On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 11:32:43PM -0500, Major Variola (ret) wrote: > Carburetor? Didn't that connect to the phonograph through a cat's whisker?
Carburetor is French for "leave it alone". While only one of my cars is old enough to have a carb, all but one of the 10 or so motorcycles in the garage do. So I work on carbs a lot. They are a marvel of applied physics and they work pretty well. And if you are careful and keep things clean (carbs hate dirt), they are easy to work on. > > but except for my first auto mechanics class, I didn't mess with brakes - > > if I mess up an engine, my car might not go anywhere, but that's > > usually fail-safe, while making mistakes on brakes is fail-dangerous. > > Bingo. And hacking on production machines is a no-no. It was a bit tough for street cars for a while, but these days there's a lot you can do and be 100% legal. Many aftermarket manufacturers get EPA approval for their bits (not difficult to do). Fuel-injection has made automotive systems both simpler and more readily modified. It's a lot easier to plug a laptop in and diddle the fuel mapping than it is to take the carb(s) off and change jets. I prefer motorcycles to cars as they are much easier to work on and there are fewer regulations and less enforcement, even in California. And many of the bikes I have worked on have been competition bikes, not road bikes. > Doncha wish there was a traceroute for hoses under the hood? > > Cars look like the hoses pipes and tubes in _Brazil_ nowadays. Not nearly as bad as they did in the 80s. I have an early 80s Toyota 4x4 farm truck and it's got probably 40-60 different Little Black Hoses plus assorted Mystery Boxes. New cars just have an FI computer and a throttle body and a few wires. Some vehicles (i.e. Ducati 999 motorcycle) use a digital network instead of dedicated circuits. Making it even more amenable to hacking, at least until the factory figures out DRM... The future is in a few powerful networked computers per vehicle instead of many dumb microprocessors on seperate circuits. This will make vehicles even more hackable. The other place that computer tech is changing things for the home vehicle haxor is in machining. There are a lot of cheap CNC setups available now. Most use PCs. One of the better CNC programs runs on Linux and was developed by/for NIST, who distributes it free. > [1] Air Quality Management District, the pollution police in SoCal at > least. They make 2-cycle engines and useful BBQ lighter fluid illegal here. > Also won't let you register a car if you've modified the pollution controls > in any way, since mods are officially bad and you can't register a car > without a periodic smog check. You're not supposed to paint your own vehicles in SoCal either, automotive paint being a VOC. But a back room or garage can be made into a dandy hidden paint booth. All you need is a fan and some plastic sheeting and duct tape. The fumes will disperse enough that the neighbors probably won't notice, and if they do they'll just think that you're running a meth lab. Eric
