amptramp

Back about five decades ago when Ferrari hand-built cars, they quite often turned out to be asymmetrical. Ferrari's response to someone mentioning this was, "Nobody looks at both side of the car at the same time."

It gets to go shopping today. But nothing is being done to it.

Did you hear about the taxidermist who was kicked off his United Airlines flight? Turns out, they only allow one carrion per passenger.

My friend recently got crushed by a pile of books. He's only got his shelf to blame.

Don't forget, the new part would be manufactured the same way as the old part which means lead-free solder that requires a higher temperature to melt. The reason for a number of failures is the solder has to be kept under the temperature where it would destroy the parts on the board but must be high enough to melt. The normal QA practices and tests tend to favour lower temperatures so you get cold solder joints that pass functional testing but will not withstand breakage due to differential thermal expansion of the solder and the circuit board. What you can do with the existing unit is use 63% tin / 37% lead solder and the temperature at which it flows will go down so you are in no danger of damaging the parts. Go with reflowing the old part because the new part would have the same latent defect as the old part.

There is another interesting source of oil information: https://540ratblog.wordpress.com This site compares film strength of the popular (and some obscure) oils and goes on to bust some myths about oil technology. Good reading.

I just read that someone was killed with a starter's pistol. I bet it was race related.

Did he get those hubcaps from James Bond or Ben Hur?

Mobil 1 5W-30 is on the thin end of the viscosity spectrum for a 5W-30. I used it a few years ago in my Miata and the car was not happy with it - immediate slowing when the throttle was lifted and a feeling that it had just worn too thin. I changed to Pennzoil Platinum 5W-30 and that has been perfect for both the Miata and the Legacy. You can use up your existing stock but try something different next time. You don't need to go to a 5W-40.

A first-grade teacher, Ms. Brooks, was having trouble with one of her more precocious students. The teacher asked, “Harry, what exactly is your problem?” Harry answered, “I'm too smart for the 1st grade. My sister is in the 3rd grade and I'm smarter than she is! I think I should be in the 3rd grade, too!” Ms. Brooks finally had enough; she took Harry to the principal’s office. While Harry waited in the outer office, the teacher explained the situation to the principal. The principal told Ms. Brooks he would give the boy a test. If he failed to answer any of his questions he was to go back to the 1st grade and behave. She agreed. Harry was brought in and the conditions were explained to him. And he happily agreed to take the test. Principal: “What is 3 x 3?” Harry: “9.” Principal: “What is 6 x 6?” Harry: “36.” And so it went with every question the principal thought a bright 3rd grader should know. The principal looks at Ms. Brooks and tells her, “y’know, I reckon Harry can go to the 3rd grade.” But Ms. Brooks is still sceptical of the little bugger and says to the principal, "Not so fast, let me ask him a few questions.” The principal and Harry both agree. Ms. Brooks asks, “What does a cow have four of that I have only two of?” Harry, after a moment: “Legs.” Ms. Brooks: “What is in your pants that you have but I do not have?” The principal wondered why would she ask such a question! Harry replied: “Pockets.” to the Principal’s great relief... Ms. Brooks: “What does a dog do that a man steps into?” Harry: “Pants.” By now, the principal is sitting forward with his mouth hanging open. Ms. Brooks: “What goes in hard and pink then comes out soft and sticky?” Now the principal's eyes open really wide and before he could intervene, Harry replied, “Bubble gum.” Ms. Brooks: “What does a man do standing up, a woman does sitting down and a dog does on three legs?” Harry: “Shake hands.” The principal is now trembling with apprehension as Ms. Brooks asks the last question. Ms. Brooks: “What word starts with an 'F' and ends in 'K' and indicates a great deal of heat and excitement?” Harry: "Firetruck.” The principal breaths a huge sigh of relief and tells the teacher, "Put the little sh*t in 5th Grade; I got the last seven questions wrong myself.”

The abominable snow car?

First day back at school for year one kids. Teacher asks them what they did in the holidays. Jenny: "We went to my uncle's farm and watched him shear the bah bahs!" Teacher: "Come on Jenny, you're in year one now, they're called sheep. Anyone else? Billy: "We went for a drive in the country and saw some moo moos!" Teacher: "Now Billy, what did I tell Jenny? You're a big boy, they're called cows. Anyone else? (getting a bit annoyed now)" Little Johnny is waving his hand furiously. Teacher: "Okay Johnny, what did you do?" Johnny: "I read a book." Teacher: "Well done! How very grown up of you, Johnny! What was the book?" Johnny: "Winnie the Shit!"

A Nun is having a bath in the monastery washroom when she hears a knock at the washroom door. Panicked, she jumps out the bath and grabs a robe. "Who's there?" "I'm a blind man" replies the voice from behind the door "the Bishop sent me, he said you maybe able to help. I only need a minute of your time." "Oh, please come in, so long as your sure you won't be long" she says. She climb back into bath safe in the knowledge the man wont be able to see her uncovered body. "What can I help you with?" The blind man replies "Nice tits, Love. Where do you want these blinds?"

A man walked out to the street and caught a taxi just going by. He got into the taxi and the cabbie said, "Perfect timing. You're just like Brian" Passenger: "Who?" Cabbie: "Brian Sullivan. He's a guy who did everything right all the time. Like my coming along when you needed a cab, things happen like that to Brian every single time." Passenger: "There are always a few clouds over everybody." Cabbie: "Not Brian Sullivan. He was a terrific athlete. He could have won the Grand Slam at tennis. He could golf with the pros. He sang like an opera baritone and danced like a Broadway star and you should have heard him play the piano. He was an amazing guy." Passenger: "Sounds like he was something really special." Cabbie: "There's more. He had a memory like a computer. He remembered everybody's birthday. He knew all about wine, which foods to order and which fork to eat them with. He could fix anything. Not like me. I change a fuse and the whole street blacks out. But Brian Sullivan, he could do everything right." Passenger: "Wow. Some guy then." Cabbie: "He always knew the quickest way to go in traffic and avoid traffic jams. Not like me, I always seem to get stuck in them. But Brian, he never made a mistake and he really knew how to treat a woman and make her feel good. He would never answer her back even if she was in the wrong; and his clothing was always immaculate, shoes polished too. He was the perfect man! He never made a mistake. No one could ever measure up to Brian Sullivan." Passenger: "An amazing fellow. How did you meet him?" Cabbie: "Well, I never actually met Brian. He died. I'm married to his damn widow."

This guy brings a girl he met at a bar, back to his apartment in the richest place in town. Huge place, very luxurious. Guy suggests a drink to the girl, and that she looks around while he's in the kitchen. Girl enters the living room where there's this HUGE gong on a wall, with its mallet hanging beside it. Guy comes back with drinks and the girl says: "Wow, that gong is incredible! It's so big!" Guy replies: "That's not a gong, it's a rude speaking clock" As the girl looks at him baffled, he gives her his drink and says: "Here, let me show you" Guy takes the mallet, and with the largest swing he hits the gong which makes a deafening sound. 15 seconds later, three pounding noises on the wall and a muffled voice shouts "Hey, mother f***er!!! It's 3 in the morning!!!"

This is a story about a couple who had been happily married for years. The only friction in their marriage was the husband's habit of farting loudly every morning when he awoke. The noise would wake his wife and the smell would make her eyes water and make her gasp for air. Every morning she would plead with him to stop ripping them off because it was making her sick. He told her he couldn't stop and that it was perfectly natural. She told him to see a doctor. She was concerned that one day he would blow his guts out. The years went by and he continued to rip them out! Then one Thanksgiving morning as she was preparing the turkey for dinner and he was upstairs sound asleep, she looked at the bowl where she had put the turkey innards and neck, gizzard, liver and all the spare parts and a malicious thought came to her. She took the bowl and went upstairs where her husband was sound asleep and, gently pulling back the bed covers, she pulled back the elastic waistband of his underpants and emptied the bowl of turkey guts into his shorts. Some time later she heard her husband waken with his usual trumpeting which was followed by a blood curdling scream and the sound of frantic footsteps as he ran into the bathroom. The wife could hardly control herself as she rolled on the floor laughing, tears in her eyes! After years of torture she reckoned she had got him back pretty good. About twenty minutes later, her husband came downstairs in his bloodstained underpants with a look of horror on his face. She bit her lip as she asked him what was the matter. He said, "Honey, you were right. All these years you have warned me and I didn't listen to you. "What do you mean?" asked his wife. "Well, you always told me that one day I would end up farting my guts out, and today it finally happened. But by the grace of God, some Vaseline, and these two fingers, I think I got most of them back in.

I didn't even think a crush washer would fit on an oil filter. Yes, it was on the drain plug and yes, the old soft copper washer (which is not a crush washer) was OK and hadn't leaked a drop. A washer of some sort is definitely required. I have a 2009 Legacy Wagon with the same symptoms as a number of people - the filter loosens after a while and drips oil on the ground. I have since changed the oil and replaced the filter with an AMSOIL EA15K13, the longer version of the standard filter. When I was removing the old filter, it came off with just thumb and index finger pressure and this seems to be a common complaint with Wix filters on Subaru's. I think I understand why this filter tries to escape on a Subaru but is perfectly OK on my Miata: In a flat-4 engine the primary and secondary forces and moments are cancelled out in the plane of the pistons, but since the cylinders are offset from each other, you get a rotational vibration about a vertical axis. My 1993 Impreza had a nasty vibration between 2700 and 3000 RPM because of this, but the vibration is around a vertical axis, like an anniversary clock with the vertical torsion pendulum. The filter is mounted vertically so in one direction, it tries to unscrew the filter and this is aided by the internal pressure. Oil filter tightness should be a regular maintenance check on a Subaru. I did not have this problem with the Impreza, only the Legacy. BTW I was using the longer version of the Wix filter, so it is the same oversize as the new Amsoil filter. If anyone has a better explanation, I am interested.

Common Tools Explained To the uninitiated, the workshop can be an intimidating place, full of tools you may not know what to do with. To help, here's a helpful explanation of common tools and their uses. DRILL PRESS: A tall upright machine useful for suddenly snatching flat metal bar stock out of your hands so that it smacks you in the chest and flings your beer across the room, denting the freshly-painted vertical stabilizer which you had carefully set in the corner where nothing could get to it. WIRE WHEEL: Cleans paint off bolts and then throws them somewhere under the workbench with the speed of light. Also removes fingerprints and hard-earned cleco calluses from fingers in about the time it takes you to say, "Oh [censored]!" ELECTRIC HAND DRILL: Normally used for spinning pop rivets in their holes until you die of old age. SKILL SAW: A portable cutting tool used to make studs too short. PLIERS: Used to round off bolt heads. Sometimes used in the creation of blood-blisters. BELT SANDER: An electric sanding tool commonly used to convert minor touch-up jobs into major refinishing jobs. HACKSAW: One of a family of cutting tools built on the Ouija board principle. It transforms human energy into a crooked, unpredictable motion, and the more you attempt to influence its course, the more dismal your future becomes. VISE-GRIPS: Generally used after pliers to completely round off bolt heads. If nothing else is available, they can also be used to transfer intense welding heat to the palm of your hand. WELDING GLOVES: Heavy duty leather gloves used to prolong the conduction of intense welding heat to the palm of your hand. OXYACETYLENE TORCH: Used almost entirely for lighting various flammable objects in your shop on fire. Also handy for igniting the grease inside the wheel hub from which you want the bearing race removed. TABLE SAW: A large stationary power tool commonly used to launch wood projectiles for testing wall integrity. HYDRAULIC FLOOR JACK: Used for lowering an automobile to the ground after you have installed your new brake shoes, trapping the jack handle firmly under the bumper. EIGHT-FOOT LONG YELLOW PINE 2X4: Used for levering an automobile upward off of a trapped hydraulic jack handle. E-Z OUT BOLT AND STUD EXTRACTOR: A tool ten times harder than any known drill bit that snaps neatly off in bolt holes thereby ending any possible future use. BAND SAW: A large stationary power saw primarily used by most shops to cut good aluminum sheet into smaller pieces that more easily fit into the trash can after you cut on the inside of the line instead of the outside edge. TWO-TON ENGINE HOIST: A tool for testing the maximum tensile strength of everything you forgot to disconnect. CRAFTSMAN 1/2 x 24-INCH SCREWDRIVER: A very large pry bar that inexplicably has an accurately machined screwdriver tip on the end opposite the handle. AVIATION METAL SNIPS: See hacksaw. PHILLIPS SCREWDRIVER: Normally used to stab the vacuum seals under lids and for opening old-style paper-and-tin oil cans and splashing oil on your shirt; but can also be used, as the name implies, to strip out Phillips screw heads. STRAIGHT SCREWDRIVER: A tool for opening paint cans. Sometimes used to convert common slotted screws into non-removable screws. PRY BAR: A tool used to crumple the metal surrounding that clip or bracket you needed to remove in order to replace a 50 cent part. HOSE CUTTER: A tool used to make hoses too short. HAMMER: Originally employed as a weapon of war, the hammer nowadays is used as a kind of divining rod to locate the most expensive parts adjacent the object we are trying to hit. MECHANIC'S KNIFE: Used to open and slice through the contents of cardboard cartons delivered to your front door; works particularly well on contents such as seats, vinyl records, liquids in plastic bottles, collector magazines, refund checks, and rubber or plastic parts. Especially useful for slicing work clothes, but only while in use. DAMMIT TOOL: Any handy tool that you grab and throw across the garage while yelling "DAMMIT" at the top of your lungs. It is also, most often, the next tool that you will need.

It was oil change day for me - a jug of Pennzoil Platinum 5W-30 and an Amzoil filter in the longer 110 size rather than the 108 size with the part number EA15K13. I had been having trouble with leaks around the oil filter and determined that it appeared to be the filter itself. About a month or so ago I tightened the filter as hard as I could by hand. The filter came off today with light rotation applied by two fingers and it was almost backed off entirely. When I drained the oil, there was not much more than two litres in there. BTW I used the crush washer sold by Subaru. The plain copper washer that was on there before showed no signs of leakage, so maybe the crush washer is not essential. This had better work - the filter was $21.95 CDN with a core charge of $0.50 and sales tax had brought the total to $25.37 CDN. But if it lasts long enough to allow oil changes every 15,000 km or even 15,000 miles, it would be worthwhile. I get the impression that being surrounded by hot exhaust pipes and hanging upside down from the block makes the filter loosen and checking filter tightness should be part of normal maintenance just like checking oil level. Although people had reported the problem mainly with Wix filters (which I had on there before), it seems like any filter may be suspect.

I was at a bar last night and saw a beautiful woman sitting alone. So I walked up to her and asked her out on a date. She screams "No I won't sleep with you tonight!" Everyone in the bar was staring at me as I walked back to my table. A few minutes later she came up to me and apologized. She said she was a graduate student in psychology and was studying how people respond to embarrassing situations. I yelled "What do you mean $500?!!"

I have been having an oil leak problem for a while and finally got around to investigating it. It turned out to be the NAPA Gold oil filter itself. A quick check on BITOG (bobistheoilguy, a website about oil) showed that a number of Subaru owners were reporting the same thing. I use the same filter on my Miata where it behaves properly, but I cannot recommend it for a Subaru. Maybe having exhaust pipes wrapped around the filter gives it a problem, one that other filters do not have.

In the early days of synthetics, the poly-alpha olefin base caused shrinkage of seals and this led to leaks. It was found that adding esters caused seal swelling that offset the seal shrinkage. High-mileage oils added even more esters to ensure seal swelling. The new API-SN oil grade also provides excess esters so seal will continue to swell. If you have a head gasket leak, I doubt changing to a different oil will do as much as you would like. 15W-40 should not be used anywhere - it slows down oil movement through the bearings and puts large pressure drops across the filter. You may think that the oil pump is positive displacement and therefore the oil speed through the bearings would not change, but the bypass would open sooner and farther and divert most of the oil around the pump. If you do use a dino oil, Pennzoil yellow bottle is as good as anything. Note that the earlier Rotella oils are API-SM rather than API-SN, so you don't get the additional esters.

We celebrated out 30th wedding anniversary last weekend. Amazing. Even more than amazing because I almost did not get a second date. Why? Because I did not open her car door. I (incorrectly) expected that whenever a car goes off a bridge and into a river, that she ought to know to open her car door!

A man was walking down the street when he was accosted by a particularly dirty and shabby-looking homeless man who asked him for a couple of dollars for dinner. The man took out his wallet, extracted ten dollars and asked, "If I give you this money, will you buy some beer with it instead of dinner?" "No, I had to stop drinking years ago," the homeless man replied. "Will you spend this on green fees at a golf course instead of food?" the man asked. "Are you NUTS!" replied the homeless man. "I haven't played golf in 20 years!" "Well," said the man, "I'm not going to give you money. Instead, I'm going to take you home for a hot shower and a terrific dinner cooked by my wife." The homeless man was astounded. "Won't your wife be furious with you for doing that? The man replied, "That's okay. It's important for her to see what a man looks like after he has given up drinking and golf."