy we talked into coming in who runs the crane on that line who lifted everything and swung it into place for us and two other Millwrights from another outfit who work on these things all the time.
I put in13 hours, another guy was there before me and wound up working 15 and nobody worked less than twelve.
I was wiped out and hurting like a sonofabitch when I got home.
Pain pills wouldn’t even touch it and then I didn’t sleep for shit because I had leg cramps all night waking me up from being on my feet all day.
My damn legs are still aching right now.
So that’s why I didn’t post anything yesterday and I’m here to tell ya,
I ain’t doing a damn thing today except sit here on my ass in the recliner with the heat and vibrate functions going full blast all day.
There is going to be at least one full blown nap coming my way too.
Yeah?
Choose wisely.
Kryptonite…
