Search results

Helping my friend with the wiring on his tent trailer. We got everything working, but I was curious as to what this little module is. It's in line with the feed to the trailer's positive battery terminal. It says 30 A on it. I suspected it was a diode to only allow current flow in one...

Yesterday evening our son and his wife dropped the little ones off so they (the parents) could go out for his birthday dinner. Our older granddaughter, who's still a few weeks away from turning five, wanted to take her pedal bike down to the park. Groan - always hard on Grandpa's back. She's...

We've pretty much gone from cold to hot here. Time to use the AC. I just turned the breaker back on. Typically they say to wait 24 hours before running the AC, to allow the oil to warm up. Any pros here who can confirm this is required? Thanks!

Idle curiousity on my part - what are those three devices on the roof? Couldn't tell if they were cylindrical or not. Antennas? Solar collectors for heating water? They face south.

Google has uploaded scans of all of the old weekly LIFE magazines (1936 - 1972), and I've enjoyed skimming through them. The editorials are unfailingly fair-minded, the ads are sometimes cringeworthy (I don't know whether to laugh or cry at some of them), and it's fascinating to read...

This is w.r.t. my friend's 2012 Chevy Sonic. We were doing a seasonal tire changeover yesterday. The lug nuts on the rear wheels were very tight, but did come off with some persuasion from my corded electric impact wrench. The threads were rusty, and I cleaned them up with a wire brush on my...

This old veteran has been on display here for decades - one website says since 1967, Canada's centennial year. If I recall correctly, it originally wore Golden Centennaire colours. It got pretty shabby over the years, and in 2018 was restored and painted in Red Knights colours.

Hello all - My friend asked me to help troubleshoot a "really bad noise" on his daughter's 2016 Dodge Grand Caravan. He had not yet looked at the van or done any troubleshooting, but was just going by his daughter's description. We had no nature of what the noise would be, so looked...

My friend's elderly father asked me to look at his '07 Mazda5's non-functioning front windshield washer. The wipers worked, and the rear washer worked. Fortunately there is a Mazda5 in the family, so I had the FSM. It sounded to me like the washer motor was not making any sound, ruling out a...

Regular plates, like a daily driver. It's gone downhill since Walt Kowalski owned it.

Specifically, vegetable pie - potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, onions, peas, and gravy, in a puff-pastry crust. Quite wonderful. I ate 3 and 1/7 pieces. ;) No, actually I held myself to two pieces.

My friend contacted me with a weird issue with his Subaru wagon. It's a 2011 Impreza, 2.5, with a manual transmission. He limped it into his driveway, but it's not driveable now. The clutch pedal goes down to the floor, and won't come back on its own. It can be pulled back by hand. We bled...

Hello all - I've replaced a few things on our furnace in recent years and kept it limping along, but the time has come. It's a 30ish-year-old Carrier, natural gas, mid-efficiency, and it packed it in yesterday morning. In the past five years I've replaced the blower motor, the fan control...

I guess the title says it all, or at least most of it. Perhaps three years ago the clutch started to feel weird, and then didn't want to return from the floor after being pushed in. This was during a very cold part of the winter, same time of year as now. I bled the slave cylinder, and was a...

On February 20th 1962, John Glenn made America's first orbital space flight in a Mercury spacecraft. Friendship 7 orbited the Earth three times. Glenn's flight was the third manned Mercury flight, and used the powerful Atlas booster - Alan Shepard (May 1961) and Gus Grissom (July 1961) had...

I'm finally getting around to posting some of the photos from our idyllic trip to Germany in 2018. Of course I took a bunch of photos of our friends, and of the spectacular scenery and architecture and so on, but also enjoy shots of common consumer goods and storefronts and so on, as I feel...

I picked up a copy of How To Rebuild Your Engine by Ben Watson from the library a few days ago, and am really enjoying it. (I don't anticipate having to rebuild an engine in the foreseeable future, but it's a good read and I'm always glad to learn.) He writes knowledgeably and with a bit of...

Fifty-five years ago on this date, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died during a test of their Apollo spacecraft on the launch pad. Grissom had flown the Mercury 4 suborbital flight in July 1962 to become the 2nd American in space, and commanded the Gemini 3 flight in March...