Nails do not belong here (2)

I fixed the tire yesterday evening. On the way home I noticed another couple nails on the same stretch of road where I punctured the tire yesterday and stopped to get them off the street. 10 minutes later I had picked up a handful. Must have fallen off a work truck or something ...

Nails do not belong here

While I was waiting for my wife to pick me up with this punctured tire, I picked up a few more nails and screws from the street and threw them away.

Distracting

I attended a work-related event today. When a reflection exercise came up, it was accompanied by this picture. All I could think of was, "I do not want to be this person. What the heck are they doing?"

The railheads are clean and the tracks look reasonably well maintained. This is very likely an active rail line and crossing this trestle in the middle of the woods seems like a sub-optimal idea...

Locked ... or not

Maerklin BR86 167 conversion to LokPilot

My very first digital Maerklin locomotive was a BR86 from a starter set. This model is known to have problems with power pickup, and sounding like it's grinding up its gears. Part of the issue here is the very low-end MM2 decoder built into these locomotives. Nevertheless, I lived with it for the last 10 years, but the locomotive got less and less use as other, cooler locomotives arrived on the Welztalbahn or were converted from analog.

When switching a local freight this afternoon, I got fed up about the noise and crappy driving habits of this locomotive and brought it to the work bench. The axles got some more oil, the gears some grease, and it ran a little bit quieter, but not a lot.
Alright, I do have a couple spare LokPilot 3.0 sitting on a shelf. Today's the day!

The old MM2 decoder made way for a Lokpilot, I connected power pickup and motor leads to see if this truly makes a difference... and what a difference it makes! The drivetrain no longer aches and croaks, but purrs like a kitten. I connected lights and Telex couplers. It all works. Off to the programming track we go.

Next, I spent a considerable amount of time debugging the bad power pickup. It's not the (known) bad power pick up from the outside rails, which I fixed soon after I got the locomotive by soldering cables between the spring that keeps the pilot trucks on the rails and the ground connector inside the locomotive.
It appears the pick-up shoe has trouble maintaining healthy contact with the center rail studs, and/or passing the current to the decoder. As a test I soldered a wire to the pick-up shoe base and fed it directly to the decoder.

That worked a bit better than using the contact at the bottom of the locomotive. I went even as far as routing the cable through the innards of the locomotive to the decoder bay and connecting it to the red cable feeding into the decoder.

When test driving the locomotive across the layout, however, it reliably stalled on the inside curve of curved turnouts and caused shorts because the pick-up shoe made contact between the center stud contacts and the inside rail of the outer curve. In the end what did make a difference was installing a replacement pick-up shoe. Supposedly, a Roco "silent" pick-up shoe should work even better.

Unfortunately, the grinding sound problem came back as well, not as bad as it used to be, but it looks like I will need to do some more tuning with the Lokpilot motor control settings to try and get this under control.

Sigh. Quite a bit of work for only moderate improvement...
For now, 86 167 is back in service on the afternoon local from Emsingen pulling cars for Prechtal into staging.

Taking apart a BR50 and not finding anything wrong

When I put Maerklin 37819, engine 051 013-1 on the roller stand yesterday, it wasn't recognized automatically by the Mobile Station. At all.

Another locomotive was programmed just fine, so it wasn't the overall setup. Tonight I double-checked connectivity, checked the wires, checked the decoder socket, swapped in another decoder, nothing. I tried the decoder in the BR 50 with cabin tender and it worked there, so it wasn't the decoder (whew!)

I slowly took apart 051 013 until I had the naked engine in front of me. I checked the cable connections, double-checked connectivity, put it on the roller stand. ... And it worked just fine. Slowly and carefully I put it back together, and ... it still runs just fine.

Maybe user error and I didn't press Stop on the Mobile Station to let it detect the locomotive? But then it should have worked with the decoder from the other BR 50.  I have no idea. At least now I know how to take this engine apart and put it back together. The fine wires sticking out underneath the boiler make reassembly quite tough, since the wires kind of need to be pushed aside on both side to not get caught when reseating the boiler on the chassis assembly. I ended up canoodling the engineer's side into place first and then do the fireman's side.

Since I had the boiler with the cab off, at least it was a convenient time to install Preiser figures for engineer and fireman. I wanted the engineer to have his elbow on the window sill, so unfortunately he had to loose his shoes and feet. I used canopy glue to keep the two guys in place.

Glassplitter im Bier

Das Ergebnis von ungeschicktem Anstossen... Die Bedienung brachte mir umgehend ein neues Bier.

Ameisenbekaempfung

Irgendwie muss man ja schauen, ob die Ameisen, die bei uns in der Kueche rumliefen von aussen kamen ...

CDG - SFO

This was a miserable flight. I don't sleep well on planes, so I usually stay awake, work on the laptop, eat, watch a movie or two, ... but this time it didn't work. I was sleep-deprived, dozed off multiple times, and basically felt like a zombie. I was glad to get off the plane in SFO in one piece.

Seeing the Concorde display at CDG was cool, though. It's impressive how small that super-sonic plane was.

Whoops!

Lesson learned: Sheet styrene of 0.05" thickness is too thin.

It has almost no step transitioning from my existing street across the gap to the movable station segment, but is not stiff enough to hold its shape with color applied. I need to rethink this transition and move away from the idea of papering over the gap with thin styrene sheet. Instead admit there's a gap and dress it up the best I can.

Caltrain 156 at Great Oaks Blvd

The sun is shining. I'm on the right side of the tracks. Engine 920 pulling Caltrain 156 is barreling towards me at track speed ... and entered the shadow of a trackside tree just as I took the photo. Groan!

This stretch of track will likely change dramatically when HSR gets built to San Jose Diridon station in a couple years.

Bad German is Spreading

I almost went into conniptions at the exit of Breuninger Garage in Stuttgart. The madness is spreading. Not surprising, really. The same manufacturer Scheidt&Bachman makes the payment machines at Stuttgart Hbf. Too bad that a German company doesn't speak proper German.

Seriously, Blogger!

I landed in Greece yesterday, and went to the blogger.com admin page to update my Blog this morning. While I really don't have a problem with Blogger changing the language of the admin UI to the current locale when I'm in the US, Germany, or France, it becomes though when the UI looks at me in Greek.

Maytag MDB6701AWS dishwasher standing water in the tub

A "fun" way to spend a Sunday afternoon is figuring out why our Maytag dish washer has standing water in the tub after a completed cycle and also doesn't quite clean as well as it used to. I cleaned the floater which felt gooey and didn't really float up and down as easily as you would expect. Didn't make a difference.

The troubleshooting instructions for "standing water in tub" suggest to check the drain for food remnants. I pulled out the dishwasher from under the counter and checked the drain hose. No apparent blockage, but I noticed that it took 10s of seconds after the pump came on until the water started to flow stronger than a trickle. I figured there must be something blocking water flow inside the dishwasher...

There was, and I learned a few things:

• When your lovely wife says, "The dish washer needs a thorough cleaning", do the cleaning. It'll save you pain like an overflowing dish washer tub later.
• It is not necessary to pull the dish washer out from under the counter top in order to clean the filter and sieve.
• Contrary to earlier dishwashers we had, this Maytag model (MDB6701AWS) supposedly doesn't need manual cleaning of the sieves and filters. Of course, that's not actually true, it just takes longer until it is necessary.
• The mechanism to shred, filter and sieve food inside this dish washer is quite involved, yet fascinating.

I didn't take photos when it was dirty, but I took a couple after I had everything back together. This is the inside of the dish washer. As you can see there are no obviously serviceable parts. The floater is the round thing on the right-hand side.

I first removed the 4 screws circled in red to take off the sprayer arm and loosen the filter cover. Then unscrewed the 6 screws under the arm on the inside ring. I circled 4 of those screws in green, there are two more under the sprayer arm. The middle part now comes off fairly easily revealing a black disc, which is actually part of the pump mechanism. There is a small screw on top of the disc. Unscrew that, and put the disc aside. Finally, there are two more screws holding the filter/sieve assembly in place. Take those out, too. With some gentle convincing the cover and the filter/sieve assembly can be taken out of the dish washer. Underneath you will find the blade that hacks food into tiny parts to be washed down the drain.

In our case, the inside of the filter/sieve assembly was completely gummed up with food remnants. This part can not be opened. However, a little bit patience and using a shower head provided sufficient pressure to loosen the gunk through the sieve and wash it out. While everything was out, I cleaned the other parts, as well as the drain inside the dish washer.

Finally, I put it all back together. Apparently I didn't break anything in the process. Our dish washer seems to be working fine again. We're running an empty cycle right now to wash out any remaining gunk. So far, so good.

"FAILING_NOW"

I rarely get to see SMART output that shows a problem with a hard drive, before the disk is actually dead. Today is one of these days. One of the 2TB Seagate drives in Grumpy shows ominous signs of unhappiness:

Grrrrrreat. The drive has started to reallocate sectors due to read failures.

This is the drive that didn't die 3 years ago. It's still under warranty, so a warranty replacement has been arranged. Let's see if I have any more luck than last time.

Update October 26, 2014:
The warranty replacement has arrived and is now swapped in. The 2TB partition will be done syncing in ~10 hours unless Seagate wants to repeat history.

something to model...

Seen while standing in traffic on Highway 101 through San Jose this morning...

When you don't have anything better to do, you break some stuff ...

... or something like that.

While the ramp rebuild is now complete, I somehow managed to bend and damage the semaphore on track 2 in Emsingen today. Even with carefully bending it back, the semaphore arm and linkage seems to be twisted in a way that makes the arm hard to move. Certainly too hard for the dual-coil machine that drives the signal.

Twisted arm and misaligned linkage of the semaphore on track 2 (in the middle) prevent the arm from even going into the horizontal position to signal Stop (Hp0).

Due to a lucky accident a couple years ago (also known as "over-buying"), I had a spare of the exact same semaphore, so I could install a replacement fairly easily. Nevertheless, along with dinner there went the evening. No point to start something new at this time.

Semaphore replaced and tested.

By the way, I budgeted a day for rebuilding the tracks on the ramp. In the end it did take me about 12 hours to get that done over the course of 3 days. Not exactly how I planned to do it, but one has to take care of more than just the railroad while on vacation...

Next up: Track work in the locomotive servicing facility, including finding out why the turntable likes to short out the whole layout. This work was the motivating reason for fixing the ramp, since I wanted easier access to the servicing facility segment and thus had it out of the layout, which made the ramp accessible.

Making the road narrower

Narrower access road.

Well, this didn't quite come out the way I wanted.

Looking at the access road today, it feels like I'm building a German Autobahn through the Black Forest, or at least a major two lane highway. I contemplating ripping out the access road and starting over, but before I did that I traced a narrower one lane road on the existing shoulder and used a hobby knife to cut through the Scuptamold-tape-cardboard contraption along the edge of that narrow road. Next I simply cut off a few millimeters of material, straightened out the edge, and voila ... this looked much more like what I had in mind.

The first photo shows the new road after I made the cut and re-arranged the slope. The former edge of the road is half-way down the embankment now. The second photo shows the situation after patching up the cut with Scuptamold.

Embankment patched up.

US bank-to-bank transfers

When we came to the US, Direct Deposit (i.e. depositing your pay check directly into your checking account) was a big deal, and there were plenty of promotions to get free checking account when using it. We were scratching our head what all the excitement is about.

15 years later, I still find myself unable to easily send money from my checking account to someone else's checking account. To do a wire transfer which is the only available option to do this electronically, I not only have to come in to the bank branch, but also are required to pay $40 for the privilege. ... And I think they still print checks for this process.

This bank no longer accepts wire transfers through online banking due to "regulatory constraints" (Another bank I do business with doesn't have this limitation, and they will get more of my business in the future).

Sooo, ... instead of a simple electronic transaction (that in addition could be traced easily in financial networks) I have to drive to the bank, talk to a person, get a printed official check, pay $5 fees, drive back to the office, print out an overnight shipping label (and pay shipping fees), find an appropriate envelope, put the check in the envelope, seal it, put the label on the envelope, ride a bike to the shipping drop box a couple blocks away, where the express shipping company will stop by tonight to bring the envelope to the airport, to put it on a plane to LAX overnight, and deliver it, so that the escrow company has the check tomorrow.

What's not wrong with this picture?

Seagate's 2TB SATA drives

A year ago I added two 2TB SATA drives made by Seagate to grumpy, my MythTV machine, and set them up as a RAID1. I got the Barracuda Green 5900rpm drives at a quite decent price.

The trouble started within weeks. The ominous "Seagate click". Study of various articles led to the conclusion that in this drive family this is some harmless recalibration during times when the disk has been idle for a while. Not  the well-known "click of death", when the disk heads can't read the servo information on the platters any more. Aside from a firmware upgrade (which more or less just makes this calibration less audible), one could prevent the click by making sure there's at least one disk access every 30 seconds or so. 

Anyways, that was dealt with. A year later, in late October,  one of the two disks got thrown out of the RAID array due to failure to read a sector. Since this is a giant data volume with lots of movies and videos, I got a replacement drive at a local store (at a higher price than I paid last year, thanks to the flodds in Thailand), installed it and resynced the RAID. Good.

I sent the disk to Seagate for warranty replacement. A refurbished drive arrived promptly a few weeks later. On Monday the replacement drive I bought new in October got thrown out of the array with a bad sector. I ran a SMART self-test, and sure enough, the self-test reports unreadable sectors. 

Not a problem, I still have that replacement drive in the closet, install that, re-sync the mirror over night, go to bed, and ... the sync didn't even complete before the drive got thrown out of the array with read errors. In the morning, I left the drive in the machine, and went to work with a plan to take a closer look in the evening. Just after dinner, there it was, ... the "click of death". The replacement drive didn't last even 24 hours.

So, now I have two bad drives that are going back to Seagate tomorrow, and a replacement Green drive from Western Digital should show up by Friday. 

Sometimes I hate technology.