tinkering – Whatsittwoya

Rack attack!!

Yes, here comes the tale of the inevitable, the essential, and long awaited upgrade of our home network to relative industry standard.

After many years, and unceremonious additions of a gigabit switch and router, I’ve finally gathered the needed ingredients for a substantial upgrade across the majority of the network. Now, I didn’t get stupid about it by sticking in 10GBE switches and the like, but rather I cast an eye towards future proofing the setup for the next ten years or so.

The first on the list was an upgrade to my current NAS, a Synology DS212+, which had served me well (pun intended) for a decade. It began life here with 2TB drives, which soon filled up and were replaced with 2 – 6TB drives. These were installed without protection as JBOD (just a bunch of discs), were approaching capacity, and beginning to throw minor errors in their health check, so I knew time was running out. Also, as I learned, I had begun to call on it for much more over the year (eg. this site) and while the DS212+ was great for serving video, it was only ‘able’ to do everything else. Read more “Rack attack!!” →

At Home

Charger Boards

In the last week all my orders from China have arrived. According to the tracking #’s, all of them actually arrived in Canada in early May, but were delivered within the last three days of their extended delivery times due to the so called ‘pandemic’. Today is August 1st. Politics is the more likely reason for the delay, but I digress.

Two of those orders were 10 battery holders, and 10 battery TP4056 charger boards for 18650 batteries, which are the type you find in laptop batteries when you take them apart. You can do all sorts of things with these batteries, but only once you have a way to recharge them.

At Home

There will be a 2.3

Because all did not go as planned…

While everything regarding the trailer itself remained trustworthy and whole (save for a temporary … inflection), the truck I built in ’98 to pull it around had a mind of it’s own.

350 small block Chevy with RV cam, MSD ignition, open face air filter, headers and dual exhaust.

At Home

Red Whale 2.2

Ok, so after the inaugural trip, there were indeed a few things still in need of attention. One of them was the electric brakes, which just weren’t hooked up properly (or at all). This was at least manageable on a short trip, and were, what I thought, an easy repair. Another was replacement of the 7-pin wiring harness, which over the years had been let to drag on the road enough times that bare copper was visible. It wasn’t me…. honestly. What remained was encountered along the way, and will probably be the meat of this post.

The first attacked was the 7-pin, which I was putting off because it meant opening up a big can of worms. To get to the tin on the front of the trailer, the “rock protection” (mouldy carpet and plywood) and edge trim with putty under it had to come off first.

At Home

The Red Whale 2.0

In 1999 I bought a trailer, a 1979 22.5 foot Vanguard, and called it home for a while as I worked in Joffre, Alberta during construction of the the poly-ethylene plant. It was old at the time, but in excellent shape, and came with absolutely everything. All I had to do was put food and beer into it, and I was good to go. It was heavy compared to newer models, but pulled like a dream because of it, and somewhere along the line I Christened it “The Red Whale”.

I lived in it for several months, and once I was done there I brought it home to park in my driveway. I used it only occasionally over the next few years, with the last time being somewhere around 2007. It has sat idle since, sometimes covered with a tarp and sometimes not, weathering the years as expected, with the cost of tire replacement always being the hurdle to its use.

By whatever circumstance, I found recently that trailer tires could be purchased rather cheaply, setting in motion the reconditioning of everything in preparation to be set out to sea once more. The list was long and vague at first, only to lengthen as time passed, yet within a few weeks the challenges were overcome, and it now looks to be time for a second Christening. What follows is a detailed account of the process.