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July 3rd, 2009
 | 04:19 pm
Got the Saab 95 put back together with the new radiator and a thinner fan, a 12" low-profile one from Jegs. It actually fits the 95's radiator amazingly well -- the brackets line up directly with the top and bottom core supports, no need to fab anything or use (shudder) zip ties. Everything went together smoothly this time, and testing in 86 degree weather showed that the fan cycles properly and has no problem pulling the temperature down to where the thermostat starts to close. Decided to sell the 900 Turbo fan that didn't fit on eBay; I wouldn't really feel right trying to send it back, because it was my mistake and I've already changed the electrical connector on it.
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June 28th, 2009
 | 03:32 pm
Today I started in on the cooling system work I had planned for the Saab, installing a recored radiator and replacing the belt-driven cooling fan with an electric one.
The fanshaft-ectomy went well. Actually, the whole thing went brilliantly until I tried to put it all together and found I didn't have enough space.
I think I've mentioned before that this car had a minor front end collision at some point in its life...in fact, that's what trashed the original radiator and fan. Anyhow, it looks like the entire front clip was compressed slightly by the collision, bringing the radiator closer to the engine. It's not much, probably less than an inch, but it means the Saab 900 electric fan — which is normally a tight fit anyway — is just not going to go in there. Not if I want a car that has a grille and hood and headlights, anyway. ;)
The basic concept is still good; I just need to get a thinner fan. Fortunately there are aftermarket fans that should fit with room to spare.
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June 26th, 2009
 | 12:51 pm - This probably just proves that I have no sense of visual design.
Apparently, members of a typography forum are picking apart the Microsoft Bing logo. Words like "wretched object" and "bloated" have been tossed around. One member posted his improved version, shown here with the real logo above it:
To me these look practically identical. I had to study them for a while to pick out the differences. Not only that, I really don't see what's so ugly about the logo to begin with. Am I just lacking in design sense? Or is this the equivalent of audiophiles arguing about whether a CD sounds better with green sharpie marks on it?
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June 22nd, 2009
| 06:46 pm
The re-cored radiator for the Saab arrived today, along with an electric fan from a Saab 900 Turbo. (A Saab 900 radiator core turns out to be the same height as a Saab 95/96 radiator, making the fan an easy fit.) The shop also installed a thermo switch in one of the radiator tanks, so it should be a nice, clean installation.
Hopefully I'll get a chance next weekend to put it all together.
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June 19th, 2009
| 03:17 pm - Why I'm skeptical of health insurance reform plans that rely on private insurance.
The centerpiece of the Republicans' alternative health reform plan is a tax credit for people who buy their own private health insurance. While I don't doubt that this would help some people, I strongly suspect many people who support such a plan are ignorant of what the private health insurance market is like. Most Americans get health care through their employers, and never have to deal with that part of the market.
Private health insurance suffers from a phenomenon called "adverse selection;" simply put, the people who want to buy health insurance tend to be people who are sick or more likely than average to get sick. Unlike an employer-based plan, where signing up is usually mandatory, there's no guarantee that a private plan will have enough healthy people signing up to balance out the sick people and make the plan profitable at a reasonable cost.
The result is that insurers try very hard to weed out anyone who is likely to make a claim. If you have anything that could be considered a preexisting condition -- even something seemingly minor -- it can be very difficult to buy private health insurance. Worse, even if you get accepted to a plan, there's no guarantee that you'll be covered if you get sick:An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period. Keep in mind, these are people who had paid premiums every month and thought they were covered. Cancellation (sometimes called "rescission") may be warranted in cases of actual fraud, but it often punishes people for innocent omissions:A Texas nurse said she lost her coverage, after she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, for failing to disclose a visit to a dermatologist for acne.
The sister of an Illinois man who died of lymphoma said his policy was rescinded for the failure to report a possible aneurysm and gallstones that his physician noted in his chart but did not discuss with him. The profit motive for denying claims is strong:The committee's investigation found that WellPoint's Blue Cross targeted individuals with more than 1,400 conditions, including breast cancer, lymphoma, pregnancy and high blood pressure. And the committee obtained documents that showed Blue Cross supervisors praised employees in performance reviews for rescinding policies.
One employee, for instance, received a perfect 5 for "exceptional performance" on an evaluation that noted the employee's role in dropping thousands of policyholders and avoiding nearly $10 million worth of medical care. In Senate hearings, executives of the three largest insurance companies in the country explicitly refused to limit rescission only to cases of intentional fraud.
This is why I feel any meaningful health care reform plan must at least give people the option of a publicly-run insurance plan. The private insurance market simply isn't an affordable and reliable option for many people.
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June 18th, 2009
 | 10:03 pm - Is this what technology has brought us?
So, post digital transition, PBS is pillarboxing their old content for the HD feed. Fair enough. But then for the SD feed, they letterbox the HD feed. So I'm currently watching Frontline in a little square with a big black border around it.
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 | 02:06 pm - Sunspot mystery solved?
Via KB6NU's blog: Researchers at the National Solar Observatory now think they understand why this sunspot cycle has gotten off to a slow start. If their theory is correct, fears that we might be entering a new Maunder Minimum are probably unfounded.
This information is of great interest to amateur radio enthusiasts because higher levels of solar activity result in better radio propagation on shortwave radio bands. Its significance doesn't end there, however. Solar flares during the sun's more active periods can cause geomagnetic storms that affect satellites and the power grid, so predicting solar activity is important. Solar activity may even have an effect on global climate; this is much less clear, but the Maunder Minimum coincides intriguingly well with the Little Ice Age.
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June 12th, 2009
| 09:26 am - Enertia
So, a company called Brammo is about to start selling an electric motorcycle called the Enertia in the U.S. My quick impressions based on their marketing materials:
The Good:
- Charges to 80% in 4 hours from a normal outlet.
- 45 mile range, 50 mph top speed makes it a reasonable alternative to a scooter for city transportation.
- Should be ultra cheap to run -- no gas and few moving parts. It has direct chain drive with no gearbox.
The Bad:
- Costs $12,000. You can buy a pretty nice 250cc scooter for half that. With the remaining $6,000, you could then buy approximately 130,000 miles worth of gas.
The "WTF?!":
- Will be sold at Best Buy. This strikes me as a bad move. When I see a vehicle in an electronics store I automatically assume it's a toy.
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June 11th, 2009
| 03:53 pm
Over on Emergent Chaos, mordaxus talks about the outing of blogger Publius and has some good thoughts on the nature of pseudonyms, and the consequences of outing the people who use them.
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June 10th, 2009
| 12:51 pm - Dawwwwwww.
Current Mood: Dawww
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June 9th, 2009
| 03:21 pm - Sorry, we can't hire you. You need the money too badly.
From the L.A. Times: Trapped: It's hard to get a job if your credit is bad
I continue to fervently hope that, now that the subprime debacle has destroyed the credit scores of thousands of middle class Americans, there will finally be enough pressure to make this kind of abuse of credit scoring illegal. Credit scores are fine as a basis for lending decisions, but they should not be used as a generic "figure of merit" for hiring decisions, car insurance, etc. Someone's credit score does not reflect their personal ethics, and just because it's easy to measure doesn't mean it should be used.
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June 8th, 2009
 | 01:04 pm
Republicans, I think it's an excellent idea for you to keep positioning yourselves as the anti-empathy party. That's sure to play well with the public.
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June 5th, 2009
 | 06:52 pm - Memo to Californians
Dick Cheney is now officially more progressive than you on gay marriage.
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June 3rd, 2009
| 09:58 pm
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) austin_dern pointed this out to me. I know there are some car geeks reading this who will get the reference:
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June 1st, 2009
| 01:46 pm
Jalopnik has an article today called Ten Vehicles That Bankrupted GM. The ten are mostly good choices, but they're skewed towards the present. To really understand what went wrong with GM, you have to understand where they got their reputation for poor quality, and that happened in the 1980s with cars like the Cadillac Cimmaron and all the cars that used the LF9 diesel engine. The latter was so poorly engineered and serviced that it soured a whole generation of Americans on diesel engines.
I also think the article is a too hard on the Aveo. While it's not an especially exciting or innovative car, it does what it sets out to do well, and the build quality is on par with other Korean-made cars. The problem with the Aveo isn't the car itself, but what it represents — GM's complete inability to develop a viable small car in-house. A badge-engineered Daewoo may fill a gap on dealership lots but isn't the same thing as developing their own compact car platform. If they ever get to produce the Volt it may remedy that problem, and also make the EV-1 look less like a blunder and more like a technological stepping stone.
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May 28th, 2009
May 27th, 2009
| 10:21 am
I ended up ordering a re-cored radiator and electric fan kit for the Saab from West of Sweden. The price wasn't much more than it would have cost me to assemble the parts myself, and they've done this before and have a setup I know will work. An added benefit is they'll ship me a ready-to-go radiator and take my old one back as a core, which saves me the trouble of pulling the old one and figuring out what to do with an undrivable, radiator-less car while I wait for a shop to finish re-coring it.
This will result in a more-or-less permanent modification to the car, but this vehicle was never going to be a showpiece, and a modern cooling system will make it a much more practical vehicle for day-to-day driving.
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May 26th, 2009
 | 10:10 am - Congratulations California, you're the worst-governed state this side of Alabama.
Apparently no one's rights are safe from mob rule in California. Yet another reason to stay the hell out of that state.
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| 09:39 am - So, everyone's kind of twiddling their thumbs...
...waiting to see if California's constitution means anything, or if anyone's rights can be taken away by popular vote. Expert consensus seems to be that the court will uphold Prop 8, basically rendering California's constitution pointless. Not really their fault, I suppose, if that's the way it's written, but still sad and rather scary for any minority groups in that state.
Remind me again why California is made out to be such a liberal paradise?
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May 24th, 2009
| 06:13 pm - Yet another Saab story. (Pun intended, but regretted.)
Spent most of this afternoon working on the Saab's cooling system. The most time-consuming work was replacing the heater hoses. Many of them were original, 37-year-old hoses, and one of them was starting to bulge ominously. They probably only survived this long because the cooling system is low pressure, running at only 4 psi. I opted to replace them all for my own peace of mind. It was a bit of a struggle because many of them had bonded to the hose nipples and had rusted clamps.
I drained the system and flushed it with Prestone Super Flush. When I drained it again and filled it with water (to clean out the flush chemical) the radiator developed a pinhole leak. This was not really a surprise. The car had previously been in a front end collision that had damaged the radiator, and there was quite a lot of Bars Leak in the coolant. I've decided I'm going to have the radiator recored, so instead of refilling it with coolant that I'd just be draining out again, I left it filled with straight water for now.
I had also planned to replace the radiator fan, which had lost a blade, probably in the same collision. I had one from a Ford Capri V4, but it turned out not to fit — while the Ford and Saab have the same engine, their pulley arrangements turn out to be different. Good Saab fans are made of unobtanium. I'm thinking I may go with an electric fan conversion, which would likely cool better than the original arrangement, which lacks a fan clutch. I'm curious if anyone knows any good rules of thumb for how much airflow I need from an electric fan for this engine. It puts out about 65 hp, and the radiator is a two row design.
The good news is I can't feel any play in the balance shaft bearings. Those bearings are usually the first thing to go on V4s, so their condition is a good proxy for engine wear. This suggests the engine in this car is still pretty tight. The previous owner was a little hazy on the car's history, but based on what he told me the engine was probably rebuilt no more than 60,000 miles ago.
Related photos here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cgull/sets/72157618745749366/
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