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Messages - aqmxv

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31
General Discussion / Re: They don't build them like this anymore
« on: March 06, 2008, 03:35:19 PM »

An old water pumping station in England.  According to the article I read about this station it ran for 100 years non-stop basically before they shut it down.  They fire it up a couple times a year so that people can see it in motion.

http://www.opacity.us/site147_ryhope_pumping_station.htm

You don't have to go to the UK to see such engineering.  Hamilton, Ontario has its original 1859 water works as well.  Two huge, beautifully restored walking-beam engines with pumps.  Daily pumping capacity: about 5,350,000 Gallons/day at 185 ft lift.  Thoroughly worth your time.

http://www.esemag.com/1198/histori.htm

http://www.soe.uoguelph.ca/webfiles/wjames/homepage/Teaching/HamiltonsOldPumpHouse.htm


32
About time too... finally, small, economical AND DIESEL!!!!

I'd forgo the hybrid crap if it made the whole package more reliable but it's the "in" thing at the moment.

RC

Hybrid technology is like any other technology - if you have a good use for it, you can get a good result out of it.  Most hybrid designs tend to have that 'cobbled together out of conventional ideas' look about them.

If you haven't looked at the inner workings of Toyota's hybrid system used on the Prius, it's worth looking at.  If the batteries are reliable, the whole system should be almost eternal - there are no friction clutches in the system at all - the magic is done by two permanent-magnet motor-generators and a single planetary gearset.  The motor generators (one on the ring, one on the sun shaft.  The engine is on the planet cluster and wheel drive is from the ring) sometimes buck each other, sometimes one generates current to feed the other, and sometimes both are working as motor or generator depending on where power is coming from just now and where it needs to go.  All in all, it's a clever and very original solution to the electric hybrid problem.  It's also compact and generically adaptable to anything, pretty much.

Hybrid-shmybrid.  It's the coolest automatic transmission design I've ever seen, as well as being continuously variable.

33
Listeroid Engines / Re: Injection pump and priming question
« on: February 08, 2008, 04:36:59 PM »
Yes, that one definitely makes hotater's greatest-hits list.

34
General Discussion / Re: Lister Substitute Belarus
« on: February 08, 2008, 03:55:18 PM »
It was actually originally used with 2 anvils, one sitting on top of the other one to signal that big news was coming during the civil war.  Much more fun than ringing a bell on the church steeple like most folks did in those days.  There are actually some idiots who do it the old way and have someone run up with a red hot poker and touch off the blackpowder by hand.  They must be deaf (or wear non-standard historical hearing protection) not to mention inelligable for life insurance.
Stan

I must admit I've never seen an anvil shoot.  I've seen something similar though - a gunpowder tester.  You Canadians can see one if you go to the Plains of Abraham above Quebec city - the arsenal there still has its gunpowder test cup.  The procedure is:

1) pour a standard measure of powder in the cup, and use about 15 seconds worth of slow match as a fuse.
2) Place a galloper cannonball on top of the cup (I think it was the 6 pounder)
3) light the fuse
4) run back to the sighting line (which is also the safety line)
5) when it goes off, make note of how far up the vertical scale on the wall the ball goes.  Didn't get the altitude you wanted?  might be too coarse-grained or damp.  Could also be adulterated.

35
General Discussion / Re: where is everybody from?
« on: February 01, 2008, 08:11:41 PM »
About two hours northwest of Richmond, VA.

36
Waste Motor Oil / Re: Waste Motor Oil Refining
« on: January 31, 2008, 08:06:14 PM »
  Maybe a dumb question (not the first) but can dry oil have a ph? I presume you are concerned about corrosion, but as long as water isn't introduced, is it really an issue? My limited understanding is that to be acid/alkaline, you need to be in solution with water and I can certainly understand how mixing water with used motor oil could raise or lower the ph of the water due to contaminants in the oil. But...if the oil's dry and you don't add any water to it, it's not corrosive is it???

Technically, no.  Oil with no polar (water-like) solvent in it can't have a pH, because there's no way to have excess hydronium in solution.  However, in the real world, you have to assume that there's something polar around that can cause you grief, like water in the bottom of the drum.  The chemistry way to check for acid/base in a nonpolar solvent (oil, in this case) is to shake up an oil sample/water mix in a seperatory funnel, let it sit and settle (like vinegar/oil salad dressing) , and then draw the water fraction off the bottom for pH testing.  The dishwashing detergent bottle left to settle upside down is a great way to do this on the cheap.

You'll want to test some new motor oil to develop a standard procedure.  New oil should test somewhat alkaline because of the buffers added during manufacture.  If the WMO was changed promptly, it should  be alkaline as well.  Oil that was not changed in a timely manner goes acidic (especially in a gasoline engine that ran cold).  Acidic oil combined with water vapor made during the combustion process in the engine results in an acid bath for internal engine parts...which is why we change the oil in the first place.

If I had some oil that tested alkaline and some other oil that tested acid, the first thing I'd do would be to mix the two, heat, and stir a while.  The remaining pH buffer in the alkaline oil might just solve the acidity problem...

Diluting before filtering (centrifugal or exclusion) will definitely help with throughput.  It'll also increase the extraction efficiency of a centrifugal filter.

37
General Discussion / Re: SF6 and mercuryt arc rectifiers
« on: January 25, 2008, 03:17:18 PM »
I'd seen pictures of the (still working) rectifier in the Belsize Park deep shelter in London a couple of years ago.  The specs on that monster are something else (enough power at 500 V to run an elevator motor).  I suspect you get plenty of ultraviolet from it, too.

38
General Discussion / Re: THE CF-105 AVRO ARROW
« on: January 25, 2008, 03:09:00 PM »
  Some say the SR-71 Blackbird is a re-worked Avro Arrow built with a larger budget for speed & altitude???
  There are also claims the Concord in both frame & engine design is an up-sized Avro Arrow.
  The Arrow was certainly the 1st production fighter aircraft to incorporate 4500psi hydraulic systems.

I can address that one - my father was involved with the development of the J58.  There's certainly a relationship in the sense that both are air-breathing high-performance airplanes, but that's about the end of it.  The Arrow was meant to be a high performance interceptor and was optimized for that role.  Scramble from the runway, climb to 45,000 feet as fast as possible, accelerate to mach 1.5 and engage invaders with missiles before they can drop the bomb on Toronto.  It's the sports car (probably a 289 Cobra) of the airplane world - not much range or payload, but good handling and performance.  The blackbird, by comparison, can only be compared to a land speed record car - something like the Blue Flame or the Thrust SSC.

About all the Arrow's design parameters have in common with the mission profile of any produced variant of project oxcart is supersonic flight.  The blackbird was the first airplane in history to be optimized for supersonic cruise.  Time to climb doesn't matter, the 'weapons bay' on the paper F-12 variant theoretically held all of two missiles (sneaked in beside the forward landing gear), and the primary payload (recon nose pod) went where fire control radar would have to be.  The Arrow is of rather conventional (riveted aluminum) construction.  The blackbird is all titanium and radar-absorbing plastic.  The blackbird actually gets its best fuel economy at maximum cruise.  The arrow, like all fighter interceptors, has a maximum design range of about 400 miles, and less than 300 miles if a supersonic sprint is required.  The blackbird has just settled into cruise altitude (70,000+ feet) and speed (mach 3.5+) 400 miles from base, after hitting its first tanker for a big pull of JP-7.  Oh, and if you try to roll a blackbird you will die - they were called 'sleds' by their pilots for a reason.  Definitely not a dogfighter.

If the Arrow has a direct descendant, it's probably the MiG-25.  The blackbird's descendants are not officially acknowledged...

39
General Discussion / Re: THE CF-105 AVRO ARROW
« on: January 21, 2008, 02:29:56 PM »
Having been to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum (which seems to have enough parts to build a functioning Arrow, should the political will to do so arise), I'd have to say that the US F-15 owes more than a little of its design to Avro Canada's forward thinking...

The politics surrounding this was just as ugly as the end of the B-49 project.

40
Slight derail, but since we're talking about wheels here - what do you (any of you) think of the idea of mounting a pair of these outboard of the primary wheels on a 6/1 for extra inertia - sort of a poor man's start-o-matic wheels in convenient easy-to-lift chunks.

The only question is: where do you put the starter handle - maybe I'd have to mount one inboard and use electric start?

41
Engines / Re: The project begins
« on: January 08, 2008, 03:22:22 PM »
One possibility for the need of boiled water in these recipes is gas solubility - boiling water (or most other sufficiently pure liquid compounds) drives off all of the dissolved gases.  Since the atmosphere is 70% nitrogen and 18% oxygen, I suspect that it messes up the chemistry to have these present in the solution.  Ergo: boiled water.

Likewise, there are iron-digesting bacteria present in a lot of groundwater.  Boiling the water would kill all of these.

42
I've got my own set of answers to that one, predicated with the statements that 1) I have plenty of mechanical and some electrical skill, and 2) I can afford and justify investment in a system that will have lower long-term running expenses.

So why generate power at home?

1) I'm at the very farthest end of my generating utility's grid, at the end of a dead-end road with a 1/10 mile line running to my very own pole-mount transformer.  If a squirrel sneezes on something in West Virginia I have no power.  I've already had my small (1kw) genset up and running twice in the last three months keeping the natives happy while the utility failed to provide what we pay them for. (I have plenty of CF bulbs, three Aladdin lamps, and two Aladdin Blue Flame Heaters.  About the only thing I can't do easily is heat the water in the water heater for a shower or (a biggie) run the well pump (but do have a big accumulator tank).

2) It's a well-insulated house with modest heating requirements in winter.  10-20K BTU/hr waste heat is enough to keep it toasty warm.  if not, see above for the Aladdin solution.

3) if I can get cheap/free fuel and do cogen, I can afford to justify running the generator just because the heating costs on cold days become a sunk cost.  If we then have an ice storm and the power goes out, I should be able to run anything I care about with a 4 KW gen head.  If the outage is in high summer for some reason, a 4 KW/220 head is big enough to run the heat pump or a couple of window a/c units I have laying around.

4) I lived through Hurricane Fran in Raleigh, NC.  My little portable generator made our house an island of civilization on a dark night.  Bad stuff happens.  Being ready for it means you are smart and foresighted, not paranoid.

5) it's fun.

43
Everything else / Re: Exhaust heat recovery- Exhaust to water exchanger
« on: January 07, 2008, 08:55:06 PM »
People get confused because of tuned exhaust on 2 strokes where you actualy have back presure and it provides a power boost.
...if the backpressure is at just the right time.

On a piston-ported 2 stroke, the reflection wave from the exhaust system, if tuned just right, can provide some supercharge.  Basically, the system works like:

1) inhale mixture through carb into crankcase (extra points if there's no reed valve - enigne is fully piston-ported).
2) blow mixture through transfer ports scavenging remaining exhaust gases out the exhaust ports.  If your volumetrics in the intake cycle work out well, you can blow a little more mixture out the exhaust port than the cylinder will nominally hold.
3) piston starts to come up, closes transfer ports
4) reflected pressure wave crams the excess mixture and a little exhaust gas back into the cylinder
5) the piston closes the exhaust port.

it makes for an incredibly peaky engine, but it can make for better power, better fuel economy, and increased knock resistance (because of the EGR).

44
Waste Motor Oil / Re: blended waste motor oil results
« on: November 12, 2007, 05:06:53 PM »
I see a lot of mention here about filtering WMO, but nothing about checking PH. Are we checking PH?
How do we go about doing that?

There's a little bit of a misnomer here - you can't check pH in a nonpolar (oily) system.  what you generally do is put a known amount of the oil to be tested in a jar (Ideally a separatory funnel) along with a known amount of deionized water, then shake vigorously for a known time.  This allows the water to come in contact with any polar compounds in the oil.

Then you stand it upright and wait for it to separate out.  Draw off the water fraction and measure the pH of it.

For the test to actually mean anything you have to have known standards to work with.  I'm sure there's an ASTM standard somewhere...

45
Sorry for the slow reply, but thanks very much for the info!  Knowing that the part numbers are Generac numbers, and that the local B&S dealer might be able to get them for me is a big help.

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