Hello??

I read you 5X5 ... all is well here at The 12 Acre Wood . I spent my morning identifying and repairing electrical issues on my "new-to-me" Yanmar 1500D tractor . It's now charging from it's onboard alternator and the dash warning lights are working . Got too hot to work outside before I found the fuse links ... so the horn , turn signals , and headlights will have to wait .

Far as I know.

I live! (according to my doctor)

I read you 5X5 ... all is well here at The 12 Acre Wood . I spent my morning identifying and repairing electrical issues on my "new-to-me" Yanmar 1500D tractor . It's now charging from it's onboard alternator and the dash warning lights are working . Got too hot to work outside before I found the fuse links ... so the horn , turn signals , and headlights will have to wait . Snag

------------------------------

Similar electrical system projects here. I removed the 2000 Honda's distributor and drilled out and retapped a rust-frozen and broken 5mm cap screw, a simple task on a vertical milling machine, which has paid back its cost. Kroil has freed some rusted bolts in steel but not this one in aluminum. It's next to the cap vent and perhaps ozone from high voltage sparking attacked it, I'm told the localized corrosion there is common.

A rusted engine mount bolt into a hollow frame section that would start turning and then jam from thread rust inside came out after wedging a bronze bore brush against it through the nearby small drainage hole that had let water in. The undercar bolts yearly LPS-3 spray could reach loosen after 25 New England winters but the inaccessible ones may need drilling. I'm told Waxoyl and Woolwax (lanolin) are also effective, though messier.

The 1991 Ford needs a windshield wiper switch, I found two sources. Restorers tell me parts are still available for much older American vehicles. A friend turning a 1970ish Malibu into an SS Chevelle has found what he needed. He said he could buy all the parts to build one if necessary.

Test driving new cars and trucks convinced me to keep my simpler old ones, that have taller clear windows, full-sized spare tires and for which I could and did buy the factory shop manuals. The lane-keeping assist that works very well for me was tightening the steering play adjustment. I might add rear view cameras, otherwise I don't need the expensive and reportedly troublesome modern extras.

Yup, r.c.m. does seem to be working and I seem to be fairly alright :-) Regards,

Yup, r.c.m. does seem to be working and I seem to be fairly alright :-) Regards,

--------------------------------

I was concerned because you hinted you hadn't been.

And the degree in Gismology to drive the damned things!

... otherwise I don't need the expensive and reportedly

And the degree in Gismology to drive the damned things!

-------------------------------- During the "preflight" familiarization I ask the salesperson to turn off all the automatic driving assists. I don't use or need cruise control to hold a steady speed and tightening the steering box cured a slight tendency to wander.

It appears that my 2000 Honda may have a Double DIN radio size that will take an LCD screen with a backup camera, I could use one and GPS+NAV. Has anyone done this?

I think I have learned a lot as I looked back on the summer of (intended!) activities. The impression was so little result for the time - and that was for sure only my own fault (is that really true though?). However life does teach you that fundamental realisations don't come easily (cheaply) - they cost in pain almost always.

So you have a feeling there was a need to go through aggravations on a path to realisations coming. That much I was philosophical and reflective about.

Those reflections have ended-up reaching far back - a sort of grand reconciliation.

The essence is that anything I want to do I have to do it all myself in-house. I previously asked about "machine tools" and you were all absolutely emphaticly "yes!".

The reconciliation in the mind is that the mind which sees the "useful projects" and the way to do them has learned from doing and driving before. I have to do that doing. That it is unlikely that group projects on my aspirations can deliver. You always end up having to accept a compromise which has even more consequences than you could visualise departing from the plan you had - with huge time-consequences and waste of energy "flogging dead horses" and that energy not put to "I got the steel in; I welded in my outbuilding; I ...".

Getting through my Doctorate after everything wrecked-up, working in industrial plants when I got the chance, working in Turkey rescuing regarding the welding aspect the 3rd bridge over the Bosphorus - all involved team-work, collaboration and fostering a shared vision of a shared endeavour.

That had supplanted the go-for-it of learning to repair motorcycles and tinkering leading to what launched my Doctorate - I saw methods and I did the pilot-tests which showed feasiblity then came up with the "full-spec." methods which delivered the results.

But now things come a full circle.

Collaboration would be like "Here's this chalcopyrite (the primary copper ore) 'which I found lying in my garden as it just so happened' which I've broken-up - will you grind it? Jim has got a lab. froth-floation machine. Bill has the firebricks to build a furnace in his garden" - etc, etc. Make my contribution "modular".

There are some others.

But broadly - reflecting on it all, there's a lot of things "dropping into place", many of which give quite an upbeat self-validation.

I do see that what I have done has worked straight-off because I thought it through. Did calculations I actually find quite nice - maybe what a cross-word-puzzle person gets. Make a coffee and settle at my desk for an enjoyable time-out picking through the challenge. But calculations others find impossibly difficult. The insights and the means to do them. "In the sum of everything" the methods I have built-up for practical tasks do deliver. So for instance the rod-mill worked first-off... It would be demoralising going through try after try, none really getting there for reasons you can't figure.

I see that without a specific objective to wake up to each morning time slipped-away like sand pouring between parted fingers.

The "model" is the very productive time on building work on my home in late summer into autumn. I knew every morning when I woke up exactly what needed "hitting". Plus - I felt good! So yes - keep "my" projects "modular" in that I contribute parts I do the doing on.

I don't know if any of this makes sense...

Just a little other point.

We did have a disappointment in the late Spring. Knowing the reopening local tin mines - tin is not distributed like most other minerals are - would have a need for "core drilling", and having a machine left-over in the hobby-mine from when it was a training mine - think like Colorado School of Mines - we thought "this is it". We could drag one of these down levels in existing / abandoned mines and have a several-hundred metre start on "proper" drilling machines "at grass". Plus, as the lode structures are usually parallel on the same about 10deg to 20deg to vertical in the mineralised areas, we visualised

- and geologists confirmed - drilling "sideways" from existing levels would in most cases give optimal angle on the suspected / likely untapped lodes. Yes it wouldn't meet "standards" particularly those for raising vast amounts of money on stock-exchanges because the cores are too small - but - you wouldn't pay for the "to spec." drilling until you damn' well knew the assay, thickness and extent of the target lode. (that's a lesson in science and in welding - don't pay for expensive tests until you damn' well know what the answer will be) However, the first reopening mine "wanted experience", and said experienced person hired "our" core-catcher from our "group" but we were otherwise shut-out. We all had to go other ways, getting our daily bread elsewhere. One would have thought a company would try to get more than one source of a critical resource - in this case diamond core drilling teams - but apparently not.

"All we had to do" was mess-around going through the learning-curve diamond-drilling into "sterile" granite at the hobby mine. Yes we would have had to make a few gifts towards the electricity bill for running the compressor at-surface for our "pillocking-around" - it didn't half produce a spike in the electricity consumption doing as much as we did. But miners of the era until 1999 did say the only way to learn is exactly what we were doing.

Even this though is part of the overal philosophical "fitting it all together". Got to feature into plans that nothing will be "plain sailing".

Well, big response. Best wishes, Rich S

The essence is that anything I want to do I have to do it all myself in-house. I previously asked about "machine tools" and you were all absolutely emphaticly "yes!".

The reconciliation in the mind is that the mind which sees the "useful projects" and the way to do them has learned from doing and driving before. I have to do that doing. That it is unlikely that group projects on my aspirations can deliver. You always end up having to accept a compromise which has even more consequences than you could visualise departing from the plan you had - with huge time-consequences and waste of energy "flogging dead horses" and that energy not put to "I got the steel in; I welded in my outbuilding; I ...".

--------------------------

When designing and building industrial electronic test equipment I was at the mercy of mechanical engineers and the machine shop for everything I couldn't make with a file, drill press, sheet metal shear and brake. Whatever I wanted had to be fully described and toleranced on a drawing, they wouldn't tolerate cut-and-try. I can't blame them, degreed engineers can be notoriously clueless outside their specialty, and sometimes at the hands-on aspects within it.

As I didn't know machining at the time I couldn't distinguish the hard and easy ways to do a job, for example I would round a corner to control 40 KiloVolt corona discharge by grinding and filing, the shop would order a corner-rounding end mill in the size I specified. They knew nothing of electrical problems so they would suggest the solutions they could do based on how they chose to interpret my attempts to explain.

I found that a local school offered night classes in machine shop and jumped on the chance to learn, as also with programming, welding and blacksmithing. The student-abused machines were valuable to learn proper versus excessive cutting feeds and speeds through experience as well as how to accommodate the wear and damage to the old lathe, mill and surface grinder I bought. Fortunately others made the more spectacular mistakes such as shattering a surface grinding wheel, I only burned an endmill.

The buying approach I partly chose and partly lucked into was acquiring machine tools sized above model steam engine building and below what's practical for production, apparently a range meant for a model shop, tool maker or inventor. Old American iron was available when I looked in the

My machines suffice for most of what I want to make because I know their limits. I've learned enough to adequately specify the jobs I can't do and send out to a larger shop. There have been a couple of them this summer, not too expensive because I did the prep and fixturing. The DIY constructions you've described are in the same range of size and power.

My most recent lathe job was a custom 5mm automotive screw of non-standard length with a turned-down section on the shank to captivate it in the partly tapped bushing on the distributor cap. I made it from stainless because the original rusted, froze and broke. It's a small simple part, but essential and unavailable for a 25 year old car, particularly in stainless. The mill had drilled out the broken screw remains in the distributor casting accurately and squarely enough to keep the drill bit from deflecting into the softer aluminium. jsw

Collaboration would be like "Here's this chalcopyrite (the primary copper ore) 'which I found lying in my garden as it just so happened' which I've broken-up - will you grind it? Jim has got a lab. froth-floation machine. Bill has the firebricks to build a furnace in his garden" - etc, etc. Make my contribution "modular".

--------------------------------- The British approach to electronic warfare R&D during WW2 was like that, very small teams on tasks that could be modularized such that each member handled an entire electrical or mechanical aspect and the only collaboration required was connecting them. I was part of a similarly managed project to design a tester for advanced semiconductors.

In the Farm Hall transcripts the captured German atomic scientists discussed R&D group dynamics after hearing of the US success and complained that Germans couldn't and hadn't cooperated as well as they assumed the Americans had on such a large project. Their egos were too big and Nazi dogma promoted competition instead of cooperation. They hinted that they hadn't really wanted to succeed. My "Copenhagen" guess is that Bohr and Heisenberg discussed ways to appear to make progress without actually doing it. I think the same was true of Kammler's Bell which I can see as an X-Ray antiaircraft weapon.

Nice job!

Removing broken off metal parts stuck in aluminum (or anything soft) really sucks😑️

I broke off a threaded bolt while changing the thermostat in old truck years ago. Simple 30 minute job became whole day job. Even worse I broke off a harden steel EZ-Out in the broken bolt stub too🙄️

I got out the Dremel and a Carbide cutter I'd bought years ago but never used. Was REALLY surprised to find this actually worked and I ground out the broken off EZ-Out albeit very slow. Had to work at a ~45deg angle to my vision, so couldn't really see what I was doing. I noticed early on while cutting on the EZ-Out that it sounded different if I drifted off it into the aluminum. Once the EZ-Out was gone I just kept working on the broken bolt stub by ear. It went a lot faster than the EZ-Out. Once I chewed through the length of it to aluminum on one side what was left came out.

I picked up a metric tap for it the next day to clean up what was left between cutting and corrosion. It still had enough threads left to do the job with a new bolt okay.

In hindsight I should have just used the hole drilled into bolt stub for EZ-Out to guide the Dremel cutter instead. Listened to the noise while cutting to guide it. Would have taken maybe an hour extra instead of a day.

I knew better than to try an EZ-Out for a job like this but the bolt had been moving a bit by wrench early on. I just didn't want to go get a better suited wrench to tease it back and forth and broke it off being too impatient...

I knew better than to try an EZ-Out for a job like this but the bolt had been moving a bit by wrench early on. I just didn't want to go get a better suited wrench to tease it back and forth and broke it off being too impatient... Leon Fisk

----------------------------------- I used to tear down and rebuild older motorcycles for education (not profit) and EZ-Outs rarely worked for me on 6mm screws frozen into aluminum. Usually a hammered impact driver got them out eventually, maybe the axial impacts opposite the tightening direction cracked the corrosion locking the screw thread to the aluminum.

I can't always tell if the bolt is starting to turn or to shear. Kroil in a needle bottle is a definite help, not a guaranteed fix. I've had to use the part that was attached as a guide to make a jig with matching holes that fit their screws closely, with a drill bit guide sleeve at the broken screw location. The distributor cap served to locate the broken screw under the mill spindle with a center finder.

The current project is the wipers in the 1991 Ranger. Low and Intermittent don't always work, High does. I replaced the multifunction switch on the column which showed some suspiciously high resistance readings after 150,000 miles. At dawn when it was cold everything worked, at noon in the sun the failure was back. Contact problem? The motor seems OK when powered directly through its connector via 1/16" Molex pins. I'm checking things in the order of their ease of access.

...I replaced the multifunction switch on the column which showed some suspiciously high resistance readings after 150,000 miles. ...

-------------------------------- That is a known issue with switch contacts. The oxide buildup shows resistance at the low voltage and current of a DVM resistance measurement but not so much at its higher normal working voltage and current, which "punch through" the oxide at least temporarily. Those contacts still lit turn signal bulbs brightly (my test lamp). On a high end Keithley 580 Micro-Ohmmeter there is a setting that limits the test voltage to 20mV to measure the resistance of the undisturbed oxide.

Switches meant for low voltage and power usually have gold-plated contacts that don't oxidize, the better switches for higher power use a silver-cadmium alloy whose oxide is conductive. Gold-plated "dry contact" switches can be damaged by arcing if opened at higher power levels.

The contacts in starter motors I've fixed had thick copper contacts which had burned away enough to no longer connect. I built them back up with brazing rod which lasted 40,000 miles, twice.

Suspect you already know this...

The old motor assemblies like what was on my standard wiper 1982 Chevy K10 had a set of "park contacts" inside them. Parking being completed wiper in the down position after turning them off.

Suspect you already know this...

The old motor assemblies like what was on my standard wiper 1982 Chevy K10 had a set of "park contacts" inside them. Parking being completed wiper in the down position after turning them off.

-- Leon Fisk Grand Rapids MI

------------------------------------ My 78 Accord was like that with a separate interrupted circular contact track that continued to power the motor after shutting it off until the wiper blades reached the Park position, I cleaned and greased it when it became sluggish.

This 91 Ford has only gears visible in the box, the Park power switching function (which still works) appears to come from an electronic module tucked somewhere under the dash. I'll have to remove the seat to get my head under there, only a section of dash below the steering column removes for access.

I just opened the gearbox and haven't yet made enough jumper wires to power and test it without short circuit risk, the motor ran properly on external power while installed. The Hi and Lo motor connections are direct and the Park signal is the +12V or Gnd output of a switch that may be under the output shaft gear.

Found a ~40mb pdf Service Manual here, seemed to have wiring info for wipers:

Found a ~40mb pdf Service Manual here, seemed to have wiring info for wipers:

-- Leon Fisk Grand Rapids MI

------------------------------------------------- Thank you very much.

I do have the full set of factory manuals from Helms, the problem is finding things in them as info is scattered, grouped by type rather than subject, and they aren't well indexed. The files you found are searchable, 325 matches for "wiper".

I've been redrawing the separate component internals, wiring harness and connector pinout drawings to have them in one place.

The Engine/Emissions-Diagnosis manual covers all 1991 engines and vehicles and is 4" thick, the Ranger/Explorer/Aerostar books add up to nearly as much.

I quickly decided these vehicles were long term keepers and bought the consumables, manuals and special tools to take care of them.

On a 1990 Lumina van, I ended up running numerous grounding straps.