Automotive

My 1988 Ford F250 Lariat

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The F250 Lariat that I bought to haul crap around (for a $1000) came with a steering column whose tilt steering was broken. 

The truck is tall enough that whoever owned it before me would use the steering wheel to pull themselves into the drivers seat. 

The truck developed this problem where when I turned the wheel the truck would stall. Disconcerting to say the least when you are on the road with traffic behind you. So I stopped driving the truck and started looking for the problem. 

After some troubleshooting and getting some understanding that the key is _not_ the ignition switch I discovered the problem. 

There is a mid-column switch on these models and there is an actuator (metal rod) that runs from the key module down to the switch. The actuator was not broken (a very common issue with these models). 

Because the tilt steering was broken the actuator rod would move right to left. Over time this caused the mid-column ignition switch to separate. This separation then caused my intermittent stalling. As the wheel turned, the actuator moved and pushed the ignition switch apart just enough to cause the vehicle to quit.

Replace the mid-column ignition switch and the problem is solved for now. It’s easy to replace the switch.

Take the negative cable of the battery. Remove the plastic covers to the left and right of the steering column (1 screw plus some careful tugging), mark the position of the switch on the column and remove the electrical connector to the switch. Remove two bolts holding the column up and drop the column. Note the way the actuator is coming into the switch, undo the two nuts holding the switch to the column and removed the old switch. Reverse the process and make sure the actuator is in the right place. and put the new switch in place. I tested the key/actuator combination before putting the column back in place. $12 and 30 minutes later and the problem is solved.

I’ll have to think about fixing the tilt steering. 

I dug around on the internet forever looking to solve the problem but I didn’t find this specific issue. Hope this helps someone. 

Disc Golf

Learning to throw a Disc Golf disc – Part 1 – Introduction

Andylibrande sunset

Introduction

Some friends and I play a disc golf tourney every fall. 6 guys. There is a trophy for first place and a trophy for last place called ‘The Meat’. 

I got ‘The Meat’ for the last couple of years. I was easily 20 strokes back from the lead most years and sometimes 30. There are also some unique ‘rules’ to the tourney that make bogeys on holes an unfortunate thing.

One thing to understand is that before I played Disc Golf with these guys I had NEVER thrown a disc golf. A frisbee on the beach? Sure. Never a disc golf. 

I decided that in 2014 that a little practice was in order to change the results.

The goals were:

  1. Not come in last place in the 2014 tournament
  2. Win the trophy in 2015

To accomplish these goals I needed to: 

  1. Understand a little more about discs and the rules of the game
  2. Improve my putting skills
  3. Improve my driving skills

Whereby ‘improve’ means get past the previous pathetic results, get to predictable throws and better scores.

To become better I broke things into sections: 

  1. Research
  2. Putting and practice
  3. Driving and practice
  4. Results and continued improvement
For the purposes of this blog I have broken the posts into the same bits and I will link to them from this post.
 
I’ll include the links to the different research and videos that I watched and hopefully these posts will help someone else. 
 
Enjoy!
Publishing

Clay Shirky – Last Call

Another article in a long line of articles describing the long painful death of newspapers. 

See here.

There is one point he makes about the loss of journalistic talent. Important. I personally think that the biggest loss is the talent along with the role that many newspapers held of being a check on political issues. 

Sure, we can report on the local politician being a corrupt or a good politician in digital but how many people are going to see these reports?

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