Matt's Garage

This is our fault. As I sit, drinking my diet coke from a plastic cup, listening to traffic going by, and pondering the lawsuits going on about the oil spill in the gulf, blaming BP, Halliburton, etc. When are we as a society going to accept it’s our own damn fault?  They wouldn’t be drilling for oil if we were not asking for more, more, more… Even the BP shareholders are suing BP for the loss in the stock!

If we are going to live in our society today, as we have made it, this is one of the ugly costs. The gulf fisherman are upset … but what powers their boats?  Those aren’t sailboats out there! People are upset about their vacation spots and wildlife preserves- how do they get to that vacation or observe that wildlife?  How are you reading this right now? Those electrons don’t move themselves!  If you dive into your 401(k) or mutual fund, I’m sure you have investments that involve oil in some way.

Litigation won’t solve it, though it will probably make whole lot of money for a whole lot of lawyers. And a fraction of any settlement money goes to actually cleaning up. BP probably can’t pay for the entire cost of the cleanup and various lost revenues without bankrupting the company (and even then it would be left incomplete).  Are we going to go after the current and past shareholders? After all, they made money off of BP before it all went to hell.  Do we really want to sue ourselves?

BP has pledged to pay.  We’ve also gotta pledge to pay, quit whining, start cleaning, and if we don’t want to see something like this happen again, use the oil infrastructure we’ve built to help us move to something that doesn’t just keep pushing the costs down the line.

Well, I want to make sure my check engine light works- so I’m working on a circuit that will read the voltage from the car, watch the voltage for noise and then turn off the CEL once the engine is running. With all the ricers running around, I would have figured this was something that I could buy just about anywhere… but no.

So I’m working on a circuit that does it with some smarts. I’ll still have to pass the “sniff” tests, which is really the important part, right? Just because I have an aftermarket ECU, does that mean that I can’t have OBD2? It looks like I will be able to do it with a minimum number of parts, thanks to the wonderful features of the PIC16F886.

I found a solution to the vacuum leak that has been vexing me for so long- I pressurized my intake, corking the tailpipe and used my handy home-made smoke generator:

Dry-ice in a ketchup bottle wrapped in a towel (to insulate it), and duct tape liberally applied, with a straw hot-glued into the lid to draw the “smoke” from the center of the bottle when the bottle is inverted. Add warm water to make the smoke start.

I saw an unusual amount of the fumes being pulled into a stream from just about the most inaccessible place on the engine- under the supercharger and above the manifold. So it was off with the supercharger.

Can you guess where the massive vacuum leak is?

I put a new gaskget in (a thinner, stronger material) and the MAP levels are reading in the 30 range at idle, and no idle fuel-cut oscillations!

Now, I might just be able to tune!

You can trick out your ride, but you ain’t trick until you’ve tricked out your body. I’m not talking about those easy things like piercings and tattoos- I mean serious Titanium improvements.

In my case, I’ve added the Titanium to my spine.

I like the little Smart cars. I really think they are the type of cars we need to see in the USA. They say they are Challenging the status quo. Not really. I asked if they were going to be bringing in their Diesel- their response:

Dear smart Enthusiast, Thank you for your interest in smart USA. At this
time, there are no plans to offer a diesel version of the fortwo here in
the US. If you have any other questions or concerns, please contact us
via email or by phone at 1.800.smartusa. Thank you for your interest in
smart USA. You will be hearing from us soon! James McMurray Customer

Not a great picture, but the black blob is a crunched brand new Ford GT- looks like it hit another car- the front end was all crumpled up- it was at the intersection of Loop 360 and Stonelake Blvd, here in Austin.