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  • Users: faust9
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  1. F

    Is my dad right?

    Convice your dad to replace the dim condescent bulbs with bright compact flourescent bulbs. The cost of these has come down a lot (about $4 for a 15w bulb) and they work much better than they did 10 years ago. A 15w buld gives the same amount of light as a 100w incandescent bulb and the CF bulbs...
  2. F

    The World's Most Efficient Cars

    Most car companies do this. Mazda spent more money than you can shake a stick at on the Miata exhaust before the Miata went into first production. Mazda had these little RV's with individual sound studios so ppl could listen to different exhaust tones and select the most pleasing.
  3. F

    Garage Door Remote.

    It's the same because making a frequency scanner for the express purpose of opening a garage door on a house you do not own is just as illegal---at least the act of opening the doors is and in all reality, garage door frequency scanners probably run afoul for the DMCA because garage doors tend...
  4. F

    Garage Door Remote.

    You honestly believe someone would risk the liability of involvement in a "prank" by telling you how to make a remote? Wow! While you're at it why not ask how to make a pipe bomb?
  5. F

    Increasing fuel efficiency?

    Not true, chips usually 'tune'---I say that with some disdain BTW---a very small range to the detriment of the rest of your engine operating band. TPS is not a feedback sensor usually. When you're driving the position of the TPS does not in and of itself dictate the fuel needs and is only...
  6. F

    Katrina: Lessons learned

    I'd like to add that arildno's point about the French Quarter is meaningless because the French chose that area for a city because it was the highest point in the entire flood plane. So, if the highest point STILL got flooded then the rest of the area REALLY got flooded(the 80% of NO underwater...
  7. F

    Katrina: Lessons learned

    I tend to agree with the "Don't live were the water wants to be" philosophy. Man Vs Mother Nature has a time tested result---Mother Nature wins. We have very few successes when actually doing battle with the old gal. We do our best but just like the rumble in the jungle we are only punching at...
  8. F

    Overdrive on a Truck

    You might want to ask someone more in the know about this. Ford AOD's(not AOD-E's) have a weak OD band so it's actually better to drive them in D while in the city and only go into OD when driving for an extended time greater than 45. Older VW auto's had a similar problem. Actually, there are a...
  9. F

    Taking FSAE to a highschool, ideas?

    Not a whole lot of underhood and aero in an FSAE car(some teams go full body but most opt for a shapely nose cone with only minimal aero consideration). Aerodynacic design of FSAE cars is wasted effort because the cars traverse an autocross course with one maybe two straight aways. Speeds...
  10. F

    Torch Brazing

    The same process holds for brazing and welding. Clean, clean, clean. Brazing isn't any more difficult than tig welding with one little hitch---when you braze Al you have to move quickly. You can't overheat the joint unless your intent is to produce a weak brittle weld. You have to move as...
  11. F

    Torch Brazing

    Don't sand the surface. Get a stainless Steel brush http://www.sjdiscounttools.com/kdt2309.html [Broken] and scrube the surface. The SS brush will clean the joint without leaving silicate particles embedded into the aluminum. Wash the freshly scrubbed surface with distilled H2O (DI would be a...
  12. F

    Optimum closet shelf width

    Trial and error possibly. Do you have access to CAD? That would help too. I wouldn't attempt to do this as a hand calculation myself. I'd use pencil and paper and a ruler or CAD to determine the correct lengths. Good luck.
  13. F

    Optimum closet shelf width

    What do you mean, why not go wall to wall(72")? Are you worried about support conditions? Why not cut the shelves with the same curvature as the wall? Here, let's standardize our terminology: Width is how far the shelf projects from the wall(you called it depth) and length is how many...
  14. F

    TEC heater/cooler

    Thermo-electric cooler(TEC). The answer is maybe. For a peltier to work properly a sink must be used. If you want to use a peltier to heat something then you need to have a substance from which a heat flux will flow from. If you want to use the peltier as a cooler then you need to remove the...
  15. F

    What kinds of engineers usually build submarine?

    I think the question should hing on the type of sub in question. Yeah, the USS Parche needed every type of engineer imaginable; however, the glass bottom subs tourists ride in Wikiki probably were designed by only a few engineers. To answer the original question we need to know the scale of the...
  16. F

    What kinds of engineers usually build submarine?

    What kind of submarine?
  17. F

    Pneumatic cylincer help

    My company used pneumatics as described by Justin. Justin, you will need to make a servo and this is no easy task when dealing with pneumatics. You might be better served looking into motor controlled linear actuators because the controls needed to give variable height and rate control for a...
  18. F

    Understanding the good effiency

    Here you go Fred: http://www.cnet.com/5208-6033-0-10.html?forumID=105&threadID=104376&messageID=1195130&start=-1 [Broken] Honda Civic hybrid? Not very good efficiency! :biggrin:
  19. F

    What is a gear and what does it do?

    Those wheels were weighted at the top to make them inherantly unstable. Only a slight nudge would be needed to destabilize the system(the wheels) causing the wheels to roll. Make the weights big enough and the wheels will exen roll up a hill. Kind of like balancing a stick on a finger. The...
  20. F

    Can an AC signal light an LED?

    At audio frequencies the light won't appear to be blinking--well for the most part that is. Anything greater than 30Hz will appear to not be flashing. There are a lot of ckts on the net that one can build using a cheap microphone and a bandpass filter to make a blinking ckt. Essentially the...
  21. F

    Can an AC signal light an LED?

    Adding any circuitry to the audio signal will add distortion though. Use your car's DC power system. Add a 610 to 750 ohm resistor in series with the LED and connect to the car power. Heck, tap into one of the wires used for your driving lights that way the LED's will only operate when you turn...
  22. F

    Vacuum applied to a system

    Yes, you are correct.
  23. F

    New Efficient AC

    Here's a description of the "NEW" cycle. http://www.idalex.com/technology/ It looks like a modified two pass cooler (similir to the one used on the last power plant I worked at). The site above makes it sound like scientists the world around gasped in horror because this system should not...
  24. F

    Vacuum applied to a system

    Tap water has a lot of trapped gas in it. Fill a glass with tap water and let it sit on a table over night. You should see a lot of bubbles form on the glass. Some of the bubbles are a result of exposure to the air while sitting on your table while others are causesed by gases trapped within the...
  25. F

    A possible replacement for a torque converter

    You basically described the current Torque Converter design except you've added a requirement for a higher pressure pump (remember, the entire transmission uses the same pump and fluid so changing the pump requires a redesign of the valve body, actuators and accumulators as well) and a variable...
  26. F

    Automatic painter

    An inkjet printer for walls? What about windows, outlets, and the like?
  27. F

    3 Volt DC Motor Performance Graphs

    Try http://www.mabuchi-motor.co.jp/english/ [Broken]
  28. F

    Working of a Hall Probe

    Googling the term Hall probe turned up 1.2 million pages: the first one being hyper-physics. Hyper physics has a very good description of how a Hall effect probe works. What exactly are you looking for?
  29. F

    Finding Speed

    http://www.fcps.k12.va.us/AnnandaleHS/StudentActivities/BotBall/softwarecode.html [Broken] http://web.mit.edu/rikky/www/motion.c.txt
  30. F

    Finding Speed

    Motorola chips use something called vectored interrupts--its just a scary name. Essentially, when the chip receives an interrupt(like from an encoder) the processor will always jump to a certain location in memory. There are different types of interrupt and each interrupt has its own location in...
  31. F

    Finding Speed

    I would start here: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/library/documentationlist.jsp?rootNodeId=01&nodeId=01624684498635&Device=All&DocTypeKey=10Ksd1nd&DocTypeKey=10KsfC2b&DocTypeKey=10Ksfwlk&DocTypeKey=10MTYPgQ&DocTypeKey=10Ksgj8q&Results=25 And here: http://handyboard.com/ According...
  32. F

    Finding Speed

    Give me a few minutes. I'll have to look up that controller. It's HC11F1 based isn't it? I know an HC11 can easily handle multiple timing events(HC11's were designed originally to control GM engines).
  33. F

    Finding Speed

    Don't use a fixed time. Simply measure the time between encoder pulses on one wheel and compare that to the time between encoder pulses on the other wheel. If you use a fxed time then you will have more inaccuracies. How are you controlling this BTW--what kind of controller?
  34. F

    Finding Speed

    Here's probably the easiest approach to this. Measure the time between pulses on both wheels and compare those times. An example: Lets say you want the right wheel to be the master wheel. This is the wheel that you--the user--control the angular velocity of. When you want to speed up...
  35. F

    Better fuel efficiency through vapor carburators?

    I disagree with this. I race quite a bit. I have a 94 Mustang with a welll build 302, a 79 T/A with a 455, and a 91 R6 which puts a little over 125Hp to the ground--tough to do on a 600cc Bike. Water injection has limited use in racing today for amny reasons one of which, the biggest in my...
  36. F

    Load on castors - can't calculate.

    You should be able to do this using statics. Assign a point A to the joint where the boom is joined to the base. Use \vec{r} from A to the CM of the mass. Calculate the moment at A due to the mass. Translate the moment into a set of forces at the Wheels. Use a worse case scenario where all of...
  37. F

    Can beer bottles pop car tires?

    It all depents on the type of tire, tire composition, and remaining tread. Soft beltless tires (high performance usually racing or motorcycle) can be popped by glass, Your average steel belted tire that still has tread should be fine. Old bald tires are suseptible to puncture. I would pull each...
  38. F

    Voltage Controlled Variable Delay?

    So, are you just trying to turn a light on/off with a slight delay based on a voltage input? How accurate does this need to be? PIC's, AVR's H8's and many other microcontrollers have built in 8bit ADCs which could easily be used as voltage controlled delay circuits. A 12 series (tiny 8 pin...
  39. F

    Choking an Engine

    No, its A/F; however, A/F ratio is a mass ratio not a volume ratio. An A/F of 10:1 (about 7 to 9:1 for a choked engine) means 10 mass units of air to 1 mass unit of fuel (i.e. 10kg of air to 1 kg of fuel). The volume of fuel is insignificant when compared to the volume of air because the...
  40. F

    Choking an Engine

    This is worded incorrectly. Internal combustion engines are positive displacement machines. Let's look at my Pontiac 455 for example: 8 cylinders 57.875 ci volume per cylinder. When any single piston goes down on the intake stoke 57.875 ci of air WILL be drawn in. It doesn't matter where...
  41. F

    How would you play baseball on the moon?

    Or, make the ball more massive. Make the ball 25oz instead of 5oz or something crazy like that...
  42. F

    BMW Paralever

    Found a line art for ya. http://www.micapeak.com/bmw/gs/images/paralevr.gif Your not going to find a BMW sanctioned CAD file. You May be able to call BMW engineering and get the info. I got some good information for a research project from Ford about the Cobra IRS rear suspension a while...
  43. F

    Variable cam timing

    Is it possible? Yes. If you really want, you could completely redesign the NS head so it uses some VVT configuration. Question is how much would the new head cost and would thos costs be worth the possible Hp gain? Windosor blocks are 2V heads but there is a company (do a google search fro 4...
  44. F

    Toque v's Horsepower

    This isn't a good question IMO. If your engine was designed to operate at high rpm's you'd probably spend more time at those higher rpm's. I like to mention modernday superbikes (I know they are different than cars) because superbikes are designed with peak Hp's at or well above 10K. On my R6 I...
  45. F

    Toque v's Horsepower

    I disagree with this statement. Brake horsepower is only half of the story because it doen't describe how much power is applied to the road, or the vehicles ability to use said power. My Yamaha R6 with about 110 Hp (these things come stock with about 95 BHP, but judicious use of a flow bench...
  46. F

    Better fuel efficiency through vapor carburators?

    This sounds like a "hoakey" explanation of EGR. EGR shows a minimal improvements in milage but it doesn't do it by altering the exhaust gasses into some magical vapor. Moreover, combustion is an oxidation process--how much energy would be required to reverse that process? Answer: A significant...
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