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Showing posts from January 9, 2005

The Nissan Leaf Gets a New Rear Axle

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Well, I finally have a salvage title for the 2013 Nissan LEAF (Actually I dont have the title yet, but I think they mail it to me. We are far from settled with the insurance company for sure. It has been six months since Angie was rear ended. The following chart shows a very sad and disturbing trend. Insurance companies aren't paying out. It should be criminal. I went shopping for a new rear axle so I can get the car driving again. The rear ended axle was so bent, the car couldn't move. The new one with no connecting bits was over a thousand dollars. The cheapest used ones I could find on ebay were over 500 dollars. I finally scored at a local used parts place for 95 dollars (removed) and with associated bits such as bearings, bushings, parts of the brakes. It took me a concentrated day with cancelled and moved meetings to get the axle replaced and the car running again. The accomplishment felt good. I am now configuring the car with tractor tires and other modifications t...

White Knuckle Driving

Bonnie and I had an interesting experience this evening. We heard a strange noise that stopped us mid-sentance. She described it as an explosion. I described the noise as a rolling casacde as if something fell from the roof. I took the big spotlight out to check the house, stove pipe, the barn, the llamas. After some more discussion we figured out what the strange and unusual sound was... it turned out to be a strange noise indeed. It was the town snowplow. Yes, it is that quiet on the farm that a normal sound like a snowplow can be really load and unexpected. Partly, because although it snows a lot, we dont have that many snowplows. I had the worst drive to work this past week. I was traveling 5 mph down one of our hills (in neutral) and still had the antilock brakes kicking in! Just keep the machine between the ditches! We made it. White knuckles
Cool Creatures the Tsunami washed up!! The above link is definately worth checking out. It is in Russian but the pics are worthwhile. We live on a bizzare world. I went to the hamfest in Marathon this morning. I picked up a few connectors, some 100Mbps NICs for a buck a piece and a few other morsels of electronics. I am receiving quotes for my new truck. The prices are coming in where I expected (a lot lower that most would think they would). I will sell my current truck in the summer. I will make a decision on a truck and a dump trailer soon. I have been asked to speak to of a bunch of gun instructors tommorow about presentation skills. That should be fun. They are having the seminar at the Gander Mountain store so I will pick up a few lures when I am down there. Maybe some game loads too... I know, I need a clay pidgeon launcher. I will look for one of them as well. This past week I was riding around with electric fork lift service techs in the Albany area. I...
I am working mostly on computers again this weekend. I am moving all the files into their appropriate storage areas. I have a quite a bit more to do. I am stuck with a 10 Mbps NIC in the machine I am typing on now (Pentium 233 we threw together). Simultaneous Internet access and file transfers can take quite a while. The progress box on the other machine here says 98 minutes.... uh oh, something is weird. I am setting the new "work box" up to easily accept strange hard drives. It is a dual boot machine with linux and windoze. I will be adding a 5-1/4 in floppy drive to the complement of I/O. It has both MFM and IDE controllers. I am skipping all SCSI and CDROMs for now. Other future projects will be to figure out how to get the data of the C64 disks so we can run those games we had so much family fun with in a 6500 emulator that must be out there. I sent out a bunch of RFQs for my new truck and dump trailer. It will be interesting to see what I get back. I did it by p...