Alright, for a while now, Steve and I have been trying to find a single project to devote our selves to throughout our 4 years at UConn. We couldn’t find one for the first year, so we resolved to make a final choice this summer. At the moment, the general area has been decided to have to be something to do with space, most likely some form of propulsion to help open up the true space age.

There are a number of concepts out there for drives at the moment, but the problem is that they all require high levels of electricity, to a point where it becomes impractical. One of the most promising drives that is an example of this is the Magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) thruster. It works using the same effect used in the Rail Gun, but in order to provide 50 pounds of thrust, it needs to be supplied with 3 megawatts of power (in comparison, a typical nuclear power plant produces in the range of 870 megawatts, so 3 megawatts is nothing to scoff at).

In order to produce the needed amount of energy in a practical size with a practical amount / type of fuel, technology is going to need major power boosts. My idea is that modern nuclear power plants work by converting energy from nuclear decay (in the form of heat) into physical work (in the form of steam rotated turbines) and then back into energy again (in the form of electricity). If we can skip the physical work step, we should be able to do this more efficiently. Promising technologies in this area work by converting the heat directly to electricity using a Radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), which utilizes the Seebeck Effect. However, this type of gate is, as of yet, quite inefficient (10 – 20% efficiency tops), so more work needs to be done.

Keep returning for more updates as research continues!

Alright, I admit it! I’m horrible at keeping blogs up to date!!! Any of you who actually read this thing must thank Steve for reminding me to update or I would have forgotten it again for another couple of days.

Anyway, first, there’s the car update. The most recent change on the beast was the conversion from the crappy Mopar automatic choke to a manual choke. This may not seem like much of a story, but sit back and relax and listen in or read on.

Now normally, I’m a pretty easy going guy. And I’m terribly forgiving. So it is unusual that I go off on a rant about how bad a business is. But today I feel the extreme desire to bitch out the boys at Baxter Auto. I can’t say for the whole chain right now because I’ve only dealt with the one right down the street from me in Tacoma. So here’s the scoop.

I go down there to get a converter kit for the choke. Not a major part. Nothing complicated. No problem. I get it, bring it back to the house (saving the receipt of course). We take the air cleaner off, find a nice spot under the dash to mount the pull switch, get it all ready, and then go to mount the switch. Then we run into a problem.

For those of you unfamiliar with a pull-switch for a manual choke, the kit looks like this:

Manual Choke Pull Switch

When we went to remove the nut on the back of the switch (it has to unscrew from the rear of the switch and slide down the cable) we found a defect in the craftsmanship: namely, the cable was crimped onto the switch in such a way that the bolt couldn’t come off… Talk about defective workmanship. I wonder how many of these got sold. They couldn’t have tested them before they sold them because that’s a pretty glaring error.

So anyway, I saved the reciept, so I bring it back to Baxter’s and show the guys behind the counter. Their response: “well if it was me, I’d have just modified it. Ya know, just bend the crimps around until the nut fit over it”. Great idea guys!! So I’m supposed to screw around with a part you sold me that should have worked in the first place. Then, seeing as that crimp was very poorly done in the first place, as soon as I get it set in such a way that the nut will slide off it’s going to snap the connection with that cheap ass cable. Then I can’t use it and can’t return it and I have to go back and buy another one anyway. I’m sure that sounds good from a sales point of view: I buy twice the parts that I need, you make money and you don’t have to worry about hearing that your product is crap. But from my view, I’d rather return it, embarass you for your product in front of other customers so maybe you’ll actually sell good ones, and then get the money back to buy a different one that actually works.

So I got a different one (after checking at the store that it was actually built right, of course), got it all mounted and working inside the car (after some fiddling around of course: my dad, the friendly family car mentor, says that mopar chokes are the biggest pains in the ass out there, so if I can convert one of them alright I should be able to repear the process on other ones if I need to ^_^).

Now all I have to do is get used to using a manual choke……

Peace out, rant done, happy hacking! And better luck with parts than I got 😉