Gnubbs Blog

There are a lot of reasons that I like my job.  One of them is that my boss lives to mountain bike.  This means that any day that I want to I can bring in my bike and go for a ride with him at lunch.  Since the weather is starting to get nice again, today I brought in all of my gear and we went for a ride.  Sunny, no wind, 55 degrees.  Perfect for riding.

We took a new 12 mile ride that he has come up with.  A good mix of paved bike trails, gravel bike trails, and a bit of road.  Great views of the mountains along the way.  All was going well.  I was trudging about with my slow ass winter legs and lungs.  We head down a section of 10″ wide gravel bike path, I round a nice corner along a bit of stream, see a doughboy flying towards me — head down not seeing a thing, hit my breaks, WHAMM!  We both go down.

It takes me a moment to gather my wits again, having just been ripped from my leisurely ride by a collision.  I am fine — a bit of road rash on my legs — and my bike looks fine.  Kind of a crappy first ride of the season.

My wife was out of town this weekend, so it seemed a prime opportunity to crack open some PBRs and spend the weekend working on my car. I had two goals for the weekend — compression test my engine and replace all of my coolant lines.

Friday night after work, I pull the car into the garage hot and immediately go to work getting it ready to compression test. This test has to be done with the engine hot, but also requires me to pull all of the coils, spark plugs, fuel relay, battery, windshield washer resevoir, and intake. All was going well until I tried to install my compression tester on the back drivers side cylinder. This is the hardest to get to, so I figure the best to start with. After screwing around for quite a while, I conclude that I am missing something and that I will have to try this again because the engine was completely cool at this point. I reassemble the car, and head inside to continue drinking PBRs.

Saturday morning I get up and am outside working around noon. I warm the car back up, and give this a second shot. When I open my compression tester, I look and realize that the fitting with the short hose is still long enough to work. I get this installed without too much trouble, hop in the car, and start to turn the engine over. I let it turn over about ~6 times to allow the compression to max out, but also notice that my coolant temp is just above the Cold mark. Not totally cold, but nowhere near operating temp. My compression readings are 135, 129, 135, 132psi. On the low side, but they are all consistent which is the most important thing.

Next up are my coolant lines. I replaced a total of 7 accessory hoses and my 2 radiator hoses with Samco silicon hoses. This was also my first excuse to pull my intercooler off. It looked good inside, with basically no oil residue in it. All went well except that I accidentally pulled a power steering hose. After a trip to the parts store for some power steering fluid, I get the car back together and start her up. After spending a while massaging hoses to get out air bubbles, I take her for a test drive. No leaks and my water temp stayed normal.

Once I have run this for a couple of days, I will switch from a 0.9bar to a 1.3bar radiator cap. That should give a decent increase in cooling capacity — so long as it doesn’t pop the plastic end tanks off of my radiator.

Just wanted to give everyone a gentle reminder… Never trust the guy at the autoparts store when they get a part number off of their computer. Always double check.

Last night I went in to get some new spark plugs, among other things. I have the guy look it up on the computer, and he grabs me some NGK Iridium BKR6EIX-11 plugs. I ask him if they come pre-gapped, and says “yeah, at 0.044.”

For some reason that seems wrong to me. So I run out to the car and look in my service manual. BKR6EIX is the correct plug, at a gap of 0.028-0.031. The BKR6EIX-11 is the plug for the non-turbocharged engine. (On NGK plugs a “-##” at the end of the part number indicates a wide gap plug.) Had I listened to the autoparts guy blindly, I would have installed the wrong plugs in my car.

I head back in, and they don’t have the correct plug for my car. They may have had an Autolite that would work, but for something I change every 30k I can afford the good stuff. So, I will have to run to my favorite subaru garage to get the right plugs. At $11 a pop I am not happy about that, but that’s what I get for buying a car that runs 15psi from the factory.

gnubbs

One of the nicer things about my job is that in the summer I can adjust my schedule a bit and climb after work. Yesterday was the first time I could pull this off.

I got to work bright and early at 7am, and left promptly at 4pm. Scott and I met up at a parking lot, and headed into Eldorado Canyon State Park. Life is good when one of the best climbing locations in the world is only a 10 minute drive from work. We got Scott a season pass to the park, and headed to Wind Tower.

We decided to climb the Wind Ridge route to start things off. Two pitches of 5.8 climbing (mostly easier, with a couple of 5.8ish moves thrown in to keep it spicy) and we were sitting on a ledge 300 feet off the floor of the canyon (probably only ~200 of actual climbing though). We took it easy for a while chatting and enjoying the perch. I could see taking up climbing just to get views like that.

After traversing the ledge a bit (this is sketchy, no room for error scrambling), we quickly decended a gully back to the start of the climb. We grabbed our gear and headed to the start of Calypso (5.6). This route is always crowded, but it was late enough in the day that there was no one on the first pitch. Scott makes short work of it, and I head up. This is the first time I have climbed the route, and it is exceptionally nice.

It has been a long time since I climed outside, so these routes felt a bit squirrelly to me. Calypso is an especially nice route. The climbing in the dihedral is sustained and fun. We repel from the bolts at the top of the first pitch, and get back to the car about 7:30pm.

Days like this are why I live in colorado.

steve

On my new install of Ubuntu on my laptop, I was running into the following error when trying to access one of my Rails apps.

Mysql::Error: Lost connection to MySQL server during query: …

Took me a bit of searching, but it turns out this is caused by not having libmysql-ruby1.8 installed.  apt-get install libmysql-ruby1.8 and I am golden again.

Just posting so I remember this the next time I run into the problem.