Brushes simply wear out over time, and are meant to be replaced.  When you pay $120 at AutoZone for a reman alternator, you’re basically paying for the alternator to be shipped to their alternator rebuilder partner, taken apart, cleaned, brushes replaced, possibly replace other parts that go bad less often like bearings and voltage regulator, and shipped back.  Plus a mark-up, of course!

Sometimes brushes wear out faster than normal when the bearings are bad.  If you find this procedure fixes your alternator only for a short time, you may need to replace the bearings next time.

Symptoms

Your alternator light comes on.  When mine first came on, it would turn off above 2500 RPMs.  When I pulled the alternator and took it to AutoZone to test, their machine spun it so fast that it tested good!  That was good, though, because it told me the voltage regulator was fine.

Tools

• The tools required to remove and replace the alternator; for my ‘95 4Runner:
  • 10mm, 12mm and 14mm sockets, wrench and extension
  • pry bar, or something else to apply tension to belt
  • 1/16″ music wire, if your alternator connector tab is broken
  • a belt tension gauge, optional
• New brushes:  part FAX88 from AutoZone
  
• Tools to disassemble the alternator:
  • 8mm and 10mm nut drivers or sockets
  • philips screwdriver
• Soldering iron and solder
• Wire nippers

Remove the alternator

• First, disconnect the battery!!! If you short the main alternator cable to ground while working, you’ll have a lot of extra trouble replacing the fusible link.  Ask me how I know! 
• On my 4Runner, to make space to pull the alternator out, it’s easiest to remove the small air hoses where they connect to the air box in front of the alternator.
• Loosen and remove the top and bottom alternator bolts.  The alternator will be free.  You disconnected the battery, right???
• Remove the cap from the alternator main wire and unbolt the wire.   
• On the other alternator connector, push in the tab and pull the connector out.  If the tab breaks from heat and old age, don’t chew up the connector with pliers trying to get it out!  Just stick a piece of music wire (or something long, thin and stiff) into the hole in the connector and push it in as though it were the original tab.  Note the hole at the bottom below the middle wire:    Insert a wire like this and press in the directon of the wire: 
• On the 4Runner, the alternator should come out the front.

Repairing the alternator

Before you start, you should take the alternator to AutoZone for testing (and buying the new brushes).  They’ll test it for free, and tell you several things about it.  If the voltage regulator tests come back bad, you may need to replace that, too.  You should be able to buy that from an online or local alternator repair shop, but I’ve never done this.

• Start heating up your soldering iron.
• Remove the plastic insulator around the main wire terminal with a 10mm nut driver.   
• Remove three 8mm nuts and the rear cover from the alternator.     
• Remove two screws that hold in the brush assembly with a philips screwdriver.        You can see the problem here, one brush has been worn down.   
• Desolder ONE of the old brushes.  Leave the other in place so you know what position to solder the new brush into.  Don’t lose the spring.  
• Install the new brush.  Pull it into the housing so that the brush-side end of the cable is about level with the other brush, maybe 1/16″ below the edge of the housing.      I found it handy to wrap the lead around the assembly’s mount to hold the brush in the right place while soldering.   
• Solder in place, then trim the lead so that none sticks out.   
• Now do the other side.      
• Put the brush assembly back together.
• Install the brush assembly with the two screws.
• Install the rear cover.
• Install the main wire terminal insulator.
• Done!  You just saved $120 by spending $3!

Replace the alternator

Replacement is the reverse of assembly.  One trick:

• Use a pry bar between the alternator bracket and alternator to put tension on the belt while you tighten the lower nut.    Pushing pretty hard on it easily got me over 80 lbs. tension; the Toyota FSM says a used belt should be at 100 +/- 20 lbs. (160 +/- 20 for new belt run <5 minutes). 

After Chris Holmes and Alba turned us on to Pinetop Perkins last Thanksgiving, we went back to Antone’s on New Year’s Day to see him and Lou Ann Barton.  He’s the greatest!  Watch the video!

[See post to watch Flash video] ]]> http://www.butchwax.com/2010/01/pinetop-perkins/feed/ http://www.butchwax.com/2009/04/testing-flv-embed/ http://www.butchwax.com/2009/04/testing-flv-embed/#comments Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:36:34 +0000 jman http://www.butchwax.com/?p=139 Here’s a test video of Bootsky, the amazing rodent.

The completed puzzle:

And disassembled:

These puzzles are actually very famous in China. It seems that everyone knows that they were invented some time around the beginning of the 3rd C. by Zhuge Liang, a high official during China’s Three Kingdoms period, and the Chinese all know his character in the Chinese classic novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. He has the reputation of being very smart and well-educated, and that he invented this puzzle is evidence of that.

After Yamin brought this home, I solved it within the first 5 minutes. However, that turned out to be beginner’s luck, because later, I was not only unable to solve it a second time, but I actually proved that it couldn’t be done. Ahem.

So, I finally decided to solve the problem by writing a python program to try every single combination of the blocks. It took me a couple of hours to write, but only 3 seconds to run, and the computer actually found two unique solutions! Very gratifying.

Yamin thinks I cheated by writing the computer program. However, I don’t think so. Because I wrote the program, it means I have demonstrated that I know a method to find both solutions. Whether the actual work to find the solution, using this method, was performed by me or by the computer doesn’t really matter. My example to her was, if you use an electric drill to make a hole, do you say that you made the hole, or do you say the drill made the hole? The code defines a simple, dumb procedure to methodically try every combination of each piece in each position, nothing magic, the computer isn’t doing any intelligent thinking for me. Perhaps I shouldn’t get any more credit than I should get for the first time I solved the puzzle, when I blindly stumbled on a solution. However, I definitely give myself credit!

Over the last few months, we’ve taken several trips to various places in Beijing, usually the 798 or Cao Chang Di areas, to visit galleries, usually with no plan but to just hop among them and see if there’s anything we particularly like. Yamin’s reasons are related to her new career as an artist, and my own reasons are that I want to learn art history, to be able to have a conversation about art, and to nurture some uneducated art ideas of my own.

Ai Weiwei, an article in the Beijing 798 book said, is one of the most influential members of the Beijing contemporary art scene. He was one of the first to move near the 798 factory area, and, the author said, he was the only one who had any taste.

It’s unclear to me what the author meant by that. Allegedly, Ai Weiwei had built a poured concrete house that was sparingly furnished with mostly Chinese antiques. He may also have been one of the scene that had the most exposure to Western contemporary art, since he spent 12 years abroad, mostly in New York, in the ’80s and ’90s.

Whatever the case, he certainly has credentials, as his photos show. Perhaps half of the photos are of famous people, such as Alan Ginsberg (who showed up in his apartment many times), Chen Kaige (the internationally famous Chinese director); protests (like a New York AIDS protest) and riots (like the 1988 Tompkins Square Park Riot); politicians (like Bill Clinton campaigning in New York) and others. I was quite struck by how he’d managed to be so involved in society in New York, since he was a foreigner.

In China, many of the more experienced artists complain that much of Chinese contemporary art is made to satisfy foreign demand. Many Chinese artists use internationally-recognizable Chinese symbols in their art, such as images of Mao, the Forbidden City (the artist Tian Ye), or Cultural Revolution propaganda (Wang Guangyi). This is sometimes interpreted as being “Chinese kitsch”, like the Mao shoulder bags, Lei Feng posters and other cheap Communist-themed crap (all of which I love very much) sold mostly to foreigners at the tourist markets. Ai Weiwei, in an article that Yamin translated bits of for me, said that contemporary art doesn’t even have any meaning to the average Chinese today. Yamin pointed out that when Chinese have art in their homes, it’s often traditional Chinese art, such as painting or calligraphy. So contemporary art made in China is mostly aimed at a market composed of foreigners and affluent Chinese.

Ai Weiwei’s statement cut through the crap for me, and for this I liked him. Today, after we saw the photos, we went outside the gallery where the attendees were hanging around fires chatting, and Ai Weiwei was there circulating around talking to people. I decided to ask him how as a foreigner in the US, he’d managed to meet all those people and be part of all those events. I think I was hoping to get a little bit of wisdom out of him for myself, since I really don’t have any friends in Beijing outside our office, and happening on an event like this is a pretty big deal for me. Yeah, I’m spending all my time building a start-up, but that means a little advice would be even more valuable, since I don’t have so much time to devote.

I thought about how to ask the question in Chinese, waited for the right time, and walked up to Ai Weiwei and asked. How did he manage, as a foreigner, to be so much in the middle of things? He told me, he didn’t try, it just happened. “Shit happens,” he said, in English. Yamin tried to help clarify what I was trying to get at, but he interrupted, saying, “我完全听懂了他的意思”, “I completely understood his question”. Crap. No wisdom there. I told him I loved the exhibition, and thanked him, and walked away. He seemed a little surprised that I walked away so quickly, so perhaps I could’ve pumped him a little harder, but I felt like his answer had kind of cut me off. In effect, he was saying that he hadn’t needed to try at all, and that somehow, magically, wherever he went, he’d ended up in the middle of riots or had Alan Ginsberg knocking on his apartment door, uninvited. Maybe that’s part of the artist’s mystique, to keep people guessing. But I’d hoped he’d try to be a bridge between Western and Chinese cultures, and to share some of his experience.

Ai Weiwei and John

For now, I’ll just keep reading about art on the Internet, going to galleries with Yamin, and maybe, down the road I’ll have a big breakthrough. Anyway, it’s certainly a lot of fun to think about art. It’s a whole new world.

Bicycles aren’t the same ubiquitous mode of transportation in Beijing as they were in the decade after Deng Xiaoping started his economic reforms in 1978, when he said “to get rich is glorious” and when he promised that every household would have a Flying Pigeon-brand bicycle. These days, buses and subways have the greater role in shuttling the masses around this giant city, and as the Beijingnese grow wealthier, they take taxis, electric scooters and even drive their own cars. However, a great number still get around on bicycles, and the bicycle industry still thrives. Although the Flying Pigeon company has nearly quit manufacturing their classic 28″-wheel bicycles, like the one I ride, many other brands have sprung into the market, like Forever (who makes a similar classic 28″ model with enviable luggage racks that the mail carriers ride), Giant (from Taiwan), and many others. And when your bike breaks down, there is always a roadside stand within a li (a Chinese mile) or two who will sell and install new inner tubes, brake pads, pedals and cranks, and other common parts.

I use these roadside stands sometimes, but I don’t like the quality of work they do. The time before last I went to get a new right-hand (right-foot?) pedal, the shifu (’master’, a respectful form of address for one of the working class) cross-threaded the pedal, which I could see from the very moment he started, and then wrenched it down very tightly before it got stuck. He then corrected his mistake by screwing the pedal in from the back of the crank, which straightened out the threads enough so he could then reinstall it correctly. I don’t like this, though, because it makes it harder to install the next time. Then he tried to charge three yuan more than two weeks earlier when I’d come to replace the left-foot pedal. Yes, it was only US$1.17 instead of US$0.73, parts and labor included, but it bugged me because I’d had to wait quite a long time while he fixed his mistake, and he’d arguably broken the crank. And this is just the most recent example of many. So, I’ve decided to do as much work as possible on my own bicycle.

I have most tools needed to repair my bike, but was missing a tire lever. The tiny bicycle section of the Wal-Mart across the street had no tools other than tire pumps (one of which I bought), though this wasn’t surprising.

It was more surprising that several hardware stores at the giant nearby market, more like a bazaar, not only did not have them, but did not even understand what tire levers are. My Mandarin is poor, and I don’t know the proper name for ‘tire lever’, but I’d figure that someone who knows tools would know when a customer asks about a “tool that is used to install and remove bicycle tires”.

Yamin, on her Tuesday off, helped ask the local bicycle shifu where they got theirs. It turned out that they’d made theirs back in their hometown and brought it along when they set up business here in Beijing. I’d hoped to learn of a market where the pros equip themselves, but no dice.

After all these inquiries, the conclusion seemed to be that the low end of the market for the daily commuters doesn’t cater to those who fix their own bikes. After all, when you can get your pedal changed for five yuan and not get your hands dirty, why bother? This was no reason to give up the search, though. The next place to turn was clearly the upscale market, targeted at rich bourgeois who have money and time to spend on extravagant hobbies.

I guessed that mountain bikers with flats on the trail would need tire levers, and a (suspected foreigner-oriented) Beijing mountain biking club’s Google group listed several bicycle stores. This morning, Yamin and I went to one a couple of miles from our house, and it turned out they had the exact tire lever as this one on Amazon! (Isn’t it pretty?) However, they wanted 85 yuan, or US$12.45, which seems a bit high, considering that Yamin bought my whole bicycle for about 100 yuan (and considering the tire lever is cheaper on Amazon!). It didn’t seem to go with the old Flying Pigeon anyway, so I gave the tire lever a few longing looks and we left.

With all other options exhausted, there was only one left: go the professional route and fabricate my own tire tool. But I really needed something today, since I’d been riding the bus for a week (2x the commute time to the office), and fabricating something wouldn’t be easy, since I don’t have the same assortment of tools in Beijing as I did in Austin. Yamin remembered that when she lived in Lubbock, she changed the first bicycle tire of her life (again, there’s no reason to repair your own bike in China!), and she used a butter knife. This seemed like a good start, and with some modification, could be an ideal tool.

On our grocery trip back to the afore-mentioned market/bazaar, I bought a cheap hacksaw, and at Wal-Mart, I bought the heaviest stainless steel table knife I could find. After a little hacksawing (a little WD-40 helps keep the blade from overheating!), grinding (I wish I had a real grinding tool, or even a file…) and bending (the newest application for your Crescent wrench!), I now have the perfect tire lever! And that for under US$1 (not counting the hacksaw). Here’s a pic so you can admire its beauty.

Its head is already scarred from using it today, but it works great! It is stainless steel and very strong, and smooth enough that it doesn’t hurt the inner tube. The tools used to fabricate it are also pictured.

Since it turns out that the problem with the original tube was just the valve anyway, I’ll go try to buy just the valve tomorrow, but otherwise a new tube, from the shifu near our house. The Flying Pigeon should be road ready for Monday!

It turns out that the old inner tube’s problem was the valve; the rest of it is still OK. In China, we have two types of valve: the newer style Schrader valve, like we use in the US, and an older one that I’ve never seen before. I was surprised, when I disassembled it, to find how it worked.

The valve itself, on the lower left, is simply a metal tube; one end is closed and has a small hole drilled through the side, and the other end is threaded. A rubber tube is slid over the closed end and up over the flared part of the valve. Normally, the rubber covers the holes, preventing air from escaping the tire. When inflated with a pump, the incoming air exceeds the tire’s air pressure, and goes through the holes, pushing out from under the rubber tube, and into the tire. The area where the rubber tube covers the flare doubles as a seal where the valve seats against the stem. So simple!

Another nice feature of these tubes is that all of the valve stems I’ve seen are threaded on the outside and come with a nut that tightens down on the inside of the rim to secure the valve. This eliminates the problem where an inner tube misalignment causes the stem to protrude at an angle, making it hard to attach the pump.

To assemble, the valve is inserted closed end first into the valve stem. A metal cap is then screwed down to press the valve into its seat and make a tight seal. The assembled valve is shown on the lower right, and an adapter to use a pump designed for a schrader valve is pictured at the top and top left. The adapter simply clamps onto the valve head, pressing a rubber seal against the top of the valve.

It seems this valve is called a ‘Woods valve’. Pictures on other websites show a valve with a similar head, but the valve itself looks quite dissimilar. However, Woods valves for sale on one site say they are for vintage bicycles and ‘cheap Chinese wheelbarrows’, so these may well be interchangeable parts.

You can tell from the picture how cheaply these parts are made. The valve body is crudely cast from a cheap alloy. Note also how after assembly, the valve body and the valve cap aren’t even nearly concentric. This is typical of many products here that are manufactured for the local market: the standard of quality is very minimal, but this is the subject another blog.

Just for fun, below is a picture of two inner tube boxes. It’s curious that the glue that holds them together has split on every box I’ve seen; Beijing has a quite dry climate.

Beijing Art Galleries