I use either Blaster Parts Solvent or Crud Cutter Parts Solvent. Napa has the first, and Tractor Supply has the second.
15 years ago, Blackline used Simple Green. No idea about now.
@Stan Galat posted:Blackline uses Simple Green.
Regular or Aircraft? You couldn’t get Simple Green near a BMW motorcycle motor. It would make streaks before you could rinse it off.
Aircraft Simple Green? Hadn’t heard of it before now.
They were using regular old Simple Green back in the day.
My brother used Simple Green on Snowmobile engine parts. Regular old S-G from Home Depot or Lowes (or, even more likely, for him, Harbor Freight). He had one of those recirculating H-F parts washers with what looked like a spin-on oil filter to get longer life out of the solvent. That was back when Fram PH-8 filters were really cheap.
It has been brought to the attention of the U.S. Army Aviation Missile Command (AMCOM) Depot Maintenance Engineering Team that numerous units are using the
commercial product SIMPLE GREEN as an aircraft wash.
STOP! This product has been through Department of Defense (DOD) testing and was determined to be highly corrosive on aircraft aluminum and also a catalyst for Hydrogen Embrittlement in high strength aircraft alloys.
While a highly effective cleaning agent for floors and non-aluminum / non-high strength alloy vehicles this product is not approved for aviation usage. If your unit
has been using SIMPLE GREEN on a regular basis, it is recommended that a thorough fresh water wash with the approved cleaners per the appropriate airframe maintenance manuals be accomplished as soon as practicable. This should be followed up with a corrosion inspection /treatment and application of approved Corrosion Prevention Compounds (CPCs).
>Mr. Richard Cardinale, corrosion@amcom-cc.army.mil
> (361)961-4041, DSN 861-4041
As previously posted, if you used simple green on BMW cases and wheels and didn’t rinse it off almost immediately, it would leave light colored stain on the metal.
There’s also an aluminum safe paint stripper called, oddly enough, Aircraft Paint Stripper.
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Well! Learned something really useful, today.
Thanks!
OK.…. but Blackline was still using it with an ultrasonic cleaner as the second step in their carb rebuild process (the first being a soda blast of bodies) the last time I sent a set of carbs out 6 or 7 years ago?
I’ve got Simple Green in my HF ultrasonic cleaner and run pretty much all metals through it. Apparently, I have no “aircraft alloys” in my garage. I’ll probably keep using it until I wreck something (which to be clear, has not happened yet but may, based on David’s warnings). YMMV.
Regarding aircraft stripper, it was the industry standard metal stripper from the time I was 15 until a few years ago. A formula change (for environmental reasons, if I’m not mistaken) really neutered it.
You can still buy the old stuff. You just have to read the label. (I can’t remember now what the active ingredient was) it’s what I used to strip my trans, following the advice of a lifelong VW mechanic and motorcycle restorer.
For a year just after I left high school, I worked as a cash register technician for NCR. We had a solvent to clean the platens inside the registers that got saturated with goopy printing ink from printing receipts. The stuff would take your skin right off, which worked pretty well on a gross, callused-looking scar I had on my thumb from a high-voltage electrical burn I got when I was 15 years old, so I used it to massage that callous/scar quite a lot.
Years later the EPA banned the stuff as a carcinogen. 😳
Can’t wait to see how that affects me as I continue to age. There were a lot of things like that in our past in the 1940’s - 1970’s. All that stuff is gonna come back to haunt us, like spraying Imron paint.
I think I’ve posted before that I used to use MEK without any PPE in my first sound company gig. Used it to dissolve the MonkeySnot-like glue JBL used to glue the cone/spider to a speaker frame.
And again, it is a miracle that some of us (you listening, Merklin??) managed to last this long.
In my defense, nobody ever told me that stuff was a Carcinogen.
I just knew that it ate my callouses up……..
But, wait! I have this great "Carbon Buildup" story!!
When I first met my wife, around 1969, her Dad had had an English Ford Cortina (Very rare and weird in New England back in the late 1960's) which he eventually gave to his older son upon graduating from college. John, her Dad, was a "Foreign Car Buff" who worked as a mechanical engineer for Pratt and Whitney Aircraft in East Hartford, Connecticut - You reading this, @edsnova? It was very important, at P&W in those years, for the engineering force to appear "Cool" by living in the right neighborhood or right town or hanging out with the right people. People from "East Hartford", an upper blue-collar/middle white collar town, didn't hang out with the Harry Gray's of the world (the P&W CEO), as Harry lived in Glastonbury or Farmington or that ilk. (Harry would smack me for saying that, but it's true).
Anyway, the Cortina went to my wife's older brother (a shame, really, but it wasn't a Cosworth or anything like that) and at the height of his "middle age itch" John bought a Fiat 124 Spider roadster convertible right off of the Hoffman showroom floor in Hartford (You didn't think that Max Hoffman sold only 356 Porsches, did you? And just in NYC? C'Mon, MAN! He had showrooms in the Aerospace and Insurance Capitol of the World, too!)
It was a Beautiful car, Pretty Robin's Egg Blue, a Rompin-Stompin 1,600 cc overhead cam, cross-flow 4-banger at around 120hp with a 5-speed gearbox and real Pirelli tires. The interior was done in a beautiful gray leather as befitting a true, "Touring Car". John truly loved that car, as it got plenty of "looks" from fellow engineers when he made the 1.5-mile trip from his home in East Hartford to his office in East Hartford a couple of times each week, weather permitting. It was about a 2-minute walk across the vast parking lot to his building when he had plenty of time to talk to co-workers about his beautiful "toy", too.
Honestly, it never even got warmed up, and spent 80% of it's time idling, waiting at the four stop lights on Silver Lane Boulevard between the house and his office. To say that it was pampered would be a vast understatement.
I thought that it was a very pretty car, but didn't carry it much beyond that. John thought his daughter could certainly do better than me, especially on the day that the GMC truck dealership that I worked for in Massachusetts during college traded a (poorly) factory-spec'd GMC Astro Semi-Tractor to the GMC dealership in Hartford for cash plus a White Freightliner Semi-Tractor and I got to deliver the Astro and drive the Freightliner back to Worcester. I got this plum assignment, simply because NONE of the local sales guys could drive the Freightliner's Fuller twin-stick transmission, and I could (and I was cheaper than asking one of the mechanics to do it at time and a half). I stopped by my wife's house with the tractor on the way back home and I don't think it was quite as impressive as I thought it might be, sitting in front of her house in a P&W Engineer neighborhood. 😳
John seemed to warm up to me when I started showing up in my 1966 Ford Mustang Fastback (this was around 1970) and when I started talking about doing oil changes and tune ups and doing carburetor rebuilds I really caught his attention. Even so, it was a bit of a surprise when, one day, he offered me his prized Fiat to take his daughter for a ride. I tried hard to conceal my excitement but accepted the keys, we hopped in and motored out of the driveway.
The first thing I noticed, was that at anything over 1/4 throttle the engine would start to bog ferociously, then puke through the carburetors and totally resist going at anything over 25 MPH. We got through the neighborhood and managed to get onto the on-ramp for RT 2, the direct line from Hartford to the Connecticut shore. Driving uphill on the on-ramp, this car simply could not get out of it's own way. It puked and bucked and balked through the carbs and did everything except accelerate up the ramp, all the while blowing a huge cloud of black smoke out the back.
I kept it in 2'nd gear with the throttle on the mat and waited. It puked it's way up the 1/2 mile on-ramp and was getting to about 45mph when I shifted to third and started the puking and bucking all over again. My wife looked at me, horrified, like I was breaking her Dad's favorite toy. I looked over and said, "It's just full of coke from not being run enough and it has to burn it out - It'll get better in a little bit!" and kept my right foot on the floor.
Honest to God and right hand to the sky, it took four or five MINUTES of this nonsense before it even started to run right, and by that time we were a couple of towns away (like in Glastonbury, Ed) and still going mostly uphill over the eastern ridge of the Connecticut River Valley and headed for the coast, a long way away.
We never reached the coast. After a while it started to smooth out and by the time we reached Colchester, where "Connecticut Dragway" used to be and about 25 miles from her house, I called it quits, turned back on RT 2 and headed back to East Hartford. It ran one helluva lot better on the return trip - More like what a Fiat 124 Spider was supposed to run like and it actually started to become fun to drive. We got home without further incident (Kathy was even impressed at how well it ran on the way back home, like "smoove") and I parked it and only mentioned that it was a very nice sports car and he should be proud of it - Nothing about how long it took for it to run even remotely right.
This happened a few times later, with the exact same results, starting off dead and coughing and puking for fifteen minutes and then finally smoothing out and running pretty decent. John eventually sold the car and bought an Oldsmobile (or something equally boring), but one day, after we were married, Kathy told me that he once remarked to her that "I don't know what Gordon did when he took my Fiat for a drive, but it ALWAYS ran better after he left"!
@Gordon Nichols posted:And again, it is a miracle that some of us (you listening, Merklin??) managed to last this long.
In my defense, nobody ever told me that stuff was a Carcinogen.
I just knew that it ate my callouses up……..
That stuff was Trichloroethylene, or TCE for short. For decades it was a trucked into every newspaper printing factory in huge cauldrons, vats and drums, and sprayed liberally on everything metal that moved inside, usually rinsed with water down a center drain in the floor.
The men who did this often did not fare well over time.
Where those drains drained to was another story. A long story and a sad story. A story of why journalism matters, and competition between news outlets is better than monopoly journalism.
In most places TCE drains were tied to the city sewer or just a gravel pit. In later years (or more enlightened jurisdictions with high water tables), maybe a tank was installed underground and occasionally pumped out. High-stink, volatile black chemicals would then be trucked elsewhere for disposal.
At the Orlando Sentinel, TCE disposal became the subject of multiple lawsuits in the 1990s. The plume under the printing plant contaminated (allegedly) the drinking water of nearby businesses. Naturally the daily newspaper did not print so many front page stories about this. But I worked for Orlando Weekly, owned by a rapacious Irish family from Pennsylvania, and became curious. At some point after a settlement was reached (but not yet ratified) I happened to be in the courthouse with an hour to kill, so I pulled the file and started reading depositions.
HOLY CRAP!
Several former printing plant personnel swore that part of their jobs was to deliver barrels of used TCE to a nearby landfill and kick them off the back of the truck. This would have been in the '70s, long after the dangerousness of this stuff was well and scientifically established.
The depos did nothing for the instant plaintiffs, as these dumps were miles from their properties and the contaminated plumes beneath them. So the plaintiff lawyers ignored them, which was fine with the defense.
So what about the people living around these (alleged) dump sites?
I drove out to the county. The main (alleged) former Sentinel TCE dump site had been cited many times by state and federal authorities for illegal practices, and most recently turned into a private recreation area with a driving range and batting cages. This being Central Florida, a subdivision had sprouted up all around, of course—Florida taxpayers being allergic to the kind of normal infrastructure endured by civilized nations—fed by wells.
I pulled all the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and EPA reports I could dig up. I called the corporation that owned the property. I knocked on doors. I located the last living deposition-giver and drove out to his house. He was in bad shape. Old, frail, not entirely incoherent but not what you would call a solid witness. But he confirmed what he said in the deposition, which were words to the effect of "after we'd clean, about one or twice a month we took the barrels out to the dump. Me and Jake and one other guy. I was on the back of the truck, and we'd drive in and go to the place and just roll dem barrels."
The docs I reviewed showed that TCE had at some point been dumped there, and that rotting and leaking barrels had been seen on the property. No one could say for sure what became of the barrels—were they buried, removed, what?—or how many they were.
The Sentinel's lawyers, offering no documentary evidence, insisted the barrels were not TCE at all but merely "waste ink." (Friends, you'd have to be a goddamn lawyer to believe that a major American newspaper, circa 1975, was disposing of barrels of ink in the dead of night in a sketchy landfill).
Anyway I did some more reporting and called the Sentinel's spokespeople and their lawyers and wrote it up.
Man were they pissed off. I remember the Sentinel's flustered PR person lecturing me: "So you're just gonna print the news and raise hell, huh?"
Two years later I was employed by the Tribune Company, owners of the Orlando Sentinel and other fine (at the time) profit centers. They'd bought the weekly I worked for in Hartford, along with the daily. Neither the job nor the paper lasted. I decamped to Baltimore to another weekly owned by the rapacious Irish clan instead of a cutthroat mega corporation. Eventually Tribune absorbed that too, and closed it. So I suppose they got the last laugh.
Anyway, @Gordon Nichols: West Hartford, Farmington, and Avon are indeed the rich people areas.
Yeah, and on the other side of the Connecticut river the Insurance people camp out in Glastonbury and Marlborough. My bro-in-law worked for the Hartford and his wife was an executive for Aetna and they lived in Marlborough. They now live just north of Daytona and where we stay when we do the Rolex 24.
ALL of our local newspapers have been bought and sold a few times over the past twenty years or so and as that all happened their journalism staffs have been cut and cut and cut. Our local, private, town rag had half a dozen "reporters" (mostly retired people or stay-at-homes) when I was a kid and has, as far as I can tell, two now and they don't cover much. We were surprised a few of weeks ago when they actually covered a Select Board meeting when several people showed up to complain of brown, smelly water from the public system, only to find that it was widespread throughout the town because two wells and a treatment facility were all down for an extended period due to "supply chain issues". 🙄
It came as a bit of a shock that the town does not own the public water supply - It is owned by a private company and the town government has no jurisdiction over it, so they do what they want.
Nothing was getting reported in "the papers" so a couple of people started a facebook page that quickly grew to over 100 members, all talking about their "brown water" which allowed a map to be drawn pinpointing where and when the problems were and how severe at each location. Somehow, 🙄 that data found it's way to the state Dept. of Environmental Protection and a couple of people there went more or less ballistic, sending people out to get water samples, get them analyzed and then they were all over the water company for the past two weeks to expedite a fix. Several things happened very quickly and we got this from the DEP and water company websites:
- The water test results showed that we were down a bit in PH and Chlorine (from the treatment plant being off-line which they never told us about) and that the brown coloring was from sediment from one well that was working overtime to make up for two other wells being down. Both of those had been waiting for parts to rebuild some equipment. Other than that, the water tested safe, but no one wants to drink it or bath small children in it.
- Brown water also happened randomly as the three remaining wells around town were started and stopped from time to time to keep up with demand.
- The water company had been trying to buy another parcel of land to dig another well and treatment plant for better coverage, but the town had been dragging their feet.
- The needed parts for the wells miraculously appeared and the town donated a backhoe and several mechanics to the water company to expedite their repairs.
- Everything came back on line last Thursday and the brown water cleared up almost over night. 👍
- The town Select Board has seen the light and it looks like they will be selling the parcel of land the water company is interested in sometime soon. (I guess the Select Board Members don't like getting lots of calls from the DEP, either).
- It would have been nice if this hit the local papers sooner and deeper, but in this case, a couple of Facebook pages and 50-100 vocal residents seemed to do the trick.
I don't like Facebook, Nextdoor, etc and find them to be a poor excuse for a good local newspaper with an editor and experienced journalists. We grew up on a dirt road in the middle of the woods, but somehow our parents scaped enough together to get the morning paper as well as the evening paper.
I feel like I'm shaking my fist and yelling "You kids find a good local paper and put it on my lawn!"
I just don't trust that citizen journalism is going to be a good trade for the often flawed traditional journalism. That being said, as far as I know, Zuckerberg or Musk aren't tipping barrels of Facebook chemicals into our landfill.
But what do I know and who do I trust? (and that question is kind of the point)
@Michael Pickett posted:That being said, as far as I know, Zuckerberg or Musk aren't tipping barrels of Facebook chemicals into our landfill.
IMO, selling our information to right wing authoritarian politicians to target us with disinformation is every bit as bad. One poisons bodies, the other poisons minds.
Oh, and then there’s this:
Elon Musk had Tesla overstate its battery range. Tesla then canceled related service appointments.
A team at the company was formed to cancel service appointments related to the inaccurate driving range projections.
I used to think citizen journalism offered a viable way forward. Then 2016 happened, and then 2020 happened. The ease by which the main online platforms were hijacked by state actors sowing disinformation (and the degree to which some of the narratives conjured by this disinformation became "common sense") shocked me. The story has not yet been fully told, and probably won't ever be—at least not in a manner or a forum where many ordinary people will see and understand it.
And of course it's still going on, every day, on Facebook, Tik Tok, Twitter and elsewhere. Twitter is the only social media app I use, and I watched its transformation from a forum where real stuff could be discussed to a kind of digital sewer where privileged neo nazis hold sway. It happened slowly, then all at once.
But Musk reportedly has bigger plans.
"Today, more than 4,500 Starlink satellites are in the skies, accounting for more than 50 percent of all active satellites. They have already started changing the complexion of the night sky, even before accounting for Mr. Musk’s plans to have as many as 42,000 satellites in orbit in the coming years.
"Starlink is often the only way to get internet access in war zones, remote areas and places hit by natural disasters. It is used in Ukraine for coordinating drone strikes and intelligence gathering. Activists in Iran and Turkey have sought to use the service as a hedge against government controls. The U.S. Defense Department is a big Starlink customer, while other militaries, such as in Japan, are testing the technology.
"But Mr. Musk’s near total control of satellite internet has raised alarms. .... At one point, he denied the Ukrainian military’s request to turn on Starlink near Crimea, the Russian-controlled territory, affecting battlefield strategy. Last year, he publicly floated a “peace plan” for the war that seemed aligned with Russian interests.
"... There are so many in orbit that they are often mistaken for shooting stars. Astronomers have documented how the devices have interfered with research telescopes and warned about the risk of collisions.
(Here's what that looks like):
"More than 42,000 Starlink terminals are now used in Ukraine by the military, hospitals, businesses and aid organizations. During Russian bombing campaigns last year that caused widespread blackouts, Ukraine’s public agencies turned to Starlink to stay online. ... It has enabled artillery teams, commanders and pilots to watch drone footage simultaneously while chatting online. The response times from finding a target to hitting it have been cut to about a minute from nearly 20 minutes, soldiers said.
“The huge number of lives that Starlink has helped save can be measured in the thousands,” Mr. Fedorov said. “This is one of the fundamental components of our success.” (and so on).
It's a good story, even it at one point it seems to conflate a billing issue with a strategic slap. And the graphics are excellent.
The short Mp4 I tried to embed here shows what Elon is aiming at: 40,000 LEO satellites working simultaneously to provide internet services and do whatever tracking he wants to locations on earth. What the NYT piece doesn't contemplate is how densely packed these small ("couch-sized") machines are, in effect creating a cloud of high-speed objects around the planet that rival space-farers will need to avoid. How long before gaining passage through that moving web wil require payment of a toll? The satellites last only 3-4 years before dying. They eventually re-enter and burn up, but in the meantime they're just hazards moving at 25,000 feet per second.
And if one strikes, say, a Chinese or Indian rocket heading towards deeper reaches, destroying a billion-dollar payload?
Under current space law, the bill goes to US taxpayers.
The law says "comprehensive international state liability." Doesn't contemplate "corporation's liability." So Elon Musk need not insure his stuff for those hazards.
Musk is, by the way, a car guy. And the most infamous story about that also involves his uninsured recklessness.
Back when he was a baby multimillionaire, trying to make a website money machine, burning rich guys' money doing so, his investors determined to merge his thing with a slightly better thing that Peter Thiel controlled. Musk did not like this idea, but he was boxed in, so on the appointed day he headed from his joint to the lawyer office four blocks up the street—in his McLaren F1.
As the story is told, he picked up Thiel on the way, who asked "So, what can this thing do?" Musk replied "watch this" while turning the wheel and flooring it. Reports vary but most agree he went airborne.
Thiel walked to the meeting, Musk hitch-hiked (?), the deal got done and the company that would become PayPal was formed. Musk wanted to call it "X." He wanted it to be an "everything financial" company, but the PayPal just email me the money system was so lucrative and the X concept was so much of a cash eater (and Musk was so imperious and dumb) than Musk got pushed out. This was 23 years ago.
Anyway. That's the guy with all the money and power.