Archive for the ‘vehicles’ Category

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Truck + Acetone Science Problems

Monday, September 12th, 2005

On Friday, I came to dis­cover that one of my truck’s spark­plugs was dis­con­nected and, likely, had been for the three months that I’ve owned the thing. I recon­nected the spark­plug and it’s been run­ning smoother and with­out the back­fir­ing that I’d grown accus­tomed to. Needless to say, adding another cylin­der is going to change the fuel con­sump­tion char­ac­ter­is­tics of my truck so now I’ve got two inde­pen­dant vari­ables con­tribut­ing to my mileage, which will change the way my sci­ence works. I will fig­ure out a way to account for this and get back to you even­tu­ally when I fig­ure out what, if any­thing, the ace­tone does.

What sur­prises me most is that I’d been dri­ving the truck for about 3 months and the dis­con­nected spark­plug had gone com­pletely unno­ticed by me.

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Acetoning up the Truck

Thursday, September 8th, 2005

Earlier today, I read on the inter­net that you can use ace­tone as a fuel addi­tive and get bet­ter gas mileage from your car. Now, since every­thing on the inter­net is true or, at least, I don’t really care if I acci­den­tally break my truck in the name of sci­ence, I dumped about 3oz. of ace­tone into my mostly full tank of gas. I’ll let you know how things turn out after a tank or three for sta­tis­tics. According to http://smartgas.net, who seem to have looked into it a bunch, adding 1-3oz. Of ace­tone to 10 gal­lons of gas will give you up to 30% bet­ter mileage. I’ll keep you posted.

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Synchronicity: Voyage the First

Saturday, July 2nd, 2005

My good friend Dave G.-L. and I took my Hobie, Synchronicity, out for a good, long, 5 hour sail today. She’s a beau­ti­ful boat; a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to han­dle but great. She’s now beached not 100 feet from my grand­par­ents’ place and ready for me to take out in the future.

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Synchronicity

Wednesday, June 8th, 2005

Earlier today I bought a boat. She’s a beau­ti­ful 1987 Hobie 16 cata­ma­ran. She has white hulls and the sails are red and white. Her hulls are flaw­less, the trapeze is in great shape, the sails are in good shape and one cleat needs replac­ing. I am going to have a great deal of fun sail­ing this summer.

As any good (super­sti­tious) sailor knows, it’s bad luck to rename a boat so I have two options: keep the old name or per­form a com­plex de-naming cer­e­mony. I did some read­ing about de-naming cer­e­monies, which range from spilling cham­pagne while invok­ing posei­don to sail­ing back­wards across the equa­tor, and some think­ing about the boats cur­rent name, Synchronicity. Having done the think­ing, com­par­i­son and super­sti­tious sould search­ing, I have decided that stick­ing with the cur­rent name, which it has held for 18 years, is a good one. Synchronicity is a term defined by the psy­chol­o­gist Jung to mean a mean­ing­ful coin­ci­dence. Also, it’s a pretty and pow­er­ful name, care­fully writ­ten on her side.

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