Spud's blog: A vacation, almost

"Falling down is not a failure. Failure comes when you stay where you have fallen." - Socrates

I took a week off work - scheduled it back in March. I had invited a friend to fly in from Cali for a brief visit. This friend is a younger fella that I used to work with, and trained up. He learned everything I could teach him, and continued to grow and learn after I left the place. I'm proud of his accomplishments, and proud to be a small part of his success story. He's sorta the younger brother that I never had.

The plan was to goof around in the shop, drink beer, bitch about our old co-workers, shoot guns, and play World of Warcraft together again - not all at the same time.

My employer made it to day three before I was asked to come in off vacation and help out :( So we lost one day out of the five. Could have been worse, I suppose.

Day one was brew day. I had ordered a liquid malt extract brew kit, so we set up outside the shop and brewed a batch of Blue Moon clone, with an added quart of honey for more fermentables. By the following day, the yeast were happy in their new home, and turning the sugars into alcohol.

Below: Brew kit with flavor-adding grains and spices, silvery bags of liquid malt extract, and a green pouch containing hops.

Below: A big jug of honey I had on hand that got thrown in as well.

Below: Stirring the syrupy wort as it comes up to boiling. You can't let it scorch at the bottom.

Below: Happy yeast. In a few weeks, it will have a happy home in my stein.

The following day was a tour of the power plant.

After that, we returned home and just for fun, nickel-plated a key that my friend uses on his vintage coke machine. I had told him to bring along something small to nickel-plate that wouldn't matter much if we messed it up. It turned out pretty well.

My friend is a big-time gearhead. He restored a '57 Chevy Bel Aire and set it up as a driver/drag racer.

Lifting the front tire up on a 4000lb car isn't easy.

I asked him what he thought about the old 1960 F100 truck. So he looked it over and said "I bet we can get it to run". To which I said "This year?", and he replied "No, Today."

Step 1 was determining where all the crazy ad-hoc wiring was really supposed to go. A guy who turned a beat-up '57 into a hot rod has a better idea of where to start than I do. It all looks really sketchy to me.

He got up under the dash, where I'd never bothered to look, and informed me that there had been a wiring fire, and that the wiring harness has to be replaced. :( He said that's pretty typical for a project vehicle. He recommended replacing the burned up wiring harness with a modern one made for this specific truck, and so I placed one on order. Already into the project $1000, and it doesn't even run yet. LOL.

Fortunately, the only thing under the dash that currently is connected to 12 volt power is the ignition switch - probably because all the other wiring is fused together. It looks like one wire was added later on, just to get the engine to run. This truck probably only ran during daylight hours. It definitely had no brake lights, turn signals, or headlights. Just enough electrical to get the engine to run - ignition, starter, and the electric fuel pump.

We trekked down to the local auto supply store, and I bought an inexpensive battery. I also purchased 10ft of fuel line. The truck smells like foul gasoline, and I assumed that we would have to use fresh gas from a small container.

Below: The only thing on this truck that actually works. The battery box is corroded too :(

Below: As-found electric fuel pump. Note the orange wire nut on the upper right. I added that, because the fuel pump's hot lead was bare wires twisted together. Maybe stuff like that is the reason there had been an electrical fire under the dash?

Anyhow, the fuel pump did not run when we applied power to it. I wasn't surprised, because the fuel pump didn't work previously. A few years ago, my wife's uncle (who I suspect did most of the modifications) insisted that I start it up. He kept telling me to crank it, and the entire time I kept telling him that I hadn't heard the fuel pump working. That's why I'd bought a cheap fuel pump from Amazon a while back.

The plan was to power up this new pump, put the suction into a small can of fresh gasoline, and see if the truck would start with the new battery. So we cranked the engine over for about 15 seconds with the ignition coil de-energized - to get oil up to the top end (valves, rockers, camshaft) without actually starting the engine.

Then we re-connected the ignition, powered up the new fuel pump, while taking suction from a small gas container. I brought my wife out to the shop - because this truck belonged to her grandfather - and asked her to start it. It cranked and cranked and cranked, but never fired - nothing. Not even an attempt at a kick.

At that point I broke out the starting ether - AKA "consent in a can", AKA "Bill Cosby". This time, while the wife cranked the engine over, I sprayed a stream of Cosby into the carburetor. Damned if the neglected little engine didn't fire and come to life! It sounded pretty good too - seemed to be hitting on all the cylinders! It was a pretty joyful moment, to be sure.

Since it ran on ether, it was pretty clear that - at a very minimum - the carburetor's fuel filter was plugged. Sure enough, the fuel filter was full of rust and completely blocked. So was the fitting on the carburetor body that the filter screws into.

Below: More rust blocking the carburetor inlet - after the filter was removed.

At this point, it was pretty clear that the entire carburetor needed to be cleaned out. Once the cover was off, it was obvious why fuel was not getting to the engine. These things contain several tiny orifices, and these were all clogged with rust and varnish left behind from years of evaporated gasoline. He cleaned them out with some welding tip cleaners, and lots of carb cleaner spray.

Meanwhile, I drained gallons and gallons of nasty, nasty gas from the old truck's fuel tank. This was not a pleasant task, because I could only drain about a gallon at a time from beneath the vehicle into an oil pan. When the pan got full and it was time to block or unblock the fuel line, stinky awful gas would run down my forearms, and over time it burned the skin. Also I wasn't keen on being underneath a truck surrounded by, and inhaling flammable vapors.

In the end, I drained about seven gallons (26 liters) of skunky gas. Now I have to figure out what to do with that waste. Hopefully the county waste transfer station has a disposal facility for it. I'd hate to have to go to the trouble of flaring it all.

The fuel tank on this truck sits behind the bench seat, and that tank is going to be removed permanently. Instead I'll be getting a tank relocation kit and installing it between the frame rails behind the rear axle. A much safer location. It's not going to run on gas without replacing the carburetor, and if I'm doing that, it's getting a 4 barrel.

I have digressed about the truck. I thought it was interesting seeing how a serious vintage car guy figures out how to a vehicle in unknown condition running.

Back to "vacation". I had to go into work for an entire day to help out with an offline compressor wash.

The compressor is on the left side of this rotor - in a different power plant.

Filtered air is brought into the inlet of the gas turbine. This air is compressed from left to right on the above image. Each stage compresses air a few psig until at the discharge, you have a tremendous volume of air that is continuously forced into the combustor at about 200 psig (14 bar).

Unfortunately, no air filtration process is 100% efficient, so over time, particles of dirt, soot, and volatile compounds coat these beautiful shiny blades. It turns them black, and worse, causes a loss of compressor efficiency. Losing one psi of pressure at the compressor discharge causes about 1 MW loss of power output.

The guy below was cleaning the inlet of the compressor. A legit hero.

My part of the process was to make sure all the valves were in the correct position for the wash, disconnect instrumentation, connect drain fittings, and ensure the correct quantity of soap was added, ensure the soap was properly rinsed out afterwards, and get everything exactly back to normal before re-starting the turbine.

Below: Temporary drain hoses (black) connected to the drain manifold (center bottom) from the low points in the compressor.

Below: After the wash. Every surface in this image was jet black before the compressor was washed. We picked up 8 Megawatts of output after the wash.

I stuck around for the first portion of the start-up, until the night shift crew arrived. Then I needed to go home and de-grease. I was pretty filthy. After that, it was World of Warcraft time with my buddy because I was too sore and tired for anything else.

The following day was pretty chill - we did a brief road trip to the Cabinet Gorge dam. They have a Kaplan hydro turbine rotor on display. I had no idea how much erosion these things experience. Probably due to cavitation in the low-pressure areas.

Below: Erosion on the edge of the turbine blade.

Below: Case hardening along the trailing edge of one blade. You see a lot of this sort of thing on earth moving equipment, where a layer of very hard material is welded onto a softer (and less expensive) material beneath.

It's a beautiful dam, with a beautiful view downstream.

And of course, we had to go to the range and blast a few holes in targets. I'd recently added a scope to the little rifle, and we had a good time sighting it in.