Penetrating Oil

 Everyone who's ever opened a jar for their wife has heard the refrain, "I loosened it for you." It's as unprovable as it is infuriating and that's just what wives do. If you had a husband, you'd probably have or find reasons to irritate him. Fun, mostly.

My personal experience with 50/50 penetrating oil goes back to a jig I created to push out a siezed s65 piston. I let the cylinder soak in Evaporust for a week or two. Then I soaked it in Kroil for a week or two. I tried to push the piston down with the jig, but nothing happened, save bending of the cylinder studs. After a week in 50/50, the piston moved. Now, as the wife would say, was it loosened by the original two chemicals? Impossible to tell after the fact.

Over centuries, we bald apes have developed a method to determine the truth despite human bias and observational frailties and unknowable, unmeasurable things. It's called 'science' and it's given us longer life, pictures of Pluto, and all the newest and best bombs religion tells us to throw at each other.

Did you know that all of the electrical appliances in your home are designed on electrical theory? Since we can only observe electrons indirectly (based on things like how dead they make you when they hit you at speed and in great numbers), we can't really call our knowledge of electricity a concrete fact. But I digress.

So Lloyd tried to create a scientific test to determine which of several penetrating oils did best. To do his test, he drilled a 1/4-inch hole in a chunk of steel and machined a dowel to fit into this hole snugly. He made several of these dowels so each oil would have three each. He even left three dry to get a reading on using 'NO' oil. In science, this is called a 'control group', but I digress.

Is this a perfect apples-to-apples correlation of an exhaust bolt seized in a head in a 1939 Ford Felcher Especial? No, it's what science calls a 'model', but I digress.

The original article appeared on page 35 of Machinist's Workshop, Vol. 20 No. 2 Apr-May 2007. Here's a copy:

Lots of digital ink has been spilled over the fact that the article mentions ATF, but PSF is pictured. I, for one, don't know how close they are in composition. If you read the MSDS sheets, they're pretty close.

In 2008, the author, or at least someone claiming to be the author, and posting under the username 'lbender', wrote on the HSM forum that it was PSF that was used in the test:

"Allow me to appologize one more time. The test material was intended to be automatic transmission fluid. In the auto parts department, I grabbed a bottle of power steering fluid by mistake. If you read the article, the power steering fluid shown was used. The table you quoted has not been corrected."

In the Feb/March 2010 issue, Lloyd replied with a correction:

"The original homemade penetrating oil mixture called for using trichloroethelyne as the solvent. I cannot recommend trichlor for home shop use and definitely not for anything slightly resembling a business. Both PSF and ATF will form emulsions with acetone under mild agitation sufficient to thin the oil enough to penetrate. Upon standing, these will separate. Acetone performs better than the other commonly available organic solvents, such as methanol, but not as well as trichlor."

Here's a pic of the update, which also covers the PSF issue:

Origins
Ed's Red
Old bore cleaners
Sperm Whale Oil


Quote from PB Blaster rep from this forum:

"Our experimenting has determined that deviations in the release torque of bolts will vary greatly. Because of this, a large number of test samples are required to achieve an average with an acceptable deviation that the results can be repeated. There is no evidence that Mr. Bender calculated his deviation or tried to repeat his results to verify the accuracy of his test. We achieve repeatable results by recording the average release torque on batches of 35 evenly rusted bolts.

A great deal of time was spent developing our test. In the initial stages, we focused on bolt diameter, thread pitch and the tightening torques. Three conclusions became apparent. Larger bolts, coarse threads and lower tightening torques provided more consistent results. We decided upon 5/8 x 11tpi bolts tightened to 500 inch/pounds for our tests. We place our tightened nut and bolt assemblies in a heated salt spray cabinet for 50 hours. This produces a heavily and evenly corroded fastener. Our test procedure as written is a six page document. It was presented to California’s Air Resources Board (Jan. ‘09) as a method of measuring the efficacy of penetrants.

So, how does a mixture of Automatic Transmission Fluid and acetone compare to PB Blaster in our test? Pretty good actually.

Before we provide the results of our test, here’s a few observations. There seems to be some confusion as to whether Mr. Bender used automatic transmission fluid (ATF) or power steering fluid (PSF.) He states in the article it was ATF but he has PSF in the accompanying photo. We used ATF as he stated. These two products are rather similar in composition and would probably not change the outcome significantly. In any case, both ATF and PSF do not mix with acetone. They separate like oil and water. We kept our sample on a mixer for the duration of our test to assure a good blend of the two components.

In our head to head test PB versus ATF:Acetone, our PB barely outperformed the ATF:Acetone mixture.

PB demonstrated an average release torque of 1307 inch/pounds. The ATF:Acetone mixture demonstrated 1320.

So, PB outperforms the ATF:Acetone by 1%, which is within our test’s range of accuracy. We would conclude that this ATF:Acetone mixture performs as well as our product."

 




http://www.antiquemodeler.org/sam_new/news_letters/assets/wham_2011_07.pdf

http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-200247.html

http://geometroforum.com/topic/5391292/1/

http://www.bikeforums.net/bicycle-mechanics/864604-acetone-atf-penetrating-brew.html

http://www.britishcarforum.com/bcf/archive/index.php/t-95647.html

http://www.mtfca.com/discus/messages/411944/457782.html?1404297676

Ryobi Battery Fix

 Well I have to admit it: Lithium kicks ass. But those batteries are expensive, and once they drop below a certain voltage, the BMS stops letting them take a charge.

Let's fix that.

The trick is to connect the charger's + to the battery's +, then connect the battery's - to the charger's other two connectors. This is a pain with alligator clips so let's do a bunch of work to end up with a lazy fix.

Maverick Carb linkage with 2v Weber 32/36

I think it's getting close. I just had to get a bell crank and Jegs #15226, which is a ball stud that has a 1/4" ball and 10-32 thread 9/16" long.

I'll have to bend the carb cable bracket so it'll mount, but that's just details.

Amazon Fire Stick 4k Remote - How to Disable Alexa

I will not be making a Billy Joel reference.

First, here is how to get the damned thing apart.

pop out the wheel. remove the two screws under it. Gently pry the tabs off. Try not to break anything. Good luck.

You can see the silver microphone chip at the top center of the board. What you do with it is up to you.

Another KZ400 carb

This mess was purchased from ebay for parts. It's labeled 757A.

You can see the spacer is a little different from the 746C spacer.

Here you can see it's a little bigger than the spacer from the 746.

Throttle has only one hole and it's flat.

Has this bar that goes across the bottom and holds the throttle adjustment.

Jets were 757A stock size, which is 40 for the main air jet and 90 for the secondary air jet.

KZ400 vs TX500A carbs

Since I had a set of both all apart on my bench, I did a side-by-side. They are really similar. Some, but not all parts will interchange.

KZ400 will always be on top or to the left.

First we have the plates. As you can see by the choke spacing, the carbs are closer on the TX.

The KZ plate also goes deeper into the rubber holders.

It looks like the bowls are 100% identical.

Throttles physically fit, but the holes are in different places. Probably wouldn't run right.

Caps look identical. Gaskets look identical.

TX springs are longer. Might just be more worn...

Bodies look the same.

The bushing that goes into the choke area is different.

 Tops look the same.

KZ400:


TX500A:
60 next to the screw hole.
110 away from the screw hole.

Here you can see the brass restricting bushing difference.

 Same.

KZ

TX

KZ400 carb teardown (for real this time)

Ok we're going to try again. 746C is marked on the carbs. That makes them 1974. If we refer to the chart here, we see the standard jetting:

Here's an exploded view:

Another thing to be aware of is the butterfly screws are JIS. You can tell by the little dot on the heads. The best way to make sure you don't strip them is with a JIS screwdriver. Another option is to grind down the tip of a regular phillips.

Here you can see these guys. Top screw is 'vacuum plug' and it is removed when using factory carb synchronizers.
Bottom is 'pilot screw'. Before you remove it, screw in the pilot screw and note how many turns out it was. Factory starting point is 1.5 turns out, but it should be adjusted per the manual.

Here's the choke plug. Gods help you if it's stuck in there.

Primary and secondary air jets are 60/110. They were Keyster, so this carb has been rebuilt.

Standard jetting is 60 for the primary air jet and 100 for the secondary. The primary air jet goes into the hole closest to the screw hole.

These are called 'main air jet' and 'slow air jet' in the diagram above.

Needle jet with proper orientation. I use a chopstick to push them out.