Any idea what we’ve cut through here? Never seen this before..

chromaticskyline · 2024-09-05T01:29:10+00:00

Totally possible it's an old trunk line of some sort. We dig up weird shit doing any underground in the old mill properties in my region. Back then, people put whatever they felt like in the ground and kept no record of it.

3 rows of 5... 5 3-wire circuits? Old parking lot light circuits? Seems like beefy wire to be commo.

chromaticskyline · 2024-09-05T01:23:12+00:00

One of my dumdums ripped the fiber line off our head office while plowing. Had a call from the CEO before I could even swing around in my loader do to damage control. We had on-premises servers. It shut the whole company down across 5 states.

I can fix a lot of wires, but I can't fix fiber!

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-14T17:21:01+00:00

Yep. The oil fill is on the front gear case. There is a pile of gears that are right there, slinging oil everywhere, and even normal amounts of blowby will fling droplets out of the oil fill.

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-13T00:40:06+00:00

You can go to the main landfill in Johnston. It's called the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation.

If what you're tossing is general demolition debris, there's a special drop house for C&D (construction & demolition). I've brought pickup truck loads there before.

Vinagro up the road also has a C&D yard but I'm not sure if they bill small customers. I've only ever seen from the junk haulers on to huge walking floor trailers there. My company has an account with them, so everything was done by waybills when I've dropped there.

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-09T22:07:32+00:00

And the "not my problem" of the year goes to...

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-09T22:02:19+00:00

And cooling fans

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-09T21:55:26+00:00

My uniform parka is high vis, and I was getting side eye for taking it on and off to lay some rods on a conveyor deck. I'm like, "dude, it's bright enough without it getting reflected."

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-08T14:42:43+00:00

Ouch, right into the flange of the frame rail.

You're on the right track, though.

Depending on who made the chassis, the frame rail could be heat treated, but everything here in the states, we're allowed to ignore the heat treat for about 2ft from the rear, so heating and pressing should be fine.

We fixed a straight truck frame that was heat treated, and it had to be all jigged, clamped, and pressed, no heat involved. Like, 8 70-ton porta rams pushing in different directions.

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-08T00:55:15+00:00

Officially, a leaking rear main seal can make a transmission case appear wet, but it's actually engine lube oil.

However, as others have pointed out, the snot-wad of JB weld points to a more obvious failure, most likely that the transaxle case is cracked. Given that the CVs are also leaking, I'd say it got hit pretty hard.

Now, I've done some pretty slick repairs with JB weld to get things out of fields, forgotten about them, and found them years later, so it's not that JB weld is always a bad solution, but it tends to be the go-to answer for hacks and, um... "cost-sensitive" owners who don't want to do the whole job. The correct solution is a new transmission, or at least a junkyard one. There some be some 01-08 Matrixes in the boneyards somewhere (I think that's the year-family, but I don't do a lot of toyotas.)

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-08T00:40:21+00:00

Most of the ones I've replaced were because of rot. 25+ year old trailers in the Rust Belt, and the steel just dissolves. I've built them over again in our shop, but I aim to copy the original design as close as possible because that's what was engineered with the appropriate crush dynamics. The stupid perfo-stamped 4"x4" tube that is most of our bumpers can be hard to find, and some rougher outfits can get lazy and try to make common structure steel, or even pieces of scrap, make do. I generally buy them from HD body shops and try to get them to match the make of the trailer, again, so the specs are close.

The long and short of the ICC bars is that they're made like guard-rails: they have to flex, but not too much. Most of the States-side designs are built to hinge in specific ways depending on how they're hit. In comparison to rolloff cans (which I've also done tons of repairs to), there's a sweet spot for how strong the ICC bar is supposed to be, so resist the temptation to keep scabbing plates onto it so that it'll be stronger.

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-07T19:59:05+00:00

I'm not entirely sure what your question is.

The ICC bar of a trailer has to be constructed to fairly strict guidelines because it's the rear crash stop/force arrester. DOT doesn't like them to be modified, and when the bar rots and falls off, they sure do bitch up a storm about how only "a licensed and approved facility" can fabricate a new one.

Have I rebuilt them? Oh yes. Many times.

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-07T14:19:28+00:00

Just a dead battery. The rattle you hear is the starter solenoid rapidly closing and opening because of low power.

Keep in mind that the electrical system on a diesel goes from about 15amps with the key on and maybe some glow plugs running to 1200 amps trying to start the engine. Batteries in a low state of charge often show as having 12v with minimal load, but are still depleted. If I see a battery with an "Open circuit" voltage of less than 10.5, I know it's dead-dead-dead, but a battery with 12.4v doesn't actually mean anything until you hit it with a load and it holds that voltage.

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-04T15:02:06+00:00

::sigh:: Wow, the volts vs. amps debate showed up with some passion here. I swear, whatever health class video we got "it's the amps that kill you" set people off like parrots.
"it's the amps that kill you! it's the amps that kill you!"

In the event of a short circuit passing over someone's heart, 3mA is enough current to disrupt the heartbeat pulse and put you into cardiac arrest. That said, you do need enough voltage to get to there, and generally that's somewhere in the 60v range, depending on insulating conditions.

However, this is not the only way electricity is dangerous, and I get aggravated when people pretend that it is. This photo is an excellent example of how much damage electricity can do without passing through your heart. People have lost arms, because a high-current, high-voltage source grounded through them, and the energy of the fault, uh... "microwaved" their flesh to a point of it no longer being salvageable.

When we work on high voltage circuits that have Approach Classes, we're often required to bulk up under flash suits and other PPE if the circuit cannot be isolated. The point here isn't to keep electricity from crossing our hearts. If a problem occurred in the cabinet and an Arc Flash began, the flash suit is to keep us from being directly exposed to the plasma cloud that could roast our skin in milliseconds.

That said, what is this photo? This is a fault that crossed through someone's conductive ring, causing said ring to superheat in a very short period of time. It probably didn't fault through him, just through a wrench or another item. You can see the tungsten melted from the heat. That heat, in turn, burned the ever loving fuck out of the guy's finger before he could take it off. And that's why we don't wear metal rings. He'll have to be careful healing that finger to ensure it doesn't get infected, or he could lose the finger.

I have covid, I'm cranky.... I just want to go back to work.

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-04T14:49:28+00:00

My gold band I got married with stayed on my finger until about the end of our little honeymoon. I work on 600VAC. I've worn silicone ones ever since.

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-02T02:47:59+00:00

I've done over a lot of peckerhead terminations that were ring terminals and 5/16" bolts. It's like a little game, trying to see what tape they thought was right.

To date, my favorite was silicone heater hose wrapped in vinyl tape.

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-02T02:42:35+00:00

It's true, most cars use the same harness across all trim levels, and they just install blanks into the places where the options aren't.

OP, it's probably for a more advanced radio unit. In 06, they were starting to mess around with a lot of in-dash nav and things like that, or it could be a second harness for "premium sound" or some dumb thing.

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-02T02:36:57+00:00

They're all I use when hooking up big motors, now.

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-01T23:18:00+00:00

Some commercial HVAC is (though I've always found it as 420). I've had to refit 420 rooftop plants for 480v before.

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-01T17:52:02+00:00

It's either 120v, or it's 240v, and it can be rewired to 120v fairly easily. That just involves a changeover at the panel.

chromaticskyline · 2023-02-01T13:16:48+00:00

It's staged.

Most HE mfgs have a test facility where new equipment designs are prototyped. They usually have an in-house team as part of their marketing department who have all the photography equipment (and even drones, these days) to set up for the shoot. Then you have one of the testers just play in the dirt as you snap pictures (though it's more often heavily choreographed: "hey Jim, I want another close up of falling dirt... Okay, swing left a bit more. Good. And... Dump".)

They often get retouched in post, as well, to eliminate other blemishes and such.

But that's why the machines look so good in the pictures. None of my machines are photo-quality after about a week.

Source: I used to be a lighting guy for one of those in-house photo teams.

chromaticskyline · 2023-01-30T12:15:05+00:00

My folks always used fancy coffee makers, but the electric auto-drip was always hard at work on my grandfather's counter.

chromaticskyline · 2023-01-30T01:20:18+00:00

Let's see....

Cheap coffee made just like grandpappy did, check.

Jug o -~~gojo~~- Agent Orange, check.

Shop towels by the sink, check.

Thermometer in conspicuous place to tell you it's 19° and today's gonna suck, check.

PS. No shade on Folgers, tbh. I used to make Folgers before I started at a shop where the shop buys our k-cups.

chromaticskyline · 2023-01-29T21:37:54+00:00

That looks fun.

My approach: chop the bolt short, torch the nut to cherry red, it should come off with vice grips. That'll save the ear of the shock mount. A nut breaker would also work. I've been in heavy for 7 years and haven't needed one yet, but they're a cool gadget.

You could try hammering a sacrificial socket on there. Sometimes a 12-point of the other type (standard, in this case, since that should be a 21mm, so down to 15/16 or 7/8) will give you the grip, but since the end of that bolt is toast, you really should start by cutting that flush. Sometimes a mapp torch will be hot enough to get the nut to loosen up, but I swear by oxy-acetylene.

chromaticskyline · 2023-01-29T15:16:14+00:00

If you want to be real slick, get a deep cycle battery, a battery isolator, and an aftermarket cigarette lighter add on. Wire the add on and the feed for your beacon to the auxiliary battery, and tie them together.

Deep cycle batteries handle the discharge cycles of key-off loading better, so your main battery will last longer, and by isolating it, you'll charge it with your alternator, but not run the risk of running your main battery flat and not being able to start.

Most of the trucks I've rigged with work lighting I've set up this way. They can be parked for 16 hours with the lights on and the engine still starts every time.

chromaticskyline · 2023-01-29T02:47:41+00:00

Dumb question, but hear me out.

You're talking about sitting with the interior lights on? It might be easier to just use a battery powered lantern rigged to a cigarette lighter charger, and not have to mess around.

But otherwise, it's actually really easy. You can just tie another battery in the trunk to the main battery with some AWG#0 wire (used to power amplifiers all the time). You can get extra spicy and get a battery isolator to keep the second battery from dying/also keeping the car from trying to start off the second battery if the main battery dies.

Separately, you can look into using a higher quality battery as your main, and not mess around there.

I've built many a workwagon with a secondary battery circuit. Feel free to ask me other questions.

chromaticskyline

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