Magna TF unique starter motor isuse.

My car suddenly started to make a terrifying loud noise. It literally sounded like a bucket of bolts being shaken around in a tin can. The car started, and drove fine...I could not pinpoint the exact source of the noise. It was just "somewhere inside the engine". Terrifying.

I bumbled into suggestions online implying a broken flexplate/driveplate (flywheel on manual transmission cars). I listened to some youtube videos online of this problem, but the sound wasn't quite right. In some obscure forum comment somewhere while looking deeper into the flexplate issue, I saw a guy mention the starter motor failing to disengage properly as a cause for some really crazy noise. While closely related, this is different to the sound you hear when you leave the key turned too long when the car has started. In that scenario, the electric motor is under power.

...so, given the complexity of dealing with an auto-trans on an East/West front wheel drive...I decided to investigate the starter motor first...

Here you can see the pinion gear doesn't really look retracted very much. It doesn't match photos of a new starter motor.

Two long bolts hold the motor to a planetary gear reduction and the pinion assembly.

The planetary gear is housed in a plastic casing. You can see this collar has broken off.

I determined that the plastic collar only serves to retain the planetary assembly as one "part" before the entire thing is assembled together with the Y-harness/spring for the pinion, and the electric motor. Once the electric motor rotor is aligned inside the planetary gear, the plastic does nothing. Everything is retained and aligned by metal parts after that. These broken parts rattling around were interfering with the intended stroke of the pinion gear.

Reassembled. Now the pinion gear looks retracted correctly!

So back in the car...everything works great! Problem solved.

Hiking Ethanol Burner testing

Just trying out a little metho burner for camping. After about a minute alight, the heat of the unit and flame are enough to vaporise sufficient volumes of fuel that it begins to jet out of the little pinholes around the edge like a gas burner, instead of just a goofy flickering flame in the middle pool. It's pretty cool.

It boiled 2 cups of water in 7 minutes with 14g of fuel. Compared to ~3-4 minutes with 3 hexamine tablets, or 2 minutes and 7g of propane. They all have trade-offs with starting volume/weight and ending volume/weight depending on how many days or meals you intend to cook. This one is easily the most fun.

With 25% water mixed in, there is literally no soot on the cooking pot afterwards.

Not the methanol burner...testing a toasty on a car-camping frypan I found at Savers. Good thick aluminium, packs flat, no coatings so no scratch issues. This side is the frying side with a short rim. The other size is for grilling, and the lip on that side is actually a fat-drip-well. It's super cool. The square design holds precisely four pieces of bread.

Metho burner cold-start.

Fuel begins to vaporise in volume, and come out the pin holes around the edge forming a stove like burner ring.

So that's kinda fun. :)

Misc hiking

After our Oberon Bay overnight hike, I scoured the web for lighter variants of virtually every item we took. Obviously most exist if you throw more money at them, but some simply don't.

Our "2-person" tents were $10 from BigW or Kmart, don't remember. They weigh 1.3kg and cannot be beaten at any level for size vs weight or price. They're simply superior by many, many, many orders of magnitude. They are NOT capable of certain conditions, there is no separate fly, and no internal fly-screen. It's just a single-wall frame, fly-screen inner door, tiny screen back window, and screen vent at the top covered by a tiny "cap" fly. You will melt in the heat with doors closed, and get wet in a serious rain. Anything in between is just fine. ...they are however...small... 1.9m long x 1.2m wide base (in theory...keep in mind sloping-inwards walls) means I touch both ends when laying down, and my gear is against the sides unless I scrunch up. This is actually luxury by comparison to most dedicated hiking tents.

The cheap 2 person tents we own have no floor-space-per-weight equivalent even at the high end hikers tent market except for some far outliers by the MSR brand which are sub thousand dollar tents. I'm talking 1-3 person tents. 4-person+ don't really exist.

Yet again, department store to the rescue. $49 gets a 2.6kg tent with an inner-mesh-frame, a 2/3rd fly, more floor space than two of the tiny versions combined (2.4 x 2.1m), and comes in at the same total weight of 1.3kg for a tent each. This includes an additional bonus of increased height. This is classed as a 4 person tent by any tent definition. Shut-up and take my money! 2.6kg is unattainable by any branded hiking tent for 4p.

So here it is, basking in the sun after I gave it a wipe down with some water sealant treatment. It's super unimpressive to look at, and looks just like every other cheap tent you see at every drive-in camp ground. Yet you'll NEVER see this thing out on the hiking trail!! ...that's until Jana and I rock up. (I actually heard a dude mock our $10 tents while we were in camp. Too bad when I looked up his tent he failed at weight and size, let alone cost. Black-Wolf tents are amongst the worst by every metric.) Half of the elite hiking tents require pegging down and ropes in a vain attempts to save weight, yet simply do not achieve that goal. This thing is the standard dome tent. Pegs not required. Tie-downs optional. Will not blow over (with contents inside), cannot be uprooted etc..etc... Stop wasting my time "hiking tent" retailers! Yeah sure, this cheap tent "could" be a problem with high-winds and a wind-scooping 2/3 style fly, but even Everest hikers only go at the PREMIUM times of the year.

I can drop the weight of this thing by an additional 140 grams if I swap out the poles from the small tent and install it in this one. They're a lighter gauge and the pole section lengths match perfectly if I use spares from any of the three smaller tents I bought. Not too shabby.

Pixel is helping during setup by adding more ventilation holes. Thanks Pix'.

Notice the smaller tent is shorter in its long dimension than the bigger one in its shorter dimension. Same total weight x 2 though. Awesome.

(fly pulled back to see the standard inner mesh design)

Wilsons Prom Oberon Bay overnight hike April 24-25 2018

Jana and I did the Oberon Bay overnight hike in Wilsons Prom from Tidal River. Nice short 7km hike along the coast each way. Under normal circumstances we'd do this as a day-hike both ways, but we wanted to do some genuine hiking camping before we get too old. 7km is a hard walk with a heavy pack. We were horribly beginner-leveled weighing in at ~17kg's, which is on the edge of too-heavy. Partially because of deliberate fresh food and water choices, deliberate high-difficulty-cooking stove and food choices to push ourselves and gain bulk experience on that subset, partially because of low-budget-gear, and partially because of a lack of experience.

The campsite has a fairly new long-drop toilet on site. In theory there is tank water on-site as run-off from the toilet roof, however we knew going in that there was none available (posted on the web site). We don't have enough experience with coastal streams to know how far inland we have to go to get non salty water...so we brought all our own which is generally not done. So...so...so...heavy...

We deliberately packed as though we were going for 3 nights minus all the food, but did have enough water for non-summer conditions for ~3 days. This made for pretty heavy packs. All our food was fresh, not dehydrated...also generally not done. Yes we took raw eggs and raw potatoes and cooked them on a hexamine stove. Possibly never done before. We munched through about 28 hex-tablets cooking up steaks, potatoes, eggs, ham etc over dinner and breakfast. Normally this would be done with 2-4 tablets per dehydrated meal (2 cups of boiled water worth) :D

It rained on the 1st day heading to the camp site. We got VERY wet, but not destructively soaked.

We both took two foam bed rolls each, because one is a joke. The next morning we determined through scientific rigor that two is also a joke. We bought ridiculously expensive uber mats on the way home that weigh less than 2 foam mats, take a fraction of the size, and feel like luxury air beds. We were exhausted and both almost drifted off to sleep on them while testing in the store.

Some of these photos are meant to be panoramic but I haven't bothered to stitch them together. Use your imagination. Sorry, many grainy blurry shots. Others are obviously not from the trail...like the Tesla charger at the Fish Creek pub on the drive.