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And now for something compeletely different. Christmas is the one time of the year when we're away from home in a big block, and I think the cats really do miss us. They tend to be a bit more clingy for the first week when we get back. I have a few nice photos of them here that I took in the last few days. It's not the usual topic here but they're so cute.
A very rare picture of the three of them. Pangur up on the back,
Thrice on the afghan and Jasper on the right.
We got some actual snow on Monday. Here's Thrice looking out at it.
She's facinated by anything that moves, and the wind was blowing stuff
around the deck pretty well.
A semi-typical evening lately. Thrice (foreground) and Pangur (near
my feet) curled up and resting. Thrice is now roughly five years old,
and she's turning into quite a lap cat.
A minor fix-it triumph. The button for the garage door opener for the
far side (vintage Beetle) door broke a few months ago. I finally
remembered to get a replacement button. This is actually a doorbell
button, and doesn't have a light in it, but it works to open the
door.
(A note to myself--the garage door openers put about 8.5V DC on the
wires going to the button, so they are indeed compatible with
door-bell style buttons.)
I've been really busy at work for the last part of 2011, but I have
been moving forward on getting the defrost installed:
The vent is taped to the air circulation box at the right. The three
defrost hoses are installed here. The hose to the center defrost vent
is makred with magenta dots. The yellow dots are the hose to the main
right side vent (that I just installed). The green dots show the
white hose that go to the side defrost vent.
Looking down into the A pillar:
with all the hoses hooked up, you really can't see the splitter.
New year's resolutions? I have a few. I may articulate them here at some point. I plan to organize my stuff in the house much better. Happy New Year, everyone!
I took a road trip this weekend (including Monday) bewteen two weeks of training. I drove 526 miles up and 538 miles back today. It seems like a long way to drive just to sit on a couch.
Getting on I-39 where it begins at Bloomington. Driving dead
north--NOW we're getting somewhere!
There are a couple of big wind farms along I-39 in northern Illinois.
Here's a side shot. The camper is a random occurence; the "bend
backwards" stance amuses me. I presume it's because of the way the
camera raster-scans the image.
For quite a while here, it looks for all the world like the road is
goin to go between those two wind turbines, like the Gates of
Argonath from the Lord of the Rings.
But the road turns eventually.
Some closer shots of turbines:
This is either a Unicycle built by B.S. Johnson of the Discworld
novels, or else a new power line pillar with wheels for running the
new wires.
I love the mural on the back of this truck.
In Wisconsin, I-90, 94, and 39 run together for a while. I-39
continues to the north, but I branch off to the west with I-94 to head
towards Minneapolis/St. Paul.
It's been cold farther north. There's still snow on the ground.
And finally, at the end of the drive up, here's the river as I cross
into Minnesota. Yay!
The primary reason for going on this trip was to surprise my brother
by showing up to his 30th birthday party. Here's photographic
evidence. I'm on the left, my brother Dave is on the right. Would
you trust your computer to these guys?
The other reason I went was I visited Chippewa falls Monday (today).
One of my stops there was the
Chippewa Falls Museum of Science and Technology, which contains an
extensive exhibit of vintage Cray hardware.
I'm sitting on serial number 1 of the
Cray 1 Supercomputer. The
computer parts are in the tall cylindrical section behind and above
me. The wider part, that I'm sitting on, houses the power supplies.
It was awesome seeing this museum. The early Cray systems defined the
very idea of a Supercomputer, and were marvels of engineering and
computing design.
(At the left of the picture is a display with three floppy disks
illustrating how storage has gotten bigger over time.)
The end-of-trip obligatory speedometer shot.
I bought this car just about exactly 2 1/2 years ago, and I've already
put almost 55,000 miles on it. In a bit over 5,000 miles from now, it
will have passed even the extended warranty that I bought for it.
I went to Kerrville, Texas in October for the annual convention of the Mooney Aircraft and PIlot's association. A lot of folks flew into the convention. The Kerrville airport closed one of the runways and used it for parking space.
On Saturday afternoon, a few people took a van out to the airport to drop off logguage and stuff. I tagged along. These pictures are fun; you don't usually get to shoot photos while standing on a runway.
A panorama:
And the panorama larger.
I have a post about a car, that's not mine and not even a Volkswagen! I rented it on a recent trip to the San Antonio area and I have to say I was intruiged and impressed. The car was a Chevy Malibou, which is not certainly not a car that I would gravitate to, but I picked it with my usual Zen method of car picking. It wasnt' even the model that I'd picked when I did the paperwork, but that's what I ended up with.
The first thing, which was surprising and neat, is that it was so quiet. I think it's close to the quietest driving car that I've ever ridden in. It was just whisper-quiet. I liked the way it drove...it was nice and smooth.
But that's not what I wanted to write about. The car's intstrument
panel was...different than any I've driven before. The numbers come
from lights inside the dash, and aren't illuminated when the car is
off; then the dials are just blank:
When you turn on the key, the dial nuumbers slowly fade in, like this:
where you can see the numbers are still dim. And here the self-test
is done; the numbers are fully bright.
Oh, and it has a USB jack on the radio for power:
And I have to say--I've always liked the status displays that tell you
that you've just engaged the cruise control:
Aaaaaaaand...if that wasn't neat enough, the dash status display will
give you the pressures in the tires. Awesome!
Perfect is the enemy of good enough. I keep having these grandiose ideas of the really groovy stuff I want to blog about, but then I don't have the time to edit up the nice photo set, so the post gets delayed, and I don't write the post. I have trips in October and November that I have lots of photos that I want to document. Several interesting posts about airplanes and one about cars coming up.
One quick on that the pictures are ready for. I flew to a conference
in Seattle early in November. On the way back, from SEA to ATL, I
photographed this unique-looking river-convergence. Note the airport
marked with green dots:
I didn't have my iPad along on this trip, but I figured that this
formation of rivers, town, and airport had to be fairly unique.
It turns out that I was flying over "little Egypt", which is the very
southern tip of the state of Illinois. Here's that same spot on the
sectional on the screen of my iPad:
The town is Cairo (pronounced "kay-row", by the way). I find it often
tough to figure out where you are when you're looking at stuff from an
airliner, but this time I got lucky and managed to figure it out.
The Beetle's running great. I haven't assembled a second carburetor yet, but other than that my set up spare parts is getting close to done. Once that's done, I'll start working on taking it out on longer trips.
The heat's working great. I haven't measured it, but I suspect that driving down the highway I can get a 30 degree F differential above the outside temperature. To slightly imprive that, one of the things I need to do is get the rest of the air handling stuff finished in the front end in the luggage compartment. I worked on the gas tank a bunch last summer, and I really never got the rest of the trunk stuff re-assembled.
While I get a lot of heat out of the engine, the worst thing you can
have in a forced-air system is an open exit that doesn't go anywhere
useful. Most of the air tends to leak out there and mostly not go
where it's supposed to. Right now, on each front side of the car, two
of the defrost hoses are hooked up, but not all three:
What's missing are the vent assemblies that go from the vent box in
the middle top of the trunk area to the dashboard vents. Fortunately,
I was able to find the vents in their box that's been sitting around
the garage for a year and a half.
There's a box at the top of the luggage compartment that takes outside
vent and pipes it into the dash vents. It has valves to turn that air
circulation off, or a fan to blow the air if you're sitting still.
The fat tubes (blue dots) on the sides of the vents connect to the air
box. The end slots connecto the dash board and put air out into the
passenger compartment (green dots). The reason to connect these up
for winter is that the remaining defrost hoses also connect to the
vents (red dots).
There's going to be salt on the roads soon, so I don't know that I'll really get to driving it much more than I already have until spring rolls around again. However, this coming year, I should be able to start seriously using it and taking driving load off of my new Beetle. There aren't any significant maintenance items that are upcoming. The only one that I really should do soon is to lubricate the CV joints on the drive shafts, and that's something that can be done one at a time, fairly non-invasively. It's just messy.
[It's always mystified me that people talk about having lists of blog posts that you have to write. I've always thought that if you have a post to write, you write it. Well, now I'm having to take a dose of my own medicine; this is a blog post I've been trying to put together for six months.]
My philosophy of phone buying up to this year had always been to buy a relatively old phone that was just about to be discontinued. It's cheap, all the bugs have bene worked out. I had a Palm Treo and then a Palm Centro under that philosophy. However, I'd always wanted to have a phone that had an ssh client, so early this year (February, I think) I went shopping. My critea were I wanted a phone that had an ssh client, and one that could plug into usb. My friend Wayne was confused, and said that they were all like that (the usb part).
Well, I ended up getting my first nice new phone ever, a Droid X. As
I was told, the charging power suppy for it looked like this:
It plugs into the wall, and has a USB port, which supplies power to
the phone, or it can charge with a computer USB port. So I got that.
Slightly later in the spring,
I got an iPad. The iPad came with a USB-output charger too:
These two things together rang a bell. Douglas Adams wrote an article about this once. He talked about eliminating "dongly things"; discrete separate power supplies for gadgets (he was rather a gadget freak). He suggested that there should be a more common standard that just everything could plug into. I thought, with these two gadgets, that the power standard that Adams talked about has arrived, and it's USB!
Well...not only did someone already think of that, but they posted that fact to the relevant page that has his article. Among other things, apparenlty the European Union decided having different chargers for everything was silly, and set up an initiative cell phone companies to damn well compromise on USB as a power standard (I'm paraphrasing here) for mobile phones. So much so that new European-style power outlets are to have USB outputs built into them separate from the power plug. Here's Douglas Adam's article about "dongly things", complete with references to USB as a power standard.
So that's the article that I wanted to write in March, but I hadn't taken the time to take the photos and write the text. I got all excited at the time, though, about the whole USB-as-charging standard thing. I mentioned this to my pal Alex, that charging iPad and phone (he has a nice Droid phone too) via USB was great 'cause you dont' have to bring as many chargers and stuff. He said "Yeah, but the iPad charger puts out more current". I told him that was preposterous, USB has a power limit and surely the wall chargers respected that. He shrugged, but assured me that was the case.
As in all things, and I should have known this, it turns out that Alex was right. I'm not going to go into the details, but Wikipedia's article on USB has a good power section. The important bit is that devices are allowed to draw 500 mA under USB 2.0 and 900 mA under USB 3.0 (all at a nominal 5V). There's also a "Battery Charging Specification" under which USB devices can draw 1.5A, and up to 1.8A from a "dedicated charger" (presumably like a wall charger). A later section also lists devices that don't follow any of the specifications, which concludes with "The iPad and MiFi 2200 are two devices that draw even more power (10 watts or 2.1 Amps) than the Battery Charging Specification allows via USB ports."
So apparently, there are fairly normal USB chargers, and "high
power" USB chargers. The specifications on my charging devices bears
this out. Here's the charger that came with my phone:
It can source 850mA. This charges the phone in a few hours. But the
iPad charger widget says:
Ye hah!
Those are dedicated charging devices that come with their parent
device. However, that means that stand-alone USB chargers have several
variations, including normal ones and "high power" ones. It turns out
that's the case. Since then, I bought this charger that I like to
take along on trips. It draws power from the wall OR from a lighter
socket in a car, and its output is a (high-power) USB socket:
The most recent chapter of this story happened recently, although I'm
sure it's not the last one. I flew down to San Antonio, Texas, a few
weeks ago and rented a car and drove to Kerrville. The car that I rented,
through my usual Zen method of car selection, was a Chevy Malibou.
For the very first time in my experience, this car had a USB power
charging jack in the dash board:
I've been working on my vintage Beetle a lot lately. I've test-driven it up to 30 miles. The electronic ignition seems to be doin fine.
Now that I'm taking it on longer and longer trips, I'm working through the long-term list of stuff that needs to be updated or fixed. Earlier this week, that was changing out the transmission fluid. I changed out the trans fluid early on when owning the car. I put in "90-weight gear oil". Well, it turns out that there is debate about the best specification of oil to use. I'm not going to get into that debate here, but I pulled out the GL-5 gear oil that I'd put in a few years ago and put in fresh GL-4. I don't know if that's really better, but it sure runs noticably quieter.
Here's Thrice sniffing at the trans fluid plugs and the hex tool used
to remove/install them:
The garage is kind of chilly, so I warmed the container of trans fluid
in hot water in the sink before attempting to put it in the car.
...and, my sophisticated gravity-actuated insertion system.
I want to have a spare carburetor to take with me on long trips. I'm
not to the point of trying to put together a second working carb, but
I'm trying to understand which parts are important to check. Here I'm
checking the amount of time it takes for the thermal-electric choke to
open when voltage is applied.
An auspicious day. Drove to Knoxville to get oil in New Beetle changed and 2 new tires. The desk dude fixed the roll pin in my switchblade key so it now folds smoothly (it's been bad since I got the car).
I had a fairly productive day at work; got some stuff moving.
This afternoon evening drove most of the way to office-away-from-home. Sirius Satellite radio had a town-hall Q&A with band (surviving members of) Nirvana, hosted and MCed by John Stewart. It's the 20th anniversary of the release of their album Nevermind. There was apparently a contest and the winners got to go to Sirius/XM studios in New York and be there to ask their questions.
It was a 2-hour session, and it was interesting hear them talk about their experiences. They played a few songs too. One was they played the demo tape the'd made recorded on a boom box of "Smells Like Teen Spirit". It's interesting to hear it in that unproduced format.
I was planning to grab a hotel room for the night anyway, but I thought it was auspicious that the session was ending as I was approaching the exit, and the full version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" started to play, and I got to crank it up and listen as I drove to the hotel and parked. I don't know that I'm a huge fan of the band, but I certainly have a lot of nostalgia for that song. (it came out my Freshman year of college).
And I got room 137 in the hotel, which is a nice bit of physics nerd numerology.
Instead of flying, I stayed home yesterday, because I've been busy a lot lately and it was nice to have a day to work on the car.
Before driving, I did a bunch of stuff in the garage and adjustments to the engine. I have a relatively cleared work bench. I've collected together all the parts that I want to have in my spare set for long-distance driving, and all the VW tools are packed back in the tool box. I have a spare distributor which I was going to pre-time. My plan was I'd leave the distributor cap with the spark plug wires hooked up, and change out the rest of the distributor. However, it turns out that the notches in the distributor bodies are on different sides, so to do that I'd have to unplug all the spark plug wires, which is a pain, so I didn't bother. If I need to swap in the distributor, I'll have to statically time it, which will be fine.
I checked the valve clearances. Given my past problems with valves drifting, I was rather worried when cylinder #1 had much higher clearance than spec; it was like .014 inches rather than .006. The clearance getting larger is the natural way the engine wears, and is not indicative of a problem (clearance getting smaller is a big danger sign), so it's not catastrophic, bit a bit worrying since I just set them 600 miles ago when I assembled the engine. HOWEVER, cylinder #2 was similarly out of spec in the benign direction. Going to measure #3 (now on the opposite side of the engine), I've never hoped so much that a measurment would be out of spec. But cylinders #3 and #4 were similarly out, so I can only conclude that this is a symptom of the brand new pushrods settling in. I'll have to check it again in a thousand miles and hopefully it will remain stable.
I also wanted to run the engine for a while to get it to operating temp. I made sure the carb was adjusted properly. While I had the engine hot, I decided to spend some time and do an oil pressure test. When I re-built the top half of the engine, I replaced the oil pump because the old one was worn and had been put together by an idiot. I bought an entirely new pump, blueprinted the gears and body, sanded and polished the cover plate, and then installed it.
When I got the car, the oil light flickered at idle when the engine
was hot. This is a sign that something in the oil system is worn;
it's usually a combination of the main engine bearings wearing out
and/or the oil pump. I did an oil pressure test; it was definitely
out of spec. The test is:
30-weight oil, oil at 70 degrees C, 2500 rpm
new engine, oil pressure should be 42 psi; wear limit is 28 psi
Before the engine rebuild:
30-weight oil at 62 deg C, 2500 rpm, pressure was 18 psi
Since the rebuild, the oil light has never flickered at all, so I knew
I had improved things drastically, but I didn't know how much.
My test yesterday:
30-weight oil at 67 deg C, 2500 rpm, pressure was 42 psi
So it's well above wear limits, which is great, but it's nearly up to
new spec. That's awesome! That long Monday Night Football game I
spent sanding the (cast iron) cover plate until it was smooth was
worth it!
I also drove the car yesterday to run errands. This was the first drive out of the driveway with the electronic ignition, which seems to be working stably. Yay!
I've been working for a couple of weeks on getting electronic ignition set up in my vintage Beetle. I bought one setup, which turned out to be badly made and really wasn't going to work. That's another story. The story for now is that Monday I bought a Pertronix electronic ignition module from vwparts.net on Monday, it arrived yesterday mid-afternoon, and about sundown the engine was running successfully.
Here's what the inside of a classic VW distributor
from the factory, with old-style "points" installed:
The shaft in the center of the picture rotates when the engine
rotates. The shaft isn't round; as the shaft rotates,
the lobes of the shaft push against the rubbing block (red arrow),
moving the points arm (marked with blue dots) and opening
(disconnecting) the contacts (green arrow). Then the lobe passes and
the arm closes the contacts again. When the contacts are closed the
black wire is electrically conneced to the distributor body; when
they're open it isn't.
The reason for doing this is complicated, but the important thing is that something inside the distributor closes a switch and opens a switch in response to the rotating of the engine. This points setup is a simple way of accomplishing that goal. The problems with it are that there are several points of mechanical wear. The points degrade from the constant sparking and need to be replaced. The timing of the engine drifts as that wear happens. Eventually, the bearings of the distributor shaft wear out because of the constant pushing from the rubbing block.
The inside of the distributor in the car now looks like this:
The black ring marked with red dots fits down over the shaft and locks
onto it, so that it always rotates with the shaft. It has 4 magnets
in its rim. The black box marked with green dots contains a magnetic
sensor and the other electronics. As the black ring rotates, it
senses the small magnets going by, and in response, it electronically
connects and disconnects the black wire to the distributor body,
just like the points did.
The advantages of this approach are:
One additional consideration; the points worked by using a mechanical
switch to connect the black wire to the distributor, and the movement
of the switch (the points) was provided by the rotation of the motor.
With the electronic system, the electricity has to be delivered to the
electronic module to power it. So instead of one wire coming out of
the distributor, there are now two.
The black one goes to negative
side of the coil just like in the points setup. The red wire goes to
the positive side of the coil (which is hot when the key is on) and
powers the electronic ignition module. I've put a fuse in the
positive line, just in case something inside the distributor touches,
it won't burn up the wiring.
My wife and I went to DragonCon in Atlanta over Labor Day weekend this year. It is, if I'm remembering correctly the fourth time we've gone since we moved to the southeast in 2006.
We got into downtown Atlanta slightly after 4pm, and ended up getting snarled in traffic quite a bit. We probably got delayed for half an hour. Once we were there, it was fine.
The convention was fun; we got to see good stuff. One night there was a musical performance by Paul and Storm, Jonathan Coulton, Molly Lewis, among others, which from a seeing-stuff-on-stage was definitely my highlight.
One super-neat thing: I've been a fan of Wil Wheaton's work forever. I've been following his on-line writing for 10+ years at this point. I've been trying to arrange to go to a convnetion and say hello for a while. He was at DragonCon this year, and I got to do that. Turns out, he recognised my name from on-line interactions and posts I've made to his blog, so that was a neat surprise. You can read the whole story of me meeting Wil Wheaton on its own page.
One of the really fun things to see when going to DragonCon are the "cosplay" costumes that people make and wear to the convention. I took a lot of photos of costumes I saw and I posted some of the better ones on a separate page, so that they don't clutter up my blog page. My DragonCon photos from 2011.
A couple of notes about going to DragonCon. You can book admission (they call them "memberships") long in advance, or right at the door (for more money). However, the hard thing to get is a hotel room in one of the convention hotels. There are 5 now, and they usually all fill up very soon after their rooms are announced, which is usually October or November of the previous year. So if you want to go in 2012, you'll probably want to start keeping an eye on the DragonCon web site for announcements about hotel room availability for next year. (By the by, we will NOT be going next year (2012). We have an important out-of-town anniversary to go to that's also over Labor Day weekend.)
Speaking of Hotels, I would like to put in a plug for the Sheraton Downtown Atlanta (one of the con hotels). If you have the choice, I would highly recommend it as the place to stay. It's much quieter than the other hotels. There were never huge lines for the elevators. Their staff was pleasant; the people running the restaraunts were sort of in costume. It was really a lovely time there.
It all started when I went to renew my subscription to Flight Guide. It's a set of
publications put out by a company called "Airguide Publications".
They contain non-official information about airports in the US. The
great thing is they contain(ed) information about the airports that
wasn't in any official source. They list hotels and businesses at or
around the airport, and they have airport diagrams for airports too
small to have official diagrams in the official FAA stuff. They are
(were) awesome tools for the VFR pilot. Although I let it lapse a
couple of times, I had an active subscription for most of the time
between when I got my pilot's license in 2007 through last year.
After I got my instrument rating last fall, I realized my subscription had lapsed, and I went to renew it. Well it turns out that they were changing their format and the old format is no longer available. Huh. I started digging into their web site, and I noticed one of their products called Fight Guide iEFB. Hmm...I wonder what that is and would I want it?
There's a set of descriptions for Electronic Flight Bags (hardware and software), and Airguide has apparently decided to spend a lot of their time building one for the Apple iPad. An EFB application has and displays charting and reference informationt for operating at airports and flying between them. It can contain charts, frequencies and departure and approach information which before pilots carried in their flight bags (the big heavy bags that pilots carry onto the airliners).
At first I didn't feel a burning need to swtich to electronic stuff. While I certainly love gadgets, I have enough to think about when I'm flying. However, I thought about it and did some math. Instrument publications change over a lot faster than VFR publications, some of them every 28 or 56 days. The information in those publications is free (as a product of taxpayer money), but getting them on physical paper costs money. I realized that keeping myself in publications for the parts of the US that I would want to fly in would cost me something on the order of $300 per year. The electronic EFB applications generally require a subscription service; Flight Guide's cost like $75/year for everything I want. Given the great cost efficiency increase by going electronic, I went ahead and invested in an iPad.
The flight guide app does have charting, but I don't think it's the
best app. The one that I use when I'm flying is ForeFlight. It's a great
interface, it's very smooth, and it's very very SIMPLE. I find it's
great to use in the air. Here's ForeFlight on my iPad displaying
instrument en-route charts with a highlight flight plan:
And displaying an instrument approach:
This is roughly my setup when I'm flying:
I have the iPad on my left leg mounted on an leg
mount from Ram Mounts. That's a kneeboard on my right leg
(basically a clipboard with a strap). I have a note pad clipped in it
for writing down clearances and frequencies and stuff. This is
obviously not taken in an airplane; I just took this at home for
illustration purposes. When I'm flying, normally there are rudder
pedals and things in front of my feet instead of, in this picture, a
cat. I've flown with this setup for real, lots in VFR, and also in
simulated instrument flying for practice and in on case an actual
instrument approach. It works very well for me.
What's interesting is that air carriers that carry passengers for hire have been working on getting FAA approval for using iPads for charting devices. This February, a company called Executive Jet Management got approval from the FAA to use iPads (with Jeppesen Mobile TC application) as their charting source (article on Wired) (article on Gadget Venue). The second article is interesting because it says that they have approval to use the iPad as a sole source of charting information.
The reason that I bring this up is that yesterday, United Airlines announced that they are going to be issuing iPads to their pilots to replace bound paper charts and publications. So, for once, this is one trend that I'm actually in on the ground floor!
(Wow--I haven't blogged for 9 days? Oy--I'll never do a post per day this month at this rate.)
I've had all kinds of various problems with the pedals in my vintage Beetle. The throttle cable has always been moderately too long. And of course there were the problems with the brake master cylinder, which I replaced a few years ago. Recently I've even put the proper spacers in so that the master cylinder is attached correctly.
I've been fighting with the throttle cable again. There's something wierd going on with the length of it. There's a cable length that's supposed to be for Beetles from 1972 to 1974, which includes mine. However, I got a couple of new cables of that length, but they're even longer than the almost-too-long cable that I took out. So I ordered an earlier model cable from Wolfsburg West (a shorter one) to see if that would help.
This is a timed photo taken with the recent "new" throttle cable
from the supposed correct year. When the photo snapped, I'm in the
car with the accelerator pedal all the way down.
The green arrow is pointing to a gap that shouldn't be there. When
the throttle is all the way open, the throttle arm to the right pushes
up against the body of the carburetor on the left. This is partly to
do wtih the too-long cable, and the slightly goofy way I had it
attached to the lever assembly at the front of the car.
The carburetor end of two of the cables. The 1972-74 is on the right,
the 1971 and earlier on the left. The green arrow shows about where
the cable clamp at the carburetor falls, so the one on the left that I
got should actually be about right.
With the new cable installed, the throttle opens all the way when you
push the accelerator pedal down.
It's hard to see (it was hard to photograph), but here's the end of
the cable at the carburetor. The red arrow points to the barrel
that's crimped onto the end of the cable. It's perfect--about half of
the barrel is ahead of the carb clamp and about half behind it.
I got the above done last night. Tonight I tied in the pedal end of
the cable with cable ties. The end of the cable just goes through a
hole in the lever that's ahead of the accelerator pedal (shown here).
It stays in just by a bend in the crimped end. It stays Ok when it's
under tension but I was afraid at some point motion of the pedal would
dis-lodge it and I'd lose throttle control. So I put cable ties on
the crimped end (indicated by the red arrow), so now it won't fall out.
I hope to get the electronic distributor in soon and start going out for test drives.
