Kool Cheap stuff...

[JohnRoberts]

I don't know if this makes me green... but I just bought a solar powered lamp to place at the end of my driveway so I can find it coming home at night. I guess i could have painted a rock with reflective paint but this lamp was only $3... Just a singe rechargeable AA cell, a photocell, and a LED light. It seems simple enough but still cool for that little money.  I'm probably killing a polar bear or a seal cub, with the energy consumed to manufacture this, but that's how it goes. mea culpa. 

JR

 

[sodderboy]

Put $0.000003 worth of ProGold on the battery contacts and you will double the life expectancy for a nice ROI.
Mike

 

[JohnRoberts]

And where can I buy some ProGold in any quantity, for less than the $3 Lamp replacement cost? 

I am philosophically in favor of preventing corrosion rather than generating more waste. I wonder if there is a DIY substitute... I worry that oil could attack the plastic.

JR

[edit- I just had to order some silicone lubricant for my treadmill belt. I suspect a dab of that might work and not attack the plastic/edit]

 

[JohnRoberts]

Well this is disappointing. Last night was my first test of wether the lamps improved the visibility of my driveway opening at night. I have deep rain ditches on either side. The solar powered driveway lamps were barely noticeable. If anything I could see them in my  headlights when close, not their light source from any distance.

Simple reflectors would work better.

JR

 

[walter]

I have a dozen solar lamps in my yard. They work for a summer, not so much with winter sun, then die, then I buy two more. I suspect the batteries are cheap. The interconnects could also be a point of failure. Such a simple device. It seems like the batteries are sealed inside, I would have to crack the case to get inside.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I ordered some reflective tape, and plan to convert the lamps to be lamp/reflectors.  I will look at sealing up the battery compartment with hot melt or something I can get open later.

The rechargeable batteries have to be cheaper than dirt, since the complete product is cheaper than dirt...

JR

 

[PRR]

Up here in Maine, some several-year-old driveway lights work very well, in the summer, until midnight. Unless there's several cloudy days. As the sun dips toward winter they work less well. And this week's Canadian cold front killed them. They may thaw on a mild sunny day, or next spring.

When they work they are very easy to see. (But nearest streetlight is 2,000' around a bend, nearest "city" is 5 miles, so pretty dark-sky here.)

Regular beatings helps beak the corrosion.

None of mine is remotely sealed.

RadioShack stocks "Solar Light Batteries", what we used to call Ni-Cad. (The young kid didn't know Ni-Cad, but the old guy did.) Apparently this is the last market for Ni-Cad.

My tractor threw a rod. I'm real tempted to take its lead battery down to the street with a couple of glovebox lamps. Not even bother with the sun, I'm so far north. Just drag the lead back to the garage once a week and dump a charge into it.

 

[CJ]

just get some old school smudge pots,

China is killing the air anyway, so no guilt,

used for road barriers in the 50's, remember?

 

[JohnRoberts]

Or some tiki torches ... ;D  I am not as concerned about releasing carbon as the impractical control of timing so they are making light when I want it. I ordered some reflective tape, to wrap around my wimpy LED lamps.

Ironically perhaps, I have too much light in the area. There is a post office across the street with illuminated parking lot. My problem is discerning my driveway from the nearby rain ditch at night. Some reflective paint on my driveway would work too. Maybe plant some bushes on either side (nah).

JR

 

[JohnRoberts]

I am rarely pleased by consumer purchases this cheap, but after a few months the light output imbalance between the two seems to have self corrected (probably from repeated deep discharge of the batteries), and they are doing the job of giving me visual indication of my  driveway location at night. It still stands to be seen how long these will keep working.
=====
On the subject of rechargeable batteries, my electric toothbrush was getting puny. I decided to run it down, so left it turned on for a few hours and then recharged it. It was like new for about a week, so I repeated the deep discharge. it seems to be holding up longer after the second deep discharge..

I like cheap fixes like that.

JR

 

[PRR]

Kool Cheap stuff...  you can buy a proctoscope for $20. USB chat-cam interface. I have not tried DIY proctology, but I have stuck it in spark-plug holes and verified that the left piston was not going up/down when the right piston did.

You can also buy a contractor-branded hole-scope at Lowes/Depot with display. But I found it easy enough to lug a laptop to the sick engine. If I spent my days fishing in walls I could see getting the whole system at $150. But $20 for the camera alone is stupid cheap.

 

[JohnRoberts]

Kool Cheap stuff...  you can buy a proctoscope for $20. USB chat-cam interface. I have not tried DIY proctology, but I have stuck it in spark-plug holes and verified that the left piston was not going up/down when the right piston did.

Ewww  DIY protoscope.  Yes tiny cheap cameras are a nice fall out from the smart phone explosion.

A piston not going up down, sounds like a major fail... I only threw one connecting rod back in my motor-head youth, and that one punched out holes in both sides of the cast iron block, and just about cut the oil pan in half... I had no trouble diagnosing that one without internal inspection. Back in the day I recall sticking mechanical probes (like a small stick or a finger) into the spark plug hole to accurately determine TDC.

Generally a compression check pressure gauge will tell you what you need to know. If the piston is not moving up and down, max cylinder pressure will be zip.

You can also buy a contractor-branded hole-scope at Lowes/Depot with display. But I found it easy enough to lug a laptop to the sick engine. If I spent my days fishing in walls I could see getting the whole system at $150. But $20 for the camera alone is stupid cheap.

We are living in a golden age for gadgets. I expect them to get cheaper and more powerful.

JR

 

[PRR]

> a compression check pressure gauge

Or your finger. But no compression still needs the differential diagnosis. Stuck valve? Blown head gasket? Hole in piston? In cylinder? (No water in the oil on an air-cool.)

This is surely a connecting rod. Oh, well.

 

[JohnRoberts]

Yup... Surprisingly I never bent a valve**, but I did burn one head gasket (gasket opened up between two adjacent cylinders). I blamed it on a bad tank of gas, but in hindsight head was probably not torqued down perfectly, or tight enough (IIRC I did use a torque wrench).

It seems a broken connecting rod will make a racket if the motor runs at all. You can tell if you have a dead cylinder by shorting out the one spark plug, and if motor idle speed doesn't change the cylinder is not working. Again not a specific diagnosis.

JR

** I used stronger Isky valve springs so my valve train was capable of higher RPM without valve float. Unfortunately my short block was engineered for < 5000 RPM... So i was operating it outside of design spec so to speak... 

 

[PRR]

> It seems a broken connecting rod will make a racket

A few loud bangs.

An autopsy means taking this 18HP engine off a frame originally designed around a 6HP engine. Which kinda means dismantling the whole frame. While I can get the conn-rod (the B&S boxer is still in production), the tractor is 44 years old and came to me free. And barely worth that. I've tired of the challenge.

The Kool Cheap Stuff is the $20 proctoscope. I remember when engine borescopes were only for top-fuel and gran prix mechanics. And before that, when the inside of an engine was just a mystery.

 

[JohnRoberts]

If there is enough power left, and connecting rod has stopped breaking stuff,  you could just remove the push rods from the valves for that one cylinder and run the tractor on the remaining cylinder(s). If only a two hole motor, might be wimpy running on only 1 but 1/2 of 18 HP is still more than original 6 HP.

====
Yup cheap cameras are kool... I have a USB microscope that is a few lenses in front of cheap digital camera.

It is interesting to see the technology fallouts from consumer products. I use a sweet tiny class D IC in my tuner that was developed for battery powered consumer products.

JR