I just have to ask one question: When installing an oil filter, and it says that once the gasket grabs, you are supposed to turn it one quarter turn, does this mean to a dealership that you need to torque it down until the 8' breaker bar you are using snaps at the strongest point?

And on a related note, the Subaru dealership in this locality is both the most ridiculously expensive car repair facility I have ever had service performed by, but months later I discover they also don't know what they are doing.

The other day we went to Lowe's, and picked up a lot of supplies to prepare for Spring.

One thing we picked up was a lawn roller. I attempted to build my own, but that was a horrible disaster. I decided that it made sense to just buy one.

Another thing we bought was a ladder. We looked at a forty foot ladder, but there was no way we could transport it, let alone where I would keep it.

And then I bought a mole trap. If I can't kill these vermin using these traps, the next thing is a backhoe, and a few tons of cement....

We bought some new blinds too. We went with a nice 2" plantation plank style. They are very good at shutting out the light, but they are also incredibly heavy. When you pull on the cord, you really need to pull on the cord.

Long day ahead of me. I should have probably stayed late last night, but we had house guests. I'm afraid that I am going to have to go to work this weekend, too.

I wish there was someone out there that I could throw this whole project over the fence to.

I had another crazy idea yesterday. I want to expand the capabilities of my Battlebot to equip it with a wheelbarrow. So here are some quick ideas I had:

A pager style personnel tracking unit.
-This would track the person using the thing so that it had something to follow. This eliminates all the crazy vision systems that would need to be in place to track a moving object.
-Follow, Stop, Dump, and come closer commands.
-Emergency stop.

Either a remote computer tracking everything and doing the heavy thinking, or a computer on the barrow-bot.
-Path tracking.
-Path planning. This would include the ability to not only follow the path of the person when they are outside the distance set in the software, but also ignore the path taken when the person is close to the robot. I don't want the robot taking the same pattern when the person is moving around the robot, once the person leaves the range.

A pneumatic lifting mechanism that would dump the wheelbarrow.

GPS on both the personnel tracker, and the robot.

The ability to remove the wheel barrow from the robot. This would allow for moving the wheel barrow around without the robot, or vice versa.

I am sure there is more, but I think this is a good idea.

So I got the engine off of the floor. I used the cable hoist, but swapped the J-hook out with a pulley. It worked, but it was still pulling the shelves closer to the engine. So, I gave it a couple of cranks on the cable hoist, then lifted the engine by hand. It worked, and I had the engine about 1 1/2 feet off of the floor.

Then the floor joist I had the pulley bolted to split, threw the pulley at me, and dropped the engine on the floor.

Luckily, I wasn't hurt and the engine only sustained a punched in oil filter.

So, I did what I should have done in the first place. I waited for my buddy to get home, and had him help me lift it. A 2x4, some chain, and some grunting and we had it in a wagon. Now I can at least move it around easily. I still need to get it on a stand so I can drain the oil out of it, and strip the nasty cruddy paint off of it.


I also had a guy come by to take a look at the sunroof off of the ZX2. He had come by a little while ago and took some measurements, but today he was back with the promise of buying it. He just wanted to take one more measurement. This time he needed to see what the roof line on the ZX2 looked like compared to the car it was going into. Unfortunately, the sunroof will not fit in a Thunderbird. The ZX2 had a greater amount of curve to it then the Thunderbird. Crap.

Now I have to go through the trouble of re-posting the sunroof, and maybe finding someone who will buy this thing. So if you know anybody...

I need to get the Zetec engine off of the floor, so I can continue to clean it up. I want to get the oil out of it, and I want to clean the rust off of it, so I can re-paint it. At some point, maybe not until I get it into the car, I want to replace the stock oil pan with a shallower system.

I don't have an engine hoist, so I decided to hack something together to at least get it onto the the work bench. I got a manual cable winch, which I bolted down to one of the shelves I built in the basement. I ran the cable over a J-hook which I screwed into a floor joist above.

First problem I found today, was that as I wound the cable up, it simply pulled the shelves.

So, I pounded a piece of conduit into the floor in front of the leg that was being pulled, and that fixed that.

The next problem is that the J-hook is being bent in the direction of the winch. The engine is being picked up, a little. The cable is being pinched at the J-hook though. I am afraid to get it up off the ground, and have the hook or the cable fail, and drop the engine.

I've started a seperate blog for the Lotus Project. Check it out!

Don't worry, I haven't dropped the ROV project, though. Nothing has been done on that for a while, but I do have quite a while before we could launch it.

In the mean time, I would like to work with the accelerometer to make sure I can determine the stance of the ROV. Especially in a rollover situation. With our design, there shouldn't be a rollover possibility, but... I want to be absolutely sure that if the ROV does rollover the thrusters reverse, and lift the ROV.

One of my long dreamed of projects is recovering a 1972 Lotus Europa from a seized engine. Years ago, my father bought this car, and several years after that, the engine seized due to unknown reasons. After trying in vain to get the seized piston moving again, the car was covered with a tarp, and has only seen the light of day a few times since. As with any surface in a cluttered garage, the top of the car became a storage shelf.

Flash forward a few years, and I feel the need to fix this car. So, I did a little research a found a place that is willing to sell me a crate engine that will simply drop in where the old one used to be. I can't remember where it was, but it was somewhere out in California, and they wanted an arm and a leg for it.

Flash forward a few years later than that, and a buddy of mine points out a website of engine swaps with newer, more common engines. It turns out that the common Zetec engine, present in the Ford Focus, Escort ZX2, and a few other cars, fits the engine bay, with a few modifications of course.

I started checking out Ebay and craigslist for any of these cars that had the right engine, that may have been in a rear end collision. That way, I was hoping to pick up the engine for a steal, and throw out the rest of the junked out car.

After several weeks of looking, a couple of false alarms, and a couple of no-call-backs, I found a ZX2 that had been in a front end collision. The engine survived, as did several of the other bits and pieces. The donor car also has several good bits that I should be able to sell off for a little bit of profit. Now the hard part starts.

It's only a few degrees above zero today, but I plan on getting some of the parts on the car off of the trailer and down in the basement. I also have a guy at work that is interested in buying a few parts. Hopefully he can find enough on the car to make it worthwhile. I'm going to need some capital for this project anyway, for all the custom bits and pieces that need to be made to get the project on the road.