Wouter's Blog – Page 23 – Who said it was your cheese in the first place?

Wouter and Tanya’s Excellent Adventure, Part 1

(I’m back-dating these posts. This will probably confuse both my readers, but it will make sense in the archives. I hope).

So it was decided that we would take a trip to the Kruger National Park. At first we thought the kids would come with, but they got a better offer :-) and it ended up being just the two of us. Hey, the fewer the merrier.

Two people can fit everything and a tent in a car, but I’d already decided to take the teardrop, which still needed some more work. But all’s well that ends well, so on Wednesday the 9th of December we headed north.

The mission: Tanya wanted to see leopards and cheetahs. Preferably leopard and cheetah cubs. Playing with one another. In a tree. Oh and maybe some lions too. And I’d never seen wild dogs so that was on my list.

Tall order, I know :-/

So being, well, me, I joined the sanparks forum and started doing research. Turns out that the Lower Sabie / Skukuza / Pretoriuskop area is the place for cats, with Satara being good for lions. Or so they say. So I went online to book (the online booking is excellent. Possibly the best I’ve encountered anywhere). This was at the beginning of July, and places were already starting to fill up. I would have liked three nights at Lower Sabie, could only get two. At this stage we didn’t know whether the kids were coming with, so I booked the campsites for two people — you can change this when you arrive in camp, pay the difference.

The itinerary:

2015-12-09: Wednesday: Drive to Bloemfontein
2015-12-10: Thursday: Drive to Nelspruit
2015-12-11: Friday: Get up early, get into the park as early as possible, camp at Lower Sabie
2015-12-12: Saturday: Lower Sabie
2015-12-13: Sunday: Drive up to Satara
2015-12-14: Monday: Satara
2015-12-15: Tuesday: Drive to Skukuza
2015-12-16: Wednesday: Drive to Pretoriuskop
2015-12-17: Thursday: Pretoriuskop
2015-12-18: Friday: Spend as much time in the park as possible, leave in the afternoon, overnight at Witbank
2015-12-19: Saturday: Pick up toys first thing in the morning, head south, see how far we get
2015-12-20: Sunday: Get home
2015-12-21: Wouter back at work for a couple of days.

I didn’t really have much of a plan about where to stop over — The Formula 1 (now SUN1) chain is always good, but we have the teardrop so camping it is. Somewhere along the way I googled it and came up with Reyneke Park. Phoned them, they had lots of space, so that’s where we went.

Didn’t even bother to unhitch the teardrop.

2015-12-09 by wrm Kruger 2015 Teardrop 2

I scream, you scream

We all scream for big screan.

2015-11-18 by wrm Farting around Geek 1

Golf 4 oil change

The manual says that you should tighten the oil filter sealing cap to 25 Nm.

But of course the previous fellow who worked on the car was some type of gorilla.

So find an appropriately sized pipe clamp, tighten it around the cap…

And whack the shit (technical term) out of it.

This will hopefully be easier next time, because I’ve taken over servicing Tanya’s Golf.

2015-11-05 by wrm Cars 1

I’m at a loss for a title.

… or we shall be forced to put up a bigger sign?

2015-10-27 by wrm Farting around 0

Teardrop update

So it came to pass that Tanya and I decided to go to the Kruger National Park. Over December, which is not the best of ideas, but that’s how it worked out. It might turn out to be somewhat hot.

Accommodation up there is rather expensive, with camping being by far the cheapest option. And since we have a teardrop, we are set.

Except that the teardrop needs a bit of work.

The lexan expands a lot more than wood, so when it gets hot the entire roof pulls up. This breaks the seal, of course, and when it rains I get wet. I don’t like getting wet.

Also, I never completed the galley and inside cupboards*.

I decided to shorten the see-through part of the roof, taking it from the front to the top, not over towards the back. I’ll have to drill bigger holes through the lexan to allow it to float, and use weatherstripping rather than trying to glue it down.

Here I am using my l33t template skilz so that I can cut two pieces of ply to the right shape.

Puzzling about the layout. No, three drawers won’t fit.

(And a lot of cutting and screwing later) — Looking good.

Update 2015-12-05

So I’ve been procrastinating with the second door. It’s a major PITA. But it had to be done so…

As with the first door, I first bolted the hinges to the panel and then cut the door out. I tried to transfer the dimensions from the other side as accurately as possible.

Trimmed the hole with the same aliminium T section, and then ran into a problem. Because when I went to buy more aliminium, they were no longer there. And I couldn’t find the same thing anywhere else. Found something similar at the fourth place I looked, it just had to do.

So the trim on the second door is kind of iffy.

Let’s go.

** The Atma Travelear is somewhat above my competence level.

2015-10-27 by wrm Teardrop 1

Perhaps she even wiggled her toes

Lindgren liked to sit on the small second-floor balcony with a view of the sea. There is a bench in a corner of the balcony. Karin Nyman, Lindgren’s daughter, who is now over 80 and closely resembles her mother, says: “Take a look under the bench.”

It’s easier said than done. Dates, a few words and many stenographic symbols are written in pencil on the underside of the bench: “July 3, 1963. Summer. Radiant. Like in the good old days. The early summer was magical. I was here all of June and wrote “Michel from Lönneberga.” The book is now finished. We bought a sailboat, the ‘Saltkrokan.'” Lindgren must have laid flat on her back to write these words, with her feet sticking out from underneath the bench. Perhaps she even wiggled her toes, just like Pippi.

Read the whole article here.

2015-10-22 by wrm Farting around Get Off My Lawn 0

10 Years

Congratulations Sandra and Philip!

2015-10-08 by wrm Uncategorized 0

Gemsbok Sosaties

A sosatie is a kebab. Meat onna stick.

Start with a gemsbok loin (rugstring), nicely matured, cubed. Bacon is good. Some dried apricots, soaked in water for a few hours (also soak the skewers so they don’t burn). Some blanched onion, and some cherry tomatoes (it helps to work things out ahead of time, I had 8 skewers, 24 cubes of meat, 16 apricot halves, 16 tomatoes and 10 rashers of bacon cut into thirds. Some sosaties got more bacon, some got less onion).

Drizzled with olive oil & rosemary sauce.

There was a bit of loin left, that got sauced up and braaied separately. Also braaied a kilo of gemsbok wors.

Add a green salad and half a butternut wrapped in foil and put on the coals much earlier, and call it Sunday night supper.

2015-09-20 by wrm Foooooood 1

Fun with a Power Supply

Oooh look! Someone threw out this perfectly good Spectrum SPL-603 power supply!

Well, mostly perfectly good…

She who was once the beautiful 723

The 723 had given up all its magic smoke, to the point where the socket is also buggered. Fortunately this is a stock part in my junkbox, as are 2N3055s (the one output transistor was shorted emittor-to-collector, but I can’t explain why this would break the 723). I also replaced the H1061 with a BDW93B because I could.

Truth be told, this is a terrible PSU.

The non-regulated DC is 52V, which means that at 30V output the transistors are dropping 22V and at 2.5V out they are dropping just about 50V. No wonder two 2N3055s are needed for a measly 3A output (A 2N3055 is good for 15A and 115W, so when dropping 50V you can only get a smidge more than 2A out of it, and that with a good heatsink).
The 723 Vcc is connected to the non-regulated DC, but the 723 is rated for 40V max Vcc. This is probably what broke it.
When I set the PSU to about 6V and turn it off, there’s a ~20V spike on the output. WTF?

So why the high non-regulated DC? I thought maybe it drops under load because cheap transformer, but this is not the case. The transformer gives out 38VAC which drops to 35VAC with a 1A load.

The general schematic is similar to http://www.circuit-projects.com/cimg/2V_to_7V_8A_power_supply_by_723_and_7812.gif but with a difference — the base of the current limiting transistor is connected to a voltage divider (R4/R5) to ground. This causes the current limiting point to be higher for a higher output voltage. Again, counter-intuitive.

So I changed things around to how it should be. Fitted a different transformer, from an old UPS — it’s only good for about 18V out but that’s enough for me. Not going to try to make a purse out of this sow’s ear.

2015-09-04 by wrm Electronics 0

Brewday!

My new brewing setup. A nice large stainless steel urn with a dual element, and a cooler box with a filter that used to be a braided hose and a tap.

The box under the urn is a PID controller so that I can (in theory*) dial the temperature, have a homebrew, and have water at the right temperature on tap.

It’s not going to win a panel wiring contest, but it works. The PID doesn’t have the switching capacity, so there’s a solid state relay. I also wired diodes to send the positive part of the AC to the one element and the negative part of the AC to the other element to spread the heat.

The switch controlling whether the diodes are in-circuit or not comes from the junkbox. Been a while since one could buy something useful for R3.45.

Grain in the cooler (this is 6 kilos of pilsner, on Saturday), add the water, let it be for about an hour…

..and drain the good stuff (this is Sunday’s brew, an IPA).

The pilsner is all-grain, which means that you end up with quite a lot of liquid to boil.

That’s the next step. The urn, on low, should be able to boil the wort as well. If not, I need to get a 30 liter+ pot, I have quite a few gas burners.

Good news is that both brews started bubbling easily (I added Servomyces to both and DAP to the IPA). The pilsner is my first all-grain and my first lager — I’m using ice to keep it cool.

* The water coming out the tap seems about 5C too cold. Some calibration required, looks like.

2015-08-24 by wrm Beeeeeeer Electronics 0