♫♪ Wednesday, Wednesday ♪ ♫ (bah-DAH, BAH-dah-DAH-dah...) ♪ ♪ ♫
Pingaha. Yesterday morning it snowed hard. Today it was beautiful and 70°F. I spent several happy hours puttering around with the Green Machine. Click and Clack, those two buffoons on NPR who call themselves the Tappet Brothers, took their name from the same Slant-6 engine that's in this car. I swapped the MP distributor, with its inappropriately fast race centrifugal advance curve, for a production item with a more realistic street curve to solve the part-throttle pinging that had caused me to retard the static timing last time I drove the car. Donno where mhkrabat keeps his timing strobe, so I had to field-time it by ear. I also replaced the thermostatic spring in the choke stove, chased the crud out of the windshield washer nozzles and ran new hoses to them, adjusted the fast-idle cam and repaired the broken-out bolt hole in the fibreglass heater core housing. Dug a couple of final-year ('67) Stromberg WW carburetor cores out of the trunk, put them on the workbench and did some investigative diassembly.
Today's cars are all thoroughly computerized, and this includes every aspect of the engine except the purely mechanical core reciprocating and rotating movement of internal parts. Fuel delivery, induction, ignition and timing-all continuously monitored and manipulated by computers via sensors, transducers and actuators. Not the 42-year-old Green Machine. Its engine management system is based wholly on nothing more than gross physics of the electrical, magnetic and mechanical. Those advance curves I was talking about? They're a product of the centripetal force generated by a pair of flyweights of a specific mass, pivoted at one and and pinned to a cam at the other, counterbalanced by calibrated springs that allow the weights to move outward and the cam to counterrotate at a calibrated rate as the shaft to which they are mounted spins at one-half engine speed. The choke stove? A coiled length of laminated flat metal strip. The one side is of a kind of metal that expands relatively fast and much when heated, the other side expands relatively slow and little when heated. Since the two sides are bonded together-a bimetallic strip, it's called-the coil exerts spring tension upon the choke pushrod when it's cold, gradually unwinding and releasing the tension as it's heated by proximity to the exhaust manifold, allowing the choke pull-off diaphragm and pullrod to open the choke progressively as the engine warms.
You can stand there and watch these mechanisms operate, and if something isn't working the way it should, and you know how it should, you can tweak it to do what you want. It is frequently unbelievable to those who've never known non-computerized cars that they start and run at all, let alone reliably. In proper repair, they certainly do. I've no real grudge against well-implemented computer controls (badly-implemented ones are just as aggravating as anything else crappily done); they've brought us improved efficiency and reduced exhaust toxicity, and from that standpoint are very much worth having.
They've also brought us the ability to neglect our cars long past their service-by dates, because the computer can compensate to mask a great many worn or deteriorated components. They've made it less necessary to poke around under the hood, which means greater convenience but less chance of spotting an imminent failure. They've taken away the need to tweak bimetallic strips and centrifugal flyweights...and the ability to do so. They've made repairs less frequent, but more costly. They've reduced the chance you'll be stuck by the side of the road, but guaranteed that when it happens, all the mechanical knowledge in the world won't get your car going again. So, from the perspective of the owner and driver of an automobile, things aren't objectively better or worse than they were-just different. But from the standpoint of Mr. or Mrs. average driver, today's way is better because there's less hassle involved, less often and more predictably. Think about it...how often do you see a dead car by the side of the road today vs. 25 or 35 years ago? Service stations have all been replaced by gas stations with convenience stores because periodic maintenance is no longer an every-two-thousand-miles affair and there's no longer enough dead-car-by-the-roadside business to support much of a service station industry.
One thing that won't change any time soon, at least not until metallic glass comes into wide use: like all machines, cars deteriorate as much from storage and nonuse as they do from constant use, but in different ways. Metal corrodes, paint oxidizes, rubber and leather perish, critters nest in the works. Entropy must needs carry on, one way or another. *sigh*
Klud
The tangerines and grapefruit I bought at the food coöp the other day are heavenly. They're amazing. I can't recall ever having tangerines this sweet, and these grapefruit are only somewhat below the standard set by the grapefruit tree grandma and grandpa had in their backyard in Arizona for a few years. They're minneola tangerines, and they are scrumptious. I'm hoping it's a generally good crop, rather than some ultra-scarce supply I won't find elsewhere. While I was there I also picked up some other treats: Local tart cherry juice concentrate, and curried cashews. The cashews are a dangerously addictive crunchy snack, the danger being primarily to one's wallet; their cost is such that they are a small-quantity-once-in-a-long-while treat. A little of the cherry syrup goes a very long way, and it is excellent!
Today's cars are all thoroughly computerized, and this includes every aspect of the engine except the purely mechanical core reciprocating and rotating movement of internal parts. Fuel delivery, induction, ignition and timing-all continuously monitored and manipulated by computers via sensors, transducers and actuators. Not the 42-year-old Green Machine. Its engine management system is based wholly on nothing more than gross physics of the electrical, magnetic and mechanical. Those advance curves I was talking about? They're a product of the centripetal force generated by a pair of flyweights of a specific mass, pivoted at one and and pinned to a cam at the other, counterbalanced by calibrated springs that allow the weights to move outward and the cam to counterrotate at a calibrated rate as the shaft to which they are mounted spins at one-half engine speed. The choke stove? A coiled length of laminated flat metal strip. The one side is of a kind of metal that expands relatively fast and much when heated, the other side expands relatively slow and little when heated. Since the two sides are bonded together-a bimetallic strip, it's called-the coil exerts spring tension upon the choke pushrod when it's cold, gradually unwinding and releasing the tension as it's heated by proximity to the exhaust manifold, allowing the choke pull-off diaphragm and pullrod to open the choke progressively as the engine warms.
You can stand there and watch these mechanisms operate, and if something isn't working the way it should, and you know how it should, you can tweak it to do what you want. It is frequently unbelievable to those who've never known non-computerized cars that they start and run at all, let alone reliably. In proper repair, they certainly do. I've no real grudge against well-implemented computer controls (badly-implemented ones are just as aggravating as anything else crappily done); they've brought us improved efficiency and reduced exhaust toxicity, and from that standpoint are very much worth having.
They've also brought us the ability to neglect our cars long past their service-by dates, because the computer can compensate to mask a great many worn or deteriorated components. They've made it less necessary to poke around under the hood, which means greater convenience but less chance of spotting an imminent failure. They've taken away the need to tweak bimetallic strips and centrifugal flyweights...and the ability to do so. They've made repairs less frequent, but more costly. They've reduced the chance you'll be stuck by the side of the road, but guaranteed that when it happens, all the mechanical knowledge in the world won't get your car going again. So, from the perspective of the owner and driver of an automobile, things aren't objectively better or worse than they were-just different. But from the standpoint of Mr. or Mrs. average driver, today's way is better because there's less hassle involved, less often and more predictably. Think about it...how often do you see a dead car by the side of the road today vs. 25 or 35 years ago? Service stations have all been replaced by gas stations with convenience stores because periodic maintenance is no longer an every-two-thousand-miles affair and there's no longer enough dead-car-by-the-roadside business to support much of a service station industry.
One thing that won't change any time soon, at least not until metallic glass comes into wide use: like all machines, cars deteriorate as much from storage and nonuse as they do from constant use, but in different ways. Metal corrodes, paint oxidizes, rubber and leather perish, critters nest in the works. Entropy must needs carry on, one way or another. *sigh*
Klud
The tangerines and grapefruit I bought at the food coöp the other day are heavenly. They're amazing. I can't recall ever having tangerines this sweet, and these grapefruit are only somewhat below the standard set by the grapefruit tree grandma and grandpa had in their backyard in Arizona for a few years. They're minneola tangerines, and they are scrumptious. I'm hoping it's a generally good crop, rather than some ultra-scarce supply I won't find elsewhere. While I was there I also picked up some other treats: Local tart cherry juice concentrate, and curried cashews. The cashews are a dangerously addictive crunchy snack, the danger being primarily to one's wallet; their cost is such that they are a small-quantity-once-in-a-long-while treat. A little of the cherry syrup goes a very long way, and it is excellent!