One of my giant platform boots broke apart after probably about two years of me wearing them to work every day. For them being boots more intended to be worn for stompy dancing at a goth club, they put up with that amazingly well.
Duck tape held them through their last day.
My boss saw this and said it actually looked pretty neat – he envisioned a pair where one boot is black and one silver being pretty awesome. I agree.
Do you ever look at something and wonder, “why in the actual hell?!”
This is one of the RTU (Roof Top Unit) air conditioners at one of the transmitter sites. It looks like a total pile of garbage but still works for some inexplicable reason. It was made by Payne – their logo still survives on one side but all other identifying marks are gone.
Just look at that glorious weird ductwork. It’s next to the roof kerb where the ducts pass into the building, and then the ducts do a giant whirl around it. There might be an inline heater in the duct at the very end but who the heck knows.
Every now and then, it’ll yeet the evaporator fan belt. Last time, it yeeted the motor pulley too!
It looks like someone replaced the motor in this thing’s history and when they installed the new one, they found the shaft key didn’t fit and left it lying in the bottom of the cabinet and just tightened the set screw against the shaft. This worked until it eventually started slipping and the pulley spun on the shaft. I found it with the belt off and the pulley dancing around on the shaft. When I turned the power off, the pulley fell onto the roof. The shaft bore now measured 5/8″ on one side, 3/4″ on the other — it had become conical!
I got a new pulley and shaft key from McMaster and put it all back together, it works, but sounds a tiny bit more like a lawnmower. I don’t think it’s all that much longer for this world, honestly.
So on another note, Carrier got away from belt drive fans on their newer RTUs! Look at this monster that just went in at the other site..
The evaporator fan, which moves the air to be cooled from indoors, is now a big vaneaxial type. It’s amazingly quiet too. Smaller vaneaxial fans can be found in 1 rack unit servers where they are most definitely NOT quiet, and larger ones are used in tunnel and parking garage ventilation.
I dunno, it seems like replacement of the Payne at the aux site is low on the priority list but I’m a little concerned that we’ll find it should have been higher on the list if we have to broadcast from there for a while over the summer. I can only imagine how many kilowatt-hours are being wasted via that pile of rusty crap. Somehow I’m imagining it being 10 SEER or less…
So there’s literally a creep “gear” – the ratio blips up a little at very low speeds!
Now, as for the question of what the converter lock does: whatever the hell it feels like
There is a pattern though: let up on the gas and it usually disengages. In cruise control it usually stays engaged, and going downhill in low tends to keep it on for engine braking.
I’m pretty sure the nasty all in one would make the nice turquoise fade out to dead grass green, but I dunno. I have never let anything that foul touch my elegant rainbow.
I’m pretending to know what I’m doing with makeup, if this raises any questions please refer to the following meme
This is a post full of cats.
My coworker, Amina, sent me these pictures of the station cats and I love them so much. I always wanna boop that little spotty nose but Scrappy always mooshes his whole face into my hand first!
And here’s Miss Cassie
Oh, and two turkeys. These have thankfully been wise enough to avoid sales department windows. We’re still waiting on replacement glass….
I got a broken MiniDV camera pretty much free for the asking and took a look inside. Well, I’m glad I didn’t go in expecting a successful repair because oh no
Probably 50% of the weight of this thing is tiny screws.
I was intrigued and horrified all at once that a tiny cog belt was visible! See it peeking out there to the left of the rubber pinch roller?
The iris was stuck closed. I’ve seen this failure on a few JVC mini DV cams and had never opened one up to investigate. Upon seeing the mechanism I’m not surprised this happens. It’s a combined aperture and ND filter with two weird thin plastic blades that have stuck together, actuated by a very tiny rotary solenoid.
So there’s the tape transport, it has only two motors aside from the head scanner. A very small pancake capstan motor is under the side where the pinch roller is; the one standing in the corner controls the load/unload action.
And finally, that tiny cog belt runs between the capstan motor and a pulley that drives the gear idler. The tension is regulated by a spring loaded brake (felt?) under the take-up reel and that’s pretty much it. This isn’t exactly a very sophisticated transport.
I can’t really imagine actually repairing one of these. Everything had to come out to get to the back of the transport and it’s a total mess in there. Wow.
TRI-COLOR FOAMING WAX
Starting to get wet again:
Some sort of white foam protectant off a “lava foam” bar:
And the evil yellow pollen is gone!!!
So everyone was preparing for the return of most of our staff to the office when senior management was in a meeting and heard an enormous bang….
That WAS a double pane window. Then a wild turkey in rapid flight came along, and both were no more.
I excluded the dead bird from these pictures. Do not continue reading this post if you don’t want to see it. I’ve included some unrelated safe images so you won’t see it accidentally.
Read more “BIRD STRIKE!!!”
Out of curiosity, I pried apart a laser pointer from Dollar Tree. See that tiny spot next to the blob-top circuit (probably the current regulator/driver)? That’s the laser diode.
I really want a microscope now to see what the heck is going on here!
There’s a lens to focus this into a more, uh, pointer-like beam. I haven’t figured out how to photograph this well yet but the uncollimated output is a wide elongated ellipse of light with pond ripple patterns at the ends.
For some reason I always envisioned the common laser diode to be a bigger object, but no— it’s teeny weeny. Cool.