Moving Air

I've updated the Places I've Been page. I didn't go anywhere in July except back to the US (and other work related trips). Amanda went with the family to Scotland. Maybe I can show her how to tag the places they went to and upload those. It's kinda cool to see everywhere we went in Ireland from 300km up. We covered a good bit of the Emerald Isle.

One thing I forgot to mention that I accomplished last weekend. I fixed Amanda's blower! The heater blower fan for Amanda's Peugeot wasn't spinning (even though I was certain that I checked it when I test drove the car) and as a result if the weather was wet and cool you had to crack the windows to get the windshield to defog. Not a big deal right now, but wouldn't be acceptable come winter. I'd already checked the fuses and relays without finding a problem, but I needed some free time to really check everything out (and a multimeter).

So, last Sunday I borrowed a coworkers multimeter and took out the blower assembly. Turns out it is very easy to get to in Peugeot 306, right under the passenger side dash. First thing I did was check the windings. Measured about 45 KOhms. OK, that sounds reasonable (not open, not short). Put the multimeter on the harness. Dead simple setup, there was two wires for power and one wire to supply a speed control voltage (which means that the speed control circuit is part of the blower assembly and can be replaced in one go if it if faulty, nice). Supply voltage is 14V, good. Control voltage ranges from .7V to something around 2V depending on where I set the fan speed switch on the dash. That looks OK. What the hell is wrong with this thing?

One thing left to try. Hook it back up and see why it won't spin. So I hook up the harness, turn on the car, and whirrrrrrrrr. OK. Reassembly everything, and it continues to work. So, best case scenario, the wire harness had a bad connection with the motor assembly. Disconnecting it and reconnecting it fixed the problem. Worst case scenario is an intermittent fault somewhere in the harness which wiggling stuff around to disassemble and reassemble has temporarily fixed. As long as it keeps working right now, it's fixed. More importantly, I did it, and didn't get ripped off by a garage charging me for a new fan motor (which they probably would have just to do something).

Yesterday I went climbing up at Stanage again, and to stay on topic it was windy as hell. At the bottom of the crag, you barely noticed, but by the time you reached the top it was a very steady 15 mph or so. Never really dangerous, but it did feel like I was more likely to get blown off the face than fall off. We climbed some good challenging routes first, then Rich showed me how to properly set an anchor at the top and how to set protection in the cracks.

I led a very easy route first (I don't remember the British grade, but I'd put it at a 5.5 or maybe a 5.6). This let me concentrate on setting good protection and not having to do anything under duress. All my protection I could set while well balanced with a good hold. Then I led a Severe route. Estimate about a 5.7, maybe an easy 5.8. Again, I could set all my protection from a good spot. I set way more than I needed just to get practice setting protection. It was great. I'm glad to be leading again.

Wednesday I have scheduled some time with the instructor at the climbing gym to show him that I am capable of lead climbing. One other person in the climbing club can lead now, so I hope to pair up with her and get back to leading routes.

The kids start school on Tuesday and they are looking forward to that. I find out the results of my ATF interview on Wednesday. Looks like an exciting week ahead.