Many thanks to my friend Ken for sending me the first of the links below. If you are not already familiar with TED, then you’ve been missing out on a lot of fun. I warn you it can be addictive. That’s what happened to me just now. I watched the first link, and then they had an advertisement for several other links that I might be interested in and so I got to watch the ‘before I die’ second link below. I thought both were very very good. The second one particularly struck a chord with me. Obviously I know a lot more about death than I ever wanted to. And I would think that most people have a bucket list. Things that they want to do before they kick the bucket.
I was working on it before, but due to Janet’s untimely death, I have been giving it much more thought.
Whatever your interests, I can guarantee that there are some TED videos that will ‘twang your bell.’
http://www.ted.com/talks/phil_hansen_embrace_the_shake.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/candy_chang_before_i_die_i_want_to.html
Today I was fortunate enough to escape after only two wonderful videos. I am trying to flush the sediment out of the engine. During our extremely long haul out in Texas we converted our boat engine over to fresh water cooling. That’s a whole, great long story, but basically I think the engine never ever should’ve been salt water cooled.
In the last 120 years or so, internal combustion engines have gone through tremendous evolution. Fairly early on they cooled them with water, but then discovered that that water needed anti-freeze, and also it would be nice if the water didn’t boil is easily, so that the engine could run hotter and therefore usually be more efficient. I’m sure they quite quickly discovered that water and most engine metals are a recipe for corrosion, so they put in corrosion inhibitors, and then water pump lubricants, and so on and so on and so on. Nowadays there are all kinds of exotic coolants. And most of them are quite finicky as to how they are treated. By that I mean how well you take care of them. You’d better not mix them with the wrong thing or they may be worse than nothing.
I decided that it was past time to change the coolant in our engine and for many years had noticed that there seem to be a lot of fine particulate matter in the coolant. I know that one of the additives in many coolants is something to keep it from leaking. Which I assume they do by putting in tiny tiny little fibers of some sort, that tend to accumulate in a leak and plug it up. Sort of like dropping bare branches of trees into a body of water that is leaking out through a hole and letting the current draw the branches into the leak and eventually plugging it up.
I’m aware that it may work on some entirely different principle, but I wondered if that’s what the sort of silt in the coolant was for. It may be. However, it also may be products of corrosion, because perhaps the corrosion inhibitors have failed. At my present minimal understanding of the process, these can fail due to age or due to chemical interactions with contaminants in the system or due to hard water or mineral water that has components that adversely affect the chemicals that you wanted in the coolant.
So, I am trying to flush more water through the system to wash out the silt and it seems surprisingly hard to arrange to have a significant flow of water, which I hope will wash the silt out of any places that it may have settled. You certainly want the water to be able to flow easily and have access to every place that it was supposed to in the original design.
I have purchased some more coolant. I know absolutely nothing about the quality of the brand that I bought. It was the absolutely only one I could find in town. That is probably due to my not knowing where to look, but it is the best one I could find. I will mix it with distilled water, because most sources seem to say that that is best. And I suspect that the water in the Marina is is fairly hard. But I’m not sure.
So that’s what I’m supposed to be doing instead of writing this, and the reason that I made a concerted effort to escape the clutches of TED. But, I am feeling guiltier and guiltier about not telling you about the wonderful Turkish wedding that many of us from the Marina were invited to attend. So let me do that next.
Dave
Alegria1976's Blog 