Beautiful Knob Becomes a Museum Piece
June 27th, 2009Pushed Aside by Mere PVC
I did not get to use the toilet knob I machined yesterday. Very sad. My dad’s boat guy had claimed the heads were so old it was dangerous to take the old valves off, but while I worked on one of them today, I decided to see what the story was, and the old valve screwed right out. Good, because it meant I could install a new valve. Bad, because the new aluminum knob was no longer needed.
And I just put a set screw in it! This is the first tapping I’ve ever done. I was all excited about fastening the knob onto the old stem, using my home-tapped set screw.
The toilets on the boat will be greatly improved by the new PVC valves I’m installing. Only a guy who installs toilets for a living would choose to put a frequently handled valve at the base of the bowl. Plumbing is a fine and honorable trade, but plumbers tend to be unbelievably dirty. A plumber will eat a sandwich with one hand while fixing your toilet with the other. Since I’m redoing it all, I can put the new valves above the bowl. Not optimal, but considerably less exposed to…whatever.
We got the generator running, with the aid of the guy who installed it. This is the boat’s third generator. You can’t kill Detroit Diesel boat engines, but the little motors that run generators have all sorts of problems that stop them in a hurry. The first Onan we had was balky when starting, and if it didn’t feel like cranking up right away, it was easy to burn up the starter. It also had a very expensive circuit board which could (and did) quit working for no reason at all. The second Onan was no better. Now we have a Westerbeke. Supposedly it’s much simpler, and it has no silly circuit board to blow up. Mating internal combustion engines with complicated electronics has caused a world of expensive problems ordinary people can’t correct, and I don’t think any of the problems it has solved could not be fixed by simple maintenance and common sense. As I understand it, a lot of the improvements in car longevity are due to improved metallurgy and lubricants; I doubt integrated chips helped a lot. Think of all the old slant sixes that ran for eons.
This generator has three fuel filters that I have become aware of so far. First, the Racor. This is a big aftermarket filter which is really more part of the boat than the generator. Then the spool-sized filter on the way into the motor. Then an inline filter farther downstream. I accidentally shut off a fuel valve, starving the engine until it quit, and I assumed getting fuel back into it would fix the problem. I also changed the spool-sized filter, simply because my dad wanted it done. We still couldn’t get the generator to stay on. The generator guy showed us the third filter, which–coincidentally–happened to be plugged up the same week I shut off the fuel by accident.
This is how boats are. You find a problem. You find the obvious cause. You fix the obvious cause. Then it turns out another cause has popped up at the same time, defying odds in a manner that would shame Susan Boyle.
I had to put off church until tomorrow. I didn’t want to leave my dad holding the bag. I’m trying to get this family running right, the same way I’d try to get a generator going, and I believe you have to treat your parents correctly in order to get the blessings going in your life. As the eldest (only) son, I think I have a special responsibility. I am supposed to be second in authority, now that my mother is gone. Feminism isn’t Biblical; neither is the idea that all siblings are the same. I don’t buy that modern nonsense. I think the eldest son still has added privileges and duties, so I am trying to do what I think is right. Running off to church with the generator problem still plaguing my father would be the wrong move. Sometimes you can offend God by trying to fulfill your obligations to him in the wrong way.
I’ve been told that this is the true meaning of the story of the Good Samaritan. I think Perry Stone said that. The two men who passed by on the other side and refrained to help were religious Jews, and they were headed toward Jerusalem. That suggests they were ritually pure and therefore afraid to touch someone who might be dead. They could become unclean and lose the right to participate in whatever was going on at the temple. The Samaritan was motivated by compassion, not his religious routine, and that was a good thing, because believers were expected to know that in an emergency, God valued compassion more than empty observance.
I wish that when I was young, I had understood more about the way people were intended to live. I’m glad some of it is becoming clear to me. It’s sad that I have no one to pass it on to, but if I had had kids at the usual time of life, I suppose I would have had little of value to impart to them.
We had a bad drought for the first few months of this year, but it started raining a month or so ago, and everything greened up fast. Looking around now, you would see no evidence of the problems we were having a while back. I hope life can be like that. I know it can. God can change things so fast, and so unexpectedly; I keep my eyes open all the time. Most of the good changes that happen to me are gradual, but I wouldn’t mind a few quick ones, given my age.
June 27th, 2009 at 8:30 PM
Mark 7:
10For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, Whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death: 11But ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, It is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; he shall be free.
12And ye suffer him no more to do ought for his father or his mother; 13Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye.
I understand Corban to be a vow of leaving all your wealth to the Temple. Thus you couldn’t give it to anyone else (your folks) because it was dedicated to God.
Jesus took a different view.
June 27th, 2009 at 8:41 PM
“a lot of the improvements in car longevity are due to improved metallurgy and lubricants”
A few are. The solid state ignition revolutionized automotive ignitions. You had to set the points on that slant six pretty often, and on something like a big Hemi engine you were changing plugs, points, distributor cap and rotor every time you changed the oil. Carburetors are an ongoing cluster of biblical proportions.Electronic multi point fuel injection means the car is immune to the fumblings of amateurs- you think contractors are bad, take a look at what the average “qualified” mechanic does to a two barrel carb.
Cafe standards and EPA bullshit made it necesary to have complex engine management systems, but the upside of that is the stuff runs. A tuneup means changing plugs on almost every car made today. A point ignition car required a timing light, a tachometer, a distributor wrench, an ignition wrench set, and God forbid you had a chevy, because you needed a flex shaft hex key point screwdriver.
Racing avoided all this electronics like the plague until they saw they could use it to monitor complex systems and squeeze a few extra ponies out of every ounce of fuel. Now any race crew worth it’s salt has far more invested in electronics than it’s snap-on boxes.
Everyone hearkens back to some imginary days of yore when this or that engine ran forever- but those were the first cars I owned, and i had to make them run, and they were a lot of work to keep running.
June 27th, 2009 at 10:04 PM
Were these gate valves in salt water lines? If so you should check that the builder didn’t use gate valves on the intakes instead of real sea cocks. This was pretty common practice years ago but the valve stems would fail after a few years. They almost all had brass stems that would de-zinc in salt water. The valve stems would turn into soft copper sponges and break off when you needed to close the valve in an emergency.
What kind of toilet is this?
By the way, the knob is beautiful.
June 28th, 2009 at 12:47 PM
Og, some day I’ll tell you what it’s like to be in the Bahamas, in 95-degree weather, depending on a generator, only to have the totally unnecessary circuit board go up in smoke. And of course, only a trained repairman can tell the circuit board is the problem, so you end up spending an entire day in a filthy engine room, changing filters and priming the fuel system. The bait melts. The food rots. No air conditioning. Good times. All thanks to unneeded electronics.
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Plenty of cars ran 200,000 miles without that BS, and the owners were able to keep them running without paying mechanics with Ph.Ds. When I got my Harley, I insisted on a carburetor, because it doesn’t take a genius to get one working in an emergency. Sadly, I’ve proven that a number of times. Besides, fuel injection is boring.
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Bill, it’s a Hatteras, so while every production boat is full of incredibly stupid engineering, this one does not have gate valves on the through hulls.
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As noted earlier, the heads are aftermarket, so it’s not surprising that there are questionable parts.
June 28th, 2009 at 1:41 PM
The slant six ran forever (“taxi cab” motor) because it had 7 main bearings on the crank. This virtually prevented main bearing wear with its consequent oil pressure loss.
As for electronics, I’ve run into the same problem with industrial backup gensets. Some proprietary electronics that serve a seeming generic purpose. Not ignition, but power loss sensing, frequency control, etc. And the board costs $1500(!), discouraging you from buying a spare.
June 28th, 2009 at 2:41 PM
I’m all for electronic ignition, but a lot of the other crap causes problems.
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The Westerbeke rectifier that does what the expensive Onan board does costs $15.
June 28th, 2009 at 6:12 PM
Just so you know, I always washed my hands very very well before eating and never worked on a toilet while handling my lunch.
June 28th, 2009 at 10:53 PM
More cars have run more miles- orders of magnitude more- with electronics than without. My truck has over 340,000 miles. I have had an odd handful of failures, but they have all been mechanical failures, at least thus far. I have had three cars that have had at least 250,000 miles on them, and not one of them ever had any kind of an electronic problem. This is the norm, and not the exception.
Is this the circuit board in question?
http://www.gmcws.org/Tech/dsimmons/onan/onan.html#circuit-board-schematic
If so it’s just a bad design. It relies on an external ground for some critical circuits. They should have been internally grounded and protected. Harder for Onan to make a bulletproof circuit board when they’re only making, say, two hundred thoudand, compared to Ford, who has made literally millions of the OBDII system, probably the most reliable in the industry.
June 29th, 2009 at 10:23 AM
There are many different Onan generators. It may be hard to believe, I did not keep the electronics from the two we junked, so I can’t provide schematics. However I can tell you that failures caused by these unnecessary boards are “the norm, and not the exception.” If you are serious about learning about Onan electronics and their problems, I can give you the name of the guy who installed the Westerbeke, and you can look him up and give him a call. So far the $15 rectifier has served us well, and the power seems to work just like the fancy Onan power. The lights still go on and off.
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I should hook you up with my uncle, the NASA mechanical engineer. He told me all about the metallurgical improvements that made newer cars run longer. For example, cars used to require ring and valve jobs almost as a matter of course. Electronics aren’t the primary reason newer pistons and cylinders and valves and rings and valve seats last.
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Here’s a quote from Harris L. Marcus, director of the Institute of Materials Science at the University of Connecticut: ““Cars are much better than they were 20 years ago, and that’s because of advances in materials,” he adds. “Cars last longer, they are able to withstand wear, heat, and corrosion better. All because of better materials.” No wonder we see recommended oil change intervals increasing with time. The plugs in my dad’s Explorer are platinum, and the recommended change interval is 100,000 miles. Switch back to inferior materials, and the interval drops. Use better materials, and it rises.
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Here’s a quote from a professional car restorer: “How ‘old’ your engine is depends upon mileage and use, not year of manufacture. The [1970] Triumph engine, for example, will be much more worn than the [1993] Caprice, even if they both show the same mileage–the engine’s metallurgy is not up to 90s American standards, and also it has a much higher wear factor.”
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From another restorer, about 1960’s cars: “Rear end gears also take a beating and can fail. A lot of people think that because a rear end is massive in appearance it will take lots of horse. Often these old rear ends are massive simply because the manufacturers, lacking high quality steels and the kind of metallurgy we have the benefit of, built the parts massively in order to assure that they would not break under those contemporary loads.”
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If I had to have one car for the rest of my life, I’d pick a car with carburetion and new metals and lubricants and filters over a car with fancy electronics and old metals and lubricants and filters any day.
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Right now, I have a Ford with 8 ignition coils, and they fail so often, the manufacturer extended the warranty to 10 years. A 1990 F150 with the same mileage would be much more dependable in the long run.
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As for ODB, I am not impressed. I bought an expensive scanner to tell me what was wrong with my car, and guess what I found out at the dealership? It’s a toy. A real scanner costs much, much more. The one I have is very limited. So much for shade tree car repairs.
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One more fun thing about electronics: my car’s computer tells it when to shift, and because Ford did it wrong, it has a dangerous hesitation. The fix? Aftermarket hacking or a risky trip to the dealership, where they’ll charge $200 for a flash and then “find” something that costs a grand to repair. They never fail to do that.
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Guess how you fix hesitation when you have a carburetor? You already know. You turn a screw.