Strut Brace, Part the Fourth

About two weeks ago, my strut brace adventure came to a (temporary) finish. I will now tell you about it.

The painting went well, and the braces look awesome. Remember, more pictures (and closeups) on my Flickr page, just click on the picture.

Looks good, no? Everything came out just like I wanted it to. The fruits of many hours of labor are there, ready to be installed. The front brace installed perfectly, which is good considering it was installed for many months before.

All that was left was to install the rear brace. So I braved 100°F weather working inside my trunk to get it in. Got the brace fitted in and then the brackets mounted. However, when I went to install the brace itself…

Massive, EPIC, fail. Seriously, I couldn’t believe what I had done when I realized there was no way to actually install the brace.

But it fit before! What I neglected to take into account was that the brace had to fit above the brackets in order to fit onto them, and above the brackets the walls of the trunk become closer together, preventing this from happening. So the brace cannot possibly be installed in the manner I had originally intended. However, all is not lost! I realized that the walls I was trying to attach to were not anywhere close to as structurally sound as I originally thought. Also, the strut towers themselves DO come into the trunk, and I completely missed them. So I will simply re-engineer my brace to fit onto the strut towers, which is what I wanted to attach them to anyway. However, this project is on hold until September, when it will be hopefully cooler. No more working in the blistering heat for me!

Rear Strut Brace, Part the Third

I’m definitely coming down the home stretch here. In fact, in less than 48 hours, I should have the whole setup installed. At this point I have the strut braces entirely done. I shall pick up where I left off…

After bending the poles, I ground the standoffs to equal lengths and beveled the edges so that there would be no burs to get in the way of either my fingers or proper alignment of the brace parts. I marked the center of each brace and lined them up with each other, placing one of the three standoffs in the center. I placed the other two equidistant from the middle one. I then tack-welded the standoffs to one bent piece, and then the other.

Once the brace was tack-welded together, I made sure everything was how I wanted it. This is an important step, as tack-welds are easy to break, so if I mess up I can always break it apart, grind down the welds, and do it over. Everything was how I wanted it, so I simply welded all the standoffs together. It was a pretty tight space for welding, but the welds came out clean. Once I was done with that, I put my template against it, lined it up with the center, and marked the ends. I used a small, portable bandsaw to cut off the excess on each end, and then taped the mounting plates to the brace to check the fit in my trunk.

It took three tries total to get it to fit. The first fit was just plain too tight to go anywhere. So I cut about 1/8″ off one side of the brace and tried again. This time I was able to force the brace into place, but it was definitely still too tight. So I cut another 1/8″ off the other side, and then welded it up. Technically, I never tried to fit it again, but if it went in before, it’ll go in when it’s even shorter, right?

Yeah, probably should have tested it, but oh well. I’m confident it will work, though I will probably need to sand the paint between the mounting plates as thin as I can.

Once I had the rear brace welded up, I took the front brace off my car so that I could clean it up and re-prime it. Man, it makes a difference not having that brace on. Suddenly, the car feels VERY unstable going around turns. It’s amazing how much of a different it makes.

Today I painted the braces with bright red engine enamel. Think the red you see on the Coca-Cola logo. They look fantastic. Unfortunately, you’ll have to imagine it for now because while I brought my camera to work, I forgot my memory card. I used an entire can on the two braces and the mounting plates. They are drying at work until tomorrow, and I will be taking them home after work. The front brace will be very easy to install, but I will be waiting until Saturday to install the rear brace as drilling will be required.

Rear Strut Brace, Part the Second

Yesterday, I bent up the poles for my braces. And that’s pretty much all I did on the project. Between a couple unexpected conversations I had less time than I expected. But who cares? My goal is to do this well, and the project will take all the time it needs to. The result of yesterday’s work was quite excellent, as well!

First things first, an oxy-acetylene torch!

The flame is a little washed out due to the brightness of it, but you get the idea. I adjusted the flame (by changing the ratio of oxygen and acetylene) until I had a cone in the middle between 1 and 2 inches long, or around there, I didn’t exactly break out a measuring stick to see what it was. I set up a couple of workhorses to lay the tube on. I used my template to mark the bend points with a permanent marker. The flame of the torch isn’t something you should look at directly, so I used my welding helmet to be able to look closely at what I was doing. Even without the dimming (it auto-dims), things viewed through the helmet don’t have a sense of glowing, just a change of color or tone. I heated the tube until it glowed yellow as I could see it through the helmet, the torch placed so that the tip of the cone was about a 1/16″ from the surface of the steel. Another way I judged the temperature was the color of the flame coming off the tube where the torch hit it. When the torch first hits the tube, the flame looks colorless as it goes around the tube. As the tube warms up, the flame turns a deep orange and flies off the sides of the tub in huge wings. When the tube gets even hotter, the flames disappear where it is heated the most. This is the point I was aiming for.

Once I got the tube at the temperature I wanted, I extinguished the torch, set it down, grabbed some Vice-Grip pliers, and bent the tub by hand. I used the other markings on the tube to determine which way was “up”. I had to do all this quite quickly, as the steel began to cool the moment I removed the torch from it. It usually took about 2 cycles (heat and bend) to get each bend the way I wanted it. The last 2 or 3 I was able to make in a single bend.

Above is the steel still glowing after my final bend. I have no idea what the flaky stuff is on it, it came up every time I made a bend. If someone knows, tell me! I was really happy with how the bends came out; there were no flat spots. Each bend is smooth.

The final piece (one of two). All I have to do now is weld the two pieces together with the standoffs, and then trim the edges and test fit it with the plates. Once I have the pieces fit, I just need to weld the plates on and it will be ready to be cleaned, painted and installed!

Rear Strut Brace, Part the First

In October of last year, a friend of mine at work, Jon, mentioned to me a project he’s been wanting to do to his car. He has a wonderful Mazdaspeed 3, which is still under warranty, which is why his wife won’t let him do this little project. So he suggested that I do it. I work in the manufacturing shop of Gable Signs, and we have there several 20 ft .75″ diameter steel poles which were ordered for a project that was finished long ago. These poles are the leftover material and not likely to be used anytime soon. Jon’s suggestion was that I create a set of strut braces out of these poles, especially since there was some scrap .125″ steel sheet being tossed for recycling. I found out that I could purchase one pole for $20 and get what I needed of the sheet steel for free. $20 for a set of strut braces that would otherwise cost me in the realm of $300 sounded like a good deal to me.

A quick overview on exactly what a strut brace is: the wheels on your car are attached to a suspension system (this is what keeps the car off the ground and held up by the wheels). That suspension system attaches to the body of the car in the engine bay (under the hood) and on either side of the trunk (at least, in a sedan/coupe/hatchback they do; SUVs and vans/minivans are a little different in the back). Where the struts attach to the car has a surprising amount of flex when going around turns, resulting in poor transfer of weight from one side of the car to the other, reducing traction and handling performance. A strut brace simply reduces or eliminates that flex, increasing handling. This makes the car safer, as it stays in better control under emergency maneuvering, and more fun to drive, as it handles better overall. In my setup, the strut brace in the front attaches directly to the struts, the brace in the back will attach to the body as near to the struts as I can make them. I can’t access the struts directly without cutting huge holes in the side of my trunk, and I’m not willing to do that.

I made the front strut brace last November. It is completed and in the car, though it is only primed and it is beginning to rust ever so slightly. I bought paint, it’s actually engine enamel, but it just got too cold to do. At that point I decided to hold off on the rear brace because I didn’t feel like getting it figured out in the cold as well.

But now it is July, so I’m making the rear braces. I began by measuring the necessary dimensions in my trunk. I have a pair of 12″ subwoofers in my trunk, and they go slightly higher than the ideal mounting point for the brace, so I have to make the brace go over the subs, and under the rear speakers, but mount just lower than that level on either side. Since I’m now working in the Router Dept, I used a computer and generated a template with all the correct dimensions. I cut it out, and it fits perfectly. I’m using this template for when I make the actual brace.

The brace is the white piece taped to my toolbox. It goes horizontally in the trunk. It is the exact dimension I need, and I will use it to match the placement of the bends in the brace. Now that I have a template at the correct size, I simply need to cut two pieces of the pole (a single 20 ft pole is more than enough to provide all the material I need for both braces, I will have about 4 ft left over) at 56″, 3″ or so longer than I need. The brace is going to be two parallel poles with 3 spacers in between, all welded together. This will be very rigid.

I also need a way to get the brace in and out of the car without any special tools. Because my spare tire is under the floor of my trunk, and I have the subwoofers in the trunk, the addition of this brace essentially makes it impossible for me to actually get to my spare tire. Because this isn’t a racing car, I need to be able to get to the spare. So I created brackets consisting of two 1/8″ steel plates. One plate has two #10 bolts welded to it that protrude into the trunk and 2 #10 bolts that hold it to the inside of the trunk. The other plate has matching slots for the bolts and will be welded to the brace. There are two sets of these plates, one for each side of the brace. This way, I can leave the mounting plates attached to the inside of the trunk, and leave a wrench in the back for getting the brace in and out as needed. The first picture below is the assembled brace, the second the disassembled brace. As always, there are more pictures in my Flickr stream than in this post.

Now that my brackets are made (you’re seeing one, but I made two!) I just need to cut the main poles and the .75″ spacers.

The spacers and the poles are cut! Tomorrow, I have to grind the spacers to an even length, and then it’s time to break out the oxy-acetylene torch! To bend the poles, I simply heat the pole until it is bright, bend it, and repeat as necessary until I achieve the proper angle. Until next time!

Civic Spoiler Painted

About 8 months ago (around October/November) I acquired a spoiler for my Civic (’97, HX Coupe, 5 spd, ~172k mi). Now, I love my Civic. I mean, I LOVE it. I don’t have any misconceptions about how fast/not fast it is, but it is a lot of fun to drive, it handles very well, and no matter how I drive it, I’ve never seen lower than 28 mpg, and that was the only fill up I’ve seen below 30 mpg. I’ve done a few things to the car to make it more enjoyable without “ricing” it up, such as putting Integra GSR seats in that match the Civic’s interior (dark grey seats in a lighter grey interior), as well as fabricating my own front struct brace. But that’s another story for another day.

I always felt that my car was lacking a spoiler, so when I got an opportunity to pick up one for $30 and the old Panasonic radio from my wife’s CR-V, which we had no use for, I jumped at it. It’s a fairly generic spoiler, but I figured if I took the time to paint it well it would look above average. I painted all the plastic pieces, but left the metal pieces as they were. They were the mounting brackets, which were bare aluminum, and the small bolts and surrounds for the bolts that hold the sides of the spoiler to the main blade, which were chrome. However, after the winter I noticed that the aluminum brackets were beginning to oxidize (which I expected) and rust was coming out of the chrome surrounds (which I did not expect). I decided to take the whole thing back apart, and paint the metal pieces black, as most of my car is either red or black. I liked the idea of having a two-tone color scheme on the spoiler itself, as that also matched the car. To further push the red/black scheme, I decided to paint the emblems as well.

First things first, I made sure I had all the materials needed. I already had some self-etching primer and clear coat from painting the spoiler, but I had to go out and buy some black paint. There’s an Auto Zone about 2 minutes down the road, so I took care of that.

It’s great living near my parents. It’s even greater that my dad has a wide variety of tools which I can use. I removed the emblems from the car. The Civic and HX emblems were simply taped to the car, and in the heat of the day they removed easily. The Honda “H” logo was both taped and pin-mounted on the back, and just pin-mounted on the front. Once I removed those, I got to work on the spoiler. **Click on any picture to access the set on my Flickr, there are more pictures there as well**

This is what the spoiler looked like before I painted it. You can see that I’ve already removed the emblems. There was a lot of crap under there, it took me a while to clean it out. Oddly enough, the front one was darn clean underneath.

After removing the spoiler, I simply disassembled the whole thing, scuffed and cleaned all the pieces, and then primed them:

After priming the pieces, I ended up letting them sit for about 16 hours as it began to rain outside. I then painted them with black automotive paint, and applied a clear coat. That funny piece of cardboard in the upper left is all the various bolts in the thing, punched through cardboard so that only the heads are painted. This is a trick I’ve learned from the paint dept. at work.

And that’s the finished product. I’m very happy with how everything came out! The front Honda “H” logo doesn’t really pop, though, as it’s black on a grey grill. I knew it wasn’t really going to pop much, but now that I see it in person, I’m even less satisfied with it than I expected. I’ll probably paint it red once a few weeks have gone by and the paint has had time to really cure.

My next project is fabricating a strut brace for the back (I’ve already fabricated one for the front) and painting both the front and back braces. Stay tuned…

Revisiting

I haven’t updated in well over a year.

Oh well.

I’m not going to make a post about how I should have been blogging more, or anything like that. Instead, I’m going to re-purpose this blog a bit. Instead of just rambling on about random events in my life, I’ll be blogging about specific projects I’m working on.

Check in later to see what I’ve been up to!

Checking Back In…

So after about 3 months of absolute non-presence on here, I’m checking back in. Let’s see… what’s new?

Well, for those who don’t know, I am now a married man. My wife and I got married January 16, and married life is great. It’s wonderful to have such an amazing person to share all my experiences with, and the love and support we share is awesome. The honeymoon in WV was a lot of fun, and we want to go back someday.

Other than that, life is mostly work. I work at RadioShack and, while it certainly isn’t the most glorious of jobs, it’s better than having no job. The people I work with are nice as well, so all in all it’s not a terrible situation. I’m certainly actively looking for other jobs, so we’ll see what comes up.

I feel mostly like I’m not creating enough in the way of videos and animations. After all, that’s what I went to college for. I think the first thing I’m going to do is put together the Shakespeare play that I recorded last semester… that needs to be done soon anyway! If anyone has any ideas of things they’d like to see animated, I’d love to hear them!

HDRI Experimentation

So I’ve been interested in HDRI photography for a while now, and finally decided to actually try it. For those who don’t know, HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging) is a method of getting higher color resolution and better exposure from a picture. This allows photos where certain parts would normally be blown out to have every part exposed properly. The basic process is to take three pictures of the same object (preferably from a tripod so you can be sure the images will line up); one at the proper exposure (0 EV, exposure value), one 2 stops over exposed (2 EV) and one 2 stops under exposed (-2 EV). I used a Canon PowerShot S2IS to take the pictures with CHDK installed to allow me to save RAW images. I then took pictures of various places around Houghton at night by finding the right exposure, and then adjusting the shutter speed so that I got the +/-2 EV. I then corrected the color of the RAW files in Photoshop and used Photoshop’s Merge to HDR feature (found in CS2 and up). The results were mixed… in this set of photos (the 0 EV picture is the upper, the HDRI the lower) it made virtually no difference.

The eagles definitely have better exposure in the HDRI picture, but the difference is so slight that it wouldn’t matter. The background is also slightly better exposed in the HDRI picture, but again it’s so slight that it doesn’t really matter. The main benefit is that you end up with a 32 bit image which has incredibly better color resolution than the 8 bit JPEGs that normally come out of my camera (and still better than the 16 bit RAWs). However, since there was very little over expose with the image to begin with, there’s not much point for a photo like this.

The next set of images are pictures of the Luckey Building. Here, the HDRI has much more benefit. Again, top is 0 EV, bottom is HDRI.

In this picture, the bottom image is significantly better exposed, with an exposure range that could not be captured with my camera in a single picture. The image is a little dark, but that would be extremely easy to fix. Since it’s just an exercise, I didn’t really bother to but it does make my point.

Now, if only my aging computer would compute these faster…

UPDATE: At a friend’s request, I’ve added thumbnails of the original 3 images I used:

Houghton Communication

Apparently communication at Houghton just doesn’t happen. Don’t get me wrong, this is a fantastic school and the quality of education is excellent, but communication between people could be significantly better. Right now, the school is hosting NCMSLC (National Christian Multi-cultural Student Leaders Council) and I was asked to do the video for it. So I made it and submitted it (I need to recompress it for putting online, I’ll add a link here when it’s up) and they played it for the opening of the conference tonight. It went well until at the very end, where I had a surprise ending. The person in charge of sound turned the sound on the computer all the way down, thinking that the video was over. Hello?! Does no one watch the video they’re going to play for a national conference before putting it up? I even told one person to make sure the people playing it knew, and a friend of mine told someone else during the video that it had the surprise ending and to make sure the sound stayed up for it. But even so it still happened!

That’s not even the worst of it… apparently the video didn’t really speak to the purpose of the conference, which is neither my fault nor the fault of my friend whom I was working with to make this. He got the questions from the faculty member who asked him to be in charge of this. So the video was well done, but not applicable. There is little more frustrating than to work hard at making something and not having it even really apply (and then to have it shown in front of the entire conference). I stayed up until 6 AM Wed morning making this thing to make sure I got it in before the deadline.

So, in short, listen up Houghton: COMMUNICATION IS KEY! Talk to each other, prepare for what you’re doing. Don’t just wing it, assume that everything will be alright. Rehearse! Make sure everyone involved watches every video before it is shown at the actual event! This is really basic, Houghton, I hope you learn it soon. If you don’t, not only will you burn the people who made the work in question (it sucks to have something like this happen to you), but even worse you burn your own reputation.

To Upgrade a PowerBook

I bought a 1.25 GHz PowerBook G4 last semester. While it’s certainly nowhere close to a fast computer, it’s faster than the computer I received from my school, and it’s a Mac. I do most of my video/animation/photoshop work on here, and it gets the job done. That being said, part of the reason I was up until 6 AM this morning working on a video was because this computer is pretty slow. Still, it’s a lot better than nothing and I don’t have the money for a better computer right now.

Because of what I use this computer for, you can imagine my horror when I found out that the lower RAM slot had failed, bringing me down to 1 GB from 2 GB. This obviously makes using Photoshop/AfterEffects/Final Cut Pro very, very slow. They’re already slow enough, I don’t need half my RAM disappearing on top of it. Apparently this is an epidemic among all Aluminum PowerBook G4 users. So I set about fixing this, which requires replacing the logic board (aka mother board/system board). But it occurred to me that Apple hadn’t changed the design of the model much at all until the MacBook Pros came out, so I decided to see if I could put a better board in this computer. Sure enough, according to Apple Fritter, the 1.0/1.25 GHz PBG4 board are compatible with the 1.33/1.5 GHz PBG4 boards. On eBay, they all cost the same amount, so I was pretty happy. 250 MHz increase along with an upgrade to the video card (Radeon M 9600 to 9700) is not a bad thing, especially when one can do it for the same price as getting the same board one already has. The only other thing I needed to do was get the matching heat sink. Apparently the Radeon 9700 runs hotter enough than the 9600 that it requires a thermal paste connection to the metal of the heatsink instead of the paraffin wax pad the 9600 has.

I ordered the board and heat sink off of eBay for under $200 total, not a bad price for this kind of repair. Once they came in, I got started working. I used iFixit.com’s excellent guide, if you’re taking apart a Mac and don’t have the service manual, I highly recommend their guides. This is what I found myself with once I took off the top of the computer:

If nothing else, these computers are put together exceptionally well. There is almost no wasted space that I can see. This also means they can be difficult to get apart. The process, from start to finish, probably took me about 3.5 hours, though I had some decent breaks in there and did lots of pausing to look at things in the computer I found interesting. Working straight through, I probably could have done it in 2 hours, and I might be able to get it down to 1.5 hours now that I’ve done it before. Eventually, I got the logic board out. Here’s how it compares visibly to the new one (the new one is the upper, the old the lower):

Needless to say, there’s very little difference between the two. The biggest difference is between the two ATI cards. Replacing the heat sink was more work than I thought it would be. After taking out every screw I could find, the heat sink wouldn’t budge. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the mounts for the LCD hinge go into and through the heat sink itself. Each hinge has 2 torx screws keeping it down, one screws into the heat sink, and one goes through it and into the internal frame. This makes for a strong connection. You can see how it is set up:

Putting the computer back together was simply a matter of reconnecting cables and putting the right screws back in the right places. I didn’t have any screws left over after finishing; when that happens, you know you can feel good about a job well done. The computer booted right up, and I was able to log in. No need to reinstall the OS or anything like that.

So what are the caveats of doing such a procedure? Well, the clock got reset to 1969, so all the security certificates for my email accounts (I have Mail set to launch on startup) return an error of “Warning: This certificate is not yet valid.” and a couple other things kind of freaked out, but once I set the date/time correctly and restarted the computer, that was fine. All your programs, though, will believe that they’re on a different computer and it’s essentially true. MacTracker sees my computer as the 1.5 GHz model, Adobe CS3 made me activate again, FCS asked for the serial number again, and I had to reauthorize iTunes.

But the benefits are nice. The biggest benefit, of course, is that I once again have 2 GB of useable RAM available to the system. I haven’t noticed a perceptible difference between 1.25 GHz and 1.5 GHz, but I expected that. Startup, shutdown, and especially sleep times are a bit faster, though. The graphics card, however, is noticeably better. GUI elements that rely on the graphics card are definitely snappier and the games I’ve got seem to run faster or smoother.

Overall, it was a worthwhile upgrade because the logic board needed to be replaced anyway, but it wouldn’t be worth the money and time required if you’re simply looking for more power out of your PowerBook. For your viewing and geekiness pleasure, here are some before and after pictures: