Youtube comments of SeanBZA (@SeanBZA).

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  2. Numitron backing is grey because RCA used what they had in spades, the sheet steel with aluminium coat that was used to make anodes and internal structures for thermionic tubes, and this was proven to survive the glass sealing and gettering operations. Thus they used the standard tools they had in the tube plant, the flat anode sheet, slightly formed to be a stiff backing, and punched out the holes needed to hold the filaments. Then used the technology they had to make glass beads with wire in them, and sealed those into the holes, making the filament supports, and then simply used a flat section of that steel wire that was bent over to hold a length of thoriated filament wire, also a common item in the tube shop. Length and diameter calculated for the brightness needed at the applied voltage, and then simply placed in location, the ends folded over, then spot welded together to trap the tungsten wire under slight tension. Then at the rear spot welds to a lead frame attached to a standard off the shelf 9 pin glass base, and you have the complete unit. Glass top attached, and then evacuated with the standard roughing pump, and as a bonus because of the low voltage, and no need to maintain an ultra low vacuum, the roughing pump and the heat sealing of the tube is all that is needed to operate, no need for a getter to be installed, and no need to flash it, just a RF heating during sealing to get a high vacuum, then seal. Incidentally there were small versions made, the same size as your common 7 segment LED displays, and they were very popular, as they ran off 5V, and interfaced with logic. They worked best using CD4049/50 CMOS level shifting buffers, as those would source or sink 50mA no problem. Using a buffer/inverter per lamp, and a BCD decoder or counter per digit allowed those displays to be bright, and as bonus you could also use the blanking input on the drivers to use PWM to dim them. Project to replace those displays with LED ones worked, just that it really did not drop display current use, it was still 5A of current at 5V, though it was good in that at least you had a display that now was available, using a tiny HP 7 segment red display. Do one conversion and you had 16 numitron displays to use to fix others, so we only converted 3 boards to the LED version. Biggest problem was the resistor value selected was too low, so the LED displays were running way too bright, so had to be dimmed. Rather than destroying the cordwood board made to fit them, I simply used 2 6A silicon diodes in the common line, to drop the voltage seen by the LED displays down from 5V to 3V8, which made them dim to exactly match the old displays. Those 2 diodes were hard to fit in the limited space left on the display board. Users liked the new crisp displays, the bright version got complaints that it was so bright it was unreadable at night with dark adapted sight, and it lit up the entire cockpit. Display dimming had to match the other display, and that board used unijunction transistors, and had a disconcerting habit of the power transistor unsoldering itself from the wire leads, it ran so hot. Base lead unsolders itself, transistor is still conducting, runs hotter and lamp blows. Select spare lamp and it also blows, unless enough time for transistor to cool below 200C junction temperature. Would have been nice to have had some of the more modern mosfets that can handle 50A, but not at the age of that design.
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  7. Grey coating is an insulator, to prevent circulating currents through the bearings from any slight imbalance in magnetic field in the motor. there is a single bearing that is grounded ( the shiny one) to prevent charge build up on the rotor and a flash over to the frame, but the rest have to be insulated so they do not have a shorted turn through the frame that can cause a high circulating current through the bearings that rapidly erodes them through arcing. There are current paths for this current via things like the output shafts and the selector forks, but they probably assumed that, being long thin wall section steel assemblies, this long path would both keep the current low enough not to cause any major extra wear, and also the long output shaft would be mostly self cancelling field wise as well. A lot of larger electric motors handle this with one end having coated bearings, or they make them with ceramic bearing balls inside, or just make both sides with insulated bearing mounting frames, and provide a grounding carbon brush assembly to handle shaft grounding. Drawback of the coated bearing is that you have to ensure that there is absolutely no damage to the coating on the outside and the side facing the frame, so that there is no metal to metal path. However, depending on the exact coating applied, this coat can be both insulating and tougher than the steel of the bearing itself. grey would point to a spray on ceramic coating, probably vacuum deposited before final bearing assembly or applied as a plasma coating.
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  8. The thing about the photography side was that the ultra fast gas switches were not used to fire the Xenon flash, which, for the technology of the time, was easy to do, using a simple high voltage pulse that ionised the gas in the Xenon flash tube at the cathode end. The big thing was they had to actually only fire the tube for a very brief period, so as to only have this very short burst of very bright light, so that the motion of the aircraft would not blur the image. Thus the need to develop a device that would be able to turn on very fast, and also handle a massive current pulse, so as to dump all the charge in the capacitor bank used to provide energy to light the flash tube, so as to drop the voltage across the flash tube (at this time it would be dropping from the 400V or so initial voltage, to the cut off point of around 60V, where the tube itself would start to slowly cut off due to the arc voltage being below the voltage needed to keep it on, slowly being in the order of tens of microseconds) to close to zero, and thus ensure it has a sharp cut off. Most devices at the time would either not last more than a single use, or would not have the fast response needed. This device was the original gas thyratron, and the need for fast ones meant they made them with a hydrogen gas fill, with early ones filled with neon being both slow, and too low an operate voltage. Hydrogen gave the needed high voltage stand off needed, and because it is light, it also ionised very fast, giving the very rapid current path build up, in the order of nanoseconds from fully off to fully on. This has led to them being now an export controlled device, and to this day an item that is still made, on the original tube lines, by some specialist companies in the USA, as the US military needs them for operational parts, and, because of the hydrogen gas fill being able to penetrate almost all seals with ease, a part that has a very limited shelf life of around 2 years, before you need to either replace or rebuild it. Neither are cheap either. You can test it at lower current, and do all your qualification at this level, as full power operation you only have around 5 uses, before it degrades to the point it is no longer usable. Selling them is ITAR restricted, as heavily as any part can be, because of the one use case, so there have been a few attempts to steal the technology. These days you still find it hard to get the same power delivery with small volume, it really is a part that is perfect in it's application. But you can do it, with modern high power semiconductors from specialist companies, with corresponding exotic semiconductor compounds, and prices that make the gold used to plate them the cheapest cost in production. Incidentally the bridge wires also underwent massive changes, from simple thin wires, to the modern ones, mass produced using semiconductor wafer processes, to make thin film metal alloy strips that are precisely controlled in shape, composition and dimension, so that all of them are as close to atomically identical as possible. The difference in timing between them is in the order of picoseconds, they are that identical.
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  18.  @alexanderkupke920  Jet A1 is kerosene that has been dewaxed, removing all the longer chain molecules, so that it will not turn to slush at -40C in the aircraft fuel tanks. The wax that is removed is further classified by melting point, so you get soft waxes that melt around 40C or lower, often sold as Vaseline or petroleum jelly, and harder waxes that melt around 70C, which are used to make candles, and as a base for many cosmetics and shoe polish. Higher melting point waxes are also used in industrial applications for various things. Diesel oil is very close to paraffin or kerosene, just has a somewhat less and slightly different range of melting and boiling points and density. To further confuse things you also have Rocket kerosene, which is a very highly refined Jet A1, that is designed not to freeze till around -100C, and which also has even less wax in it. In general you can run the diesel vehicle on kerosene, but it will run poorly, as diesel has additives in it to lubricate the fuel system, which is needed, plus the wax will tend to clog fuel lines and injectors as it flows through and undergoes local cooling. Same for a jet engine, which will run on diesel, though it will smoke heavily, as the fuel is not being fully burnt before it leaves the combustion chamber. Run a modern GDI engine on kerosene and it will very quickly fail, but older mechanical injection engines do not care, and will run on diesel, kerosene, Jet A1 or even vegetable oil, provided you can get it liquid enough to flow through the pump. Lamp oil can be also a blend, with it consisting of a mix of kerosene, diesel and even lighter oils and benzene to make it light easier, and also can have aromatic oils added to it to have an odour other than the distinct one.
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  23. DC does not allow smaller cables, it just means you can use the cable at the rated voltage, and do not need to make allowance for the crest factor of the cable. While this is useful on HVDC (150kV or higher) power lines, where you get 40% more power transmitted, for the same current, and the same peak voltage, it makes absolutely no difference for lower voltages, or for anything that is going to be common in industry or homes, where your standard house wire in use has a 1kV rating. But it is never run even close to this, the only place where you run regular cable at higher voltage is in tunnels, where the supply for lighting and fans is typically 700VAC, as that is a big increase in power transmitted down the tunnel, for the same diameter cable, over using the standard 400VAC 3 phase supplies they normally use. Allows use of standard industrial cables and fittings, rated for 1kV, and also means they can put nearly double the load into the tunnel for lighting and fans, as they now just use either local autotransformers, to provide the local run, or have motors wound for 700VAC operation instead. Saves a lot of money if you do not need to make the tunnel 1m wider, to get the high voltage cables in and still provide the required separation, and also the need to dig big equipment rooms to house the big transformers, as opposed to simply running the cables on the walls, or under the road bed, where they are well protected, plus your control gear is almost all mostly off the shelf of Schneider or ABB, and not too much that needs custom manufacture and certification, as the regular switchgear is already rated in the most part for 1kV use under the Low Voltage directive, Low Voltage here referring to power distribution under 1000V. DC is common, just that it is typical in Telecoms, where you get a lot of equipment that runs off a nominal -48VDC rail, based on old telephony battery bus voltages, and it is also common in large industrial equipment with a lot of inverter drives, where they use a DC bus to connect all the inverter units, so that energy recovered from the one unit as it slows down a motor can be used by others to power them, instead of being dumped as heat in a brake unit. there you find 400VDC, 600VDC as common bus voltages. However a big issue is fault protection, as DC rated breakers, fuses and disconnects are quite a lot more expensive and larger over the same rating AC units, as the AC units have no need to break an arc, as it is naturally going to be extinguished twice per cycle, so all the unit has to do is prevent it from striking again, unlike DC units, which actually have to cool it down till it goes and stops, by no longer being able to ionise air. DC you can pull a very large arc, while AC it tends to go out easily. Look up the people doing welding using only solar panels in the sun, nothing else, and that they can draw pretty big arcs out of them, along with solar panel fires that only stop when the sun goes down, or the panels burn out completely.
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  60. Duracell also made blister packs of cells with the tester in, as discussed. The resistive element is actually screen printed conductive ink, which is based on silver powder, in a carrier based on printing ink, screen printed onto the plastic sheet, and then this thin sheet was dried, and the back had the thermochromic ink screen printed onto it, followed by the top layer being thermally bonded, to make a 2 layer sheet with the tester in it. Then the paper insulator was applied, pre punched out for the gap where the thermal heater needed insulation, and the one hole for the switch, the cutting die finishing separating the paper from it's supply roll. This was then punched out, and applied to the large sheet of battery label on the adhesive side, so you had a large self adhesive label, that had a release side applied, and this again got partly cut out, to leave the battery sleeve on the backing layer, excess being weeded off automatically. Then slit into working rolls, and applied on the line. Very complex, and needing lots of precision sharp cutting dies, so no wonder they decided the much higher cost and complexity per cell was not worth it. Thus the shift instead to use almost the same test unit, just with 2 strips of adhesive on the top, to the blisters, saving a lot of money, as you only had one per 4,6,8 or 10 cells. Then cost was cut again, and with all the assorted contract manufacturers not wanting to pay the cost, they went back to just labeling generic cells off a random production line, as Duracell is now nothing but a brand name applied to whatever generic cell was the cheapest quote to make a few hundred million cells, no quality required as they are running off name recognition. After all, no longer will they replace or repair equipment damaged by leaking batteries, they will only pay you a voucher for the cost of a new set, if you pay to ship the leaking batteries to them, at your own cost.
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  70. Funny enough, I did once jump start a helicopter, which had a battery that had run down due to the DC bus being turned on overnight so the security guards could use the aircraft radio to listen to broadcast FM. Helped that I did my apprenticeship on that model, and knew the entire electrical system, and also the pitfalls that could occur with them running the battery down, and what to look for. Ground power unit and the ground power connection, start the ground power unit and power up the DC bus, and they press start. Low current, the ground support unit is designed to supply 8kA at 28VDC, and this little turbo barely made it to 400A during start, so after a half minute of idle, pulled the cable ( only way, there is no disconnect other than a sense contact on the plug), waited another 5 minutes at idle to see if the battery was not going to go into thermal runaway, it was still cold so gave them a clearance to take off back. As well used another ground support unit to jump an ambulance that had waited 6 hours for the casevac to get there, with lights on, and there had to grab jumper leads to make the link between the connector and the battery. those lights went very bright on 28V instead of 24, and that ammeter needle did not even budge off the zero during the very very vigorous starting. As to the LRV batteries being used to fire the ascent stage probably no issue, the batteries certainly were the same chemistry, they used a similar enough voltage. The major issue was the disconnection, as the LRV batteries would stay behind, and the ascent stage needed power to keep the valving operational, so they designed the systems to get you power from an alternate set of ascent batteries if the main ones failed, but use batteries on the ascent stage. You could not have kept the mass centre stable if you used the LRV battery pack and carried it with, no real space to place it (otherwise they would have had equipment or battery pack there already) and also it would move the mass centre from the engine bell outside the ability of the RCS system to compensate for the eccentricity. Silver Zinc batteries are heavy, and are only used in space applications because they are so reliable and tolerant to abusive temperatures and charge and discharge use, unlike the modern lithium chemistries. Thus you can have a smaller battery pack for the same high current draw, and not have to worry too much about it cycling from -100C to +200C every orbit.
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  85.  @gregx5096  Electronic office consumed more CPU mostly in polling between keypresses, so as to give a more typewriter feel to the user, unlike engineering where you submit a batch job, which does use 100% of the CPU time, but only for a small slice of the overall time, and then releases the CPU. Contrast that to the electronic office, which needs hundreds of context switches a second to process any input, and generate output, so a hundred times a second the single CPU has to context switch, allocate the time in context switch to a user account, clear the memory by writing to disk storage, and then bring in the stored state of the electronic office user, write to main memory, restore all the CPU pointers, and then jump to the next instruction it was to execute before the scheduler triggered the task switch interrupt. Thus 100 times a second perhaps 1 millisecond of task swapping, for a user time of perhaps another millisecond to process the character typed in and update the screen, then another millisecond of swapping back to the task scheduler to run the next multiuser job. Nearly a third of user time spent in this one application, while the compute job is a single job, that is likely flagged as low priority, so is run during the night, when the multi user system is not running any real time jobs needing that level of time resolution, so can run it for 10 seconds at a time, switch back, and see there is nothing to run, and give it another 10 seconds of run time till complete. Difference is multitasking with high resolution, versus big chunks of time, as likely the overnight jobs are all large data jobs, but they can all run at any time, no need for precise3 scheduling.
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  110. Thing is that there is an oil level sensor there at the bottom of the pan. Measures oil level before the starter is engaged to start it on the first cycle of starting, then displays on the display oil level. With stop start the sensor only operates during initial start, disabled if the start is too fast. However it does not work well in operating engine, due to the oil splashing and foaming, or if there is glitter in there, though it also has oil contamination sensing (check oil for conductivity, conductive oil either is water condensed there, or very carboned up oil) built in. Likely is the owner ignored the oil level warnings, just got in and thrashed the cold engine, and also likely did not bother doing any servicing, leading to the oil being contaminated, and also being used up in blowby into the inlet. So drove it till the oil pressure warning came on, and the vehicle ECM refused to allow engine starting. Then turned off and saw the low oil warning, so dumped in a full 5 quarts of oil, which was still low, so added another 5 quarts of oil, as again no dipstick, but now oil level warning is off. Then proceeded to drive it, and as the knocking grew worse, figured that they are well under water with the likely cost of replacing the engine ( JLR not going to rebuild a engine doing the macarena at idle for sure), plus likely still owing around half the original purchase price, but now it is valued at scrap metal rate of 2c a kilo as mixed. So decided to instead slam on the anchors on the highway, and be given a love tap from the rear, in the hopes insurance will scrap the vehicle, settle the loan, and they come out owing nothing, and with still good credit score, or at least not any worse credit score. Hope they did not get that payout, and the driver that hit them was in possession of a dashcam, or that a witness got this on dashcam.
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  124.  @stevekaczynski3793  Was at night, he was actually going to bomb a factory he had been going past before the war, as he lived in Hamburg for a while. Were it not that he was a British Colonial citizen, and was in Liverpool in August 1939, he would have landed up in the Wermacht instead, or have been declared an "undesirable". He escaped from his intended fate of concentration camp thanks to the nurses at the hospital, who got him and his co pilot a complete set of SS uniform and helped him plan the escape. Blanket knotted up and thrown through the window, and they walked out the door late one Friday night, and "borrowed" the Kommandant's Adler, while he was in Berlin at a party. Drove like the clappers for the Swiss border, and because the car had SS flags and registration none of the patrols and road blocks even had them slow down before they went through. He was still, till he died, not welcome back in Switzerland, as he had belted a police man there, to prevent being sent back across the border without questions. Broke his nose, spilt ink on his uniform ,so landed up in jail and before a judge to prove he was a POW, as he spoke perfect German and English. They took a week to get confirmation that he was actually "missing in action, presumed dead", and got a detailed desription from the squadron CO as to distinguishing features, including his tatoo's. He was very thankful for the Austrian doctors and nurses who put him back together, more broken bones than intact. He did visit the hospital in the 1980's (now a hotel) and saw the room he had been in, and regaled the staff about how he had last been there.
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  127. Divide by 2 works because there is not enough time to process the LED drive in the time available. So halving the number of times, but still running in sync, will give enough time to output the data and still be above 30FPS. A thing to try is to have a loop in main running all the time, that simply times the revolution time , counting up the number of interrupts to say 254, and also using a hardware timer to get a clock, that is the number of clock cycles (probably will need a prescaler so that you have a counter with lsb being a few microseconds) taken to run, and then that adjusts the count timer to the new value per revolution. Now you no longer have to use interrupt from the fan, instead you use another counter that is counting down, and giving a software interrupt that runs the LED flash. This counter gets updated every 254 counts of the main timing loop, to be a time that will give the right number of cycles as blades per revolution. Should then run that code and still not exceed the time between interrupts. With a 9 bladed loop probably can get away with having it run 3 times per revolution as well, leaving more time to have that ADC routine run to read the pot, convert into a PWM value between 64 and 256, and set a PWM for the fan speed control as well. Going to be tricky, now we need at least 3 separate 16 bit hardware counters, but there should be enough in the ESP32 to handle it, though pin assignment will be tricky as some may not be easy to route, and you might need to actually have one or two actually go out and in again, but should be workable, as after all you do have a very fast core there. Not easy on a 8088, but doable, and there you can always add in extra counters till you run out of IO space, but you got entire message displays that ran with software running the multiplexing, on a 4.77MHz part, and they did not flicker except during scrolling, running low on memory because they only had a whole 2k of memory in there, plus another 2k of battery backed Dallas SRAM for the actual messages, which had 32 bytes for the RTC as well. Plus a thermometer that pretty much always showed that the CPU and board were getting well cooked, as the sensor was right next to the linear regulators.
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  159. You can see a skirt on the base, so likely it was lowered onto the stand and sat on the skirt. Then they likely used multiple clamps to hold the skirt to the stand. Most likely is that one or more of the clamps either were not tight, or the bolts had been machined undersize, leaving not enough thread engagement, or only a part of the thread was engaged. Then the thrust snapped those, and the others that held tore the skirt loose, which accounts for the damage, as that skirt likely also damaged the engine bells as they rose up past the stand centre, and either bent them or fractured them. Bent ones got hot spots that later on failed, and the cracked ones were losing lots of cooling fuel till the uncooled areas melted away, and caused that engine to shut down because controller saw dropping thrust. Then the remaining engines were slammed to 110% to compensate, and this extra stress meant that one of the dented ones split open, and the parts blown off into the plenum damaged piping and such on others, and also likely destroyed the guidance controls, as it did not recover. Thus the big black cloud of burning fuel and hydraulic fluid, and bits of engine rich exhaust. Controller saw thrust was dropping on those engines, or pressures were dropping and flow rates were running wild, and shut off them, trying to correct attitude with the others by throttling them back and trying to correct with steering the remaining engines, and then it went horizontal. It probably detected a launch abort, and attempted to blow the destruct charges. Of course, seeing as this is a test firing, those likely were not fitted, just had the test bypass units in place, to pass the regular self test cycle.
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  194. Thing is that they literally have the glue bond inside out, as the ring should have had an internal structure as well, to transfer the compression force from the carbon fibre to the inner titanium ring via the epoxy, not put a tensile pull on the epoxy join. That would lead to the carbon fibre delaminating with pressure cycles, and failing. They constructed that join surface as if the join was for a pipe with pressure inside, where the pressure will hold the epoxy onto the cap, not the other way round. Pipe shrank under pressure, and eventually some microscopic section of the join, likely with an embedded air bubble in it that had been compressed to have a sharp edge, caused a stress that started to propagate through the bulk resin, because there is no stress relief in the resin bond, and this then eventually grew to the outside, where water was able to fill the crack. Now the water is applying pressure to a section that can flex, and grows the crack into the joint further, aided by the tension in the epoxy join, and this then rapidly, basically the speed of sound in the epoxy as the growth speed, grew to open the joint to the inside. That joint should have had an inner and outer lip, and have been filled with epoxy with a slow cure time, and then have the shell pressed down into it, also with a coat of the epoxy on the surfaces, and then pressed together, with a few vent holes for the excess resin to flow out in the titanium, that later on would have a cap bolted and bonded to it. Or a thicker section that you put a setscrew in to fill the hole, while the resin is still not cured, after it has bottomed out, then left and heated to cure fully before removing the pressure. That join section should have been at least 3 times thicker, and longer, with a taper on the inside to allow a flexible sealer to be there, to allow the join to flex with pressure, not a solid non flex epoxy only. you want to not have stress risers, and a solid join with the different materials will have that stress riser. This hull was likely only going to last 3 cycles before you would have to replace it, they should have done testing, using a deep water area, and a cable and cage, to measure the number of cycles to failure first, not used the passengers as alpha testers.
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  196. So familiar that cockpit layout, though there are definite variations between operators, and you get a whole host of things that are upgraded differently, but a lot of those instruments and displays are common between them, and the later versions of the Mirage as well. That NAV computer is also I would think, if original equipment, all electromechanical, using a whole collection of electromechanical boxes in the nose and belly to do the calculations, using the inputs from the centrally mounted Air data computer, behind the pilot and under a fuel tank. not a fun thing to change out, so you would find every other part of the system changed out first to troubleshoot a failure on the ATE systems. Moving map as well a blend of electronic systems and mechanical intricate parts, to be able to both have a film cassette with the desired areas of interest on them ,in multiple resolutions, along with being able to move the entire cassette in both X and Y directions in the particular frame, along with rotating the entire film cassette mechanism to allow the pilot to have a moving map display that faithfully represented the view outside. I helped repair a lot of those things, with the 12V 250W halogen bulb that delighted in burning out, and killing the driver circuit, so the pilot would select the spare bulb and not have a display other than a half second flash. We were using a lot of the old nav computer arrays as spare parts, the computer having been replaced with an all electronic inertial guidance system, which was both smaller, more reliable, but definitely equally power hungry. A lot of common synchro units in all the mechanical systems, and a whole host of the parts were FRU's and plugged in. That Cyrano RADAR is not at all bad, but by modern standards very dated, but still for the time it was designed, well capable for the limitations of the envelope. Well worth the modern upgrades though, you got so much more out, like a CRT display.
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  245. One reason they have not replaced them with LED is that they are old controllers, and thus also have old conflict monitors, which are there to monitor all the lights, so that no fault can cause the light to show go on cross directions at all, any fault that might do that will cause the conflict monitor to disconnect the controller and go to a flashing red all round as a safe indication of it being a 4 way stop. Old controllers are there till they run out of spare parts or the pile of others removed from service, and will only be replaced with new controllers when the old ones are out of stock completely. Newer controllers can have LED drive as standard, but are difficult to retrofit to the old controller, as they probably are from the 1980's, where the controller also had current sensing that allowed remote monitoring of lamp failure, allowing non reported lamp failures to be repaired without having to have a monthly check on all lamps by a crew, and also this showed the relays were working correctly, giving a backup for the conflict monitor. Had this happen here, where the last 2 Automotor mechanical controllers were replaced eventually with Siemens controllers, hope the old controllers were kept for the transport museum though. On some of the controllers they had to add "cheater" lamps in the controller case to provide enough load to make the controller and conflict monitor happy with LED loads, but as almost all the controllers also had lamp soft start built in the lamp life of 8k hours was more like 20k hours as they were either kept slightly powered by a low current or had soft start resistors to keep inrush current low. If the municipality wanted to save money they could also just get by replacing the red and green lights with LED, leaving the orange as incandescent, as the 5 second on time per cycle is really low power overall, but red and green are the major power draw. Plus the burst of heat in amber helps to keep the snow off, though here, where the last time snow fell was millions of years ago, extra heat is not exactly needed. Have seen LED clusters showing 2 colours on the same pole, then a 30 second flash as conflict tripped and made it all flash red, before cycling back again to normal for the rest of the timing cycle, and then rinse and repeat.
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  250. The highest power user in modern processors is just the distribution of various clock signals around the die, with more than half of the active power being used to drive clock signals that are used to latch the assorted logic systems. that is why there is so much research in cutting clock supply to any unused parts, even if only for a single clock cycle, not running that clock for say half of the individual ALU of a core, which for a cycle or two is not actively doing work, means a big power saving. Even the bus latches that are tri stated and not actively driving an internal bus will benefit from not having the internal latching clock, almost always there to latch the internal state before delivering it out, being turned off as well. That along with non clocked logic that relies on propagation delays to provide a smooth execution path, are all things done to reduce power use. If you want crazy look at how small cheap chips generate their internal clocks, using an evolved set of logic that, due to quantum interactions between gates supposedly not connected, makes for a clock system that both self starts, does not use large areas of silicon to make RC systems, the old approach, but instead becomes a VLSI macroblock of literal magic that you drop in from the EDA tool, designed for that exact process, that will magically spit out a clock with a reasonably constant frequency, and which is all within 5% on all chips, good enough to use to run say USB devices with no need for the 11MHz crystal normally used to allow the communications to take place, using the internal clock to start up, and then having another clock derived from the signalling to talk back.
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  286. One major advantage of the single speed compressor is reliability, the inverter is a simpler 3 phase motor yes, but unfortunately it has a very big drawback in the inverter driving it is in general built down to a price point. 3 phase motor in industry is the most reliable thing around, when it comes to turning electricity into motion, and will last essentially decades with zero maintenance. Sadly the inverter that drives it is not, and is the thing most likely to fail, after the internal fans used to blow air inside the case, so that the coils and defrost mechanism can be hidden behind a cover so the buyer does not get confused by al this technology stuff. I see all manufacturers loudly proclaim the compressor itself has a 10 year or more warranty on it, in large letters, but in the much smaller print at the back of the manual, there in the 1pt flyspec font they use for all the writing in the "warranty" section, you find this covers only the compressor motor and the pump attached to it, in the hermetic housing. Not the piping, not the case, not the controls or the expensive ( single most expensive part in the unit, as the manufacturers will only sell this as a set with a brand new compressor as service spare) inverter board. Compressor only, and not if it rusts through from the outside, because it condensed water in the off time, and it pooled at the bottom of the case and rusted off the mounting ears. Changed way too many AC compressors under warranty for failing, and those had a 5 year warranty, and I was, due to painting the case inside and outside every year, and cleaning the coils as they corroded, plus good record keeping, able to actually get those warranty claims held up. The supplier did not care, I was buying shedloads of other spare parts in the interim, along with new units on a regular basis. Indoor compressor run in a calm environment I would never change it, but these were all outside in the sun and rain. Fridges and freezers they were never worth repairing once the gas circuit needed anything, at least for the last 20 years, where as before you had separate coils inside and out, that are repairable, even if they are steel or aluminium.
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  299. Major driver was cost of licence. Sony had a per machine royalty, while JVC was a lot less worried, with both much lower costs and a lot less actual chasing up, so that manufacturers would look up the cost of making a machine design, and choose the cheaper option and make VHS. As well the actual mechanics were easier to make, quite a few clone manufacturers could do the entire machine easily enough, but only found the head drum assembly too difficult, so resorted to buying them as spare parts for larger brands. Did drive Matsushita crazy for a while IIRC, with the number of head drums they were selling to the repair market, till they finally found out why, and probably started offering them as a ready to use part instead, getting in an extra profit for essentially already paid for production capacity. Then the cloners got to the point they could actually make the whole machine in house. Sony however wanted tight control, which both costs money, and also stifles innovation and changes to the mechanism, while VHS found a solution to big drums in the VHS-C with the smaller drum, faster rotation and extra heads with switching, but which left a standard azimuth track on the tape, which also was used in a few full size smaller units as well. Assorted mechanism types were to get it either smaller, lighter, cheaper, or more compact for some application. Last VHS decks I saw consumer side were essentially one single plastic injection mould of all the parts, integrated with a single sheet metal stamping, to make the deck, complete with all of the tape mounts and eject mechanisms.
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  322.  @AaronSmart.online  Ceiling fans are a definite must in the tropics and sub tropics ( so most of the EU, aside from those places around the Med, are out), and all of them I have met start off as high, medium and low. mostly because they tend to have bearing issues with time, and the bearings ( or bushings, depending on how old the fan is and who made it) will tend to become sticky with time, but so long as the fan is able to start turning they will run. Thus you start on high, to get the best chance of the bearing getting it's hydrodynamic film built up and thus reducing wear, as a slow moving bearing or bushing is going to have very high loss,, simply because of metal on metal contact. In general the fans only start to give issues when older, and often I cure it with a new capacitor, as most ceiling fans I meet are not shaded pole types, but split phase. Bearings getting stiff it is possible to lubricate them, but often the housings are pressed together, making it hard to get to them for a good repair, and the modern trend is to use that horrid CCA wire as well. The ones on my ceilings are around 20 years old, and still work well. The smaller fans almost all are split capacitor, though the old GE fan is rather odd, in that it achieved phase rotation by having variable reluctance in the pole pieces, using thinner sections of the poles to provide a saturating magnetic field. As the field saturates it appears to shift, allowing the fan to start as the field is moving, and not just varying with time, just like the shaded pole does, but without the need for the copper shorting coils to bring about the field saturation in the motor. higher starting torque simply because there is no circulating current in the pole pieces, so more energy available to induce a rotor current, plus the rotor is skewed, so there is a bias as to start direction built in. Yes 230VAC country, currently ( amazingly) 233.2 VAC , though it can go up to 247VAC at times, but after they replaced the 90 year old transformer across the park (it started leaking from the base valve, so went for repair instead of just a new valve) the newer one ( still around 30 years old, they are refurbished because of the cost of new ones) is set more closely to 230VAC instead of the old one being 240VAC. I lived in a place with the original 130 year old 250VAC supplies, and there cooking was great, but appliance and lamp life was not, though your lamps were extra bright. That will never change, as they would have to replace over 50 transformers at once, so keep the taps on the low side instead to meet spec for high voltage.
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  361. Probably will need around 5 times the delta V to deorbit, though of course that is also something you can do with just using a large ion engine, and a lot of fuel for it, with power being provided by the on board satellite arrays, as you would need minimal power to charge batteries as they only will have to provide orientation and 45 minutes of low draw during the night passes, and will not really need to power much in the environmental system with no people on board, do you can simply shut down and drain a lot of the systems to safe them, then keep the bare minimum like attitude control, computer systems and circulation to even out temperature. You can close all the airlocks as well, and that will reduce the need further for power. Just your booster bus will need some redundancy power wise and control wise, probably like the shuttle, 5 general purpose computers to run it, and likely some solar panels to augment power, and also a lot of RCS fuel for attitude control. Easy to do if you have 2 of them one each end, and thus taking turns in providing thrust in orbit to raise it, and slowly over say a year getting up to a relatively open orbit. To get past LEO will take about as much ion engine fuel though as what you can fit into a Falcon 9 heavy payload fairing, as a single large cryogenic tank, so you probably will want to make the tank emulate the fairing and take it to orbit, it will save weight using the fairings as structural and insulation instead of discarding them. Would say 4 F9 heavy launches will get the lot up there, with 2 separate orbit lifter units and tanks, and then probably a final set of spacewalks to provide connection to them so they can share fuel and power
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  409. My father was doing a delivery flight years ago with a C47, and at one of his scheduled stops ( well was the last one for that particular trip) he came in to land, and half way down the, what he thought was newly tarred runway (it was on the schedule for doing "real soon"), he hit a pothole in the water, as it was not tar he saw at the approach in the evening, but heavy rain earlier the day had resulted in flooding. The pothole resulted in the one landing leg detaching, so he made the decision to lift the remaining gear, as he was too slow to go around, plus would have an issue still with only one landing gear. Thus the plane duly belly flopped, both props went and bent, and he skidded to a halt in a spray of water, right at the terminal building, just as the duty ATC came out of the pub to fire a read flare. None of the passengers actually noticed, even though they had, when boarding the morning, needed to use a set of stairs, but alighting merely stepped down into the mud. He called the airline, and the next morning there was another C47 flying up, loaded with a crew of mechanics, 2 propellers, the requisite jacks, tools and one undercarriage leg, plus some money to pay for their being there a week. Replacement plane flew the passengers on, and left the repair crew there to do the repairs, and the plane, arrived, a week late. Tough planes those. My last flight on one was also interesting, in that the landing gear did not show locked, so there were some rather interesting minutes with the door open, and me and the flight engineer leaning out to look under the wing, so see if the gear was down and looked locked. Faulty switch on the gear, fixed after landing, and I got back on it to carry on as well. Undoubtedly the best landing I ever had in a C47, somewhat marred by the fire truck pacing us on the runway edge, foam cannon on the ready, just in case. But, as the fuel load was about 2 minutes at the time, the fire was likely going to be survivable anyway. Just we still had the original WWII seats and belts.
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  463. The white centre is the element. The resistor is there to bleed voltage away. The sensor develops a voltage when vibrated, and the spring transfers it to the connector, and then to the ECU. The ECU will show knock, measuring the voltage developed by the sensor, reading up to 30V on the sensor for severe knock, and then adjusting to reduce it. The spring is the connection so it allows the disk to flex, as it is held in place only by the edge, and under it is a small hollow area so the brass disk can bend with the vibration, like a speaker cone. Exact same disk as is used in musical cards, held at the edge, and the voltage applied makes it flex, and produce a sound, but in reverse, the flex making a voltage. Resistor is there to bleed off DC voltage, and also so the ECU can tell the sensor is there, as the ECU applies 5V via a similar value resistor, and measures the DC voltage on the wire, to see the sensor is there, and the wire is not shorted or open. The signal is strong enough that the resistor does not interfere, you can test them with the tapping, after checking resistance is correct, by putting the meter into AC volt mode, selecting the 30VAC mode (as otherwise the meter autorange will make it display all over the place) and tapping it, where a good sensor should develop anything from 5 to 30VAC signal on impact, depending on where you tap, and also how it is held. Some of the sensors ( VW being one, but all that use a bolt through the centre are the same) are very sensitive to the bolt being the correct torque, too little and they do not work well, and too tight and the ceramic material breaks inside the housing, generating low or erratic output.
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  478. Yes, easily 2 tons of static load in each of those bathrooms, and as well all those tiled enclosures, which typically are filled with either rubble and cement, or with actual poured concrete to make them solid sounding. Easily another ton there alone, and the kitchens at least 2 tons extra in mass. Tile typically, for smaller tiles, comes as 1 square metre, or roughly 12 square feet, 12 tiles if they are a foot on a side, and come in for some of them at around 100lb per pack. Add in needing 50lb of grout to put them down per pack as well, and easily you get to 2 tons plus. Then you get the plumber needing to route pipes for drains and supply, and of course you cannot put them into the unit below, so they cut a channel through the concrete, going through all the reinforcing to get to the stack pipes. Cut and jackhammer the slot, bare steel left there without any form of treatment, and cracks all the way through the concrete. Plus stack pipes in the concrete, being from the 1970's I would say galvanised steel for the ones used to drain the roofs and balconies, and with threaded ends put together with couplers. Any pipe thread sealer would have rotted away by now, and the insides of the pipes as well, all that salt and rain scouring off the zinc, and the exposed threads rusting off the couplings, allowing water to sit in the concrete at each floor, making those columns weaker with time. Likely plenty of plumbing leaks, definitely going through floors. Would be interesting to see insurance claims for water damage over the years, seeing just how far each individual leak spread amongst units through the cracks in the floors. By me there have been some who enclosed balconies, so part was filling the floor, we insisted on engineering consult, and specified low mass fills as well, not concrete, so the majority have gone for Pratletperl, as it is a very light additive, and makes for a thick light screed to cover the thickness for the fill. Same for remodels, especially if you were doing structural changes to any walls, load bearing or not.
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  489.  @e-curb  Yes, but paying somebody to send them money, in a way that actually benefits them, in that they get the money either the same day, or next day, instead of in 14 days, is kind of stupid. It costs companies a lot of money to process cheques, in they have to collect them, so a driver is full time, or is not out actually doing other work. Then a clerk who opens the bills and enters the data, then another to handle all those to be deposited into the bank, and reconcile a while later all those RD ones, and then do the paperwork to have the account reflect, plus send the letter about the bounced cheque, which then has to be posted back, again the driver. Online payment boom, all done, saving needing 4 people full time to shuffle paper around, and then paying for archiving all that paper for 7 years, just in case there is a query. By me pretty much all bills are payable either by direct debit, or by EFT, with no charges at all to the customer, and banks have stopped accepting cheques 3 years ago, because there was too much fraud on them, and the banks were not willing to keep on losing that amount of money. You want a bank account, you open one online, or go get a gift card at many of the big stores and malls, and use that instead. But pretty much everybody, especially those on social pensions and grants, who have a free bank account from the grant agency, which is operated by one of the big banks, for free to the user, for this purpose. Easy to open an account with all banks, including virtual banks and a few nearly fully online banks, in that they actually use one or more of the large grocery chains as the branches.
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  565.  @libbylandscape3560  Very much so, because in my experience buying a fancy fridge just means it fails in 5 years, about a month after the warranty expires. There are those that tout a 10 year guarantee on the compressor, but what they do not tell you is that the cheap steel they used to make all the evaporator and condenser, buried in the polyurethane foam in the case so there is no "ugly" coils showing, will rust through after around 8 years, leading to a gas leak, and thus the compressor will die. The 10 year guarantee also only covers the motor, not the associated control board, which, as a spare part from the dealer, costs half the price of the brand new fridge you just bought, before discount, and thus after 8 years, when the compressor dies, it also takes out the board, so you are in for a bill about half the cost of the unit new, and there is no guarantee on the repairs other than a 3 month one. Even then you change compressor, and 4 months later the pipes finish rusting out, because they were disturbed by replacing the compressor, and you now have a bill again for the unit more than it originally cost, let alone the $50 it is worth at best as scrap metal. Used to be fridge compressors, at least from the 1970's till 2000, were the most reliable part of the fridge, almost never giving issues till the unit rotted out, or the case of the compressor rusted away. But around 2010 they started to cost cut, first winding the compressors for 100/200VAC operation, saving on copper wire, then changing to CCA wire, because that is a tenth the price of copper, and lasts around 10 years before failing. You used to find small motors were wound with copper, but now universally all are CCA wire, and it is used to replace copper wire everywhere, as it is cheaper, even if the price you pay is not. Just remember that that appliance, you paid $500 for in the USA, was imported, shipped all the way from China, and the manufacturer paid all the shipping and import costs, but the 50% mark up was in the USA. Also the parts were from lots of other small suppliers, so that $500 appliance actually cost under $50 from the final factory, the rest of the price is mark ups on the price, from middle dealers and profit all the way at the end. Your material cost has to come out of that $50, plus the factory costs as well, and a small profit for the actual manufacturer. Of course they make it cheaper, because the buyers for the big retailers always demand that the new price is lower each time, never mind the quality.
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  574.  @WrenchingWithKenny  You are thinking of old generators, where you can get a failed voltage relay, that allows the generator rotor to be powered all the time, and then the one winding burns out from the current, going open. Thus the draw that will, because the engine generally will shut down at a preferred set of positions, depending on the cylinders holding pressure, so that you would get that open coil in position, and no draw, or get one that still works in position and a flat battery. Alternators draw will be constant, because you have at least one shorted diode, and one leaking one, so that the stator is now always having a current flow. Leaky diodes will not be too much issue, but a leaky and a shorted one causes draw, though normally a shorted diode is nearly unnoticed, as all it does is reduce current capacity of the alternator, and the voltage regulator still controls voltage. Second failed diode kills the alternator, but before that the ones that is opposite the shorted one is getting very hot. Had that before, one shorted diode, just a power supply that is a little more grumpy. 2 shorted on the same power rail it still runs, till it gets hot enough to burn out, which was a million dollar fix to order the spares, as the transformer came as a complete unit, as the cooking would destroy the entire inside of the equipment box, and fixing was going to cost more than that in spare parts. Was standard when servicing any of them to look for faulty diodes, and replace them immediately. I had a row of failed ones, used for spare parts that had not been totally cooked, for the others. My replacement power supplies came as ordinary untracked parcel post as well, despite being the price of a half kilo of gold.
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  629. They would be 3 phase transformers, so the 6 diodes in the rectifier module would be under a lot less strain than if it was single phase. As well with 360Hz ripple current the capacitor bank ( probably rated for 800VDC and running at around 600VDC in use, using 400VAC phase voltages, as most IGBT devices are 800V rated) can be quite large, but the ripple current will be low for the power. More for riding out short mains power failures, and still having enough energy to safely brake the car string to a stop even if the power goes out totally, than to store the energy to drive it. The power required is I would guess around 500kW peak, but only in bursts, and having 2 big transformers is to have redundant network connections so one going down ( or being off for maintenance) does not stop the ride. They probably have separate rectifiers, fuses and only connect to the main DC bus via some big fuses. Smaller transformer is probably only powering the ride lights, aircons and the park area around it, not the ride direct, though it might do the control room and passage lights. Cooling fans for the ride will be powered from the big transformers, 400VAC 3 phase motors are very much more reliable than 120VAC single phase ones, and can be much smaller for the power output. You would also have associated with the ride a very large force air cooled resistor bank, to dump the power the linear motors absorb when they are used as brakes. In that control room you will have a resistor bank capable of dissipating 1MW or so of power, though it only has to do that at the end of the ride, or on emergency stop conditions. It will be direct on the DC bus, and use another big power controller ( more IGBT modules) to keep the bus voltage during braking from rising too high.
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  643. Pretty reliable, once you remember the correct operating condition for the contacts. They run best with 24V across them when open, and 20 to 100mA of current when closed, which helps by keeping the contacts free from oxide, as they wipe across each other, and this make good metal to metal contact. You get a totally different switch, with thick gold contact faces, for low level signals, such as those from the hundreds of thermocouples and platinum resistance thermometers that were used to measure temperature, and the hundreds of bridge type pressure transducers as well. Those AZ-5 switches look like they break before make, so while you operate there is a brief period where all contacts are open, so as to prevent shorts. Others will be make before break, where you do not want interruption, while say changing the range on a meter. The mirror galvanometrs are very interesting, with them not only showing up as readout, but also being a simple interface to the SKALA system to be able to input state information without needing complex extra converters, and also associated programming on them as well to set limits. Just built into the existing display, annd an easy way to show if nominal, or which way the deviation is. Likely there is a further phototransistor there that also acts to inform that the lamp has failed, and print it out for a repair operation. 28VDC lamps, run on 24VDC, probably with a series resistor as well, so as to drop voltage to around 22VDC, so leading to greatly increased lamp life. The type of lamp is classed as prefocussed beam, as the optical path is fixed in the lamp construction, so that in use no further focussing is needed during changing the lamp, as all of them are adjusted in the factory to have the filament in exactly the same orientation and plane, so you simply swap the failed lamp out, and close the panel up.
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  657. The RAM chips have a weak NMOS transistor in them, which is tied to 12V, to act as a pull up, and to also supply a low current, as it is a very small channel device, so it has a high resistance. Smaller than using a polysilicon resistor, and as a bonus when at 12V it also acts as a clamp diode to prevent overshoot. The 470R resistor is there to damp down the transmission line of all the chips together in a long row, dissipating the spikes that would otherwise drive the chip inputs into clamping to the power rail, and thus also having a chance of turning on the parasitic PNPN thyristor inherent in almost every IC. Made by the junctions used to isolate parts, and, while the transistors made in that way are very poor, they do normally have a gain a tad over 1, so the 2 PNP and NPN structures can act like a thyristor, as they will latch themselves on, shoring out the power rails, if you exceed the allowed input current, typically 100mA, but in the data sheet you will see in absolute maximum 50mA, as pretty much all will not latch up at 50mA unwanted input current into the internal protection diodes that are part of these transistors. The resistor, along with the capacitance, damps down the rise of the enable pulse, and you still see this on your DDR memory, as resistors, typically 10-33R, in tiny arrays on the address and data lines to the DDR sockets, normally 4 resistors in a tiny package, that perform this function, though a lot of the DDR chips themselves also incorporate the resistors into the die itself as well, as that improves the speed at which it can operate. Done on all the address, control and data lines, turning them all into transmission lines, so all have to be the same length, so as to not skew the data applied, as 10mm extra trace on one line will mean you lose 100MHz, or more, in maximum clock rate you can use, as the chip will start to get errors, as the data or address does not arrive in step on all pins.
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  664. Louis has the perfect sign for Blackberry, right above where she was sitting, the Danger Peligro red tape there. But anything made in the USA electronics wise will also have a tariff cost added to it, because you cannot get all the component parts of anything that are purely made in the USA. Your PCB will use 3m epoxies, components of which are made world wide, and imported to be blended and formulated in the USA, the steel used for the cases and internal parts came from China, India and other countries, the aluminium ores for the parts all were mined, and for the great part refined, outside the USA. The copper came from mines all over the world, the silver used to make the MLC capacitors is a blend from all over the world, the gold used for the plating came from either Russia or South Africa to a great part, and all the cobalt and tantalum came from DRC mines, conflict minerals to a great part, despite the claims otherwise. USA did a great job exporting all the dirty process work to other countries with lax legislation (which is why India is the ship breaking capitol of the world, even the US Navy uses then to dispose of ships that are too expensive to break up in US ports) and lower cost of labour, and this was never actually used to lower prices, instead making the 1% richer, while cutting labour costs, and making massive pools of upper management that, in most cases, know nothing about what the companies actually do, and are only ever looking at a long term forecast of the next quarter for profit growth.
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  665. Also the 250VDC line power would wreak merry havoc with old phone copper in the cables, I had plenty of call outs for ISDN where the solution was to swap the pair in use with another one in the same cable to the local street box, which was actually in the basement of a building across the street, seeing as it was government owned, and the post office used to own the phone lines. they had a few racks of 3M pale blue punch down blocks, all dating from the 1970's, and the 50 pair feeding the building landed up in 3 rows of the outgoing cable, while the exchange side used a few 500 pair lead sheathed cables. Now these cables were old, over a century in service, and that basement was under sea level, so they all had had the steel sheath rot off them decades before, and not really were good at holding water out. So either swap to a good pair in the 50 pair, and hope that it would last a while, or the 50 pair was good, then you swapped with another pair in the 500 pair units, and hope it would be good. You know a cable is bad when you are splitting pairs to get 2 good wires to use, and eventually we were down to having DSL on the one good pair still there, with POTS on all the good wires in the others, and the TELEX line was sitting with the least noisy bad wire, and running with SWER connection, as the sheath was still mostly good enough to provide a common when bonded with mains earth. When cancelling that telex line I was told by them not to return the equipment, as they no longer wanted it. Turns out it had not worked in a year, failing quietly.
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  677. Well, the 3 colour tube projection TV sets have a non shadowmask display, though the front screen is lenticular to provide a brighter image in the forward view by concentrating the light in that direction in rear projection sets, the ceiling mount ones use just a diffused screen ( or one with a reflective layer to provide optical image brightness gain to the centre for the same reason, higher perceived brightness for the same CRT brightness) to scatter the image in the room. Line resolution in a mono CRT and rear projection 3 CRT set is more to do with bandwidth of the video circuit, or how fast it can go from one predetermined brightness to another predetermined brightness ( typically 80% to 20%) and then how many of these cycles it can do in a single horizontal line before the difference between the 2 levels is no longer displayed. Thus you get the 500 odd pixel display resolution, which basically translates to the roughly 7MHz bandwidth the TV channel has allocated to it, the set cannot display more lines than that without exceeding this bandwidth, and this is the big reason for the resolution. Vertical it is fixed by the number of lines in the interlace, with the 2 half frames each drawing an image with half the lines, then the other half of the frame filling in the image in the blank space between the lines drawn on the other half of the frame. Overall it looks like a single image, but it is 2 with a line offset between them, the eye integrates the 2 half frames into a single one. With monitors that are not TV sets you can get higher bandwidth, up to 70MHz or more for the last of the CRT monitor displays, which meant you could get much higher resolution, allowing you to use a much finer pitch shadowmask in the CRT to get a sharper image, though the trade off is both more complex alignment in production, more complex drive circuits to get the beam to stay aligned perfectly in all the positions it scanned on the display, along with the smaller phosphor dots meaning you had to drive them with higher power to get a bright image, thus the big risk of image burn on these CRT units. CRT displays also used an aluminium sputtered backing on the phosphor layer to reflect light back to the front instead of losing it in the inside of the CRT, which did not affect the electron beam, but which doubled the brightness, though the thick dark glass reduced this again to give increased contrast ratio on the image..
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  776. The law should be that the HOA has to go before a judge to get the power, and that they need to have proof of service on the homeowner of that case. That is the case here by me, with a whole host of laws covering HOA's and COA's, with them needing to go through a lot of hoops to get before a judge. I have been the one starting that, took nearly 5 years before the case came up, and i had sold and moved a little before, but the tenant that was there came to court, absentee owner, and had forged a rental agreement, but the agreement was not at court, because i had phoned the lawyer who said they had witnessed the signing, and asked if he was willing to stand up in court and say he was a witness to this, because i had dozens of letters, hand written, by the actual owner, all signed with his signature, and even to me that signature would not be a match, and was he willing to bet his registration on that. Case came up, judge asked the tenant if he had anything other than verbal, and then told him he had no standing, and 30 seconds later default judgement. Off to auction, where it was sold one day, then buyer came, saw how it looked, and got out of the sale, as the sale was 10% down on hammer, and balance within 14 days, so he waited out the clock, and lost his deposit. Second one bought, came to see with some "assistance", and told the tenant that it was now 4PM, and that at 6PM he would be leaving, his choice would be to leave willingly by the door, or not so willingly, in which case door or nearest window. He left, and after the sale the lawyer for the BC landed up with a lot of money. Went to all the other owners, I knew all of them, and told them to bring all the bills through the years of damage to property they had from the last lot. All got paid out of the money, and the lawyer followed the legal trace route, 3 months get another trace from a PI on the owner, paid out of his money, till the money was all gone. Hard to trace a person when the last known location was Morocco, and he was there not for visual tourism, so was keeping off of visible places.
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  854. Well, it would devolve to VFR from 1924, when pretty much the instrumentation was the pilot and his eyes. Would suggest a good upgrade would be to add in a standby compass, standby altimeter and a standby airspeed indicator, as a minimum flight instrument list, that will help in case the ancient Garmin decides to brain fart, as they are well known to do with some combinations of a complex map and some locations. All 3 can be bought used, and simply sent in for a certification, and then the standby compass will just need to be swung with the aircraft in flight ready configuration, to adjust the 8 cardinal point compensation screws. Memories of 3 hours in the swamp, in the compass bay, acting as the intercom link between my instructor melting in the rear, and the 2 pilots and flight engineer melting in the cockpit. After the 10 full circles to get the newly repaired fluxgate sensor aligned perfectly, the others decided to drive back on the tow tractor, while I elected to stay on board, and fly back with the 3 in front. They still had 3 hours of fuel left, but only needed an extra hour to complete flight hours for the month, so they did a little trip out to sea, and there I got to see them doing an aerobatics show with the 16 ton helicopter, doing all the daring moves, that are limited to 0G to +3G, that are permitted with a helicopter when you want to avoid chopping your own tail off, or having the main rotors separate. Sitting in the door, hand through the strap, and looking up at the ocean above me, and the sky past my feet, as they did a few barrel rolls around 1km offshore, with the closest place to swim to being the offshore oil platform. 2 very happy and now cool pilots.
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  860. Going to bet though the bridge report went through from Penndot to the local municipality, where it was promptly filed and forgotten. Who owns the bridge, and who is responsible for the maintenance, now that is the problem, because I can bet you these are two totally separate deparments in government, and each tries to pass the buck. But as to failure, yes likely bus was the final straw, though the bridge by that point likely was barely able to withstand it's own static mass, and the bus and cars, along with a few tons of snow and frozen slush, did finally cause the one support to buckle at the base. Then the other side got a step loading, and promptly sheered off, and the other side followed. I would say the far side from the bus was the one that collapsed, after the bus went over, and the buckled deck is indicative of the supports by the bus holding on a second or so as the bridge fell behind the bus, pulling them over, and then the roadway longitudinal members there, probably from years of salt corrosion removing most of the metal, folded, and the deck buckled at that stress point. The supports pulled off the base, leaving the plate behind, simply because the rusted bolts were stronger, and had more cross section, than the remaining support steel at the time. Coreten steel is amazing, but really does benefit from having a protective coating applied, just that you can do construction with minimal care, and only lightly blast the surface, or wire brush it, before you paint it, the rust will provide adhesion for the paint.
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  876.  @ZirothTech  not really a new thing, just a standard synchronous motor with external excitation, using a planar transformer to power the rotor winding. Pretty much something common on high power generators, where they need to run long periods without stopping, making them useful in power generation for long run time, as the only thing you need to change is the oil bath oil in the bearings, and thus can run them for 10 years with no stopping, before stopping to clean and inspect them. Does not even need much in the way of electronics in the power transfer, you have a rotor coil with a bridge rectifier, and a exciter coil with some form of AC power, either simple H bridge at some fixed frequency, giving a constant current, or variable to allow you to vary current based on duty cycle of the bridge, allowing max field strength at low RPM with high current, and at high RPM you drop excitation to a lower level, or even turn it off, to allow the rotor to act like an induction motor, using the diode bridge to handle the freewheeling current, which will improve efficiency a lot, as now at speed no cogging losses in the magnetic system, while at low speed you get a very high breakaway torque. Much cheaper to make yes, and while you have a lot of copper in the rotor, and need to cool it as well to keep the heat down, it will work well, even with existing drives, with only minor changes to provide the excitation power, and the added temperature sensing needed. Your bridge rectifier will probably be improved by adding in active switches, as you otherwise will need beefy schottky diodes on a heat spreader to handle the high current, as high current is needed to get a strong field, and you will definitely want to reduce inductance. So schottky diodes rated around 100A per diode, or add in power mosfets, and a separate power winding to allow an active rectifier to be on the rotor as well. Slightly more complex, but allows an extra percent or two lower losses.
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  898. Power supply capacitors aging, and the top section of the picture there was insufficient beam current in the EHT circuit to provide a bright image. The picture started lower down as the scan current reduced as the scan got to the middle, and the lower half the scan coil, while still having an increasing current, this was stored energy in the coil being dissipated before the high energy pulse rerquired to do the retrace to the top again. The CRT is blanked during flyback in both vertical and horizontal, so the blanking interval was increasing as the set aged, and your particular set design used the vertical deflection circuit as the source of the vertical blanking signal. Other designs used a digital counter in the jungle chip to do this, you would have had a smeared image with the slow flyback instead, though generally the later chipsets also sensed beam current, and would shut off the horizontal and vertical drive to the CRT if the current varied beyond acceptable parameters, done by sending a specific set of pulses during the top overscan in sequence to get the dark current, a mid scale current and a full bright current, and storing to allow to compensate for tube aging. If you deliberately made the raster fit the CRT instead of being overscanned you would see a set of 3 red green and blue strips on the top 6 lines, with there being none on the left, then either 3 or 6 lines, one dark and one bright of each colour. This then set the black level clamp of each gun and the peak colour drive of each one instead of having to adjust them during service, so the hue did not change as the CRT aged.
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  939. Similar here, aircraft being towed out of the bay it was in. However there was miscommunication, and they did not disconnect the nose wheel steering link pin, so as the tug and the tow bar turned, the nose wheel did not. Frangible link did as intended, and broke, disconnecting the aircraft from the tow bar, and, as it was now on the slight incline out of the bay, it rolled down till it stopped in the reinforced earth berm 10m away. Guy in cockpit was pumping the brakes, but as there was no power, as battery was disconnected and removed, and he had no time to use the hand hydraulic pump either, so it rolled till stopped. Unfortunately the furtherest point forward was the pitot static tube, which pushed back, shearing it's mounting points, and moving back around a meter into the nose. Then the radome tip hit the wall, and penetrated the 3mm steel sheet. Radome actually survived intact, no damage to it or the rest of the radar cover at all. Unfortunately not so for the pitot probe, and the space behind it, which was the main electrical control box for the aircraft, and the aluminium alloy probe pole sheared through it right in the middle, cutting the main mount that held all the aircraft relays almost in half, relays, wiring and breakers and all. Damage was repaired in under 2 weeks, because there was another airframe undergoing a full rebuild, and that nose section was completed already in the rebuild, so it was shipped out, and put on in place of the original, which then went to have it's 7 figure rebuild, delaying the other aircraft only by around a month overall, but more than doubling the overhaul cost. That aircraft was odd till it's next major service, having 2 distinct different paint schemes on it front and rear. There was quite a bit of fall out from that, but luckily I was a spectator, though did get to see all the carnage up close, as the radome came in for inspection, along with the nose of the aircraft landing up outside our service unit doors for a month.
    5
  940.  @TechnologyConnections  The way those work is to use either the condensing coil fan to sling the water over the condenser coil, or to use a condenser coil below the evaporator coil, so it drips down via gravity and then is channelled over the condenser fins. This then allows the evaporating water to provide extra cooling for the coil, improving efficiency. The big drawback of this is the uncoated coils corrode really fast, and in general only last 3-4 years before they are only a mass of corrosion products on the inside, blocking the air flow, and bare piping that is running hotter than safe ( higher pressure, greater erosion inside the microgrooved pipes, oil breaking down from the high temperature into acid and carbon) and ultimately failing. Outside they look fine, but are totally blocked once you get to the fan chamber. Window wall units do the same, unless you remove the rubber bung and install the optional drain line, though most of the new ones do not come with a drain, and expect you to replace the entire unit after 4 years, from the case and coils being rotted through. Note the warranty is only 3 years on the compressor only, the rest of the unit is only statutory warranty ( often a year) and in general you find they never get a warranty claim, as if the compressor fails within 25000 hours ( they rarely do, even though they are cost cut way down, but that is another story) that is a rare failure. Coils however are often badly rotted after only a single season if you live near the sea, like I do. Split units have to have the 2 drains, though often the outdoor unit drain is rarely installed, as in heat pump mode the outside air will be very low humidity anyway in winter. They do build up amazing amounts of sludge and bacteria though unless regularly serviced and cleaned. The inside plastic parts are black, so the sludge mat does not show visibly, even if the rest of the unit is light coloured plastic.
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  984. Easy to do, they steal them, drive to a rented industrial lot, and stack them up to 4 up in the container, then ship them out with a forged export permit, either saying it is scrap metal, or by hiding the vehicle under scrap metal. Then when they arrive in Nigeria, or any of the West African ports, they get taken out of the container, and either then get falsely entered as vehicles into the systems there, or are smuggled across the border to another country, where you can get papers using just a bribe, then they take them, with the "legit" papers, and export them to other countries. The container cost is low, as the ships are deadheading back to China, so a hundred containers to Africa, even if you have to send 20% empty or with a part load of ewaste in them, and stolen cars the rest, will be cheap, and the ewaste will pay for the shipping, leaving the rest of the money from stolen cars as pure profit. Might be $500 to ship the container, including $500 for the buying of a scrap container, which will probably be resold as either a house, or a container to be filled and taken with scrap to China later on. The vehicles will be bought from the thieves perhaps for $1000 at most, for top of the line new ones, or anything from $200 up for common cars. Sell for the equivalent of $5000, including the washed papers, and they will be run till they fall apart, and can no longer be blacksmithed back together, then stripped for scrap metal, and spares for other vehicles. Half the stolen cars, common ones, will be chopped up before the container, to fit 20 engines and front halves into the container, and sold as running front halves, to be used as spare parts, or used to run equipment and farms.
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  993.  @helplmchoking  The one who has a clue, but needs a clue by four applied to him. To be fair, those kind of electrical gremlins are often hard to find, especially on a machine that is at best described as newish to you. did spend one December fixing up an old packing machine, and getting it to match the manufacturers blueprints again for electrical. Real blueprints, and with a good number of the parts being made from Obsoletium in the electrical section, but was able to replace them with plug in industrial standard building block parts. Amongst all that also did the mechanical side, replacing a lot of the smaller bearings in there, along with a lot of cam followers. Those are expensive, especially when you go in and order them by the dozen. Then some linear bearings, and the steel rods they ran on, because the old ones had worn grooves in the steel. Got it down to only one Festo cylinder, replacing all the others with SMC, but that one was only available from Festo, and a pretty price. All pneumatics changed out, with the exception of 2 Numatics valve bodies, they got friends instead, as those had been in there since at least 1986, and even though I put a service kit in them, they actually did not need it, but the kit was ordered anyway, and was cheap. All went Numatics, they had proven themselves, and worked out costing less than Festo, especially after a year, which was the life of some of the valves, which refused to fail. got around 20kg of crap out, old changes over the decades, and replaced a lot of quick fixes as well, seeing as I was able to access the rear of the electrical panel, so put the bodge wires in there instead, and pulled the failed wires out as well. A dozen or so 8 pin and 11 pin bases to replace failed timers, and failed Brown Boveri relays, and then some work to replace the cursed Diazed fuse blocks with breakers, forever keeping me from needing to buy those fuses. Biggest change was an inverter, replacing the old Varispeed drive, as that was worn out, though, because of the gearbox, the drive belt stayed, I simply took the variable side off, and put in a double V belt pulley and Fenner lock block, with the pulley having the centre turned off it, to make it fit the varispeed belt. Main gearbox stripped, new bearings and seals, and filled with oil, instead of the NGLI0 grease it had, which was now nearly solid. Noise solved with molyslip. New clutch linings, fan on the drive motor as it was now going to run at 30Hz, so forced cooling was better, and the original 1970's era Lenze motor was still in great condition. That was one busy 3 week job, but the machine was running like new. Obsolete, but a replacement was nearly a million Euro, and the old machines are still in use around the world, simply because they work, though the Chinese copies are a tenth the price, and do about 50% of the capacity. OK they come as a ready assembled kit, and you really want to strip them down, and rebuild them off the bat, to at least get the dirt out, but they do work well. Bought Chinese instead of fixing the other, simply because one part quoted more than the price of the new machine, as a service exchange part, with a 3 month turn around time. It became the back up machine, though in 10 years we actually did not use it at all.
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  1008. Not as critical, as the interference pattern causes a large variation in return light, but any pit approaching the required depth causes some interference, and the return light is less. The receiver in the player is not too concerned about the actual variation, just that, relative to the transmitted light returned from the smooth surface, there is some loss, and that this is enough for the player to discern the pits from the lands. There is a variable gain stage that compensates for the variation in return before the data slicer in the laser electronics turns this very analogue voltage into a digital signal for further processing. This analogue voltage is also filtered and forms part of the focus, as it tracks the average distance between the laser focus lens and the actual data layer on the disk, and the lens is kept a constant distance despite the actual disk having variability of up to 2mm per rotation in use. Then there is the fact the receiver is actually 4 separate photodiodes in a quadrant, so the signal is the sum of all of them, but the difference between opposite pairs of the diodes is used as info for the focus system and the 2 linear tracking servo loops that keep the laser beam following the single long spiral track faithfully, despite it not always being concentric in the disk itself. Incidentally almost all the laser modules were developed by Sony, and you find a whole range of KSSxxx laser modules used in CD and DVD players, all operating on pretty much the same principles, but with various layouts and mounting methods used in them for various players. Now almost an industry standard module, often no longer made by Sony, but still with the KSS part number.
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  1022. Not mandatory here in South Africa, but many of the new units come with this by default, as the units are imported and thus they comply with the big US market safety and ancillary wise. Older units do not have anything other than chimes, and some that are from the 19th century are still in use, just having to have safety upgrades ( door glass with safety glass instead of window glass, inner doors instead of the lattice steel, an emergency light and bell in the car) to comply. The new ones are almost always, in a retrofit or as a lower cost add on to existing structure, a motor room less one, and the hydraulic powered elevator is almost unheard of here aside from in some very old, no longer approved for passenger travel, goods hoists that have no in car controls or lighting. Even a goods hoist new has to comply with passenger car regulations. When you upgrade an older unit ( controller and car interior upgrade, replacing only the inner skin, the floor and the lighting, plus the call panel and trailing cables, along with a new controller driving the existing motor and gearbox, sheave and cabling and shaftwork) you typically get the audible signals and direction signs as part of the package, though they might not be installed in some buildings due to lack of space and no wall boxes. Your building I would speak to the elevator service company, and they can plug the modules back in to the controller, and simply unscrew each panel and use the volume control built in there to drop the volume down to quiet. Suggest to the building owner that the penalties for non compliance with the ADA are pretty high, and deliberate non compliance can result in multiple lawsuits against them in person.
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  1057. No need to actually look for a new processor, simply use one of the more modern Space rated products that are still available in large volumes. Intel still does supply the 386SX and DX in space rated packages, using a SOS technology, which is a more modern and faster part. Yes likely just a few thousand fully tested dies in CA storage, ready to be packed and tested to order, but still a part likely to be around for the next 50 years. Buying an original Mostek or Rockwell part is still there, not robbing old equipment, you just pay Rochester Electronics to take a wafer and pack it, then test the result and get the qualification, they specialise in old silicon, buying up old wafer stock and storing them essentially forever. You need it you pay the price they ask, and smile. With gritted teeth, they price just below replacing the whole lot entirely, but still cheaper. However the 6502 is, thanks to it being out of copyright, one of the more prolific processors around, available as an IP core for pretty much all FPGA and ASIC families, as it is simple, very small and very functional. You have one in every hard drive, used to load the firmware into the ASIC and FPGA units that do the actual work, and it also then is a slow processor, but tiny one, that does housekeeping and monitoring of the hard drive, so that the drive can retract heads and shut down gracefully when power is removed. With only 64k of memory you can make half the fixed ROM, for bootloading the rest, and the rest RAM to handle memory, with a little bit of IO somewhere to feed data out to the rest of the array. Simple to implement in silicon, free assemblers and compilers, and no money to pay for a per unit license, it is very common to have it embedded all over in equipment as a processor doing something.
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  1075. 747 INS was based on taking the closest 2 out of 3 separate systems. Each system used 6 small peanut gyro units, which are smaller than a fist each, in a redundant system, one per axis, to keep the inertial platform level, at the start position when powered on. It would turn 360 degrees almost in a day, the error being the amount the earth rotated along it's orbit, and if you left it running for a month you would be able to extract, from the residual noise, the orbit of the sun around the galaxy as a small constant offset. On this platform are the 3 accelarometers, which then get integrated to give you velocity, as a 3 vector output, and this then is integrated again to give you distance again as a vector output. Mapped by the computer on the IMU to a model of the earth, with known starting position as a point, accurate down to the foot, measured by the nose wheel being parked on a painted spot on the hardstand, and the body aligned to a line as well. They are accurate enough to fly waypoints to within a few feet half way around the planet, and to get you within a hundred foot of landing on autopilot. Replaced by the laser ring gyro units, which can do the same, but the drift is so much lower that you can let the autopilot fly till touchdown, with no worry that a gyro failure will get you out more than a few feet. Plus no more temperamental units as they aged, where you might find one of the dual redundant halves fail in flight every few thousand hours, and you would have a slight degradation in accuracy overall, but only see it when you landed and maintenance looked in the bay to see the one unit is showing a degraded accuracy flag on it. You need a class 10 clean room facility to repair them, not many of them left around who still have the room, the tools, and most importantly the skilled technicians to work on the units any more. I was lucky to get the tour of SAA Technical in the 1990's, as part of training, where as a group we spent a day in there, in the class 10000 clean room facility looking at all the work they did. Look into the clean area to see them strip them to bare bones, pulling the peanut size gyro units out of the housings to service and calibrate them.
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  1084.  @eno2870  That would be extra, as you then have to use medical grade oxygen, which has a much lower concentration of contaminants, most notable being nitrogen, which is pretty close in boiling point, so you have to do fractional distillation of the liquid, or use molecular filters to reduce the volume of contaminants. Expensive and slow, as you do need to keep a very precise control on the pressures and temperatures. For each passenger you would need around 3l of liquid oxygen, per flight, and probably around 15l of liquid nitrogen as well, so as to be able to make a one atmosphere environment, and simply dump all the exhaust out of the craft. Otherwise you need lithium hydroxide CO2 scrubbers to be able to recirculate the air, and then your gas needs are lower, but you do need a lot more mass in scrubbers. However the scrubbers need to be fed dry air, so you then need to extract almost all of the humidity out of the air first. So, probably a ton of scrubbers alone, another 2 tons of airconditioners, for the hundred passengers, to save the 1500kg of liquid nitrogen, but the LOX is not going to be much less. That assumes you want to have the passengers feel like they are in an aircraft, though you could get away with dropping cabin pressure to a bit lower, and increasing oxygen concentration, but having them need to spend an hour before and after each flight doing a decompression would probably not be a desired thing. After all, the space shuttle and ISS takes the best part of a day to get ready for EVA, because the low pressure in the space suits requires all nitrogen to be removed, and the time for the Starship will not be much less.
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  1221. No, that is a full wave 3 phase rectifier, as diodes are a lot cheaper than copper, so putting in 6 diodes, and only half the number of turns of thick copper (or for the cheap alternators the thicker CCA wire) to get the rated current output, is a lot cheaper than having to put in double the number of wire. Then make a larger case to fit them, and having to get much more expensive diodes, rated at 200V, as opposed to the regular diodes that are rated at 30V, and are designed to break over at around 40V, to handle the case of a load dump transient (which is part of the job of the alternator now, as electronics in a vehicle is so much more than when a generator was around to drive only a few lights and a coil with points), or a regulator failing and causing the alternator to go to full output. Ripple you see there 6 peaks per revolution of the alternator field past the pole pieces, because of the 2 phases, and at any time 2 diodes are conducting at the peak. The larger lower ripple is because of the rotor turning once in the housing, and also the slower response of the voltage regulator modulating the average output voltage, as it is being aimed at a particular set voltage by the internal regulator module. Typically 14V4 when cold, and dropping to 13V8 as the regulator heats up, to closely track the actual battery temperature, but still provide a high initial current to charge the battery from cold, tapering off with time. With modern alternators getting controlled from the ECU the initial voltage set is zero for a few second,s to allow the ECU to gain control of idle RPM correctly, and start the cold start warm up and keep emissions down, then it is ramped up to get voltage to 14V4 for a few minutes, to provide a full charge to the battery. Maintained till the ECU sees the battery current start to taper off, as the battery approached full charge, sensed by the sensor on the ground lead. Then it will depending on the model, either switch to a 15V charge for a few minutes, to desuplhate the battery, set by a counter programmed per the OEM battery manufacturer as to best profile for this, or will drop the battery voltage to a set voltage as determined by ambient inlet air temperature, and engine compartment temperature (coolant return temperature) so as to not overcharge the battery, and all the time monitoring, so that the sensed ground current in the battery is close to zero, so the alternator provides all the engine and vehicle current draw. this means that your alternator warning light comes on when the ECU detects the battery is being forced to provide current for more than 5 seconds, either due to the engine not running, or that the load exceeds the output 5 seconds after it has been commanded past 95% duty cycle on, and the alternator is not supplying this current.
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  1310. Brake seals are all made from a synthetic rubber that is perfectly compatible with brake fluid. Other fluids though will make them start to swell, as they are absorbed into the seal, and this means the seals grow, and no longer can slide, and the hoses grow soft, and are no longer capable of holding pressure. The swollen seals in the master cylinder, the calipers and the back wheel cylinders now no longer can be moved back to the resting position by the release of the pedal pressure, so the calipers stay in contact with the disks causing a lot of extra friction, the drums will not be able to relax to the off position, and the master cylinder can no longer return, trapping fluid in the system under pressure, as as the brakes heat up the pressure increases, making them grip more, till the disks and drums are red hot and the linings are totally degraded and worn. You also no longer have working brakes, and as well if you have ABS you now also need to replace every rubber seal in the ABS control unit, which means a new ABS block, and for older transmissions where the trans gets brake pressure to disengage it, you now also have to replace the actuator in the trans as well. In a pinch, if you are totally out of brake fluid, you can add in pure alcohol to the system, as that is compatible with the seals, though it will need to be over 150 proof, to not cause damage, and will need to be flushed fully with new fluid as soon as possible. In ultra cold climates the brake fluid is mostly alcohol, either methanol or ethanol, as it will not freeze easily, though synthetic esters and glycols are more common there, but they are miscible with alcohol. With modern cars fluids are now critical, if it says use x fluid, use it, do not just chuck generic ATF into the power steering, as you will run into issues, and the same for trans fluids, where there are now dozens of different fluids, and the wrong one can be a very expensive fix. Even manual trans the fluid is critical, many vehicles need a SAE75 oil, and will balk with SAE80 oil, or grind with SAE70 oil in them, and some are even more critical with what they need, you put OEM in only. Even engine oil the same, SAE30 is not going to work on many, especially newer vehicles where the oil viscosity is critical in engine operation.
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  1331. Oil yes regular changes is important. For a cheap and safe engine clean simply add in a half quart of SAE30 HD3 diesel tractor oil in a few days before doing the next oil change. High detergent oil for farm tractors, it will clean a lot of the gunk off the engine, as it is meant to keep soot in suspension for farm tractors, that spend a lot of time idling. Yes filters almost always have a bypass valve ( though some of the no name brands do not actually put it in, adds 10 cents to the cost) that will typically open at around 20PSI pressure differential across the filter media, on the theory that having oil flow, even if dirty, is a lot better than no oil flow. But having this valve operate does mean all the junk and tramp metal the filter is supposed to remove, and a lot of the stuff it has removed, and which is inside the can, now can travel past the filters. Not great for bearings and the rotating surfaces, and definitely not great for small clearance holes, like lifters and variable valve timing actuators. Great on the oil, I got some filters for my car cheap, old stock ones that were sitting at a store on a shelf, at the price they were selling them in 2008. So next service filter is there already. Will differ with you on the dry filter, if the surface is just wiped clean, yes you can put it on dry, as the oil film on the housing will lubricate it, but if it has been washed clean with brake cleaner, oil the filter seal. I just grab a bit of the old oil and wipe it, then pull that seal out, flip it over and oil the underside as well, and make sure it fits back in the groove properly. Recently had a no name filter which, brand new, was leaking, I assume from the metal face not being true, and thus the seal not holding. I only buy 2 brands, GUD or FRAM, as they are locally made by me (20km away), and are the OEM brand for most vehicles in the country. 1 million Toyota filters made by them, they pretty much have it right. As to tyre pressure, the top end of the vehicle manufacturer spec is the one to go for, as yes that is the one for either heavy load, or for economy. You want comfort make sure you have a high profile wheel and tyre. Painted on rubber and all alloy is always going to be harsh ride, and noisy. Drivetrain yes likely dry universals, or they lost a needle when putting them in, grease will tell you quick if the UJ was dry, or if you are spending a hour changing both sides. Gearbox simplest first test is change the fluid, fill back to level, and run it, as otherwise the issue is a sticking ball inside, or a seal that is leaking when cold internally.
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  1370. They simply take that contaminated fuel and put it into a bulk tank, diluting it with a lot of petrol. The tank at the garage they simply pump dry, and then fill again, as a small amount of contaminant is not going to matter. After all you get fuel stations with a single nozzle that dispenses either petrol, diesel, E90, E85, and the small amount in the hose is going to be going into the tank of the next customer irrespective of the fuel selected. Most common thing is that the tanks will get filled with illuminating kerosene instead of diesel, as the IP is cheaper, so diluting the diesel is making more profit. The leaking tanks the water is normally pulled out daily, though there have been a few dishonest pump and attendant cases where the pump fills up the tank with a few thousand litres of water, and then the fuel, and then the "excess" fuel is put in another tank elsewhere and sold cheaply. Attendant then dumps the water out the tank to waste, and fudges the dip readings for a few days till the error is gone. Of course by me the refinery was phasing out the TEL, and when they finally emptied out the TEL tank they found a nice crack in the bottom, that had been leaking TEL into the ground for decades. Then the guy with a house near the pipeline who dug a hole in the ground, and it filled with fuel. Refinery spent a good bit of money first fixing the leaking pipelines, then also digging up all the properties along the route, and replacing the first 3m of topsoil, plus the garden and fences, all for free.
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  1382. Seen a similar thing on a Ford 1.6 CVH engine, would start, but only run with throttle held near full, and not idle. was looking and wanted to check if there was actually oil in it, so pulled dipstick with engine running. Idle dropped to near normal, with still full throttle, and on removing oil filler, it dropped stone dead. We could have rebuilt it, but instead it was quicker to instead send it to Ford themselves, and get a complete new engine from them in return. Not cheaper, but the engine was needed urgently as otherwise there would be massive delays and lack of critical equipment. This engine was used to drive a hydraulic pump, and this in turn was a specialised vehicle that there were only a very few of, so a missing one was somewhat of a crisis. Not over revved, as they all had limiters on them ( though often bypassed, so we locked out the throttle plate range instead with a welder, to hold that limiting bolt firmly in place), best we could guess is somebody ran it without oil, or with low oil level, and cooked the bearings and rings, or had not checked coolant, and the engine had overheated. Same end result. Otherwise those engines were pretty robust and gave little issues. Those VW 2.0 TDI/TSI engines also are the power plant on a lot of fork lift trucks, where they live a very hard life, long idle times, frequent stop starts, hard running when cold, and generally just abused. Amazingly they do survive that quite well. Saw them often at plants, pop that cover and the VW logo is there, while the outside is quite a different logo.
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  1400. I bought a can once, on special, and actually used it on my sister's car, as it did not come from factory with a spare. Now she has a working spare, and the can got her through a month of not being able to get to fix the flat. Did check my spare tyre, and yes it was flat, but you have to remove it from the boot to check it. Also with that spare under the car, please take a can of dry chain lube, and spray on the threads of that stud, so it can actually come loose off there when needed. Dry lube, so it does not attract dust and become a dust block. Same for the jack, as they do not come with much lube from the factory, so spray with brake clean, and get the grease off, and spray with chain lube, and run end to end, plus on the bearings and pivots, and then wrap in a cloth, sprayed with a thin coat on the inside, to both protect from rattles, and to provide you with a cloth to clean your hands when changing. Yes have had the pleasure of getting the spare off, using a hacksaw blade, on the side of a highway, because the steel bolt rusted fast to the nut. Fixed that the next day, stainless steel bolt, and a loose fitting nut, with a nice coat of molyslip between then in the threads, and a split pin to prevent the nut coming off. Was a tank hold down bolt, but 10 minutes with a grinder and a welder, to make a plate that was used to fix to the trailer chassis, and it never gave any issues ever again. Worst came to the worst use a shifter and pliers to undo the 2 M8 bolts that held it down, and slip through the centre hole. Next time I had to change it, again on side of freeway, after finding a nail I assume (only had the sidewalls left, after the middle shredded itself off, actually same spot I twice had to dodge a Hiace half shaft and wheel assembly complete, as it came past me) it was so easy to undo, jack up with the jack, and get the bolts off the trailer wheel. Tip as well, lube the threads on the wheel fasteners, light coat works, and use a torque wrench to put them on, not Cletus and turn till it half way snaps. Impact driver to put them on means you never get them off with the socket in the car kit.
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  1401. My father crashed one, after leaving the one wheel in the middle of a pothole on the runway, hidden by the part time airport having had heavy rain in the morning, and on approach in the late afternoon my father had seen the shiny water, and thought that the airport had finally tarred the runway instead of being grass, and was just late in updating the charts they had with outside countries. Nope, was water, and on landing he was getting spray, and then the one landing gear left. So he decided to cut power, using those magneto switches, up there for making turning off the engines a deliberate action you could not do by accident, and went gear up. So skidded to a halt outside the terminal/bar, where the part time ATC was belatedly firing a flare into the air to denote to go around. Passengers did not notice the accident, aside from them not needing a ladder to disembark, and them noticing the 2 bent propellors. Long distance phone call was made, via a good number of operators, to the destination airport, and the actual owner of the aircraft that he was doing a ferry flight on. Next morning the new plane was there, dropping off a crew of mechanics, 6 blades for the propellors, and the left undercarriage complete, and the tools and jacks. This then left with the paying passengers, down south to Johannesburg. A week later the aircraft, now repaired, flew back down with the mechanics and the damaged parts. Very likely I did fly on that exact aircraft, years later, in the military, as they got the entire fleet as the airline upgraded. My last flight in the military was on one, and of course it had issues, with me and the FE leaning out to look at the gear, as the right side was very unhappy to show green. I was the human chain, holding his belt, and acting as audio relay, while we both agreed it looked like it was over centre, and thus locked. Best landing ever on a C47, smooth, almost no bump, though slightly marred by having a fire engine keeping pace with us, with foam cannon ready to use. Got in to destination 6 hours late, and when asked, I replied the C47 broke down over the last stop, and we all had to get out and push it the rest of the way.
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  1460. Input yes you can use a simple voltage divider, but the optocoupler works well to get some isolation, especially if you use a 4V7 zener diode in series with the LED to get voltage immunity to the signal, so a blown bulb does not leave the brakes on all the time from stray voltage. Resistor divider you also need a set of diodes to keep the voltage from exceeding supply rails, along with a small capacitor (roughly 100n) to provide noise immunity on the input. Incidentally reed relays work well, small, easy to drive, and the contacts interface well with MCU inputs as well, as they have very little bounce. Just have a pull up resistor to provide 2mA of contact current to keep them in good condition, and it works. I have added trailer relays to my car, as I do not want a faulty trailer wiring set to blow the BCM up, and used 4 relays to do this, using the existing lamp wiring as source, and an extra fused power lead from the battery. In the power line is a reed relay, with the coil replaced with 12 turns of enamelled copper, there to close the contact when current is over the draw of a 21W trailer lamp, and then the reed is powered from the 12V supply, and a lead runs off to a LED near the dash, that lights up whenever I press brakes, or turn, with trailer attached, as a confirmation that trailer indicators are working, and at least one brake light still works, and the plug is connected. Will guess your TRS80 issue was simply because the original designers ran out of space in the very limited ROM, and thus to get space to fit all the headline specs they had to sacrifice some things, and the full keyboard debounce was chosen, simply because it was not an issue with a brand new keyboard, or only minimally so, only getting worse as the keyboards aged and were made cheaper. New switches with clean contacts minimal bounce, but as they age, and the contact surfaces, with only a very small current, get dirty, there is a build up of resistance till the force is enough to break through the film. That is why industrial logic almost always has a 24VDC rail, and 10mA of current flow through a switch input, even if it is going to a MCU input only. The voltage is high, and also the 10mA of current, along with the 22n to 100n input filtering capacitor, provides enough energy to always clean the contact surfaces, so allowing them to be reliable. 5V logic needs that 10mA of current flow, and gold plated contacts, to be almost as reliable, but most keyboard designs, due to the demands for low power, and also limitations of the CMOS and older NMOS designs in ability to source current, only use much lower current instead, and thus the need for software debounce increases as the key switches age.
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  1474. Still is the ancestor of them, though the Saturn guidance system was developed in parallel with the missile guidance systems, as both were under development by the same companies, at the same time. Thus a lot of the problems share common solutions, though the modern ones have moved mostly away from mechanical gyro platforms, and instead use solid state gyro units, and rely on computers to correct them for drift, as that can easily be characterised during assembly and test, as you can use a reference platform to allow one axis at a time to be decoupled from rotation and get the inherent drift. They also use accelarometers, and computer based integration, to get velocity, and again to get distance, and then can use the ring gyro units to calculate a position, based off of initial conditions. Then you use things like GPS, or star trackers, to obtain the error you have, and use that as part of the drift correction applied. But the modern reference platforms are now so accurate that you have correction both for rotation of the earth, and also for rotation around the sun, and have to apply as well correction for the motion of the solar system around the galaxy core as well, simply because this does otherwise show up as a long term error. In the 1970's Boeing had inertial reference platforms that were stable enough that you could fly an autopilot based flight without any external correction, and have a single flight from London to Sydney do that flight, and at landing it would be within 100 feet of the true position. 3 separate gyro units in each inertial reference unit, and the logic would fault any single one that disagreed more than the specified amount, and still give a valid reference off the other 2, just with a caution that maintenance was required. 2 inertial units, just in case one failed, and as backup you also had the old standby magnetic compass, and the Decca beacon receiver to allow you to plot location, provided you did not use the wrong lane. Later on GPS with the Decca, until the Decca was finally phased out. But even in the 1990's Decca was still in use a lot, simply because the cost of retrofitting a lot of aircraft was expensive, so it was in use till almost every aircraft had been updated to both, before it eventually was slowly switched off world wide, though there are still a few stations running for some countries.
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  1497.  @consaka1  Basically a specially machined bolt and nut, with 2 ends, where one end is the minimum size for that particular thread diameter and pitch, used to check the thread is not oversize, and is the go size, in that it must fit without binding, and must be firm with no wobble. The other side is cut to the maximum diameter, at least just past the first few turns, and should engage a turn or so, so that you are sure the thread is not oversize as it stops going in. For the nuts the first is the maximum diameter, and all bolts should fit with no slop, and the other side is the minimum, and it should not go onto the bolt after the first turn or so. Unfortunately precision parts, and you need one of each double ended tool, per fastener pitch and diameter, so these are not common, normally used only for very close tolerance work where you are running the fasteners at a very close tolerance and at a very high loading. you normally see them in aviation maintenance, where they are used when rebuilding airframe and engines, to determine whether a fastener, which is normally an expensive part, as the cheap (under $5 each) fasteners are simply regarded as a part you throw away each time. These are for the more expensive ones, where you will use the gauge to check the fastener, and the hole, are still within tolerance, so as to allow them to be reused. $500 gauge, used to check a $1000 plus bolt, and the gauge itself has to be calibrated and certified annually, or more often, depending on use. Half of an aircraft repair facility toolbox is special measuring tools, so they use a Snap On toolbox, as that is often the cheapest single part in that tool box. Spanners have serial numbers in a lot of cases.
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  1547.  @BriBCG  Well, a university, with a whole facility generator, or at least a generator to power critical systems, will have a breaker box dedicated to this system ,and plugs dedicated to it all over. Thus you can plug equipment into the outlet, and it will have backup power for it, if the main power goes out. Either a battery bank and inverter for the few seconds till the generator powers up and comes on line, or it will have 15 seconds of no power, a good enough compromise for a lot of systems, who can tolerate 5 minutes of no power. This will be a separate breaker, and a colour coded plug, which in hospitals and such you normally find white outlets for regular power, a green one for patient care with generator back up, and a red one for IT equipment with both battery and generator back up. 3 separate breaker panels per area to supply them, normally next to each other, and normally just closed, or locked with a lock, and a break glass panel next to them with a key, in case of emergency. Cleaner went to the box, and turned off the breakers, till the noise stopped. That was a deliberate act, not an accident, and they knew it was gonig to turn off the equipment, because the plug and outlet were locked out, and had a sign on them. That action shows they did this with deliberation, and the company should have trained the staff better, not just hired you because you had a heartbeat, could make a cross on the paperwork, and vaguely knew which end of a mop was the one to use on the floor.
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  1676. The reset, NMI and interrupt locations are the marked addresses, but the program counter is simply set to that value, leaving all registers and flags as is, and it then executes that address as if it were a regular program location. Thus you would always store in that location a jump instruction, followed by an address elsewhere into the ROM, which actually has the right code you want to execute, and thus, aside from reset, which also clears all internal CPU registers and flags, you get the code to run from that new location, with the stack in page 0 containing the address of the last instruction before the interrupt or NMI was asserted. So after your code executed for int or nmi, you simply made sure you had restored all flags, and popped off the stack correctly, leaving it at the right address, and issued a Return from interrupt, which popped the stack back to the program counter, and the program would execute from the next instruction, totally unaware of interrupts. However the 6502 does not store flags in the stack, it is up to the programmer to first disable interrupts, to prevent another from dropping you off into lala land, then take the flags, and save them, and all registers you are going to use, into the stack, before doing your hopefully very short and very fast interrupt routine. Then on the end you restore all those registers, and flags, and finally, before you execute the return from interrupt, you enable interrupts again. Luckily for the programmer the 6502 interrupt pins are edge triggered, so if the pin is still asserted you will not get another interrupt till the pin toggles inactive and then active again. This is sampled as well by logic that only will assert it when there is an opcode fetch, not in the middle of an instruction. NMI is not so lucky, use with care, as there you can go out, as by definition you cannot mask a NMI event, though it does use the same logic for selection. Rest is the hard one, it simply uses the internal logic to force set all flags, stops the internal clocks from operating, forces all the address and data lines to the tri state condition, and same for all the control lines as well. Plus on the transition to logic low there is a small state machine that turns on the internal clocks first for a few cycles, then deasserts all the forced reset of registers, before enabling all the bus and control lines, before finally releasing the program counter from being frozen, with the pattern for the reset vector set into it from the logic, as that hard reset along with the interrupts is coded into this state machine. Been a while since I looked at the 6502 datasheet, and the errata for the later versions, alongside the early ones, have some instructions that were there, but later on got marked as do not use, dimply because there were some that did not work correctly on the early silicon, or which were as a result of a simple decode logic that had some that could work with multiple opcodes to do the same function. Those were used to tell early chips apart, as some would work, others would hang, and some did unexpected operations, generally needing you to press reset to gain control back.
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  1688.  @CuttingEdgeEngineering  I will guess mostly on his back in muddy water, upside down to his mouth in dirty acid laden mine water, welding plates onto a machine so it can "finish this shift/week.month/year before we do a proper rebuild", and the welds has to last till then, and then some, because it would never be done, and he was laying patch over patch over patch of his. Just like my late neighbour, welding patches over active leaks in the paper plant, because to shut it down you had to wait till the 3 month window for overhaul, and the stainless steel pulp feeder would be a mess of patch over patch by that time, because paper pulp is incredibly abrasive. 3 month life for the 3mm stainless steel plate, before you started running patches, the titanium alloy version he made lasted 9 months before they had to lay on the stainless steel patches. Pretty much replace the pulp side every year during maintenance window, and you had to build the chute in place, because it would not otherwise get in there. not sure if they stayed with the titanium, because of the price, and he stayed on for 10 years after retirement to train 3 people how to join paper webs. Only way you could see his joins was the colour of the mesh from the silver solder, otherwise it was identical in appearance to the rest, so it would not leave a mark in the paper. Each 0.5mm wire bevelled, brazed and cleaned down, across the whole width of the web. Not bad for an ex POW from Italy, who got interned in SA during the war, and who never went back to Italy, but instead built bridges, and became a machinist and sheet metal worker at paper plant for decades.
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  1704.  @solandri69  Most likely poor maintenance, they painted over the cables time and again, and you will probably find they trapped water in the cable, which led to corrosion cells and failure. The cables likely were made from hot dipped galvanised strands, which eventually had the zinc erode off, exposing enough steel to make galvanic cells inside the cable. I would say the design flaw was not in having enough cables there, so that you could safely remove half of them every 5 years per tower to replace with a spare set, and those removed went off to be unwound, serviced and inspected, and then greased, reassembled and recoated for the next tower rope cycle. 10 years would be plenty of time to find weak strands and remove them. Yes you would probably be splicing in repair sections every time, making the cable thicker in parts, but they would still be more than capable with that. That the initial cable failed at the poured zinc plug indicates it was very likely badly corroded inside from neglect, as that section is the one most protected cathodically, but had plenty of water ingress to corrode the inner. Likely all the lanolin applied during manufacture was long gone, and had never been replaced. Not that those were highly stressed cables, only a static load, no real dynamic force and no real bending. There are mine lift cables that are kilometers long, used dozens of times daily, that are probably older than those, but they also undergo regular inspection and lubrication cycles to keep them in operation. There are plenty that the cable weighs more than the entire telescope aerial steel structure, just in the cable alone.
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  1773.  @Azeazezar  Do not think the motherboard chipset will run without RAM, though you can just take the RAM and update the ID chip to have it report that you only have 16M of RAM on the chip, which would allow the PC to boot, though you likely would have to write a custom BIOS, basically making an old 1990's era BIOS run on a modern multicore processor, which would mean having to add in the core operating logic, to set up all the registers on the north and south bridge, to set them up like they need, then start to run the old bios as a direct task on it, and boot from there. Would need an old PCI graphics card, and also a PCIE to PCI adaptor as well, or even ISA and PCIE to ISA adaptor, to allow the VGA routines on the video card ROM to run. After all modern graphibns cards no longer likely support the older VESA standards, though it will be fast. Did think, when Pentium processors got past the 1GHz mark, that you could actually put a simple program into a ROM, and boot off it, to use that fast bus speed to directly synthsise FM radio carriers, and also the audio modulation, as a dual core could run fast enough to have one core do the DSP to read in audio, and the other core do DDS to generate the RF waveform direct, modulation and all. Just a simple low pass filter on the output needed. 300MHz processors could easily do AM radio as well, with a simple resistor DAC and a latch, with the enable being simply a write to any high order address line. After all, with 32 bits, and only needing 12 for the ROM, you can be very wasteful with address decoding if you need speed, and really only have 4 actual peripherals to interface.
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  1831. I would say the steps are to keep the power input constant during starting, as the power needs of the motor change because of the need for increased slip during the initial power application, and the steps are there to reduce the CPU need for a smooth sweep, as the original designs used lower speed processors, so offloading most of the power control into discrete power steps was needed, so as to not cause excess slip in the motor and thus poor accelleration, and too fast a ramp would result in a motor stalling. thus the constant steps, so that a driver could keep a constant pull away and not run the risk of a stall, which would mean a stop and a slower ramp up again, and a possibility of the motor generating an overcurrent or tacho feedback error. remember this was originally running likely on aZ80 or similar processor, with large parts being done by other processors as well, and the designers had both limited memory and limited performance. 400Hz was running the GTO devices at the high end of the range, as they, for power devices at the time, needed 2 or more same size power switches for each of the 6 legs of the drive, and GTO devices need you to have a very beefy current source and sink, as you need to turn it on fast, so high current at a relatively low voltage of around 5V on the gate, and turn off you need a current about what the device is conducting, and around -10V, to pull the gate off hard and fast enough to switch off. At least this was better than earlier thyristors, where turn off was done using LCR circuits, and a second equally rated thyristor to pull the anode negative for long enough that the first one would be able to turn off, and then the second one, due to the high power resistor providing it with power, would stay on till the first fired again to turn it off. High static current, high power loss, the GTO made this power use so much lower, at the expense of needing 4 isolated relatively high power supplies, 3 for the upper bridge, and the lower one having a common cathode connection. Instead of 500W of power dissipation now down to under 100W at idle. Add this up per axle and the power use becomes considerable, plus higher frequency, and the ability to do regenerative braking with much less processing power, and you can see why they, and now the IGBT, won out.
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  1843. Also had that, a cheque that had already been processed by the bank was intercepted somewhere, and then "washed", in that the only thing left on the cheque was the MCR ink, and the signature. Then the entire cheque was reprinted, complete with background, and then taken and cashed at a branch. The forgery was pretty good, until you looked under a microscope, and saw that the pale yellow background was not a Pantone colour printed with a screen, but an inkjet printer print, with the yellow dots and the odd cyan and magenta dots to shift the colour to match, and then the rest of the information was printed again. Biggest thing was that they printed the wrong cheque printing company, as we used custom order cheques in a self carboning book, printed not by the main print company for that bank, but by a local company that also did the custom cheques for this bank. Also we had, as part of the record of the book, the folio copy, with the original details there on the carbon copy, and, coincidentally, a spoiled cheque on the same page of 4, which had been crossed out, and written cancelled, by the book keeper as well. Original was for a large amount, the washed one was slightly smaller amount, and offered around 9 months after the original had been processed, and the bank accepted it, as it looked, to first glance, as if it was genuine, and was printed on the genuine paper, and had a matching signature. Police case opened, but of course nothing ever came of it, and the company got the money back as well, with giving the bank the police case number. Now of course there are no banks in South Africa that will issue cheques, and no banks that will process them either, simply because cheque fraud got to the point that one in three cheques were fraudulent, and the volume had been dropping for many years, as people went to EFT, and other direct payment methods. Pretty much the entire planet no longer uses cheques, though the USA is the hold out, still accepting them, and also still, 2 decades plus after chip and PIN was introduced, still using magstripe data, and manual impression, as a way to accept credit and debit card transactions, despite this method being so easy to intercept, and misuse, for fraud for card present transactions, and card not present transaction fraud. Too big to fail I guess means they just pass the cost to he customers, and hope they do not switch banks to one that actually cares. Of course here in SA that means you will rarely find a merchant that accepts American Express or Diners club, simply because they are both so small in the market, and also are the most expensive merchant fee wise, with the only places that take them being 4 and 5 star hotels, where they can bury that charge in the mark up, plus also charge a nice big fee for drawing cash from these cards as well, so people can actually go outside the hotel. Every other bank charges 1% to 3%, AE and Diners only 5% or more. Good luck unless your bank is affiliated to Visa or Mastercard, which are the de facto standard for cards here, accepted everywhere, even by street hawkers as well, as there are a good number of mobile card solutions.
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  1919. Reason for the colour split is probably that the ADC is using the blanking interval as a way to reference black level and peak white level during the conversion, so that the input signal can be offset and gain trimmed to make full use of the limited number of bits of the ADC, probably only an 8 bit flash converter ( which still needs a resistor ladder and 256 comparators on the flash converter chip to drive the logic, that provides a binary value equal to the peak value of the ADC input) that is fed a sampled voltage of the black level as bottom reference, and then fed a buffered voltage equal to peak white for that frame. 8 bit flash as the design probably was late 1990's, and faster flash converters with higher resolutions were very expensive, but CMOS flash converters with 8 bits ( CA3308 for example) were almost same price wise, and could sample at 15MHz with 8 bit resolution, just needed a fair bit of work to make maximum use of the limited input voltage range. Likely 3 ADC's all fed after the colour matrixing decodes the signals into luminance and the 2 chroma difference signals, and then the digital values are used to generate the 3 bitmaps of the frame, for sequential read out and conversion back to analogue video for the CRT. If you select RGB input they use the 3 converters direct per colour, so no distortion, but analogue video would need the matrix to get the signals apart, and red is typically the one that suffers the most, as it is always the poor cousin to the dominant green signal. Having only 253 values available you wanted to use the range fully, so had to use the blanking interval sampling, as in a VCR, to set the gains, thus the Macrovision interference, and the same for head switching tearing, as that also corrupts the reference levels in the blanking interval. The red would probably be due to the maths required having underflows or overflows, and ignoring the carry or borrow in the output to the DAC driving the CRT after the frame buffer. As the data is only there for a frame no real worry, but a really interesting technique used there, which I think was pioneered by Tektronix in a series of digital oscilloscopes, that had a colour screen, using a very similar system.
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  1930. Note LOX is the same, with the added benefit of it also catching things on fire as well. Done the freeze stuff, though the snake I did was dropped, fumble fingers in the gloves, and it shattered when it hit the ground. Also remember the liquid nitrogen will slowly condense oxygen out of the air with time, so the end of the dewar time, if it has not been opened, will contain a very high contaminant of liquid oxygen, so be careful in using it, as it will actually enhance combustion, and will catch things on fire with only a spark. The laboratory method to get liquid oxygen, as it normally is not provided because of the hazard, is to take a cylinder of medical grade (or welding grade if nothing else is to hand) high pressure oxygen, and slowly bleed it, through a regulator, to a length of small diameter, 6mm to 10mm copper, stainless steel or mild steel pipe, and place a coil of the pipe in the liquid nitrogen, so that at the open end of the pipe you get liquid oxygen that condensed from the gas appearing. The 2C difference in boiling point at standard pressure means you lose some of the oxygen still, but the majority will condense out as liquid for your experiment. Oh and high pressure oxygen or LOX makes many things burn, like shoe polish, graphite seal packings, any oil residue, most plastics, and clothing. Reason the LOX tanks were all in a separate blockhouse, each one with it's own heavy steel blast door, and with nothing else at all stored in there other than the LOX tank, the filling station and the hoses for this. On a 40C day though this was the coolest place to be, always under 10C, and your breath would come out as mist, and especially when the tanks were full and venting, and the floor had a thick mist all over from the vented liquid.
    2
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  1934.  @garywheeley5108  They likely carried at least 3 spare tubes for each position, and the same for light bulbs. However the bulbs and covers are almost always mounted with sturdy anti vibration mounts, so they do not really shatter as seen in the movies, they survive quite well, seeing as normally they have very sturdy heavy duty filaments, with a lot of supports. Submarine designers know there will be always water and vibration, so they make sure that things like lamps and the radios, along with all sensitive equipment and panels, are mounted on anti vibration mounts, which also serve a dual purpose to keep them from buckling as the hull is compressed at depth. Even the walkways and decks have the same anti vibration mounts, both to keep from transmitting noise to the hull, and to keep them from buckling. Damage from depth charges that breaks a bulb normally was pretty much followed by the hull breaching. Also the light fixtures all had at least 2 lamps in there, some having 4, 2 being filtered with a red glass, used in the conning tower so the captain could have night adapted eyes to use the periscope, or to run at night on the surface to charge batteries and change air. Submarines in that time were not well lit, which is why they had a lot of battery powered torches, to see to do maintenance and repairs. Those batteries were very carefully husbanded, though I would say a few enterprising submariners also managed to "acquire" lead acid mining lamps to use, as those are easy to charge off the ship batteries.
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  2023. Postal locks are bought on the spec of being cheap, and thus are sloppy and simple to pick as well. So easy for somebody to go to the post office late at night, stand there, appear to post a letter, and then pick the lock, or even just have a key, as those locks are all keyed alike, so one key fits almost all, and you can just buy them as well online. Then empty out the letters and bag them, and do the fraud for the next week, then repeat. As well the post office actually does not have a literacy requirement to be a postie, not part of the hiring, so plenty are well past the point of functional illiteracy, and well into "match most shapes" literacy, and those they cannot they simply dump. Protected from being fired by the union as well, so they get a job where all they do in move bags in the office. Another is internal theft, which is why my local post service has the motto of "We Deliver, Whatever we do not take", because it takes them 6 weeks to deliver a letter in the same postal code, even a letter sent via bulk mail, delivered to the sort centre, and going to a PO Box in the same sort centre, literally a floor above. Plus harder and harder to find post boxes, they are going fast, and as well so are the post offices, the one office now serves the area that used to be covered by 8, all closed down, and all in one single building now. The staff complain about being paid late, the deductions going off, but not being paid over, so some are losing medical and pension, and even tax not being paid over, so they get dinged tax time as well.
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  2146. Oxygen fire was a part of training, in that many things you think do not burn, will burn in pure oxygen, including PTFE, Halon, and aluminium parts, along with steel and stainless steel parts. Your oxygen system itself is cleaned to make sure easily combustible things like oil, skin residue and such are all removed during service, and all parts are washed in pure alcohol to clean them as final step during install, and are sealed away as well as much as possible. With the mask unit being replaced just 10 flights before, it is possible there was either a bit of debris in a pipe, or a plug was not correctly installed (hard to get to the connectors under the unit, without stripping large sections of panelling off to get a visual check, so easy for tramp material to be in the connector, and causing an intermittent contact) and thus the valve likelyr was stuck partly open by some tape residue from a cover, or had a tiny bit of grit in it from exposure from the service store to the aircraft on the hard stand, with uncovered ports. Flow through the sticky valve, and the intermittent contact allowing flow, so that eventually the concentration in the box was enough, and the tiny bit of tramp metal caused a spark, and in an enriched atmosphere that was sustained, causing the plug to burn, and in turn burning through the rubber hoses that were keeping the oxygen inside the pipe. Then hot oxygen rich gas was flooded into the side cavity, where it soon found likely accumulated oils and such from hydraulic systems, along with all sorts of easily burnt paper and fabric parts, and this then spread to the wiring loom and started all those cascade failures as systems, depending on the locations of the power and control wiring on the surfaces of looms, melted and shorted out, tripping breakers and leading to the ACARS messages, before the ACARS system itself was cut off. CVR and FDR likely survived so long because, as long wires in the loom, they were laid first in the looms on the assembly board, and then the long excess sections out of the loom got coiled up on the panel pin board, till the loom was complete, checked and laced, only then being laid out on another panel, to be carried on to a bulkhead connector leading to the cabin cabling loom.
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  2264. Brake use depends heavily on drive style. Drive like you have a carton of eggs balancing on a small pole and not falling over they last forever. But drive in traffic hard, and the wear is going to be severe. Heavy front of the vehicle and it will wear anyway. Did mine this last weekend, of course it is "as per sample", so go get the less common rotor diameter, and matching pads, and then take old off, clean caliper, support, hub and backing plate, and apply a thin film of rubber grease on the touch parts, and the hub and bolts, so that they have a little film to keep the rust from making them one. Pads I got are Ferodo, so guaranteed to last 100 000km, though the rotor will be destroyed by the time they wear out. Did put the little screw back in place, but only hand tight on the torx driver, not even a socket handle on it, as it will not fall out with the wheel in place. Reason for replacing was I felt a slight shudder when slowing down from high speed, and then looked, and saw that, while there is half the pad still left, the rotors have worn a nice set of ridges, and thus the shudder. So off to the spares place, and get what they have, not ATE, which I wanted for pads and rotors, but off brand rotors and Ferodo pads, so I know that in 50 000km I will replace the rotors and the pads again, with the pads again showing no real wear. Old pads were OEM from GM/Isuzu, no idea which local supplier they use, but likely the OEM, looking at the construction, was Ferodo, as they, Girlock and ATE have the local market OEM part supply pretty much sewn up. Filters I use GUD or Fram, as they now are the same company, and I never had issues with the filters from them, but the others I have had issues with leaking and such.
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  2273. The limiting item will be the final fuel pickup tank, whichever one is used for this, typically the centre tank. You will want to keep this one full as much as possible, but as the dive is generally something that is done with reduced power, after the high power climb to gain energy by both increasing velocity and altitude, and the zero G segments are accomplished by reducing thrust, allowing the aircraft to coast up and complete the rise and then fall to the recovery altitude, you do not need much fuel input, so the full tank will tend to have fuel flow mostly non vapour entrained to the fuel pickup screens, and then into the low pressure lift pump. Past there the system is pressurised, so the vapour will be condensed back down. Hydraulic systems pretty much the ame, there generally are pressurised bladders used to maintain pressure anyway, and to supply peak demands that are beyond the pump capacity, so this will do the hydraulics, and, while they may get a bit of air entrained in the fluid, it will be bled out in normal operation on the flight back, and will certainly do so on the ground when pressure bleeds off and the bladder expands to fill the pressure reservoir full volume. Toilets are going to have one way valves in there anyway, plus the seat itself has a valve that is only opened when you flush, though I would not flush in the zero G segments, as you will end up with a full coating of blue fluid, just like in heavy turbulence. Pilots will have the seatbelts on, and will also be able to find that pen that some body lost last flight, as it floats past.
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  2353.  @lawrencedoliveiro9104  Mostly due to them using ENG vans, with the high bandwidth video and audio being sent via a satellite link, so it has to go up to a Geosynchronous satellite, then back down to a ground station, then either via a terrestrial linkage, or more commonly, back up to the satellite and then down to the broadcaster studio. 4 trips to geo orbit right there, and thus the delay, so yes you will have delay. Better will be if the reporter on scene actually does not have an ENG truck, but instead uses something like 2 cellular phones, one providing the video link and the audio, using a cheap bluetooth microphone paired to it, and the other phone in the pocket, receiving the studio talkback channel to a bluetooth or wired earpiece. Much lower latency, as all likely will be done via ground based cabling or links, but drawback is that it needs there to be a dependable local cellular network available, and for it not to be overloaded, and also not shaped for that call. you get cellular data plans that are guaranteed lower latency and higher priority, but not all carriers worldwide support the ability, and often you do not have a working cellular network, so the satellite link is the only option, as the whole lot, including the antenna, can be fitted into a pair of carryable suitcases, and deployed reasonably fast, though this then gives rise to the other acronym of ENG gear, being Easily Nicked Gear. Eye watering high prices for the equipment, and also for the connection per second, plus high monthly retainer costs, so they are not common. When operational Starlink should make this lag a lot less, as it aims to only be a short hop up, then a few dozen bounces till it reaches a ground station.
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  2365. Main memory is all the address space (1024k on the original 8080 processor, 16M on the 80286, and more with each generation after). Low memory is all the space under 640k, as the memory from 640k to 1024k was reserved for add on card ROM images, memory mapped so the PC bios could use them, and the section just under the 1024k mark was reserved for the PC bios, as the processor reset and interrupt routines all expected ROM in there. Very slow cheap ROM, almost always with one or more wait states on the memory bus so they could respond, with later on fast RAM being used to shadow the ROM, increasing speed. Then you also had to allow for this shadowing to have holes, as cards could have fast memory mapped regions as well, yet another set of things that could bite you, especially with the first network cards that had a 2k RAM to transfer data. With the 80286 you has more than 1024k of memory, so all above 1024k was upper memory, and you could access this from programs via one of 2 methods, either have a call direct to there, but losing the original 8080 address features, or use the then brand new memory mapping unit in the 286 processor to bring in a chunk of this memory to appear to be in the area under 1024k, called paging. Swapping between processor modes on the 286 and higher was done by calling a special register that changed from Real Mode ( 8080 compatible code and register wise) to Enhanced mode, allowing the full processor capabilities to be used. This does change some instructions in how they are executed, so to change back you have to reset the processor only, using a instruction sent to the keyboard controller, that also controlled address line A20 to force it low to disable the upper memory areas, and also reset the CPU, so it would restart, see that it had done a mode switch from the BIOS code, and restore all the registers, and carry on in real mode. There was a logic bug in that you could set A20 high, and have an extra 64k of memory still usable from the 8080 Real Mode, and not cause the program counter to overflow, giving a 64k block of high memory that you can use in Real mode directly, making programs run much faster without the slow switching to and from real mode ( you need to save all registers, do a very slow machine wise IO instruction and then halt while waiting for the keyboard controller to read the instruction, decode it, flip the appropriate bits on it's outputs, and then reset the processor, followed by the processor reading from slow ROM, seeing if a magic byte value is present, and then if so restoring all the registers back before finally doing a pop from the stack to get back to what it was doing before the context switch) and saving on the valuable 640k of main memory. You eventually had so much of the MSDOS kernel and drivers that you could load either in upper memory or high memory that there were a few programs that needed the LOADFIX program, as they would crash, never expecting to actually be loaded with so low a real address, under 128k IIRC, and all loadfix did was fill the low memory from the original entry point to IIRC 150k, and then call the original program, so it ran from there, and free the memory again when the program exited.
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  2388. If you have a nuclear plant, you can use the waste heat to boil water, to desalinate it, though you will only boil off enough to double the salinity, for technical reasons, but this will still use the waste heat and produce all the fresh water the reactor needs, plus a lot more for export along with power. Not enough energy in the low temperature steam, you want steam at 300C plus to gain useful work, and will condense it down when it is at around 150C, which will still allow you to boil sea water, though as above, with less efficiency. Not enough useful energy in that steam, which will be very wet, to actually do useful work, and you will be needing to use heat exchangers on the incoming salt water to both condense the reactor turbine steam, and the evaporated steam, so as to actually gain efficiency, by using the first heat exchanger to boil the water, and the second one to warm the incoming water a little, with a third one to cool the outgoing water and add some of the energy to incoming water, so you lessen the energy to get it to boiling, though the biggest heat need is to evaporate that sea water to a wet steam. Basically making your inlet water be at 90C, close to boiling, so you get maximum energy transfer, and you get 95C primary water out, which uses another heat exchanger to cool down to around 50C, for the run through the boilers again. Complex, lots of pumps but will give large amounts of reasonably low salt water, not going to be distilled, but definitely equal to river water in salts in it.
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  2505. I remember one day walking in town, and seeing 2 boy racers at a light, next to a truck tractor, belonging to the railways. Nothing special about the truck, just the tractor, Mercedes Benz, with the then standard Atlantis Diesel engine and Eaton box. Boy racers were in the then new VW Golf GTI Mk1, and a new 330i BMW. They were revving engine, waiting for the green. On the green the truck driver floored it and left rubber, screaming that ADE engine up to 2200RPM red line, spinning all 8 rear tyres, and leaving the GTI and BMW in the dust. He was at the next light, and stopping, before they were even half way down the street. Both boy racers simply slunked around the corner, quietly and slowly, thrashed by what looked like any old truck. Yes they likely would have beaten the truck if the next light was 1km away, but at 300m they got eaten badly. Also Steve, in his Mk1 GTI, put money on a fighter pilot he could beat him in a quarter mile (500m) drag race. So one night while we were on night ops, they lined up, pilot on the runway, Steve on the taxi way next to it. On the flag off they both go, GTI easily being in front for the first 200m, jet on full afterburner and 20 tons mass, with extra fuel in 3 drop tanks, far behind. 300m and the jet is catching up fast, 400m and the jet passes the GTI, then flat taps at just under 200kph (Steve had a ticket or two showing he could get to there), with the jet putting a lot of forward stick to hold it onto the runway. 500m and the pilot pulled back hard, just left the undercarriage down for an extra minute while limiting speed, so as to allow it to cool down before selecting wheels up. Steve lost his money.
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  2623. I had an avionics computer come in with an odd issue, power on self test completed within a hundreth of a second, not the regular 2 seconds. Tested, and, while it was running fine, and all the internal checks showed it was functional, and it was completing it's tasks correctly, it was just behaving "odd". Opened the case (84 M4x12 capscrews, I had bought a cordless screwdriver long before, and worn out the original gearbox, it was on the upgraded Black and Decker powder metal gears for later models) and went through the power supply, measuring voltages. -21V ok, -19V ok, -15V ok, -12V ok, 12V ok, 15V ok. then the last rail, 5V, meter did a range adjust, which it should not have to do on the 10V range, on that Racal Dana meter. 5V rail was showing 16V, the unregulated input bus voltage. Power off, and start with the power supply, replacing every part in that 5V rail, including the resistors on the board, and also the over voltage crowbar circuit, that should have blown the 10A fuse on the transformer rectifier board next door to it. All new parts, from zener diodes, power transistors, resistors, capacitors, driver transistors, the failed SCR, and the diodes that fed power to the system self test for power system, on the next board. then power on, still have that self test execute too fast. Pull out all cards, and replace with spares, then test again, perfect, so a card fault. Then start replacing card by card, till I get to a card that, amongst other things, contains the system memory, IC's that are even rarer than KIM1 rom, a MK3007 serial memory pair. Also has the self test circuitry in it, and looking at the card I can see one of the surface mounted devices looks darker. Put a spare card in there, the rest of the original cards back, and power on, self test executes perfectly. Run diagnostics, check all the analogue side inputs and outputs, and put all 84 capscrews back in, and box it and send it back out. Kind of needed, I had 11 behind me in a rack awaiting repairs, held up by needing million dollar power supplies. Never got to them before leaving, and anyway the lot went into a destruction session 2 years later on, as the airframes were demilled for the new owners. Looked at the card, and the only part, of the hundreds of exotic, unobtanium, and covered by some secret acts, parts in there (the stored program, in Intel Hex, on punched tape, that did all the calculation and a lot of logic decodes, using a board of 1k EPROMS) that did fail from having however many hours of 16V applied, was a single quad open collector (ironically rated for 30V on that open collector) gate, where only 2 of the gates were used, along with a resistor, to combine all the logic to drive the 12V relay, that drove that self test light.
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  2626. I put one in a good number of years ago, because otherwise your car will be stolen. Now it went into a repair shop after it got into an accident, and my friend, who's car it was, forgot to tell them about how to disarm this. After 2 weeks he collected, and found they had been pushing the vehicle up a 2 flight ramp every day, because they had called an automotive electrician out, and he could not figure out the immobiliser. He got in, and started it, and they could not figure out how, because we had discarded the reed switch commonly used, as thieves simply went around with a strong magnet off a broken speaker to try to find them, and instead had a hard to press switch hidden under the carpet in the tunnel. Immobilier itself I used the full 2m of loom it came with, and matched the original tape used on the loom, and cut and pliced, soldered connections all round, into the main loom near fuse box, and simply taped this extra wire into the loom with matching black tape, all the way to the passenger side kick panel, where the control box vanished into a hole in the frame, and was held up there with some foam wrap, and looked like a factory installed loom and module. By me you cannot insure a car unless it comes with a security system, unlike the USA, and even a 1980 Toyota Corolla had to have a minimum spec system. You do not have the easy to steal Hyundai and Kia issue at all, simply because the insurance companies will not finance such a vehicle, so all come with a decent immobiliser. Though if it is over a certain price, or is one of the top 10 all time stolen ones, which includes the Toyota pick up, all variants, any 1 ton pick up, all larger Toyota sedans, and the biggest seller, VW, you are required to put in at least one tracking device, and often you will get companies putting in at least 3 of them.
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  2636. Finland, Switzerland and Sweden also has the same fines based on income. There have been higher fines levied, and the person appealed, but had to pay. Funny enough in Sweden my father was pulled over by a traffic cop for speeding. Now the traffic cop spoke no English, and my father's German was very rusty ( last spoken in 1945), so the officer got an English speaker on the radio. They explained that he had been speeding in the rental car, and asked him where he was going, because that road ran to the Arctic circle. On finding he was going the wrong way, they spoke to the officer, and he was instructed to lead my father to his hotel. So, right in front of a "No U Turn" sign, they did a U turn, and then started off south, and the cop had lights and siren on, and after a while they were doing around 160kph, on the road marked 80kph, where my father had been doing 90kph. Slowed down only a little going into Stockholm, and when at the hotel the cop instructed, via the hotel porter, that my father should stay in the city, and not drive on the freeway, where he can get lost. No fine at all, and he was leaving the next day, so simply left the car at the hotel, who was also an agency for the rental company. He was also told the next day, slightly hung over, that he was a big spender in the casino, due to the Swedish liquor laws that forbade the selling of alcohol after a certain time, except in hotels where there were foreigners in the bar. So in the bar, people kept buying him drinks, and he was in the casino playing roulette. Few small chips, and he was on a winning small streak, chips not getting much more, just different colours. Around 2AM he figured he needed some sleep, and went to bed, tipping all those chips to all the hotel employees he saw. Next day found that he had been playing at the end with $50k and $100k chips, and had given a few of the staff nearly $200k as a tip.
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  2641. Durham, had any vehicles in that have met the can opener bridge? Or just you doing a drive through of the bridge itself. Yes the bottom spring is there to keep the element pressed up to the base, but in the middle is the bypass valve, and up top the rubber is the non return valve on the inlet. Using a different filter than the original is fine, provided it is the correct seal diameter and correct thread. You also do not want to downgrade, so longer or fatter is usable, and if you do not have a spec for valves having them is better for cold starts after overnight, where the filter without will drain back down, and thus oil pressure takes a few turns longer of the engine to build up. There are a lot of filters that are otherwise identical in all respects, just the difference being if they have inlet and outlet valves, and there are cross reference charts saying the lowest version is obsolete, and the others that are a fit and suitable replacement. On my VW I used different filters than OE, as the OE does not come with anything other than the bypass, so I used ones that fit, but have both inlet and outlet valves. Z88, the most common filter by me, to Z147 or Z157, both fitting, just one fatter and shorter than the other, but same area of filter material in them. Older cars you find filters are obsolete, but the modern spin on filter that replaces it is worlds better performance wise, or is supplied by the dealership as a replacement, improving filter ability, or improving cold start performance.
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  2646. Amazon still uses USPS to deliver outside of the larger metro areas, because USPS still has a mandate federally to deliver mail there, and even if it is not profitable to send a post van 200 miles to deliver 10 letters, 50 parcels, and collect 5 return letters, they still have to do it. But large high density areas Amazon can use contractors for cheaper than USPS rates, no union dues, no overhead of having full time staff, no requirements to fund pensions for the next 50 years out of current revenue. So that is why you see USPS not delivering parcels, and the fleets of Amazon branded trucks, each driven by an "independent contractor", who does not get the luxury of being able to decide work hours, work route, work time at all, but must follow a rigid set of targets delivered by the app on the phone, otherwise getting penalised for it. Funny enough the set hours, set route and set tasks to complete in order apply only to employees, but they are still not employees, and can be dropped at a whim. By me post is difficult, delivery is perhaps once every week, and finding a post office is getting to be hard, as all that are in rented premises are closed, due to non payment of rent, utilities and such, and the deductions for tax, pension, medical and such have been taken off, but not paid over, for a few years now. Also staff are being paid late, and those being retrenched are also only being paid a part of the amount each month, and that often being late as well. No overtime, no raises, longer hours, no resources, invoices printed on lottery paper, as that is the only paper around, and bring your own pen and staples, plus paper, if you need something certified. Letters are improving though, only 2 months to the same post office, and parcels are now under a year to be delivered. However they still keep to their motto of "We Deliver, Whatever We do not take" as well.
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  2662. A20 handling was done by sending a magic byte to the keyboard controller, which is another Intel CPU, a 8048 single chip computer. You wrote to it, and read from it, using IO space, so you would write the A20 flip code to it, and the 8048 would get the IO write on the bus, decode it and then set the A20 output accordingly, and then reset the CPU. The output of the 8048 was logic ANDed with the CPU line, so that you could have A20 be either always low, or follow the CPU state. IO operations always occurred at bus speed, so were a lot slower than the CPU clock, so you would have dozens of wait states while the IO write occurred, and then a halt was executed, while the keyboard controller executed the instruction and flipped it's output pins in sequence. Then reset brought the CPU out of halt. Keyboard controller only has 2k of ROM and 256 bytes of RAM, and at the most ran at 12MHz. The 80386 had a separate pin going back into the CPU that fed back the state of A20, so the CPU cache logic could see the status of the line, and thus not corrupt memory by attempting to write out cached data with the A20 line disabled, and even later on the A20 handler was integrated into the CPU as well, when the keyboard interface was brought into the chipset. You still get some pins on the South Bridge that are multipurpose, in that they can have what they do assigned, and the logic of the 8048 programming is still there in most part, even to the point that some chipsets still have the cassette interface available as part of the silicon, though to use the pins would mean sacrificing the use they have now, but the code is still there, just masked off by the "magic registers" that the BIOS writes to to set up the chipset on power up, and which are in general write only registers, or which return status data back on read.
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  2683. you might not want to do hard boiled eggs to the military spec either. Start with a 200l Regethermic cooking pot, clean and dry, and turned to upright position. Pour in 50l of cold water, and also a 5kg bag of salt. Then turn pot on to high. Start loading eggs, from the boxes of 60 dozen that you got, till the pot is full, typically 3 boxes of eggs to get there. When full, wait till the pot is boiling vigorously, and start a 20 minute timer. After 20 minutes, turn off the pot, and start to unload the pot, turning as needed to reach the eggs lower down, and place the now boiled eggs back on the trays, and back into the cardboard boxes. When finished and packed, allow to cool to room temperature, and place in the walk in fridge till needed. If you are lucky you got those from the top of the pot, having only been boiled for up to an hour, and possibly still edible. Unlucky you got those from the bottom, which generally were black once peeled, and almost totally inedible. Those eggs also would bounce, even when tossed out the windows of the bus we had, and we also discovered that they would indeed go through a windscreen as well. then they wondered why there were so few of us that would eat breakfast or dinner there, though every day we got a packed lunch, as we were going 80km away to a training facility, that officially half of which did not exist, despite the massive concrete structure being visible outside the windows on one side, with the equally massive wall and bank between us as well.
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  2756. Well done on upgrading away from blow up rims to something you can get locally, with brakes that actually work. Would drain the diff and refill while you are waiting, at lest keep the sludge and water from causing further damage. Fill with cheap gear oil, and run it for 30 minutes when you are ready, then drain and refill with the right oil. Engine wise first thing I would do, before removal, is put a new filter on there, as a clogged filter can cause many issues, depending on what moves to where in it, and it either being full of water so the float blocks the outlet and prevents the pump from getting fuel, to it being clogged with dirt from the tank, and the bacterial sludge building up to clog the lift pump. Would suggest while engine is out to dump the fuel tank contents totally, and clean inside the tank, as the inside is very likely to be nice and full of biofilm and sludge. But yes with the engine with all seals leaking, best to pull it out (at least you have the right tools there to do so, plus a crane as well to make life easier) and replace every thing that says seal on it. Would also recommend replacing transmission fluid while it is out, as that will make it almost behave like new, and clean out the hydraulic oil tank, because you can bet it has a thick coal dust sludge in there as well. Diff getting water in is easy, the breathers are upside down, or are missing or cracked, or somebody was overusing a power washer. And yes new bolts for the shackles and suspension are a good idea.
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  2759. Well, I have separate scanners and printers, but I did not buy the scanners, but picked them up off the ewaste pile. As to the refill cartridges, yes, and the refill in general has more ink/toner than the original one, simply because the refill actually fills the cartridge to the correct level, unlike OEM, where they fill to just pass a IEC page print test. Proved it regularly, where an original cartridge would barely get past 1000 pages printed before showing empty, while the same refilled cartridge (send in and get the same one back a week later, with new toner, new drum if needed and new wiper) would typically give the empty display at around 1500 pages of the same print mix. Refill is also typically a third of the retail cost of the original, and around half the cost of wholesale as well. when looking at new or new to me printers I always look up the cartridge number and the refill cost, and simply do not choose those which are not refillable (more the DRM chip is not yet cracked, or not changeable, over any other reason) in the decision. Does mean I have stripped a good number of inkjets, because the cartridges are way too expensive for the amount of use, and if I need colour prints I go to the local shop and get it printed there for 10c per page. Last time it was a canvas print, on A2 canvas, so it was going to be them anyway. Yes I have a colour printer, but it is going to be turned to scrap, because turning on a Tektronix/Xerox Phasor 360 costs $600 in wax, and I got this printer for free as well.
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  2829. Your split using has multiple capillary tubes feeding the indoor unit coil, with a directional valve to provide a restriction in the flow depending on direction, so that you get better efficiency in the different cycles. There is another restriction in the outdoor unit, so the line leading in is a cool liquid at low pressure, instead of a warm liquid at high pressure, reducing the volume of refrigerant needed. This restrictor is also varied according to flow, acting as the expansion device in heat mode, and pressure reduction in cooling mode. The coil outside is a lot larger in area, so the unit is optimised for cooling the indoors, but in heat mode the larger coil allows longer run time before defrost, though the heating capacity is lower than cooling, but as you typically are not removing latent heat of condensation it all evens out, the airflow is too fast to allow much to condense. Typically the units meant for heat pump operation and the regular non heat units use the same control boards, and simply have a few bits set in the microcontroller to tell operation mode, though often the board is the same, just with a different terminal block, or non used terminals. Outdoor unit is simpler, only with a single control line to turn fan and compressor on together, and with no sensor wires to give outdoor coil temperature. Heat pumps you will have with the inverter a control board, first thing to fail, and you will find it is NOT covered with the typical 5/10 year warranty, on the compressor alone, on inverter units. The non inverter heat pumps are almost as efficient, and with a control board that is inside the indoor unit, and only a relay outside to control the compressor, with the fan speeds controlled by 2 or 3 wires, and then a control for the reversing valve (power the valve to make the unit heat, default to cool otherwise), and then only a inlet air temperature sensor and perhaps a coil temperature sensor half way along the coil, where the refrigerant is changing phase from liquid to gas. Indoor unit has the same sensors, inlet air temperature, and coil temperature. These determine operating mode, the indoor ones in cooling will stop the unit cooling down when the coil starts to freeze up, from either too low airflow or too humid, and the outside ones will dial back the cooling if the refrigerant is getting too hot. In heat mode the same, though the freeze sensing is more important. In the climate I live in heat pumps, though pretty much the standard, almost never get used to heat, so the valves often will seize up in place, and then the units will have strange faults, as the tiny volume of refrigerant in the non used valve heats up and moves the spool in it slightly, causing the compressor to leak refrigerant from outlet to inlet. Inverter units tend to be damaged from power surges, and the outdoor unit circuit boards are also prone to failing, as they are exposed to the hostile environment, and run either cooked or frozen. Not covered apart from the regular unit warranty, and you almost never will change a compressor under warranty, as the manufacturers will either insist on the board changed with the compressor, or will scrap the unit, as the outdoor unit coils will likely be almost totally destroyed before that 5/10 year period is up. Inverter board failure will probably burn out the compressor on one coil as it fails, and you will have a fight for the warranty.
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  2837. Would say the blame is more on the ISP's that have long been known to overstate the bandwidth of connections, and deliver slow speed to all customers at peak load. they all say you have X bandwidth when you subscribe, but also that at peak hours you are lucky if you get 1% of that, as they oversubscribe customers with regards to upstream bandwidth. Netflix has, due to them having agreements with edge providers like Cloudflare, and also having dedicated hardware at lots of locations close to customers, the ability to deliver all the bandwidth needed, and be able to serve all the customers the data, but the ISP's have, in general, not actually done anything to improve their own networks to deliver, despite having received lots of Federal monies to do so over the decades, they simply took it, used it as shareholder bonus payouts, and have invested the bare minimum to keep the network running at some level. You can sue Netflix, but in reality the one who is responsible is the ISP that provided that last mile of connectivity, they are the ones that had the problems trying to serve 100k 4k data streams, over a network that struggles with serving 10k 360p standard definition TV signals in the first place, as the fight likely was not sent by Netflix as separate streams to all the subscribers on a network segment, but as a multicast stream that any of the decoders and computers could receive, if it were not for the network itself having old hardware, long since paid for, and long obsolete as well, by a few generations as well, even in the slow churn that is telecoms, where 10 year hardware life is the norm.
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  2892.  @wolfgangpreier9160  The original 747 inertial measuring unit had 2 gyro assemblies for each axis, and would run if one of each failed. However that was not considered reliable, so there are 2 IMU assemblies, both located by the CG of the aircraft by the wing root. These then form the stable platform on which the acellarometers are mounted, and then the navigation computers, 2 again, each using the data from the 2 IMU sent to them, with each having it's own acellarometers and angle sensors. They then are correlated and displayed, and each checks the other. A very good system, just that you need to have the aircraft powered up on the ground, at a precise location, normally nose wheel parked on a paint dot, and the other wheel bogies on a set of painted lines, which were entered into the system as a known waypoint. Then sit there for a half hour while the computer sits and calculates drift for you, compensating for the drift of the earth rotating, the orbit of the earth around the sun, and the drift of the sun orbiting around the galaxy. Also the drift of the platforms as well, as they get slewed to have that as the initial level, and keep it for the powered up portion of flight. No vibration, no loading of the aircraft in any way, which makes it hard to keep it accurate. GPS is an augmentation, but as a single system cannot be said to be redundant, and fault that takes out the antenna will stop it working, and there are not many locations for the antennas either, as the GPS receiver calculates the position of the antenna, so it has to be mounted on top of the aircraft, in a spot above the wing root and the CG. Also power levels are low, the individual satellites only have a 500W power budget or so for the transmitter, which has to cover a good chunk of the planet, and thus the received power is very low, well below the noise, and only recovered by using complex mathematics to reconstruct it. Spoofing has a receiver that gets the area signals, and then keeps a rough lock on them, but retransmits up to the target location a signal that is stronger, but which slowly is shifted in time, so as to fool the receiver into thinking the stronger signal is the real one, and the position it is giving is valid.
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  2906. Funny enough the first time I went to a casino, I actually went there illegally. As the casino, to skirt around the rules of no gambling, drinking or scantily clad women who might make people think the kerk is wrong, was in a fiction called a homeland. Created as a fiction to allow some rights, (and yes the family farm was expropriated to make up part of one), and as military we were not allowed to leave the country, though there was no border post, and the sign was right by the entrance to the casino you were entering another country, albiet one not recognised by any others. We went on a whim, and scraped up enough to pay the parking, and around $5 each to go inside. Inside, play the slots, buy the overpriced drinks a bit, but unable to draw money to go to the "shows" we left after around 2 hours, when I realised I was walking out with $5, and had bought drinks for all, so basically the dasino had been free. Next time the same a few years later, different casino, different homeland, and right by the sea, and again I went there with the money I was going to waste, and left cards at home. Made that a rule to do any casino from then, leave cards at home, and take enough cash with to pay all the bills, and when the cash is gone you are also gone. Now legal, and 5 minutes down the road, and have not been there for the last decade, and that was only to go to the cinema there, as that is about the only surviving cinema around, the rest are long gone, and way overpriced for what you get.
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  2911. The car records onboard, but does not make it available unless you plug in a USB drive in the car in the socket inside the glove box. It only keeps info till the space is needed to record again, generally a month or so, depending on how much activity there is. If the owner wants an external copy they need to plug in a high capacity USB drive, and then can copy the info over. Very heavy handed approach, as they can easily get hold of the owner, as the registration will have a phone number, and the owners almost always have the app active on the phone as well. Plus the DMV will have an address and such for the current owner as well. Are they also going to look for other vehicles with dashcams in them, either a dedicated one, or a GPS with dashcam, or an over mirror one, and impound them, break into them, and then look at the footage to see if it is evidence. most municipal buses and school buses also have cameras on board, are they going to impound them as well, along with seizing the camera equipment of any business around a crime scene, and then keeping them to auction off under Civil Asset forfeiture, as the vehicle, camera, business, is suspected of a crime, and is being held till they prove they are innocent. These vehicles that are taken, are they impounded correctly, and checked that the battery does not go flat, because a Tesla battery that goes into failsafe mode, due to low charge, will need replacement, and if it sits for 3 months it will be stone dead, needing a new low voltage battery at a minimum, and you might need a replacement high voltage battery pack, and fuses as well, as the car will disable itself for safety, especially if it has been stored in a hot area, and has been running AC to cool down the battery packs, or cold where it has to heat them. Are the police going to pay for a rental during this time, are they going to pay the insurance, loans and such, and are they going to compensate the owner for costs incurred? Likely not, meaning owners will be incentivised to lay civil suit, as generally a person buying them can afford legal representation as well.
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  2916. 100A service is a massive power capability, here by me the standard is 60A, and generally the only time you are going to trip it is if you have 8 individual AC units running flat out in summer, which is not that common in a residential setting. Business, running out of a converted house, will get there, but the easy solution is to go first to 80A service (just a change of breaker and meter, as the wiring is rated for 100A anyway, set by the supplier regulations and the supply side fuse), till you have to install the new cable and go for a 3 phase 60A supply, which will run a small industrial unit perfectly fine. Very rare not to be able to get 3 phase power, you really have to be rural, and far out, as the standard is a 3 wire 11kV or higher distribution cable, as the losses are lower, though many farms went with a single phase, as they have to buy the cable, so plenty went for the cheap option of 11kV SWER supply, as you only need a single cable, and a giant buried ground mat at the transformer, saving a lot on the cable cost. Does mean you also get single phase AC motors up to 22kW, biggest you can run off a 60A supply, as power source for pumps in rural areas, and a lot of farms have a good deal of 11kV wiring, contactors and transformers, owned by the farm, or leased from the electric authority, with a single meter at the connection point to measure power. But in cities, or close to them, standard is 3 phase power, and houses are fed from a single phase, which is plenty enough for 95% of all houses, unless you have the multi million dollar houses, where you need a 3 phase supply, because your electric bill is sitting north of $20k per month.
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  2970. Funny enough we call the one neighbour's car the Valdez as well, though that one is called the Laurel Valdez, as he generally fills it up with kerosene, not the diesel the manufacturer designed the vehicle for. Thus it leaks a little, oil, water, kerosene, and possibly brake fluid and transmission fluid as well, though hard to see against the big pool of oil and kerosene it deposits where it parks, leaving a visible pool on the floor. Laurel as that is a trade brand of one of the suppliers of illuminating kerosene, which is a little cheaper than diesel. Of course he has to let the car warm up, at a minimum of 15 minutes, and it apparently also has to idle when he washes it, to prevent the water getting into the engine. Only good thing is it will probably never rust, though the alternator is having a hard life, swimming in fluids is not exactly good for it, as proved by it needing to be jump started recently, a few times, and a dragging starter as well, for the same reason. As to doing it twice, that was me Monday, changing the timing belt on my car. Did it so well i did it twice, because after the first 20 minute struggle with the tensioner, no way to set it other than brute force, we were one tooth out, so, with the experience from the first time, it was done again, and this time the marks all aligned after the belt was on, and still so after 4 times around the combustion cycle to get the marks we put on the belt again to line up. Belt changed at only half of it's life, because a mystery screw, that must have been rattling up top for the last 30 000km, finally made it's way into the cambelt housing, and landed up carving a horrid notch in the belt when it landed up at the bottom. Plus replaced original serpentine belt and the very noisy idler it had on there, as they came off, so new was cheaper to put back on.
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  3008. Thing is those remote disable devices are often very poorly installed, often done by the cheapest unlicensed people, who are barely capable to plug a light bulb into a socket. They often just get the module, go to the vehicle, and use a screwdriver, pliers and perhasps even electrical tape, though plenty have been known to use painters tape, or even packing tape, or sellotape, to insulate wires. They find the wiring to the ignition switch, then cut one of them, see if it has power, and the vehicle does not start, and use that then to connect the 3 wires for the module, then take the ground wire and run it to any nearby bolt haphazardly, then tape the lot up and hide the module under the dash, where it can get it's cellular connection most of the time. Installed poorly the modules draw a lot of power, and drain the car battery in under a week. Often the poor installation, and cheap modules, results in them having a rather high failure rate, and also there is no real verification done on the install, the "installer" gets a fixed fee per vehicle, very low, so it is a drive by install as fast as possible, and as many as possible, so it often is that the device is not actually registered to the vehicle correctly, wrong paperwork, or a pack of 6 modules, 6 vehicles, and he dropped the box along the way and mixed up the tags. thus you can get them being installed so they cut not only starter, but also ECU, or the wrong one is triggered, and the wrong lender gets cut off. You can get better ones, and have them installed correctly, often drawing power from the OBD socket, replacing the socket with a new one, and hiding the original up in the loom, but those cost more, and predatory loan places will not spend money on better, unless it is for themselves. Also supposed to be removed when the loan is paid off, but the loan places often charge for this, or repo the vehicle, sell it at auction and buy it back, easiest because they keep the keys, remove battery, seats and wheels, and have it go there on a lowbed, getting a fraction of the real value. Then put this all back, put in yet another unit, leaving the original one in (and more wires cut again, because the methead installer will not see his own work) and sell it again, so now 2 units to accidentally be disabled.
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  3024. Especially extended warranty on things like household goods and electronics. Here there is a statutory one year warranty on all new goods, and thus the warranty company knows that, in year one, where most factory defects will show up, they will use the factory claim process, and not actually have to cover anything. Then for say the common 2 year extended warranty they know there will be little claims, all of them invariably from the owner doing something wrong, or from the manufacturer doing a recall, and thus again no payout, or only part payout. Basically the extended warranty is almost useless, because it either will not cover all parts, or will not cover labour, or will have hoops that are near impossible to jump through to get it right. Knew a salesperson at one of these places, and half of his commission came from the selling of these, for the above reasons, they were a massive profit for the selling dealers. Cars the same, sold used with a limited warranty, and if there is a balance of factory that will do for a lot, so the extended warranty is there as a way to make profit, because the dealership gets the sales commission up front, after the new owner has paid 3 months of premiums, and then the owner is paying off this warranty at whatever interest rate for the full period. So whatever was down on paper as the amount of the extended warranty the buyer now pays at least double that over the life of the loan, and every month as well pays a "facilitation fee" of some sort, again a profit, for the extended warranty, plus a charge for taking the payments. If you have to loan to buy, but not the highest you can afford, and buy cheaper, and for as short a period as you can, and with as big a deposit as you can. That makes it easier to finish the loan, and have the car serviced, and keep it for as long as possible. Having a car loan for 7 years, on a vehicle already 5 years old, in say the rust belt, where the chances of the entire bottom rusting out before that 7 years are up, is very high.
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  3121. Only issue is that you will eventually end up with a recovery machine full of air, and then need to freeze the tank to almost all liquid, then discharge the gas out. Even residential units I often would recover the gas, made a manifold and used old fridge freezer compressors to do the scavenge, which meant I could get 90% of the charge out before changing the compressor. Did put a big drier in the suction and discharge lines, to handle the moisture and stuff that could be in there from the compressor failing, and those would eventually land up with the scrap units. Supplier hated that I had good enough records to be able to claim compressors under the 5 year warranty, though often I would have had to replace a condenser coil at 3 years, because those turned into confetti and rust, especially on the window wall units. I was about the only customer who bought coils, other than those machines that failed within the 1 year full warranty. Capacitors were pretty much an annual replacement item, you might get 2 years out of them, even the OEM ones, and new compressors always got a new capacitor, and for some of the larger units also a hard start kit as well, especially those that were oversize for the load, and thus ran short cycles. Bought 3 sets of gauges, original cheap one, then one that did R134A as well as R22, then the last one because I needed R410A capability. Note as well that those hose sets do eventually wear out, and they start to leak through the rubber, and get stiff and brittle. Vacuum pump better to spring for the dual stage units, they get better vacuum, and are almost good enough to make neon signs with, or at least use as a roughing pump for them. Change the oil regularly, all too often see pumps with either chocolate milkshake in the inspection port, or solid black sludge there. Refrigerant mineral oil is good enough, and cheap as well, and a 5l ( around 1.3 US gallons) bottle of it lasted around 20 oil changes.
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  3126. Nissan electronic module has a small RC oscillator in the chip, and a driver that divides it down from a higher frequency, so the resistor and capacitor values can be reasonable close tolerance parts, then use the shunt resistor (the loop of wire on the board near the relay contact) to detect lamp current when on, and if it is below a threshold it will switch to a higher flash rate to indicate a blown bulb. Current typically is set so the trip point is 2 21W lamps triggers it, but if you have the 2 21W lamps plus the 5w lamp it is high enough that it will not run at fast rate. Some also have an added threshold, so if you have 4 21W lamps ( hazard operation) on there it will flash at a lower rate, with a much reduced duty cycle, so that a vehicle on the side of the road will have the hazard lights run for a much longer time before the battery is flat. Generally with this you also need to install a trailer relay unit if you want to tow with the vehicle, which removes the trailer lamp load off the circuit, and thus the trailer unit also often will include, if it is the OEM version, another lamp fail circuit that will tell you if trailer lamps are faulty as well. Modern vehicles have body control modules at the rear, where they drive each individual lamp separately, and also monitor them all the time to check they are not faulty. Thus the indicator and brake lights will also fail safe, in that if a brake light fails, the indicator will come on at constant brightness on the side that has failed, in concert with the other side, though generally almost all vehicles that have body modules for the rear lighting use LED lighting for all lights, except the reverse light, which is still an incandescent lamp, as it will almost never fail, other than from accident damage. Still have lamp failure detection in them for the LED units, though that often requires using a dealer diagnostic tool to get the information, as that only sets a failure indication when all LED units in the signal fail.
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  3247. I had a similar case, lawyer showed a document purported to be signed by the owner, and I asked the lawyer who had "witnessed" the document if he was willing to stand up to a judge and verify that the person had signed the document. He said yes, so I told him that in that case I would go there with at least 100 hand written notes, all signed by the owner, and all with his distinctive writing and signature, and with a managing agent with likely hundreds more filed, as he was not only a slumlord, but also a prolific complainer, and I had at least a decade of written notes from him. Was he still willing to offer that document in court for the eviction proceedings, and the forced sale, and he was funny enough not willing. Case went through, no defence, default judgement, because the judge asked if they were the owners, no, do they have any documented proof of tenancy, no, so shut up and sit down, and a default judgement plus eviction. Went for the 10 years of no payment of levies, full plus all fees, and the balance went to the lawyer. I then told all those with claims dating back for damage to send in all bills to the lawyers, and made an even bigger dent in that amount. Remainder was eaten by the monthly tracing agent for the owner, and I guess it went all within a year. New owner went up, and told them that they had 2 choices, but that they would be leaving at 6PM. the choices were either leave via the door, or leave via the windows, and he had 6 armed police with him to "reinforce" the option. They used the door.
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  3291.  @PebblesChan  There were 5A regulators available from National Semiconductor, in a TO3 package, with a pretty high per unit price, that needed a fair chunk of aluminium to get that 5A out of them, even with the minimum input output difference of 3V, thus the 8V supply rail, that was 8V fully loaded, to 10V unloaded. 15 to 30W to dump on a card was hard, you had to either have a heatsink, running the full length of the card, with fins that took up another card space, or have it take up half the card space and still get a card in next to it. Or have a cooling fan directly cooling just that frame section. S100 bus simply did it the easy way, need 5A, put 5 1A regulators on the top of the card, each with a heatsink to handle 6W, and have 5 Vcc bus rails to the assorted chips, so each rail was only loaded to just under 1A. Easy with TTL and NMOS, as power use really did not change much with clock rate. Cray did it even simpler, as ECL has a current use that is almost constant, irrespective of clock, so all they did was to have a single ferroresonant power supply that used massive copper busbars to deliver the -5V2 to the cards, with absolutely no regulators at all, just a ferroresonant converter that made a constant AC voltage, and then simply tossed in a massive set of rectifier diodes, and truly massive capacitors to smooth out that supply. Then used liquid cooling, to keep the chips on the card frames from melting themselves off the boards. No regulators, and a variac with autotune to fine tune the voltage.
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  3356.  @Mike-01234  Just takes one election to bring in a bad actor, who will run the HOA into the ground, and destroy the community. mostly because the USA has almost no laws governing them, and fragmented laws in some states only. they need to have a set of common laws covering what they can and cannot do, and a minimum set of laws about what they must do, transparency and making public all records being foremost among them. So many cases of HOA's where the monies just go missing, and no records available until the owners actually get a court order to force the showing. Best thing for many HOA's is to dissolve it completely, and if there is nothing common, like sewage works, roads and such that actually improves home values, as you now only pay the city, not an added tax that you have no control of which is HOA dues. But HOA is popular for a developer, because they build slow, get to keep the dues during construction as profit, and then the city or town gets a new suburb to tax without actually needing to spend any money to build roads, electric, water, gas, communications and sewage infrastructure, or to maintain it, but gets the tax revenue as if they had. These kind of HOA's should not exist past the building phase, let the city/town take them over, because they get the infrastructure already built, and the HOA is actually now an impediment as it adds a higher cost of ownership to the property, which strongly affects pricing. It is showing that non HOA properties next to, or in a HOA, typically have a much higher selling price because they are not deed encumbered by a HOA. some times you need a HOA or COA, because of common property, but most cases of separate houses on public roads you really do not need it at all.
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  3362. Not true, spread spectrum clocks also jitter the clock to make noise more broad band, to cheat emissions tests that sweep across a band, so the average noise becomes lower, and the clock can jitter by 5% easily. Critical timing functions use separate crystals, though all timing on a CPU and computer is designed with tolerance in mind, as nothing outside the CPU cores is too critical timing wise, so long as edges of data and clocks line up with the correct relation to each other. The most critical timing is not in PC's, but in cellular use, where your timings even compensate for the distance from the base station to the mobile device, as the shorter the dead time between switching between each mobile handset you have, the more data you can transmit to the particular handset per frame, and thus you get distance compensation, as well as dynamic power control, so that the receive side sees a near constant signal from all handsets at the base station , so it does not have to degrade data rate, and the transmit power to each handset in the antenna field varies wildly, so they get a near constant level as well, The other handsets are muting the receivers while waiting, so they do not get desensitised by high signal levels, and the base station will dynamically allocate the handset position per cycle, to not have high power signals during the potential window time. That needs an accurate clock, and no base station runs off a regular crystal, they have normally heated ovens that keep the crystal temperature stable, and this is in turn fed from a Rubidium or Cesium atomic clock, that in turn is synchronised with a GPS receiver per base station, to get a clock accurate to within a clock cycle across the entire network, and giving free time to each mobile, as they also need an accurate clock, though the base station will compensate for the drift in the phone clock as well, in the telemetry channel each phone receives.
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  3365.  @phlodel  If he paid a deposit then they will give it back. If he paid up front, they would have no way to sell the vehicle, as they are acting as delivery only, and if the dealership sold it they would be looking at a very nasty legal case, which would result in them having to not only pay the original customer his money back, but also pay for a brand new vehicle in that trim spec as well for them, as the original vehicle would no longer be able to be titled as new. My BIL had that, paid full price for a vehicle, delivery around a year out, with his custom trim spec and interior. Year or so later it arrived, but, due to currency fluctuations, it now was triple the price, but he still paid nothing more for it. Insured with the regular insurer he used, and not a week later it was written off in a T bone, with another vehicle driving into the driver door, at high speed, and going wrong way up a one way street.. Few bruises and cuts from glass, and all airbags deployed, and he was fine. Next day insurance was not happy, as the insurance was for replacement value, and that was now 4 times what he had paid originally. Unfortunately he wanted a replacement same time, so the CEO of the local dealer network lost his brand new company car, also on the same shipment, as it was the closest trim spec to the totalled one. Back down to driving the lower spec one. Scrapyard that got it was unhappy, though the owner took it as part of the contract with insurance, and spent another year ordering all the parts to repair it from all over the world, and then sending in all the electronic modules to get reflashed and working again. He got a nearly new luxury car at the end, for half price, so drove it all the time.
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  3420. Well, using the condenser to get rid of the water from the evaporator sounds nice, but it has a drawback in that you now have a nice wet, hot film on the coils, which is going to provide both a perfect growth medium for bacteria, and also will corrode the coils to nothing in 2 years. Evaporator is already going to be a slime paradise, but those pipes and pumps will be clogging up, because of all the dissolved nutrients in the water. Split units at least you only have to clean half the unit with biocide, but window wall and portable units you have to strip it down, and clean every part with biocide, at least every 6 months, otherwise you get the perfect Legionnaire growth factory, with the product being air delivered right to you. Plus you will find, around the time the warranty expires, that it just does not cool as good any more, because those nice blue coils, which still might actually look nice and blue on the outside, have now, on the evaporator side, been covered with a nice black mould layer, and on the condenser side have turned to white aluminium oxide sludge, also with black mould and slime holding it in place. Then on cleaning, you find that you have an outer layer of fins, and nothing inner left, all now just white powder and copper pipes, lying at the base of the case. Yes they can give a 10 year warranty on that Matsushita compressor, because they will absolutely last that long, but that warranty does not in any way cover the coils, the batteries, or the inverter itself, which you will also need to replace inverter and compressor as a unit, as the failure of one kills the other. Each one, to the average service centre, without the totally overkill diagnostic equipment at the production plant, will say the other is faulty, so both are replaced together. Note inverter is not warranty cover, and is nearly the price of the unit alone.
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  3473. The fancy kettle also uses the exact same element as the cheap one, just they use a nice blob of cast aluminium alloy to bond it to the stainless steel plate, and then also put a ring of blue LED's right next to this 150C block of aluminium, to light up the water, so you know it is on. Bets are will the LED dies fail, or the element, but they never last beyond 2 years anyway, with moderate use of once a day for a half kettle of water. Same as the cheap one, made in the same factory, with the same electrical parts. Of course, if you want a no wait solution you can go buy a Zip Hydroboil (does need 230VAC to run it, and you have to have it plumbed in with both water supply and a steam vent pipe, along with the power connection rated for 15A draw) and have up to 19l of boiling hot water right there when you need it, and never fill it up again. Uses a 2.2kW heater element to boil the water, and keeps it just at a slight boil, in an insulated copper tank, and then has a small auxillary tank that has the float and fill valve, that keeps the level in the big tank constant, but also does not fill it fast as used, so it will not ever be below 95C. Thermostat uses the steam, venting into the small tank, to trip off power when the small tank lid hits 60C, so the main tank is always just short of boiling. A few sizes depending on use, from an office with 4 people, to a hotel that does morning coffee and tea to 200 people that all want boiling water over that hour of breakfast. All the parts that fail, tap, element, float, valve, safety switch and thermostat, are spare parts, and easy to change out as well. Just the price is a little more than the $15 kettle at Wallyworld (expensive, the cheap ones here are $10, with a 1 year guarantee, and actually do often outlive it), so be prepared to shell out $847 for the most common 10l model.
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  3485. Data in the VBI was generally a SMPTE timecode for the source video, used to display a time counter and frame number for the use of the editor. The other info was close captions, and then you could also have alternate data streams that contained things like title . This came from the original video tape, either Umatic, Betacam or Betacam SP, and was simply transferred to the video stream either by the TV stations or by the duplicator. TV stations would often strip out the SMPTE codes to instead add station control codes, transmit flags ( is this for certain areas only on a national broadcast, or to add local adverts during breaks) and the local transmitter text data, but line 21 would generally be left alone. The Macrovision blocks were generally not going to interfere with the timecode, but the only thing was that the video clamping would be confused by the ramp and would thus result in the decoder not getting a good signal out. Professional VCR units had the ability to turn the video AGC on and off so that you could then record the Macrovision info onto a tape without interference, and also turning it off on playback meant your video was not going to suffer from data corruption during the edit stages as well, though you only put the macrovision on at final dub stage, so that it would have less effect, as it still did cause degradation of the video by not giving as good a vertical lock. Professional VCR units would record macrovision effortlessly, and Panasonic made a lot of semi professional ( Prosumer) VCR units with this available, mostly used for home video editing where you also had generation loss and not having multiple AGC actions lessened the video degradation somewhat. You would have only the camera AGC enabled to handle the initial shooting light variations, then use the edit deck to do your effects, cuts and non linear editing ( you needed an edit deck, and also at least 2 VCR units slaved to it to do the non linear editing before HDD recorders and digital video) and record to the master tape. The edit deck could also do the audio dubbing in linear stereo in a second pass, though HiFi stereo required you to have the audio dub already set up to record. You could get really good results out of that, as good as the best professional edits, as good as VHS could deliver both video and audio wise. just needed a good source video. As to the Teletext and such, pretty much European TV sets, or at least anything that used the Phillips chipset for TV jungle processing had text built in for either free ( for the later chipsets where everything was in one chip and a front microcontroller with an I2C bus connecting them) or with only a small second text processor and a few control bit changes. Siemens also had a set of chips that did this as well, so any of the European TV manufacturers ( Grundig, Phillips, B&O, Normende) and almost all of the old satellite TV decoders as well did both close captioning and text even on the basic sets. The USA had their own chipsets, and most of the European chipsets did out of the box PAL,NTSC in assorted flavours, and SECAM with either no added changes or with only minor changes, but the US ones only did NTSC.
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  3650.  @ben_doom1958  Been in a helicopter doing that, memorable when you are sitting looking out the door, and above you is the ocean, and beneath your feet is the sky. You would not think 16 tons of helicopter can actually do that. As for transport aircraft being underpowered, they are suprisingly robust, as I also later on had the dubious experience of hearing the 2 ahead of me in the circuit landing, hearing it through the sound proofed walls of the third one in the circuit. They scrubbed all those tyres to replace in a single landing, and left a pretty impressive cloud of burnt rubber as they jackhammered the crabbing aircraft down on the runway. Of course the pilot flying the one I was in had much better cross wind capacity, and came in with a hot mic, reading off altitude till he went silent at 3, and after 5 seconds, when he commented for full reverse thrust, that for all those who were waiting, we had landed 400 feet back from there. No noise, no bump, no smoke. Interesting flight, got to watch air to air refuelling, the success, the fails, and the come back with a very clean plane, after doing too fast a disconnect, and getting washed with 500l of Jet A, promptly flaming him out. Bank off, aim level and get to practise that flame out restart procedure, that before had only been done in the static simulator, and come back to do it properly again. Passed that phase perfectly, did not get the package of the torn drogue sent to him as award. Same week also had to jump start helicopters, all that training as apprentice sure came in handy there, as I had to learn the entire airframe electric system, and read all the documentation as well, and a lot of it did stick. As to the toss bombing that is CCRP, different from the US standard of CCIP, and yes the bomb will go a lot further.Did hear of one pilot who did that, and he was a little hot in the pull up, and missed the target by a little. Also missed the bombing range entirely as well, and the farmer got a new tractor out of it as well, because the practise round landed near him in the field.
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  3753. Hp is not what it was though, having been made sweeter to appeal to US taste, and thus losing the rest of the world who wanted the original more bitter one. The reason for adding the salt was that trench warfare was generally hot and muggy, so you would sweat a lot there, so the added salt was needed, even above the original salt in the corned meat, as you otherwise would lose too much salt in sweat, and thus have poor condition troops at the front line. Even in winter thy bundled up warm, so sweating was always a thing. Modern day hot industrial plants they will always have water available, and some plants go so far as to have water chillers every section for hydration, and an important thing to add is salt as well, either in the form of salted snacks or as extra salt packs in there as well. Doing temp work in one I was drinking 8l of water a day minimum, and took along lots of salt packets from fast food places as well, because you lose a lot of sweat working in places where it was 40C plus. lots of fans as well, and many of the stations they had literally welded the fans to a length of chain, which in turn was welded to the steel building structure as well, because if they had used bolts everybody had tools to undo those, and move them to other places. I did find some that were not welded down though, at one point we had 6 just to move the air there, and it helped a lot. Not little fans either, they were the clones of the Big Ass fans, basically around 30kg of steel so as not to blow over.
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  3772. The likely way he gained access was because the shipping companies often recycle logins for the ERP systems, as they pay a per login fee, so if they have 100 seasonal workers, they will all get given the same login and password, as it will still have a separate terminal ID to use with it, but no extra charge. They will also never change the password, as then they have to train all the seasonal workers again, and manglement will have a hard time remembering to turn over the keyboard, to see the new post it note there with the username and password on it. Thus he just logged in remotely, as if he was a worker, and trawled through the packages looking for the ones he needed, and marked them as undelivered, while in fact they got delivered. Then the "customer" got a refund, and the shipping company got left with a missing parcel, which they could not trace. Only way was found that likely somebody went and looked at the logs for drivers, saw the log there said delivered with signature, but the ERP system said not delivered, and they started to look through all the missing items, and comparing with the old delivery device logs, and saw the large number of mismatches. Then started looking, and saw a terminal ID, and finally were able to track it down to a residential IP, enough evidence to get a search warrant for the address and all computers, which probably still were logged in, and also which had history of all the transactions screens as well. Will bet that this scam was a lot more than the $3.6 million, but this was what was provable through logs in the ERP, and on the computer.
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  3774. The tubes shrinking from T12 to T8, and then to T5, was a result of increasing phosphor efficiency. The T12 phosphor was essentially the same phosphor since they were initially developed in the 1920's, and was very limited in operating temperature and allowed light emission. Thus you needed a certain area of phosphor to get a defined light output. Later improved phosphors allowed both higher light output, and higher operation temperature, and also the smaller diameter tubes allowed a reduction of volume of gas fill, and also a drop in the amount of mercury in them, so the mercury went from almost 100mg for a T12 lamp, to 5mg for T8, and down to under 2mg for a T5 tube. CFL units are at around 0.2mg of mercury per lamp typically, ironically making recovery of the mercury near impossible, as it is so little. The biggest killer of them in enclosed and any fixture is that most of the power dissipation is in the filament ends, where you have to heat up the emitter material, so generating all the heat right by the electronics, and also in a nice insulating plastic enclosure. green PCB at manufacture ends up at EOL as being charred black, along with pretty much the entire inside of the lamp. Drawback of LED units is that they are also full of large amounts of toxic metals, Gallium, not so bad but still a heavy metal, and Arsenic, part and parcel of the Gallium Arsenide used to make the light emitting diode chips used in there, plus of course the phosphors are pretty much the same ones used in the flourescent lamps, and those are also a witches brew of heavy metal oxides, enclosing the GaAs chip. Flourescent linear lamps are easy to recycle, mostly glass, a bit of nickel wire, some strontium and tungsten, and a little fill of aluminium and copper from the ends, plus the water soluble phosphor inside, because it is deposited using a water based slurry. Crush up the tubes and wash them, and the wash water has almost all the phosphor and mercury, because it tends to bind with the phosphor (which is why you see so many T5 lamps that are pink, because the tiny amount of mercury in them has been adsorbed onto the phosphor coat strongly), and then you simply use eddy current sorting to pull the metal parts out, and melt them down again, and the glass goes into a furnace to make new ones. CFL units harder to recycle, you have to separate the electronics and the tube, and then mostly just recover the copper and dump the rest, and the same for LED lamps, if recycled only the copper is stripped, all the rest is just more waste to be dumped or buried somewhere. There was a brief period where CFL units had replaceable glass, as the idea was to reuse the electronic unit ballast and have a simple east to replace light emitter, but the integrated CFL quickly killed that as they were cheaper to make. Still have a few of those units around, and they will outlast the LED units very likely, as I also have a good supply of the PL flourescent lamps they use.
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  3854. That GPS mentioned also relied heavily on having an accurate local map, and also on you having close by, at least within 2km or so, a very well marked survey point whose position is, by dint of the old mapping having placed it correctly a century or so ago, and it being verified as well numerous times since then, so the exact coordinates are known down to the metre. Then a local GPS receiver is placed precisely over the pin, and the survey receiver is also placed an exact known distance and angle away from it, and allowed to measure till the 2 can agree as to local error. Then you use the mobile unit, and it, using a radio link, communicates with the survey repeater, allowing you to calculate any slight drift and transient error as you move around, as it affects both equally, so that after the survey, and you return to the survey point, and again place the mobile unit onto the exact same point. Thus any long term errors are found out, and if the positions do not agree you do them again, to get in the end a very precise map of where the points are relative to the survey point. Yes you can achieve an accuracy of 0.5cm over say a construction site, which is an order of magnitude better than your old surveys could generally give, due to reading inaccuracy, and over say a field you can get a map that is as good. But all depends on that actual known point, and it not moving at all, and not being shadowed at all during the survey by things like people walking by, or trucks or cranes in the area. Otherwise regular GPS is only accurate to within 100m on the horizontal plane, and 50m in the vertical, the perceived accuracy comes from the actual map inside, when the processor makes a best guess as to where you are, trying to get you to match the known roadways and tracks entered on there, otherwise it will, if unknown, default to placing you "near" the road, or placing you on "service road", when the actual position does not agree within the 100m distance for locating a road. Fun comes with outdated maps, or new deviations on a road that have not yet been placed in a map, where you might be shown to be in a field for a while, with a rather confused direction algorithm attempting to route you.
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  3862. A well known issue withbatteries, the terminal voltage drops with temperature rise. Thus the simpler charge systems interpret this as being a flat battery, or one with a large load on it, and try to keep terminal voltage constant. This then charges the battery even more leading to heat being generated in the battery, and a loss of electrolyte from both chemical reactions and boiling off. Most modern aircraft will have both thermal control of the charge voltage, and as well a thermal switch on the battery that indicates a hot battery. Being such an old design this was likely not on the Tupelov, and instead they had the old fashioned starter generator on the engine, where it is quite capable of charging the battery at a very high current if needs be, equal to the starting current draw of the engine. One cell would have shorted out, either from flaked off material bridging out the bottom of the cell, or a separator failing. This then self discharged the cell, and the terminal voltage of this one cell dropped. Then the engine voltage regulator simply tried to keep battery voltage constant, overcharging the other cells, and the battery got hot enough that the cell separators melted, and shorted out the battery totally. Not an easy thing to recover from, as the generator can be disconnected in flight and the battery can temporarily can provide the full load, but the battery will discharge very fast. You cannot really disconnect the battery from the DC bus though, at least not in flight, there are isolating breakers and fuses inside the avionics bays, but you would need to open panels outside to get to them. They were very lucky though, old design, mostly mechanical linkages and hydraulics, and no electrical systems on the engines needed to run them once started, and the important EGT gauges are self powered by the engine exhaust heat. More modern engine no electrical power no engines, all is controlled by electric motors and valves.
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  3908. Billing errors my father signed up for direct debit of his municipal bill. After around 3 months they mistyped the amount, and instead of taking around $36.00, they took $3600.00, slapping his cheque account into the red. He saw it the next day, as the bank called him (the good old days, when banks actually knew their customers, plus at that time he had been a customer of the bank for well over a half century) about this. So he went down to the municipal offices, armed with the statement, and the bank fee schedule, and his bill, and went up to the head of billing to get this fixed. They wanted to give a credit to the account (over 100 months, basically a decade) but he told them that he was going to sit in the head of billing's office, all night if needs be, till they had both rectified the mistake, paid him for the overdraft fees and interest charges (thus the rate schedule), plus issued him a letter to the bank about the error, and cancelled the direct debit. He got all 3, though the kicker was that, due to having banked with Barclays PLC, in various guises and countries, for more than that half century, and being a pensioner, they actually had waived all charges on his accounts for a good number of years, as he was already a pensioner. Then for the next year he wrote them a cheque, dated for the last day he could pay, and put it in the post, with their reply prepaid envelope. Sadly you can no longer do this. No more cheques, no more reliable post office, no more post boxes on every corner, and I pay mine electronically, a day or so after it pops in my email inbox, as otherwise waiting for the paper invoice means you only get it after the cut off date for the previous month.
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  3943. The actual flex part is actually a flexible printed circuit board, which is very cheap, and which is generally quite robust in use. They normally get small cracks in the copper foil that forms the tracks on them, often in the middle of the flex, and, unless you clean off all the scmoo that is there to act as a lubricant, and also as a damper for vibration of the flex boards, so they do not vibrate and rub against each other, you will not see the break. You have to clean it off, then hold up against a strong light, and hope that the traces on both sides of the board broke in the same place, as there is a base plastic film, and each side has an etched set of wide copper traces, often overlapping, so the board is opaque, and then each is covered with another polyamide film, and laminated in a high pressure high temperature press to cure the laminates, then punched out of the film, or cut out with a CNC cutter. The ends will be fixed using insulation displacement connections, pressed through the film, and are arranged so they make good contact, then the ends are often sealed in with a little epoxy applied there, or a plastic clip on cheaper models, or even soldered on some. Ends break as well, especially where the flex and rigid parts are, another place to check, but with the ones epoxied in nothing you can do to fix. Break in the middle you can often scrape the outside insulation away, and solder some thin copper film to bridge the gap, then coat with clear nail varnish as a temporary fix, as it will be stiffer, and break again near there. Yes replace is best, as often the breaks are such that the horn only works in particular angles of the wheel, and same for radio, while the airbag has the red bag lit all the time, as it periodically checks the airbag for continuity, and detects the open wiring. Very rare do you get shorted wires, though if the outer insulation wears off on high use vehicles (think a taxi that does a thousand turns an hour, in a dense city centre, and which has worn out a few steering racks already) you can get that, though pretty much all of the designs separate the horn wiring from being on adjacent locations to the SRS wires, which are normally duplicated on 2 or more parallel windings, and also are spaced on the film, so there are no wires, adjacent on others, that will ever be able to touch them and accidentally provide a trigger voltage. At least 2 layers of insulation have to fail, before they make copper to copper contact.
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  3983. Freezer on the bottom you have a smaller freezer compartment, as it has lost volume to the space for the compressor. As well the insulation there is thinner, to minimise the lost volume, plus it has a lot of hot piping running through thin sections of the insulated wall near the inside, along with 200W of heat from the compressor itself when running. Chest freezers have the luxury of having thicker walls, so there is more insulation, while a fridge freezer upright combination has thinner insulation, and the door also has to have a heater in the inner wall, so that the seal does not freeze onto the case. Larger length of seal area, thus more heat input to keep it not frozen. Seals also lose heat to convection, long vertical strips of airflow allowing heat inside the box, while the chest freezer has almost no convection along the seal in most cases. As well the limiting factor in modern fridge freezer lifetime is not the compressor, those will easily, even for the cheapest ones you find in modern fridges, with cost cutting applied everywhere in manufacture, last 10 years running all the time, provided there are no leaks in the gas system. Sadly that is the killer, the foamed in insulation is done with isocyanate 2 part foam, and as a side effect of the cure they do release acid slightly. This will eventually cause the evaporator pipes, and the condenser pipes, to corrode through from the outside. Most pronounced at the regions of the piping where they are cold enough to condense water from the air in the evaporator, thus at the cold side where the pipe enters, and for the condenser at the hot side, right by the door, where the hot gas is used to keep the seal from freezing in place, and which cools down from heat transfer to the inner side fast when the compressor stops. This then corrodes the steel pipe, used instead of more durable copper, as it is a lot cheaper, and when a small pinhole eventually does corrode through the pipes you are unable to repair it, as the pipes are all buried in the foam, and removal is going to require destruction of either the inner plastic moulding, or the exterior steel skin to expose them, and then you cannot replace the foam easily after replacing the pipes. Look at your modern fridge with a thermal camera and you see where the pipes run, and how haphazardly they are installed before the foam is injected. With refrigerator freezers the fans in the more expensive models also run all the time to circulate the air, and generally fail fast, as they are run in a very harsh environment, with water droplets running through them in the fridge side, and ice in the freezer side. Defrost in the fridge and freezer is done with a heater element by the coils, so that frost is heated up and melted back to liquid, and this then travels down a heated tube to the top of the compressor, where it collects in a pan, and the heat of the compressor evaporates it. Cheap units the heater runs when the compressor does not, but is low power, around 10W to 30W, so does not put much heat in the cavity. When you buy commercial units your efficiency takes a dive though, as convenience in getting stuff in and out, along with having either glass doors with heaters so they do not mist up, or no doors at all, is the driver. However those you can repair, as they are expected to last 20 years or more in service, unlike a domestic unit.
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  4011. Have been in a barrel roll, in a helicopter, and can agree that it is a low G manoeuvre, as I was sitting there, looking out the open door, with my legs outside, and looking down below my feet at the sky, and up overhead to the ocean. Very frustrated pair of pilots and the flight engineer, who had just spent the last 3 hours baking in the cockpit, with engines running, but zero collective, doing a compass swing and alignment, after replacement of the gyro compass magnetic pick up in the tail. I had been the human intercom between the poor guy being cooked in the tail, and the flight engineer, relaying from the pilots the readings on the 3 axis data displays for magnetic azimuth. At least we did not have to stop, like the last day, because one of the 2 gyro assemblies had dropped out, with a barberpole on the display, just near the end. Also the 707 had really good cross wing landing performance, I had a front row seat to that, with a perfect near textbook landing, while the 2 C130's that went before scrubbed all tyres to nothing on the landing, and did a really hard landing, which was audible inside the cabin of the 707. you could not feel anything, till the reverse thrust was applied full, and the pilot announced, that for all those interested, on open mic, that we had landed 10 seconds before. too bad my instructor was on one of those 2 planes, and had thought us 12 last ones were flying on a C47, we got put on the tanker instead. C47 was there to deliver AOG parts, and had spent the night as well.
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  4091. I see plenty of vehicles arrive by me, exported from Japan as scrapped vehicles, and they all go through the country on a car transport, and roll across the border, only to come back a week later registered in those countries, and driving on the roads here. Done to avoid paying the high taxes and duties, with the only thing that every 6 months you need to have the paperwork renewed to keep driving in country. These vehicles are not insured here, not able to be claimed from in an accident, as the driver often will simply give an address outside the country, and no way to actually serve them cheaply. Also the paperwork is easy to do, as they just drive up on a Friday, pass through the open border, and get the new paperwork, plus fill up with fuel that is a lot cheaper, despite being delivered from the same tanker, as the tax is so much lower. One place has 2 garages 100m apart, one does mostly servicing, little fuel sales, except to those who have fuel cards, because they do not work across the border. Both get filled with the same tanker, just the one across the border sells only fuel, and does roaring trade, except it is all cash and debit card, no fuel card sales, because the fuel price is literally half price, compared to the regulated price across the border. Often the paperwork is simply sent via courier, vehicle not needed, so the vehicle never actually leaves the country ever, till it falls apart. Bribes are cheaper than travel for sure. As to totalled vehicles, yes totalled means different things, in the USA labour is expensive, skilled repair techs even more so, and skilled panel beaters (not panel changers, a easy thing to swap out a panel, and prep it for the painter to do their job) are rare, but elsewhere you get people who think nothing of heating up a bent and mangled panel or chassis, and pulling it back into shape, and then repairing ant damage with new sheet metal perfectly matched to the original. So a car that in the USA had $30k of damage, but was worth perhaps $50k, will be taken, that $30k of repair is done for $10k perhaps, and the vehicle is sold on again with a new title. Often done with stolen cars as well, they go across borders, get new keys, a nice new valet, possibly new paint, a service, and then are sold as used vehicles, with no history at all. Only time you get problems is if you attempt to take it legally over the border back into the country it was stolen from, where you will find it is impounded, and the new unsuspecting owner now is carless. But the dealer made a profit, and so did the thieves and middlemen.
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  4111. He survived because the wing roots are right behind him, and thus on impact the nose penetrated the building, and then the wings ripped off at around row 13, meaning the crushed front absorbed most of the impact, and the little section around 11A was protected from both the impact, and the fire, because the front carried on further, along with the rear dropping into a lower floor as the mid section collapsed the building. Looks like the rear again snapped off by the rear bulkhead, so all those passengers forward were in the fire, and none at the back section stayed with the tail. Lucky man, unlike the rest of the passengers and crew, and the people in the medical facility. But at least easy to get to the CVR and FDR, hopefully they did not lose power with the engines cutting out and the aircraft transitioning to the emergency bare backbone supply from the RAT, which only provides limited flight control hydraulics power, and a limited electrical power supply to the emergency power bus to power a single display, a single flight computer, and a limited set of cockpit instrumentation plus the radios. but the power of the RAT is limited, as you only have this plus the 2 aircraft main batteries to run things, so cabin wise all you get is floor level emergency lighting and the exits partly lit, nothing else at all, aside from the PA system. cockpit the same, just a single display per pilot, and a standby artificial horizon, plus the standby magnetic compass, with limited flight augmentation from the computers other than limiting input excursions to the flight surfaces. Not even hydraulic power to raise landing gear, just the emergency drop handle that will dump them down to mechanically lock.
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  4115. Funny thing is those are not common by me, the electronic ones, which use a 48V relay, and a resistor to drop the excess voltage, and a diode as rectifier, are common. They use a 12V zener diode to get power for the 555 timer used as control, and, because of ROHS saying no Cadmium containing things, they instead use a photodiode as light sensor. 555 timer drives a transistor or small triac, that shorts out the relay coil, to turn the lamp off. Then you get the more complex ones that the street lights use, where the entire electronics is contained within a IC package, made from clear epoxy, that has the photodiode, amplifier and signal conditioning inside on the small silicon chip, and then this controls a thyristor that operates a 20A relay on the board. Note they also have to withstand all faults, so have a large MOV device across the mains input, 480VAC rated withstand, so that they will still survive and operate even if the nominal 230VAC mains has a fault and goes to 400VAC instead. Residential ones use a 275VAC MOV as protection, the last time there was a phase loss by me that got very unhappy, and blew the cap off the photocell, practically getting it into orbit. Not really going to protect, just clamping voltage to protect the wiring, and trip a breaker as it fails short. Incidentally the street lights, for the most part, come with the photocell socket integrated in, as it is cheaper to make all of them the same, and supply instead a special shorting photocell, which has inside it only a 16A fuse and a 480VAC MOV across the output, so that there is still fuse protection when used in group applications, and the MOV clamps lightning strikes on the line down to a level the ballast and starter, or the LED driver for new ones, will probably survive, and, if not, disconnect the fixture. Most common by me are GE, Siemens and Royce Thompson as photocontrols, with Osram and Phillips (branded as Beka) also having a share, depending really on who won the contract for supply for a particular year. You mostly see Osram or Phillips lamps though, as the most expensive part is the maintenance, and cheap junk lamps fail fast.
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  4158.  @sawomirkuczek3214  Slip rings have a very bad problem with shed material, so pretty much all slip ring or commutator designs have to be open frame, so that the conductive dust can be blown out by the cooling fan. Make it sealed and you now have to add in a air path that has a particulate filter in it, which also has to handle high temperatures as well, which adds cost and mass. Inductive exciter is simple, a set of magnetic doughnuts that have a coil wound in the middle, separated by a small distance, so the one can rotate and the other be fixed, and you apply AC to the one, and get AC out the other, same frequency irrespective of the rotor turning or not. big issue is that for generators they apply high voltage AC, as the rotor is wound with lot of turns of thin wire, and a bridge rectifier to make the AC DC ,possibly with a capacitor on there to smooth it, allowing lower rotor loss, and thicker lamination's to be used. Here you need to vary the DC current over a wide range, so need to have fewer turns, and much higher current for the same field strength, so you need low inductance in the rotor coil, and thus the fewer turns, and the higher current means a big beefy bridge rectifier, with it's associated heat dissipation. My guess the thing that Mahle did was put 3 phase rotary transformer in, run it at a higher frequency, so they can use low cost powdered and sintered ferrite parts, and probably have a 3 phase H bridge running at around 40 kHz to excite the system, and secondary side put in an active bridge rectifier to handle the 50A or so of current flow. Overall cheaper than putting in 50A rated carbon brushes, which will be massive blocks of copper graphite, probably 50mm by 30mm, running on the rotor, and probably still dissipating more power in brush and contact loss than the electronic system as well. Making use of current components the biggest thing will be cooling, to keep the semiconductors cool ,as they are the most sensitive item, so the oil bath will help, simply using aluminium core PCB for the active switches, and then a board on top, fully conformal coated, that is attached using IDC connections, with a top layer being the connections to the ferrite transformer. All running in a thin oil, 0W10 is a common modern one, and you get even thinner oils as well, which pour and act like water. That then can be cooled easily, and the rest of the motor can run in it as well for rotor cooling, with a thermal transfer loop to provide cooling via a water and glycol external cooler, so you can get cabin heat out of the rejected heat as well.
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  4162. As more satellites were added in different orbits, accuracy improved. With low numbers of satellites, and also with long paths through the air to provide diffraction of the signal, you got poor accuracy. More orbits meant more visible at any time, and thus a more precise position. You need, IIRC, at least 4 to get a coarse position in 3 axes, and with every added satellite visible at the same time your error reduces. At 6 you get 100m, and with more the error reduces further, with most receivers able to handle up to 12 simultaneous decodes at a time, and with more sophisticated receivers using ADC units that can sample at the actual chirp bit rate, timing each individual bit as it comes in, and thus being able to correct for smaller drift with each cycle. Some of the software defined units have no real limit on the number of satellites they can view simultaneously, just depends on the amount of memory and processor speed, as you can always add more of both, and make the rake receiver scale with visible satellite numbers. Some of those have impressive cold start capability, being able to start from cold within a few minutes, and with warm start capability of seconds, provided the data they have is not too stale. Big issue is with noise, you find that often GPS signals in urban areas are poor, lots of RF noise desensitising the receiver, and also urban canyons making for lots of multipath distortion, and limiting visible sky to use. Sometimes I need to restart the old Garmin I have a few times, as it is unable to start, but often during RF quiet times it will be up and running in 2 minutes, from a warm start.
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  4206. Inner side of those pass through actually needs to be soldered, or you really need to have used ring terminals there, as that thin piece of garbage plate is actually the highest resistance of the entire setup. Those little bits of metal will rob you of around 10% of the power output, and will run really hot. Power wise at least they used real copper cable, not the more common and cheap CCA wire. Easier for the power wires to get bootlace ferrules, but as you rarely do audio expensive for the tooling, unless you use it for battery terminal crimps as well, which also benefit from the same crimping. Alternative is some copper AC line, which you cut a small length to fit, and solder on using something with a little more power, like a propane or MAPP gas torch. Been doing that for a long time, that heavy cable sucks the heat away, especially if you use 0 gauge wire, like I did to make decent jumper cables. 5m of PTFE insulated cable per side means the majority of loss is the clamps on each side. Alternative source for the sleeves is to buy inverter welder plugs, and use the thin copper sleeve they come with. Battery side would have replaced that connector with a new one, one that actually has copper in decent thickness, unlike the cheap one made with a thin copper alloy, that probably has 0.5V drop at full power across it. Amplifier itself needs to have a proper mounting, not hidden under the seat and not allowed to cool by be buried under carpet, which will make it run really toasty. Mounting behind seat, with the correct hardware ( no drywall, proper rivnuts through the steel) to hold it both vertical and able to have airflow, and with the carpet under it cut away to provide metal to metal contact to get some of the heat out, and it will last a long time. Old one was cooked to death there under the seat and carpet.
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  4208. That Galanz fridge will fail in around 5 years, because they use cheap steel pipe for the evaporator and condenser lines, which are taped to the walls inside and outside, before the urethane foam insulation is blown into position to hold it there. This pipe is going to rust through, because of water condensing on the insulation, and wicking into the gap between the pipe and insulation, and then rusting the pipes through. Normally the pipe rusts through near the entry points in the foam, but you cannot replace the pipe without removing the insulation, and it bonds strongly to the plastic and steel. The pipe used is cheap unplated steel pipe, with only a thin coating of varnish on it, because the adding of a zinc plate, to keep it from corroding, would mean they need to have an extra assembly step to sand off the coating at the ends, where they braze it to the fittings for the compressor and drier. Takes an extra 5 minutes on the line, so will not be done, just put the cut ends in place, add the acid based flux, and use an induction heater to heat it up and then apply the braze to it. also you can see they do not remove the flux residue, just a quick spray of paint to attempt to keep it from corroding. Funny thing is the compressor will last easily 20 years, even though it is made with CCA wire, and is filled with mineral oil over any other, as mineral oil will move properly through the system with the R600A refrigerant. Thermostat works on the coil itself, fed through a piece of plastic tube, to be held against the suction line before the compressor. Thus it will only turn off when the cooling is such that the suction to the compressor is coming back at the evaporator temperature, around -10C, and thus saying there is no more heat load there.
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  4374. By me in South Africa the council never used SOX lighting, they moved from incandescent to mercury vapour, adding in the ballasts to the existing fixtures, then replacing them with new integrated fixtures. Residential went from 150W incandescent to 90W mercury vapour, while main road went from 500W to 400W mercury. Later on there were "upgrades" to 400W HPS lights, with relamps getting a blend of HPS and MH lamps. Now they are slowly using up the stocks of lamps and fixtures, using them for spot replcements, after doing some replacement actions to replace whole streets with LED, 77W and 130W for main roads, and 35W for smaller streets. The only user of SOX was the railways, with them using it in the yards as light, only later on going to HPS lamps. they even used it in stations on trackside, passenger areas being done with flourescent fittings. Only place I saw SLI lamps ( the rarest low pressure sodium lamp) was in underpasses with a rail overhead, used to provide light 24/7 in there, though those eventually were replaced with MV and then now LED fixtures.I do remember travelling as it got dusk, and you saw the rail yard light up from the high masts in a neon glow that changed to monochromatic orange as the lamps warmed up. Only reason SOX lamps fail is the filaments wearing out, or the glass seals get eroded away by the sodium metal dissolving the soft glass that is used, as quartz glass is resistant to the sodium, but the seals have to be a borosilicate glass, and this does get attacked, which is why these lamps are always run with the base elevated, to keep the liquid metal away, and slow down the erosion. the lamp runs really hot, the metal has to melt and give off vapour to operate, so early lamps had a Dewar flask to keep them hot after warming up, while later ones used an Indium metal coat to reflect the heat back onto the inner arc tube, no second outer glass Dewar needed.
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  4394. Insurer will never put the title in their name, simply because they then will have to deal with the thousands of parking tickets, fines and renewals that will them come due. Rather leave it in the original owner name, and flagged as stolen, and let the owners deal with those headaches. After all, a stolen car can still accrue toll fees, tickets and such, and the insurer is not getting paid to fix those, which reflects badly on them because their own vehicles will get title holds on them for the unpaid monies. If it is found original owner gets first option to pay for the recovery cost, and if not then the vehicle lands up either being sold on auction as non runner for scrap value, with the VIN numbers stamped over with a clearance number issued by police, or gets crushed and sold for scrap metal value. Incidentally Toyota has been marking all vehicles manufactured at the Prospecton plant, irrespective of destination market, with Identidot markings since 2013, along with all other manufacturers, and all importers as well, in an attempt to make all used parts identifiable, as the dots are sprayed on all metal parts, and also on a lot of the plastic parts as well. Each one has a serial number associated with the VIN, and only a single one showing up on a vehicle with a reported stolen VIN gets the vehicle classed as stolen property entirely. They show up under UV light, and are hard to get all of them off every part. As well Toyota marks a lot of the parts with the VIN, including around 40 of the major parts getting a VIN sticker, laser etched, that is applied before the paint is applied, from the sheet of around 80 that starts off at the front of the line, and which stays with the assembly jig all the way down, and which gets applied every few stations. Engine line also has another sheet, applied to most parts as well, so that when they are merged on the line the sheets are matching. 3M VHB adhesive on the tags, which does not let go easily, and which once cured is resistant to most solvents as well.
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  4432. Turns out making the belt for the oil pump both out of rubber, and also making it swim in oil, and also putting that oil pump down in the middle of the engine, so you have to strip the engine down, out of the vehicle, can be an issue. Timing belt also runs in oil, and also they make it that changing that set of belts is really difficult, and to change that oil pump belt and tensioner you have to strip the entire engine down. You can bet that Ford will tell the techs to put the old timing belt back, along with the old timing belt tensioner, and to use RTV sealer on all the parts, as they will supply only a belt, tensioner, and give them 2 hours labour cost back. You can strip that engine in under 2 hours, out of the vehicle, see Eric of IDoCars channel, but putting it back is not as easy, takes a good few hours, and the parts you need to replace is a lot more than a belt and pump. Now you know why that engine is also nicknamed the EcoBoom engine, and they are in demand as replacement engines in good condition, at least as a usable core to rebuild where the oil pump belt failure has not destroyed the engine. Because running it with a broken belt, and the oil light on, will destroy that engine in under a minute. Belt sheds teeth, starts running the pump slower, oil pressure drops, and it destroys valve gear before the shed teeth clog the oil suction line, and the pump destroys itself, sheds glitter of doom into the engine, and the oil light does eventually come on. Ford should have issued a new engine, because that old one is only scrap, rebuild cost exceeds value of the vehicle. Belt used because it is a few dollars cheaper than a chain and sprockets, and also gave a 0.001 MPG improvement in fuel use, and 0.1dB lower engine noise in test, but they also saw the belts would not fail till the engine was out of warranty.
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  4481.  @abdul-kabiralegbe5660  12V8 with high engine compartment temperature is correct with a fully charged lead acid battery, as the terminal voltage, which with a fully charged battery is 13V8 at 25C, is going to drop as the temperature rises. Older alternators that charged at a fixed voltage, 14V4, or 13V8, irrespective of temperature, thus would overcharge the battery, causing it to lose electrolyte due to it being split into hydrogen and oxygen. Some sealed batteries, and some more expensive refillable ones, have a palladium catalyst in the vents to recombine this to water, slowing down the loss, but you always had to add pure water to the battery to give it a long life. Thus checking the battery water, and filling up at each service. Sealed batteries are the exact same now, just there is often a cover over the screw off caps, and they say sealed for life, as they know there is enough water there to get you out of warranty before a cell boils dry, and you buy a new battery. Pull off the label, see the caps, and check the water, and you get many years more service out of them, and check the water monthly as well, even if it means you have to remove the hold down and the terminals to get to the caps. Done that to all mine, and got to see that they would last 5 years just filling up every 6 months or so, all cells taking around 100ml of water to fill up again. Otherwise would have had the battery fail around 25 months after buying, just outside the 24 month warranty. OEM battery had caps, but was never checked, despite it being part of the OEM service routine.
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  4545. Yes, avionics we were taught that high stress areas and a split pin, replace when removed, as it is a very cheap item, but the failure of that joint is not. so i keep that big box of assorted split pins in the shop, and when I come to one snip and toss, grab a new one. As to the install pretty much the standard has been it must not move. so tap the head into the hole, bend over the top of the nut, and back down to the head , and cut off flush with head for that side. Other end tap down, flush with the nut. Only other was for pins that are there for pivots, where it was tap head hard in hole, and bend tang back around to be cut off next to head, as the split pin could not fret then and wear, and it was, along with a washer, the only thing holding that pin in position. Locking wire done plenty, had the holes to prove it, but was lucky I did not do engines, where you have a single locking wire that goes around the engine every segment, that holds all those fasteners with a single wire, and it has to be correct every time. That one lock could take a day to do, and inspect, per engine ring section, just for the locking wire alone. 20 odd case sections to bolt together, and most of the fasteners there are all single use only, so there was a massive box of bolts and nuts that were free to use for anything else. Sheet metal shop used to make sculptures out of them, in lovely colours, as the titanium bolts hot to different temperatures as they heated up. Same for rivets, still have the odd bottles of assorted left over rivets that I use for joining sheet metal, as they are perfect for this, and better than pop rivets.
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  4563.  @theoneandonlysoslappy  No, the only way is to integrate the key store with the main SOC, which is what most manufacturers do. However, the phone storage is too large physically to fit into the same chip, so it is spread out over a few large flash memories. To protect them the manufacturer encrypts the data stored there. So now they have to take a number, run it through the decrypt software, which is open source, as there is nothing secret in it, and then check to see if they get something out that looks like a filesystem with valid data. The current best methods, which the 3 letter agencies use, is to take those chips off the board, put on a test jig to read the data, and clone it into another chip, then put the original back. That cloned chip image is then used in a very large compute farm, because you are going to be running thousands of guesses a second on it, and they attempt to get a valid filesystem to come out. Basically if it is a good passphrase, which, by the magic of the one way hash function it is, they have to use all 2 to 128 hash values, statistically, to break it. They use a rainbow table, generated by running dictionaries through the hash, to guess the most common passwords, using the leaked passwords that you can see on haveibeenpowned, and those are the most common, so are fast as they already are in the table. 175 million, likely they went through that list, then started on the empty space between. Use that nice big 3 letter agency datacentre in Utah, and they might, with a decent enough passphrase, be able to break it before quantum computers become big enough to do it. If no quantum computer then the sun will go nova first.
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  4569. Will tell you of a water pump deciding it was tired, and seizing. 12km out of a small town ( easy to remember, because at that point there was the "Welcome to Ermelo/Ermelo verwelkom jou" sign, and normally 310m past that was a speed camera, in the now 60kph zone), and we went from 120ish to 40 in about a car length. Coast and pull over, then turn over the engine with the crank pulley, no binding. Start up, running, but rough water pump. Note Ford CVH engine, water pump runs off cam belt, and this is an interference engine. So drive the 12km to town, pull in at the garage, across the road from the Ford dealer. Go there, spares closed 4PM, but they say try the spares place next to the garage. Now, 5 to 6, and go into spares place, and ask him for a water pump. He says no stock, but there should be one at his other branch. Quick call, and 5 past 6 in walks the other shop cashier/manager/stocker, with a new non OE pump. At the same time my friend walks in, with the old pump. Spares guy asks where is the car, and we point to the red one outside, with the open bonnet. He asked how, because we pulled in 20 minutes ago. we had done a few water pumps on those engines, because it just so was the one engine in a custom piece of equipment, and yes they did rather fail a lot, so he had gotten really good at changing them, plus on his car he had cut the cover, so he did not have to remove the crankcase pulley like the manual said. Paid, and 20 minutes later we had fitted the pump, filled up with fuel and water, and were off, also having gotten the dinner for the road in the cafe there. Another time drove down with the exhaust in the car, because at night we found a log, which popped it off the front connection, and bent it slightly, and tore the hangers all off. So a very loud trip down, with exhaust ending just behind the firewall. Next day exhaust place fitted it back, after making it more or less straight.
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  4616.  @donk5058  Look on it as area denial, you do the classic "one pass haul ass" and send them in, they get out of there before you get a heat seeker up your exhaust. Keeps the other side down in cover while your infantry grunts can move with nothing coming back at them. If you have the rocket characteristics at least well controlled and defined you will be able to enter then into a firing solution, and hope to at least hit close to the target. But that requires you to have well controlled manufacture, and well controlled storage, and spend a few hundred hours with an airframe or three doing run after run at the same altitude, attitude and airspeed, to get the data. Then do it for all the different airspeeds to get a minimum and maximum envelope, and have some smart people sit and use this to get a set of equations you can enter into the firmware of the firing computer, and use it to get the firing solution. Once you have those equations as to distance for the projectile your firing computer is doing CCRP, every cycle it calculates how far the projectile will go if released now, and distance to target, updated from air data and INS/GNS, plus ground speed from the nav platform. Then as soon as the distance it will go is greater than distance to target, it will fire. Biggest error is that you typically also have to allow time for the system to fire them, so high rates of change of attitude mean a large error in distance to go, which can mean that, if the pilot sends the release command while pulling up,. they can be too close, and they will shoot way off target, or if he does a sharp correction the same. Plus you can also fly into your own weapon as well, seen those photos of the bomb that released, but also clobbered the airframe as well.
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  4619. SAE tooling for that banjo bolt because they are still an imperial thread, and you will never be able to change that, as it is a 1/4 inch pipe fitting. Just remember your caliper bolts, brake fitting threads and all hydraulic fittings are a metric equivalent fitting, because the old stuff was changed to nearest size. 2.5 and 4mm hex keys, very common in industrial machinery, though I will tell you that, if they do get seized fast, the easiest way to get them out is to have a few of those ultra cheap 30 piece 1/4in hex driver sets, and look for the Torx bit that will just not fit in, and tap it into the damaged hex head, so you can turn it out. Will get it out, and if you do not have a replacement capscrew, you can put it back in again with it, and wriggle it with a pair of pliers to get the bit out, making it into a Torx head. Done that very often, because you might need that machine to run right there and then, and driving to get a new one, adding an extra hour of breakdown time, is often not an option. Make a note to keep that size as spare parts, for the next visit. I go through a lot of those size, M4 and M5, as they are a common thread, and you find often the stainless steel will gall fast to the aluminium parts if you do not use a thread sealer on them, especially if they get hot. I also have the thread repair kits for those sizes in various lengths, and the extractors for the broken screws, though you really burn through cobalt drill bits doing that, especially for the 8.8 high strength variant, and the left hand thread version drill bits are stupid expensive, even in plain HSS. Ridgid do make a really nice extractor set, but sadly the lifetime warranty does not apply by me, so I have had to buy some replacement sets along the way, because I always break the smaller sizes.
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