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kastein posted:I've been doing dumb car poo poo for 13 years and I misdiagnosed a bad wheel bearing as recently as a few years ago. I mean, it was on my Subaru so when I took it apart I *did* find that it was bad, so it wasn't wasted money and time, but it was not the one I was hearing, that was on the other side, which was even worse. Late, but then there's my stupid (RWD, stick axle) wheel bearing that didn't make any appreciable noise until it ate the axle, too. Then I somehow hosed up the ring and pinion setup replacing the pinion seal, and the gears whine, now. Loudest at 50-60, of course. ryanrs posted:I was hosing the mud out of my wheel wells to prep for the bearing swap, but I think I found the problem. It was wedged way in there and covered in mud. LOL.
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Dec 13, 2021 23:23
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Trying to find the middle ground between bougie backpacker food and cheap bulk prepper stuff. (I don't trust prepper food, because they don't eat it.) I like Knorr rice/pasta packets, and cutting them with additional veg, either frozen or dehydrated, seems like a good way to go. More variety, more fiber, cuts the salt, etc. Does anyone know if Vitamin K survives dehydration? I'm doing a sort of mixed diet where I get my main calories from dehydrated foods, but with some fresh or frozen veg added so it's not just straight calorie paste. Beyond my usual backpacking stove, I'll also bring a butane stove, and a normal-size pot and pan.  These are actually nice for cooking. I wonder if it's worth hauling the smokey joe mini-grill around for 3 weeks when I'm not going to have fresh meat most of the time?
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Dec 14, 2021 02:50
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 A Christmas Feast in the Desert Here's my menu of bulk calories to sustain life functions: - Mountain House fancy-pants backpacking food. Low effort, tastes good, expensive. Bulky. - Knorr's rice and pasta sides, which are 1/10 the price of Mountain House, but take more prep and fuel. Packs denser than Mountain House because of less packaging. - Harmony House dehydrated veggies. Just dehydrated veggies of various kinds. Can make stand-alone bean-based meals, or add veg variety to the Knorr's. - Pre-cooked rice. Low-effort meal supplement. That's 4 different kinds of nutritional paste, so if I get sick of one, I can at least switch to a slightly different flavor. Plus some tasty treats and condiments for the paste: - frozen peas, broccoli, first week only - some fruit, snacks - summer sausage - chinese dried sausages, haven't tried them before, but they look like they'll travel well - milk, butter for Knorr's - tortillas - smoked turkey legs for some fancy meals - tub of sour cream - beer, whiskey There's a bunch of other random stuff as well, but this will make up the bulk of my diet in the desert. Should be good enough for 3 weeks, esp with a resupply/cheat day in the middle. In other van projects, I finished acquiring parts for my nerd communication center, so I'll set it up when I'm camped somewhere remote and see if I can post in the wilderness. I have a directional antenna and booster to hopefully pick up Verizon's network beyond its usual coverage area. I bought two 5 gal gas cans to supplement the van's 18 gal tank. Normally on these kind of trips, I treat the 18 gal tank as 12 + 6 reserve. So adding another 10 gal almost doubles my not-worried-about-gas range. I'm very conservative with my gas because I'm alone. I've decided to not bring the grill and associated gear. The van has too much crap in it already, and I won't have much meat with me. e: pcb came back for my ultra-quiet power supply for the TPMS display. Slots came out fine. I'll get it soldered up for this trip. 
ryanrs fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 00:29
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   Alrighty, let's see if this fixes the TPMS reception issue!
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Dec 16, 2021 07:24
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ryanrs posted:Anvil Canyon selfie The canyon where the Germans abandoned their minivan is wilderness and you're not allowed to drive there. So I guess that's out. Next best is maybe Mengel Pass, which is where we speculate they were trying to go. After a bit of youtube research, I think there's a decent chance the van can make it over Mengel Pass. As always, if it seems very stupid when I see it in person, then I won't. But if it seems only slightly stupid, then maybe. In particular, I think 99% of the road is easy, with just a couple obstacles / hard sections. Seems worth a visit. I'm going save it for the end of the trip, though. That way if I break the van, it won't spoil the whole trip. Plus, if I travel east to west, I can stop by the geologist's cabin and write in the log book that I'm taking the minivan over the pass.
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Dec 18, 2021 02:17
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Trip status: Haven't left yet, maybe Tuesday? Curse you, REI shipping! In theory I'll be heading out Tuesday morning, leaving the Bay Area just hours ahead of the rain. By the time I hit Barstow, I'll have gained 24 hours on the rain, which won't hit the eastern Mojave until Wednesday evening. Thursday is the rainy day. With that in mind, I've been e-scouting the Preserve for places it wouldn't suck to spend a rainy day. Turns out there isn't a lot of shelter in the desert! The lava tubes and mine shafts didn't sound like great ideas, but then I found this place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IazqNjcrFD4 Goldome Mill, an abandoned ore processing facility straight out of Half-Life. It's absolutely perfect! I'm going to setup camp inside the mill and hang out there reading books all day and/or hunting headcrabs. Won't have a campfire, but I think stove cooking should be fine. e: 2008 EPA site cleanup report. tl;dr: lots of cyanide, which you'd kinda expect at a gold ore processor. Oily waste, but no PCBs. Lead, but no mercury. Barrels of meth lab chemicals, but no actual meth lab. All in all, not bad! ryanrs fucked around with this message at 07:50 on Dec 20, 2021 |
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Dec 20, 2021 06:40
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you can have a crab boil in the desert!
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Dec 20, 2021 07:38
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Three Weeks in the Mojave - Itinerary and Pics This is just an overview of where I went. I'll make some more posts to cover specific problems, projects, and van damage. Some things worked well, some things did not. I got stuck a couple times and broke some parts, and somehow lost my air compressor, but nothing really bad happened during the trip. It was 23 chill days hanging out in the desert. Imgur album with more pics.   1 I started my trip in the north-east corner of the Mojave Preserve, at the Goldome Mill off Ivanpah Rd. This is a modern 1990s gold ore processor, not a historical site. Many of the buildings structurally sound, modulo a certain amount of plasma-cutter art. The site is easily accessible by normal cars, one reason for the damage.    A storm was moving in, and my plan was to seek refuge inside the abandoned mill buildings.     As shelter, the buildings were only marginally effective. They kept the rain off, but the desert wind howled through the cut-up walls and huge open doors. I was planning on trying some more elaborate camp cooking during the rainy day, but the wind made it very difficult. I ended up spending a lot of the time holed up in the van, reading. 2 After the storm passed, I set out west across the valley, to a little mine on the southern tip of the Ivanpah Mountains.    I tried to have a camp fire here, but the wind blew eddies around my sheltered spot. It was impossible to escape the swirling smoke, and after an hour or two, I gave up and doused the fire. The firewood was also weighing down the van, limiting my ground clearance. I decided to ditch the firewood and do the rest of the trip without. 3 Joshua trees on Cima Dome. Many were burnt, many were not.    4 Camping in the shadow of a lava flow in Black Tank Wash. Yes, in the wash, but far from the main channel. I spent a lot of time walking the wash, figuring out how the water flows in a storm.     5 Following the Eastern Mojave Heritage Trail west through Jackass Canyon, towards the Kelso Dunes.    I didn't realize it at the time, but the Heritage Trail takes a little jog to avoid this section of heavy sand. Instead, I turned around. 6 Heading north along Kelso Rd, I took an old mine road up into the mountains to set up camp.   7 Resupplied in Baker and re-entered the heart of the Preserve. I stopped at some landmarks, then headed into the mountains to set up camp at a very pretty spot at 5,000 ft. Evening low was 22 F (-5 C).     8 After that freezing night, I decided to drop down to 2,500 ft, in the Fenner Valley. There was a lot more rail traffic on BNSF's route along I-40, compared to the Union Pacific route along I-15 in the north of the Preserve. Lots of intermodal traffic passes through here.   9 I crossed south over I-40, leaving the Preserve, and entering BLM land. I put the Piute Mountains between me and the railroad, but it wasn't quite enough to hide the faint roar.    I tested out my cell booster + directional antenna. It worked surprisingly well, turning very marginal, not-quite-good-enough coverage into a solid data link. Equipment is WeBoost / Wilson Electronics. 10 Exited BLM land near Needles, and headed north into Death Valley.    11 Geologist's Cabin, Burros, Mengel Pass.   The road to Butte Valley was fun. It required ever so slightly more ground clearance than I had, so I hit a lot of loose rocks. There is a lot of water flowing near the road, so there are many burros in the area. I forgot to take pics of Mengel Pass, but it was not minivan-able. It was too tight, too technical. I got briefly stuck, and a passing Jeep helped get me free (I was blocking the road). Then I turned around and headed back into the valley. 12 Heading home, sort of. First stop was Short Canyon, in Indian Wells Valley. There was a small fire there earlier in the year and I wanted to check the damage.     There was a pretty sunset when I arrived in the evening, but the day showed what was burnt. There are still some rabbits around, but I don't think they'll be back in numbers until the brushy cover grows back. Next I drove south on 33, through Los Padres towards Santa Barbara. It was getting late and I was hoping to find a place to camp. Unfortunately, Los Padres National Forest appears to be Extremely Not My Kind Of Camping: nothing but designated campgrounds and locked gates. Maybe more roads are open if you get away from 33? Santa Barbara goons please advise! The available options all seemed terrible, so I drove back over 33 to the Carrizo Plain. It's a quarter-million acres protected grassland surrounding an alkali lake. Nobody ever goes there except for wildflowers, so you usually have the place to yourself.   
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Jan 15, 2022 07:17
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Beautiful pictures. Surprised you didn't make it to Novac or Helios One, they're very picturesque.
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Jan 15, 2022 14:26
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Looks like a good time! How many days total?
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Jan 15, 2022 17:05
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ryanrs posted:It was 23 chill days hanging out in the desert.
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Jan 15, 2022 17:23
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drat! Solid trip.
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Jan 15, 2022 17:31
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Awesome pics!
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Jan 15, 2022 21:28
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The most serious damage that happened is I finally dented my gas tank enough to destroy the fuel sender (or possibly just the wire/connector?). So now my gas gauge doesn't work. This would have been seriously annoying on the trip if I wasn't carrying 2x 5 gallon cans of fuel. Having the gas cans was great. Summit Racing: 5 gal Wavian steel jerry can. Totally airtight, will not stink up the car if stored in the passenger compartment. Nozzle isn't great (slow pour), but doesn't leak and isn't a complete pain in the rear end. Rectangular shape is good for packing in the van. I will need at least a gas tank skid plate, and probably a new gas tank? Even if I fix the sender, I've probably lost several gallons of capacity just to dents. OEM equivalent is $500, but a larger aftermarket one would be cool. Stock is 18 gal, so 30 gal would be amazing. I wonder how much it costs to get a custom tank fabricated? This is the only big repair I need to do. I'm actually somewhat pleased that I was able to damage the tank enough to break the sender, but without damaging the fuel pump or leaking any gas. Truly driving at the limit, ha ha.
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Jan 15, 2022 22:28
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ryanrs posted:
It did!
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Jan 16, 2022 02:30
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Food Theories My idea of packing other kinds of dehydrated foods like Knorr's (cheaper) to offset Mountain House (good, but expensive) was not a great plan. The money savings was real, but the extra prep hassles (wind-sensitive stove, water to wash pot, etc) were a big downside, and in the end you just got carb mush that wasn't even as good/varied as Mountain House. Knorr's is legit 10x the effort of Mountain House when it's 30 F with just a little wind. The big exception is instant oatmeal/porridge. It is very often dead calm in the morning so cooking is easy. I'm also generally in the mood to sit around and waiting for the cooking does not seem like a waste of time. For my afternoon meal, I need to forget about dehydrated foods and leverage my giant 120 qt cooler. I should have a massive sandwich-making kit in there, with fresh veg, 10 types of cold cuts, cheeses, etc. Basically a Subway in my cooler. I think I can do that! And I think sandwich-making will be less sensitive to wind, and a welcome contrast to porridge/paste food.
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Jan 16, 2022 04:17
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Clearly, you need to hang strings of dried sausages inside the van for the trip.
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Jan 16, 2022 04:43
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LightRailTycoon posted:Clearly, you need to hang strings of dried sausages inside the van for the trip. funny, In the city this might encourage people to "snap into a Slim Jim"
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Jan 16, 2022 04:51
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I have tried several of these. Archer jalapeno sticks are OK, but the clear winner is summer sausage. Add some bread, cheese, an apple, and beer, and you have a ploughman's lunch. You can craft a serious meal around a chunk of summer sausage, but a dinner of slim jims will always taste like failure.
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Jan 16, 2022 05:14
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some of these bad boys: https://www.molinarisalame.com/product/italian-dry-salame/ Also good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landj%C3%A4ger
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Jan 16, 2022 05:19
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Next Trip Random people I met on the Mojave Road said I should go to the Gambler 500. It seems like a good idea. On the other hand, I really hate having other people around. Especially loud, drunk idiots. The Gambler 500 seems like something I'd enjoy encountering, or passing by, but not joining or camping with.
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Jan 16, 2022 06:35
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Yeah they tend to be of the "smoke weed and pick up garbage" variety on the trail but the loud all night shitshow type in camp, at least from my experience in NY. I hope to do the Oregon one and hopefully some Washington events this summer, hell I just spent my afternoon helping one of the Washington gambler 500 guys rewire the entire back end of his 91 Subaru XT6 G500 car.
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Jan 16, 2022 07:28
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Tent Stake Recovery While driving backroads on the Carrizo Plain, I tried to climb a road that turned out to be Too lovely for the van. And then while trying to back out of that climb, I kinda sorta slid off the road. The pics don't show the slope well, but it was sideways enough that the seatbelt tensioner refused to unlock even when fully retracted.  Rather than make the situation worse, I decided that I should go straight to recovery mode. Being the Carrizo Plain, there were no handy anchors, but a lot of quite nice sandy loam soil with no stones. A perfect chance to try out my tent stake recovery anchors. They're not marketed as recovery anchors, but I figured if they can hold up a circus tent, then a minivan should be no problem. I sunk a stake into the hillside, which was enough of a chore that I decided planting it half-way was good enough. I then attached ropes to the front and back of the van and used my winch to pre-tension the rigging. A high-center was extremely likely, so this recovery was not a time for timid application of the throttle. I got in, released the brakes, and stomped the gas. The van lurched backwards, slid the rest of the way off the road, and was yanked back up by the ropes. Op success!    Note the movement of the ropes relative to the plastic bin on the ground. I pivoted the van around the tent stake.  The tent stake held, but was bent. It was not on the verge of pulling out, though. It took ten minutes of fighting with a crowbar to retrieve it from the ground. Like many of my offroading techniques, the tent stake anchor proved to be barely good enough, aka just right. Featured knots: beer knot, girth hitch, and vise grips to keep the hitch from sliding up the stake. Ropes are 5/16" amsteel blue and a doubled loop of 1" nylon tubular webbing.
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Jan 17, 2022 02:32
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Can you get a small gas stove to work in the van? Might make cooking easier.
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Jan 17, 2022 03:04
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I use a MSR Windburner for boiling water, and a Snow Peak BiPod stove for 'cooking'. Boiling water in the Windburner is so gloriously simple, you can do it half-asleep in a raging storm. Crack open the van door, stick it outside, light it, watch through the window until it boils. So there's no way to compete with Windburner + Mountain House in bad weather, and not a lot of point in competing in any weather if the end result is merely cheaper but significantly more hassle. I don't like running stoves inside the van while I'm in it, though it probably isn't any concern with the door cracked open.
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Jan 17, 2022 03:50
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ryanrs posted:Tent Stake Recovery That's pretty clever, good option for when there's nothing solid to attach to.
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Jan 17, 2022 12:23
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Crossing a Wash https://vimeo.com/667553564 The mighty Sienna slithers across a desert wash on its steel belly.
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Jan 19, 2022 03:13
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https://vimeo.com/667656117 Driving down a steep hill. ~~~ video hosting chat ~~~ This is my first time hosting videos on the internet, though I do know a fair bit about video encoding. Does that video look kinda crappy for everyone, or just me? I have decent-ish cable internet, and what I see is obviously bitrate starved, with patches of road losing texture and lots of 'boiling' artifacts. The 25 mbit/s 1080p30 HEVC file I uploaded looks quite decent without those distracting artifacts, but I feel like vimeo re-compressed it to under 10 mbit/s. I know that wide-angle FPV videos poo poo up encoders to some extent, but Vimeo charges $85/year and limits my uploads to 5 GB a week, and then recompresses the poo poo out of my files on top of that? That seems like a bad deal. If anyone is getting pretty good quality playback, then I'd like to hear it. Maybe my player is picking a low bitrate stream because vimeo thinks my internet is crap? If I can't get vimeo working well, what are other good hosts to try? I don't care about making money (and I will pay money to keep ads off my videos). I don't like youtube because they seem bad for society. I thought about hosting my videos pornhub as "Sienna's Naughty Adventures". But that is a last-resort option, since pornhub is probably a no-go for many people, at least at work.
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Jan 19, 2022 09:50
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ryanrs posted:https://vimeo.com/667656117 yeah, i grabbed the video with youtube-dl, and mpc-hc reports 5533kbps h264 video, 253kbps aac audio. thats only like a 50x degredation cause your original was hevc, lol. i can definitely see the artifacts you mention. i havent really done any online video hosting myself, so i dont know what options are better than any others, but any free host is going to compress the poo poo out of anything you give it, i bet
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Jan 19, 2022 10:16
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I always figured Vimeo was the FLAC of video streaming hosts but I don't know poo poo about video streaming, so far I've just used YouTube despite them being corrosive to scientific education and democracy in exchange for boatloads of ad money.
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Jan 19, 2022 10:50
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Uploading the original source file to s3 is probably the cheapest way to preserve 100% of the quality.
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Jan 19, 2022 12:05
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I don't care about preserving the data as an archive or backup, I just want video I can post/embed. I don't think I can do that with a raw s3 bucket (but maybe yes?).
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Jan 19, 2022 18:39
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Two roads near the Eastern Mojave Heritage Trail, out in the BLM land south of I-40. Fast Road https://vimeo.com/667543398 Slow Road https://vimeo.com/670056987 Later that day I somehow lost the road. I wasn't lost, exactly, since I knew where I was by way of GPS and I even had good cell coverage. But my maps didn't show any marked roads, though you could see the traces on the satellite view. So I plotted a route to highway 95 on the wisps of two-track I could see in the pics, until I hit the highway. My big mistake was I ventured beyond my high-res offline map coverage. I pre-downloaded everything north of Lake Havasu City, but then drove beyond that. I think in that area, the marked route on ONX Offroad is not accurate. Each winter, the wash crossings change and the roads move around. I was looking too hard at the map, and not watching for new turnoffs, shortcuts, or cairns. Once I hit highway 95, I went north to Needles to resupply, then on to Searchlight, Baker again, then north on 127 towards Death Valley.
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Jan 26, 2022 06:46
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Minivan Damage List: 1) Front bumper tubing is bent.   Repairs will involve hammering on the tubing, hopefully without collapsing it. 2) Grille plate needs to be redesigned.  I recently realized that the big radiator behind the bumper isn't the radiator at all, it's the A/C condenser. This is important because while I still don't want to puncture it, it is not nearly the show-stopper that a coolant leak would be. So even with bad grille coverage, the situation isn't quite as risky as I was thinking.  New grille might be cnc-cut sheet metal, but I am leaning towards something with expanded metal instead. 3) The skid plate needs to be hammered flat again, and maybe reinforced. Running full-width ribs is not practical due to loss of ground clearance, but I think strengthening metal around the two mounting posts might be sufficient. So I'm thinking of welding some angle iron ribs coming radially off the mount post, maybe 10 inches long. On the other hand, strengthening the skid plate might mean the weakest link is now the bolt that holds the engine cradle to the body.    4) Rear seat heater and a/c. The Sienna has rear heat and a/c, with its own controls. In fact, it has its own everything: 2nd heater core, 2nd a/c evaporator, 2nd blower. And supplying the heater and a/c are 4 pencil-thin aluminum pipes running under the van carrying coolant and refrigerant. These pipes are crushed and smashed beyond belief. It is a miracle they have not leaked. I need to delete the rear heater and a/c, and cap off those lines in the engine bay. 5) I ripped the spare wheel off its mount (got hung up on a rock). Replacement off ebay was cheap.  6) I dented another steel wheel on some rocks. I hammered on it a bit, but it still leaks when inflated over 35 psi. I need to take it to my mechanic for a professional beating. I also have a 6th KO2 kicking around, so I bought a reconditioned wheel for it. I'll have the shop build that into a second spare. 7) I smashed up the gas tank enough that the gauge stopped working. I imagine the float is broken, or maybe just wedged somehow. This isn't necessarily a deal breaker, especially since I started carrying gas cans on trips. On the other hand, I feel like leaving the gas gauge broken could be a key milestone in a precipitous decline in maintenance standards. Maybe I should fix it just to keep it from becoming a true pos? It would also be a nice opportunity to upgrade to a 25 or 30 gal aftermarket tank, of such a thing exists. Might be stupidly expensive, though. There's a slim chance that this could all be an electrical issue, too. Maybe the fuel sender wire got mangled. I did notice the gas gauge behaving strangely after plowing through a puddle, so that should be checked. 8) Rear axle support bushings are dead / non-existent. Easy to get to, but probably a huge pain in the rear end without special tools.  That's a lot of stuff to fix! Some of it needs to happen at a real auto shop, like messing with the a/c plumbing or dropping the gas tank. Other things, like the skid plate, I could do myself if I had access to a welding machine in someone's garage. So for the last couple weeks I've been taking mig welding classes, looking at welding machine specs, and trying to find some free shop space with 240V on the San Francisco Peninsula. I'm still working on it, but I think I have something figured out.
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Mar 3, 2022 03:37
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Welding shop is go! I just ordered an ESAB 215ic MIG machine, a cylinder of gas, a cold saw, and about a hundred angle grinder discs of every variety. My new shop space has a wooden floor, so I'm going to start by putting down a couple sheets of wonderboard cement backerboard. I'll work on the skid plate while sitting on the floor, but I'll want a real welding table pretty soon. This place is not a car shop. It doesn't have a lift and I can't drive inside. There is an exhaust fan. I believe it has enough industrial character that I can get away with stick welding.
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Mar 4, 2022 07:17
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ryanrs posted:Welding shop is go! I just ordered an ESAB 215ic MIG machine, a cylinder of gas, a cold saw, and about a hundred angle grinder discs of every variety. Nice! How many grinders do you have as well? I'm at three and I kinda want a fourth one but it's fine for now.
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Mar 4, 2022 15:54
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The Harbor Freight folding welding table isn't terrible, and folds reasonably flat to get out of the way when you're not using it. https://www.harborfreight.com/adjustable-steel-welding-table-61369.html  I've also mounted a small vise to mine.  Comes in handy for welding smaller stuff. A set of various long-throat locking pliers are also useful for clamping things to the table. https://www.harborfreight.com/hand-tools/pliers/locking-pliers/18-in-c-clamp-locking-pliers-64564.html https://www.harborfreight.com/hand-tools/pliers/locking-pliers/11-in-c-clamp-locking-pliers-64563.html https://www.harborfreight.com/hand-tools/pliers/locking-pliers/11-in-swivel-pad-c-clamp-locking-pliers-63865.html I actually got a set of 3 or 4 from Amazon.
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Mar 4, 2022 18:36
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StormDrain posted:Nice! How many grinders do you have as well? I'm at three and I kinda want a fourth one but it's fine for now. I have an angle grinder and a bench grinder. I need more tools, especially a drill press, but I'm not going to buy that right away. Darchangel posted:The Harbor Freight folding welding table isn't terrible, and folds reasonably flat to get out of the way when you're not using it. How thick is the metal? This seems to be the weakness with store-bought tables.
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Mar 5, 2022 01:52
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Darchangel posted:The Harbor Freight folding welding table isn't terrible, and folds reasonably flat to get out of the way when you're not using it. I have a similar welding table that I got from amazon, works pretty well. I use a drill press vise for holding small parts, though. I ground the paint off the bottom so i can place it anywhere on the table, clamp my work into it, and strike up an arc. Works really well and can be moved out of the way for bigger things. One of these: https://www.harborfreight.com/4-inch-jaw-capacity-drill-press-vise-30999.html
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Mar 5, 2022 21:54
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ryanrs posted:I have an angle grinder and a bench grinder. I need more tools, especially a drill press, but I'm not going to buy that right away. I dunno - maybe 16-18 gauge? It's heavy enough for the size of the table. I wouldn't be using this table to make sure things are absolutely flat or square, but it's decent. chrisgt posted:I have a similar welding table that I got from amazon, works pretty well. I've welded things up in the vise before. Mine is well-used, so has no paint on the jaws or where the bolts go, making it effectively the same thing.
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Mar 8, 2022 00:17
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