Pain, misery, agony on end – Page 8

Don’t Taser me bro!

8/7/13

It is a Taser dart out of a patients wrist. Generically called a conducted electrical weapon. The darts are about 1″ long and 1/8″ diameter. The dime is for perspective. Near the tip is a barb that insures the dart will not be easily pulled out rendering the device ineffective. Wires connect to the barrel end. 2 darts are fired to complete the electrical circuit. Unless you are being Tased by more than one unit.

Many times I’ve had to remove fish hooks from patients. There is a string technique that requires no anesthesia and is painless.

Not so for Taser darts. They impale the skin up to the depth of the needle and as the victim flops around under 70,000 volts of juice, it gets really embedded in there. I have to grasp the barrel, designers have thoughtfully left this make-due handle, and yank. The barb rips skin out with vengeance.

Some how, sending 30-70,000 volts of electricity through tiny little steel darts into a 63 year old grandmother, no matter how badly she is acting, just doesn’t seem right.

Your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Corn Stubble in the snow, 100% reliable!

April, 2019

I rewired the main circuit panel (load center) in my house, recently. Although I was trained as an electrition and have done some house wiring before, a friend came over to make sure things were done right. We decided to go eat and took off for the local Mexican food restaurant after we finished the job. My buddy asked me ahead of time if I was sure I wanted to go. He had been watching the forecast and I hadn’t. It’s a matter of principal for me, I just refuse to listen to some one whose work requires them to be right 50% of the time (weathermen). And I couldn’t let a little snow storm intimidate me.

After dinner, I dropped my friend off at his house and headed out for the 20 mile drive home.

By the way, the defroster in my truck didn’t work. If you are not experienced in cold weather driving, that means that the snow/sleet sticks to the windshield, thicker and thicker over time. At first, I could make out the road because for the first 1/4 mile the road was a gravel road and it hadn’t snowed enough to cover up the irregular texture of the road and my windshield hadn’t iced over yet. But then I had to turn onto a 2 lane, state maintained (or not) asphalt highway. The snow started coming down very heavy about this time and a blanket of snow covered just about everything. I had heard of a white-out but never experienced one, until now. This is a similar view in a similar post.

Before I’d driven a mile, I knew I was in trouble. I couldn’t distinguish the road from anything else. There were some subtle indicators as to where it was, but they weren’t 100% reliable. More on that later. At first, the windshield was clear and it was the snow driven into the car (or so it seemed) that left about 20 ft of visibility. That’s about 1 car length. Even at the slow, maximum speed of 20 mph, that’s not very far. But as time went on, the windshield became more and more caked with ice until I was left with a 4″ x 10″ area at the bottom of the windshield that I could see through. I thought about stopping and scraping the ice off but feared that I might not be able to get back on the road or that I might get hit by the cars behind me that couldn’t see much better than I could.

Highway signs and mile markers would occasionally show up and would give a rough estimation of where the road was, or should have been. In our area, the road rumble-strip is on the center line and the outside edges are gravel. Both of these give a noisy rumble letting one know that you might be drifting. For awhile. Once the snow/ice gets packed in, you loose the rumble effect of these. How did I find this out? I slowly drifted to the left, crossed the center of the road and the left hand lane and into the left bar ditch. I figured out I wasn’t where I was supposed to be because I almost ran through the fence that keeps livestock off the road.

But, I persevered and on the last stretch, I found my last indicator. I turned onto the gravel road to my house with less than 1/4 mile to go, and as the truck came up the hill, the headlights pointed up causing loss of all visibility beyond the end of the hood of the truck. It’s like using high beam headlights in snow or fog. Since I couldn’t see much out of the 4×10 inch window, anyway, I rolled the side window down enough to look out there. I figured I’d navigate the last little way like that.

Then I noticed corn stubble. Corn stubble is not supposed to be in the middle of a county maintained gravel road. Corn stubble is a 100% reliable indicator that you aren’t on a road. The reason I was seeing corn stubble was because I was looking to the left and driving forward, I thought. But, there is this little thing called lateral drift (a navigational term) that basically means that if you look left your vehicle will drift left.

That 20 miles to get home took over an hour.

From your Grumpy Uncle Dave.

Mission: ICE MAKER

I came across a good deal on a commercial refrigerator and freezer. Good condition, lightly used, fit in the space available and roomy enough for the second Marines. It also allowed me to pass on to my daughter my old fridge/freezer in similar condition (detailed in The Road Trip). But behind every silver lining there is a cloud waiting to rain on your parade.

No ice maker.

Going to the convenience store every other day for ice soon took its toll on our patience. My options were to continue to buy individual bags of ice as needed, acquire a stand-alone ice maker or make an ice maker for this freezer. Stand-alone ice makers come in residential and commercial varieties. The residential types have horrible reputations and take up counter space. Commercial varieties are as expensive as what I’ve already spent for the fridge/freezer combo already.

Google to the rescue.

Some very enterprising folks have figured out that installing a universal ice maker kit (about $50) into a stand alone ice chest (about &150) will provide lots of ice for their party house on the lake, supply the frat house needs for those important parties or whatever.

So. I went shopping and got a generic Frigidaire ice maker kit. I say generic because almost all ice maker kits are the same except for the electrical plug and mounting templates. The function and design are pretty much the same. I figured that if I got real creative, I could mount the parts into my new-to-me freezer compartment.

First, I had to do get an electrical diagram of the ice maker. This freezers runs off 120 Vac. But within the freezer, I wondered if the engineers used some fancy-smancy transformer to drop the voltage to 24 Vdc or something to run the internal mechanisms. No problem, I’m an electrician and can read electrical diagrams. But, for the life of me, I could not find any electrical diagrams for any ice makers on the web! Google failed! Until I figured out that the electrical diagrams for ice makers were in the electrical diagrams of the fridge/freezer electrical diagrams for which they were intended to be installed. OK. Got that whipped. It only took me about a month to figure that out.

Well, that’s not the ice maker’s electrical diagram, it’s just for demonstration purposes, but you get the point.

Turns out, ice makers run off 120 Vac, also. Plain and simple. Four wires from the ice maker are 120 Vac hot, neutral, ground and one to control the solenoid for the water valve. Each ice maker has a specific plug for those 4 wires depending on the make/model of fridge/freezer. All I have to do is find the plug-mate for the model that I chose. I think mine was for some version of Frigidaire. Google fail! No such thing. Or at least, I couldn’t find it. It took me a couple of months to give up on that search.

So, what could I use for a 4-wire plug that was cold and water tolerant? Eureka, a trailer wiring harness! Perfect!

Mounting the whole shebang was a bit daunting. I had to drill a hole in the wall of my freezer compartment. Besides the concept of drilling a hole, I had to avoid the refrigerant coils which manufacturers wrap around the freezer compartment to, well freeze it. They are under pressure and are filled with liquid refrigerant. I mounted the the ice maker under one of the racks in the freezer compartment, the solenoid onto the back wall of the freezer and ran the 1/4″ vinyl plumbing for the water supply. Where I drilled the hole for the water supply to run through the freezer compartment wall I used that expanding foam spray to re-insulate it (OCD at it’s finest). I tapped into the 120 Vac service entrance and had a functioning ice maker. Right? No! It made one tray of ice cubes and stopped.

I brought out the trusty-old electrical volt meter and determined that my wiring was all correct and still functioning. The plumbing was intact and there were no leaks. But, there was no water in the ice cube tray. After a few very carefully chosen words and some contemplation, I found that the water line was frozen at the entry point into the freezer compartment. If I disassembled the plumbing, thawed it out and reassembled it, the ice make worked fine. For one tray of ice cubes. Then it froze again. The excellent foam insulation allowed the cold side of the freezer to be able to get to the water input side and freeze it. In the factory designed plumbing, the 1/4″ water supply line meets the 1/2″ tubing that fills the ice cube tray. The solenoid (not shown) allows just enough water to flow through the line, fill the tray and at that point the 1/2″ line will be empty of water and thereby not freeze. Only in my application, it did freeze. Figuring this out took a couple of days.

Factory water entry diagram

So, how does the water get from the 70′ F room temperature input line into the subzero freezer compartment without freezing? I don’t know how the engineers of the model of Frigidaire this kit was made for thought it was supposed to work, but I had a few ideas of how I was going to do it here.

The first thing I tried was to carve out the spray-in foam I so thoughtfully applied. I thought doing this would allow the warm room temperature air to circulate and prevent the freeze zone from freezing the incoming water. It was a good idea, but it didn’t work.

Compressed gas cooling systems work by using the compressor/coil/fan system to extract heat to lower the temperature of the compressed gas which then cools the interior compartment of the fridge/freezer, right? So, I figured I could make a plenum to capture that heat and duct it to the area that was freezing. I liked this idea as it required no extra energy to function. But, it does require sheet metal and sheet metal bending skills, both of which I have.

Alternatively, I could use a night light. You know, one of those little 4 watt light bulbs stuck in the hole to keep the freeze prone area from freezing. Generations of people have used this technique (every since Thomas Edison burned his fingers changing a hot light bulb) to keep pipes from freezing. This was my least favorite solution. First, it used additional electricity, albeit very little. Secondly, it would fail. All light bulbs fail (hence Thomas’ burned fingers). But, now-a-days one could buy a heater cord that looks like an extension cord that wraps around a water supply line and keeps it above 40′ F. It also plugs into a 120 Vac outlet. Still not the elegant solution I was looking for.

Then, I realized I just had to move the freeze prone area out of the freeze prone zone into the 70′ F room air area! The gizmo that the engineers designed had to be re-engineered. So, I used 6″ of vinyl 1/2″ID tubing, a 1/2″ barbed to 1/2″ NPT connector and a 1/2″ NPT PVC cap. The cap was drilled and tapped to receive a 1/4″ compression fitting to attach to the water inlet line. This contraption was placed so that the union was outside the freeze zone area. Subtle but different when compared to the factory diagram above. We are not about 5 months into this project, but…

Voilà! We have ice. Repeatedly.

Your grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave now has ice cubes.

Weary

Santa Obama

March 4, 2015

Christmas 2012, I posted a link to Barak and Michelle Obama’s “Merry Christmas” video. I don’t know how many of you actually looked at it, but it got a whoppin 15,000 + hits (as of 2015).

Now if you are new to YouTube and the interwebbernet and all, 15,000 hits is like you don’t exist!

Oh! It appears someone took it down.

A first follow up grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_zPFGl4IFk

Weary

The Cat’s Ride

2/2011

It started like any other day with lots of opportunity for getting things done. Then the cat gets involved.

The wife and I were going to town to run some errands. Since we were going to haul off some trash, we took the truck. I loaded up some tools I thought I’d need. The dogs had been let out to run and were put up. Cats had been fed. Off we went. The road out was soupy mud, ice and snow. The weather had been bad and there was still a 4-foot and a 3-foot drift at the top of the hill. We’d only had about three inches of snow a couple of nights before but there were strong westerly winds. This was the most drift I’d seen in a couple of years.

The night before, we had to go to town in the jeep and when we got to the top of the hill the wife (driving) said, “Oh shit.” and started to slow down. No mud then only ice. I’m urging her to speed up and hit the tail of the 4 foot drift between the road and fence post at the corner of the pasture. She did, then promptly steered the car back into the road into the middle of the 3-foot drift and floored it effectively turning a nice Jeep Grand Cherokee into a sled. All four wheels spinning uselessly in the snow at least a foot off the ground. But, we had enough momentum to get through and on our way.

So in the truck, we splashed through the mud hole at the bottom of the hill and headed up to the top where I told the wife to just barrel on through staying in the same tracks as yesterday. The truck has a much higher center of gravity than the Jeep so we didn’t slow down, mud and snow splashing all over.

I always stop at Casey’s to get a coke for that long trip into town. Since it’s quicker, the wife got out to get us something to drink and I stayed in the truck. Sitting there I noticed a tiger striped cat (a dime a dozen as far as cat markings go) walk across the parking lot under the cars and trucks parked there. Now it flickered across my mind that that cat looked like one of the two we have like that, but it just didn’t reach full conscientiousness. I mean, what would our cat be doing 2 miles south of the farm at Casey’s?

While the wife was inside, another customer came in and told her that a cat had crawled out from under her truck. She came out and we thought it would be unlikely that a cat would have ridden into town under the truck, but I got out and we looked around. Yep, there was our cat under the car next to us bawling and shaking. Neither of us could reach it. I can’t bend over, squat, crawl, and a whole lot of other things due to the recent surgery. I could poke at the damn cat with my crutch a la my Mom and her cane. This resulted in the cat running back to the truck and crawling up into the undercarriage. Did I mention that we’d driven through a mud hole on the way to town? I was between the car and the truck, the wife was on the far side of the car, so I was closest to the runaway cat.

Let me take just a moment in this short tale and introduce you to Spitfire. Spitfire is one of four cats born under the farmhouse. The mother cat disappeared and left these guys hungry. After a couple of days, we were able to trap them and brought them home. We put them in a dog crate to keep them from running off, they were very wild and young. Not so young that they couldn’t bite, scratch, spit and run like a bat out of hell, though.

The night we brought them over the wife had to work and I was off. I’ve forgotten now why I went out to check on them, food or water or something. I’d had been in bed reading and had had a shot of scotch before going to bed for the night. I got up and put on my flip flops, this was late last summer and the weather was nice, but it was raining lightly. Anyway when I opened the crate, the cats made a bolt for it, mass escape! I got all of them back in except a tiger stripe. I grabbed a flashlight and off I run, chasing a 1 pound feline monster across the yard and into the woods in the rain, in flip flops, butt naked and half tipsy. I never did catch that cat, he came home on his own, but I did decide to name him Spitfire.

So back to Spitfire under the truck. I opened the hood and couldn’t see anything but engine stuff. I could see his hind end and tail through the wheel well on the front driver’s side. Did I mention the mud hole? I reached in and grabbed his tail to keep him from getting farther into the undercarriage and out of reach. Now I was being good and observing my post-hip-replacement body position precautions, but asked for to help pull him out. We both had our upper torso in the wheel well, over the tire and our arms under the frame, neither could see the cat but we both had a good grip on it. Finally, out comes the cat.

Guess who got to ride in the back because he was too wired for me to even think about holding him on my lap in the cab.

End of story, the cat is home and doesn’t want to have anything to do with trucks anymore. He has a new name, TruckRider. I did mention the mud, right?

Your muddy, grumpy Uncle/Brother Dave.

Weary.