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Topic: Your today in pictures..
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted March 25, 2018 06:56 PM
Hibernation is (Almost) Over!
Every year right around this time we’ve had just about enough of winter. That feeling of wonder we got at the first snow flakes in December died about five storms ago. It’s time to get out of the house and maybe dream a little of Spring and Summer on the way.
Every year we head down to the south shore right around this time and spend an afternoon.
For people that live on an island with several hundred miles of them, we aren’t great beach people. We have no surf board, we do no Hula Hoop, we never met Annette Funicello either! It’s just right now it’s a great place for a good dose of sunshine and fresh air.
This time it was Jones Beach. In the summer literally millions of people visit here, but right now the crowds are pretty much as we like them!
That thin dark band between sand and sky is the same Atlantic Ocean a lot of us share, but we aren’t looking towards Europe here. This is a generally south facing beach. If you are a really strong swimmer and head towards the Horizon from where we are here, you’ll be in the Bahamas in about a thousand miles. (Pack a lunch!)
Where Europe comes in is every few minutes an Airliner passes overhead on a route to or from Kennedy Airport, Europe is most often the other end of their trip.
Look at that thin wisp of snow in the foreground: it goes to show it’s not over just yet!
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted April 07, 2018 07:46 PM
Philosophy Time
I brought my car back to Honda the other day for an oil change (JUST an oil change!), They said I needed an engine belt and it would be $250. I asked them if it was made of gold or if they needed to yank the engine out to change it. He said the part itelf was $125 an it was really hard to do.
I told them "No!", but its a long walk home from Wildwood if that belt gave up halfway there!
They were pretty shrewd about it too: somebody called yesterday to see if I was ready to surrender yet.
I got the belt, it was $29.
I put it in this afternoon, took about an hour. It was kind of nasty, but you give me 220 bucks and I will do one of these seven times a week!
Some Impressions:
1) Cars aren't built to be worked on anymore. His belt snaked around about 6 pulleys in a space maybe 2 inches wide between the engine and inner fender. The big old Fords I worked on in my twenties had enough room under the hood for a family of four to move in and invite people in for the Holidays! These new ones are packed so densely you could toss a bucket of water on the engine and it just might not run out the bottom!
2) Say what you will about YouTube, you can't fix this car without it! Honda has no service book, but beyond their control, people keep putting up how-to videos. Without them I would never have known where the belt tensioner was or the secret panel Honda put inside the fender well to allow easy access to the pulley on the crankshaft.
3) I kept thinking about projectors while I was doing this. There's a small belt on ST-1200HD to maximize the belt contact around the 18FPS roller pulley. Honda did the exact same thing around the crankshaft pulley with two idler pulleys. It just may be you can learn something useful from this hobby!
4) There's some things about owning a "new" car that aren't always a plus. I had my old car 25 years and knew every nut and bolt on it. This one I've had for five and every time I run into something like this it's a production! This will be an easy job the second time I do it!
5) If I'm going to mess around with Japanese cars I definitely need more metric tools: the pickings were awfully thin and that didn't help in the least. I used a 3/4" socket on a metric hex. (I checked to see if my Shop Teacher was watching first...)
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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