GLOBADOM

The one site I check every morning

To bed early, up early. The car only cost $490 to repair once they got the oil leaks taken care of. Such a deal.

The fun thing about weather in Vancouver this time of year is how it can fool you: Feb. 29 was a gorgeous, warm day, much like the Sunday before. Now we’re into a stretch of several days of rain, with no end in sight. I’ve even seen snow in March once or twice.

But who’s complaining? It’s still Winter in most of the country, while Vancouver is experiencing the start of Spring. We have crocuses.

But then, there’s always those smug Victorians, not to mention southern California.

Still Feeling Tired

It may be time to admit that the amount of cycling I’ve been doing is part of why I feel tired right now. Well that, and getting about 5 hours of sleep last night.

Finally gave up on fixing the car myself: Dad says the heavy mechanics at work shy away from such repairs, owing to usually-required specialty tools.

Hey, did you know that March 1 is Korean Independence Movement Day? As opposed to Constitution Day (Jul 17), Liberation Day (Aug 15), or Foundation Day (Oct 3). The first one caught The Lovely One unawares, and had her wondering where the heck her students were Monday morning.

Speaking of holidays, for Lent, instead of my usual tactic of surrendering chocolate consumption, this year I have given up sloth. It’s a lot harder than chocolate.

Short entry tonight, because I’m too tired or too busy to do more. But two things to point out in the sidebar: this is Eric’s fault because I kept reading Supafamous until I decided to write my own blog. And Andrew Chang, my arch-nemesis (no, not really; my arch-nemesis is some other guy), is now running his own mostly-photos, some-writing blog, Serenepia.

I go bed now.

Feeling tired last night, I decided to commit to doing a minor bike repair (spoke replacement) at 0500 this morning. Good choice: I went to sleep about 2200 or so, got up early, and took care of it.

There’s a certain serenity to working that early. Even though The Lovely One and I were both up (her normal work shift is 2400-0600), it felt quiet. Maybe the world outside the house moves more than I think, and makes more noise than I suspect. The noisiest things outside this morning were birds.

The repair went well. Rode the bike to work. Now I’m mulling over the question of whether the Tercel is suffering from a fuel-injection relay or a broken timing belt. Sure hope it’s a non-interfering motor.

Hm. I was going to just link to a good definition of a non-interfering motor, but Google doesn’t seem to have one. So here it is:

A normal overhead-valve Otto-cycle 4-stroke internal-combustion engine (follow the link for a detailed explanation of how these beasts work; this is the type of engine found in the vast majority of modern cars, excepting only oddities such as the rotary-powered Mazda RX-8) pushes valves down into the combustion chamber during the intake and exhaust cycles. On some engines (“interfering” or “interference” designs) the valves go in far enough or the piston comes up high enough that they enter the space that the piston would occupy at top dead centre. This doesn’t matter under normal operation, because when the valves are open, the piston is near the bottom of the cylinder.

The problem arises when the timing belt (or chain, or more rarely, gears or shaft), which keeps the valves synchronized with the pistons, breaks.

This is always bad: your engine pretty much instantly stops running, and you stop going anywhere very quickly. Repair involves replacing the timing belt, which ranges from being a fairly easy fix to a pretty big pain.

On an interference engine, this is very, very bad. The problem is that in most multi-cylinder engines, there is virtually always at least one cylinder which has a set of valves open for any given position of the camshafts and crankshaft. Because the pistons do not stop as quickly as the camshafts (they’re no longer in sync, and the pistons get driven by the wheels until you put the car in neutral), they get in a few hundred or thousand rotations while you slow to a stop. And the first time the piston comes up to top dead centre in a cylinder where the valves are down, the piston hits the valves. This makes a bad noise, badly damages the valves and often damages the piston. Fixing these things entails major engine work and costs lots of money.

So, why build an interference engine? Performance. There are good performance reasons (read: high compression ratios) to make the open area above the piston at top dead centre as small as possible. And the valves have to push fairly far into the combustion chamber to allow good intake and exhaust flow. So what this means is that high-end engines are often interference engines (it also means my pedestrian 12-valve 1500cc Tercel almost certainly is a non-interfering engine).

The moral of the story: the service intervals for timing belts are the highest-priority maintenance item for most cars.

You win some, but not this one.

Race day. I got to the race on time, though not easily. The Tercel broke down as I was passing the 200th street exit, and I coasted to a stop, assessed the situation, and rode for 30 minutes to get to the start line, still in plenty of time.

The race was fun, good and bad elements. The course was a dead-flat 4km rectangle, and we did just over 50 km in the C group. I felt good, really strong. It was easy to keep with the leaders, and I felt I was putting the hurt on riders more often than they were hurting me. My cornering was very good, and after the first two or three laps I moved to the front and took my turn on the paceline. Paradoxically, this is easier than sitting in the back of the back, where the riders are whipped into a constant brake-pedal-brake-pedal cycle by the oscillations of the lead riders.

It all went downhill on the last lap. I waited too long to head for the front, and by the time I was trying to get up to the head of the bunch, everyone else had the same idea, and the course was too narrow for that. A good drive out of the last corner recovered some ground, but the end result was a clumsy sprint for about 12th place. Credible, and enough to put me in strong company, but I need to learn positioning, and I need to learn to sprint.

Next Sunday the race heads up Armstrong Hill, aka climber’s delight. I hit 152 lbs. as of this morning, so I think I might be ready for such a race. A serious hill like Armstrong can really cut down a pack, and I’m hoping that it will put me on the fast end of things. We’ll see what happens.

Back to the car. Possibly a fuel-injection relay. Maybe not. It just went dead, classical electrical-component failure. Doesn’t seem to have been alternator or battery related. I’ll find out soon enough.

My Mom & Dad came out to see me race. Thanks, Mom & Dad! They also helped me get a tow afterwards. Thanks again! No Master’s racer could hope to have more supportive parents.

Argh.

the nice electric litter box we have for our cat broke down after 3 months. At least it has a good warranty.

Meanwhile, I’m feeling boneless. Maybe lack of sleep. Maybe because I didn’t ride to work Friday, because I didn’t fix the broken spoke in the back wheel Thursday night, because I was feeling boneless then, too.

Oh well, another busy weekend coming up. Going to finish the transmission fluid change (sigh), along with a race, a club meeting, and vast amounts of minor errands.

Ash Wednesday

Fasting, even to the limited extent that I do it, means mild grumpiness and slight apathy.

It was a quiet day in every way for me: the big excitement was getting to teach an e-mail class this afternoon, same one I teach about every two weeks or so. Quiet ride to work, tasty veggie calzone for dinner, quiet mass this evening, and quiet evening at home. Didn’t even feel like playing Ico, which is a great game, even so long after its release

I’m thinking about the race on Sunday, though, which should be fun. Looks like the weather will be good.

Hm. One funny anecdote: one of my e-mail students looked at me at the start of the class and asked if I had lost weight, noting that I had really hollowed out in the face. I used my usual joke about my great diet: eat whatever the heck you want and ride a bike for 8 hours per week. But the looks I’ve been getting in the last little while have changed from compliments to verging on worry. And yet I’m not even into the normal weight range for my height.

I’ve really burned through February; it’s been busy.

Time to start training for serious.

Days off are nice

What a wasted day. I got enough done, but I could have done more. Here I am, nice day, good weather, and I’m moping around the house eating peanut butter on crackers because I haven’t been able to find my wallet since Sunday afternoon.

The Lovely One asked if I had looked in the dirty clothes basket. No, don’t be silly, it couldn’t be in there.

It was in there. Then I felt better. Stopped eating peanut butter, grabbed my tools, and went over to Mom & Dad’s to do some car repairs.

Voltage regulator has been acting up in the Tercel for several days. At first I thought it was a bad battery, but a change of batteries (a scrounged one, fortunately) fixed nothing. Oh right. you’re wondering what a voltage regulator is. I’ll tell you in a second.

Like most modern cars, the Tercel’s regulator is integrated into the alternator package. Fortunately, you can still buy it separately from the alternator. Which is good, because the alternator would have cost $160, while the regulator cost $30. The regulator itself is immensely unimpressive. It’s a small amount of power circuitry encased in epoxy and covered by a fairly big heat sink. It sits on the back of the alternator, and has two jobs in life: rectify the AC current from the alternator into DC current as used by the rest of the car’s electrical system, and prevent the alternator from overcharging the battery.

Modern alternators are wonderful things, capable of producing solid voltages and good power even at low engine speeds. Older generator-based electrical systems were simpler (because generators put out DC power) but less effective (ask an EE why).

At anything above idle, though, an alternator can pump out 20 volts or more to your battery, grossly overcharging it. Normal car batteries react well to charging voltages in the 13-15 volt range (this for a nominally 12-volt electrical system, which is probably what your current car has, but an imminent change to 42-volt systems for most cars is expected).

Anyways, overcharging is bad for your battery, and also effectively tries to run everything in your car at excessive voltage. This makes all your lights look really bright, which in turn makes them burn out fast (interestingly, in some non-automotive cases this turns out to be a reasonable trade, because “overvolted” lights produce more light for a given amount of power).

Enough electrical education, as it appears that I triumphed. Being able to make an educated guess about the malady thanks to some observations and a multimeter, combined with a couple of hours of grunting and prodding with tools (including a tasty dinner break; thanks mom!) saved me probably a few hundred dollars in parts and labour.

For anyone with more time than money, doing your own auto mechanics is definitely the way to go. Next weekend is transmission fluid change, which unfortunately will probably only save me about $50 over a fluid flush at a garage. Oil changes are so cheap I can’t be bothered. You’re paying for something like 10 minutes of labour, and they do a free diagnosis of basic car maladies (besides catching the dirty transmission fluid, the shop guy also pointed out a dirty air filter. I’m cheap, so I declined his offer to change it for $28 and picked one up at the local parts shop for $20. Installation took about 2 minutes).

Getting the transmission fixed made me feel better. Maybe I’ll take the mountain bike to the trials park this evening and mess around.

PS: if you’re wondering where I’ll be Sunday morning, I’ll be in Langley, racing like a madman. Be there at 10:30 to see me suffer like a dog!

Ash Wednesday tomorrow. Don’t forget your sackcloth.

More unseasonably good weather

We’re just feeling all gifted and such these days, since Vancouver has been getting unusually good weather for the last few days.

Okay, I wasn’t quite right before: a few pictures were taken this weekend using the fancy-pants camera from work. Here’s one:



Nightshot mode is an awful lot of fun. I think I will take the camera out in the dark next weekend to see what I find.

Bike maintenance last night. It’s not pretty, but the rear wheel on the Bianchi now has the right number of spokes and passes through the brake calipers without rubbing. Proper true-ness will have to wait for later.

This morning’s ride in was slow, as befits a recovery ride. I barely broke a sweat, giving my legs a much-needed break.

I am rushing headlong into the serious training zone. Sometime in the next week or two, I’ll begin doing interval training. Thus ends the semi-holiday my legs have enjoyed since last August.

Big weekend equals less blogging. Sorry.

Saturday, I did a fair amount of work on the car, all too boring to describe. And then, concert! David Jalbert playing the piano. He played an eclectic mix, from Bach to crazy modern stuff by a composer he described as “a bit of a commie.” Those pieces were among my favourites, clearly indicating I have descended into full-on music snobbery. Or maybe my taste is just better than yours.

I got a good opportunity to chat with David, since I drove him to the airport early Sunday morning. We had a funny conversation, one in which we chatted about The Simpsons, the fate of heavy-metal drummers both real and fictional, and my eerie resemblance to an American pianist of David’s acquaintance.

That was only the start of a very long day (for serious: I rose at 5:00 this morning). By 10:00 I was in Langley, having dropped off David, come back home, quickly baked some cornbread (you know, because I had a free 40 minutes), and loaded up the bike for the Langley ride.

Which was epic. The longest ride I’ve ever done, at nearly 125 km in over four hours of riding. Average pace: 29 km/h, which is deadly serious speed for me. It felt amazingly good, and riding with about 20 others, we did a long tour of Langley and surrounding areas in preparation for the EV Spring Series of races. My bike computer has a heart rate monitor that showed a peak HR of about 210 bpm, far higher than I’ve ever seen before. It also has a fairly bogus “calories burned” readout, which is somewhat useful as a description of total effort. It thinks I burned 1728.4 calories on the ride.

On one hand, it was hard riding that left my legs noodly. On the other hand, I had gas in the tank right to the end, I got to clear out the cobwebs with some race-pace simulations, and while I got dropped in pretty much every one of the race tests, I was taking it a bit more cautiously than the fast guys on the un-marshalled corners (lame excuse) and I didn’t get beat by anyone I’m likely to face in Cat 5. The last race-test featured a serious hill, and I got dropped again, but nearly caught on. Most importantly, I showed good discipline. I didn’t try to overcook and let the group go when they were too hot for me, and as a result, I still had pace the second time up the hard hill, and ended up picking off two or three riders who came off the back after me.

After that, not much more. Small pizza for dinner, nap, a little housekeeping, and now, bike maintenance.

Sorry about the lack of photos. I brought home the nice camera from work again, but was just too busy.

Ridiculous link for you, instead, to the Smurfs web site.

Special Bonus post just for co-worker Chris:

Hi Chris. This is what a really unuseful weblog post looks like.