VW cylinder head machining - increasing compression ratio

Well this guy came to the shop with two VW cylinder heads that he wanted some machining done to. The idea was to remove 2 mm from the combustion chambers in order to raise the compression ratio. Not being a specialized VW shop, or a car engine machine shop for that matter, here's one way to do it:

First, find a a big faceplate for the lathe. Somewhere there's bound to be an old one with a roughly 4" by 4 tpi mount, so make a threaded stub shaft that fits, generously loctite the threads and assemble with a cheater bar and BIG hammer. Machine a slug with a centre hole. Make it so it just fits the cylinder seats, toss the faceplate-on-a-shaft in the three-jaw, pinch the cylinder head against the faceplate with a live centre pressing against the slug inserted in the cylinder seat, bolt it onto the faceplate with suitable fasteners and it should look like this:

Big faceplate with VW cylinder head - iPhone 5s

Remove the tailstock and slug, indicate the cylinder seat and tap it around a bit if you need to, tighten the bolts, mount some scraps to balance the faceplate, and bore 2mm deep. Paint the first bore with a magic marker so you can touch off and set your dials for diameter and depth, then bore to size and depth on all four.

Of course you need to use the slug and centre on all four holes while setting up. It's so much easier when you don't have to fight gravity. Depending on how flat the faceplate is you may also have to use shims. I did not want to add that fuss so I took a skim cut after assembling the stud shaft and faceplate. Next time around though, I might have to shim since I don't want to turn the faceplate into chips. It's only so thick to begin with.

Well the job was a success and I made myself a faceplate that can go in both of the big lathes without removing their chucks. Fun stuff!

iEngineer - handy pocket reference

...because you have your iPhone in your pocket, don't you?

And when you stand there wondering about what the recommended torque for a M12x1,5 grade 10.9 bolt is, whip out your iPhone and start iEngineer:

Start-up screen - iPhone 5s screenshot

And then select your bolt size:

Easy selection of screws - iPhone 5s screenshot

Hey, it even shows the pitch diameter! Nice! But swipe sideways on the top half, and soon you'll see

Ahh, there's the torque - iPhone 5s screenshot 

There! Now just oil the threads, set your wrench to 92 Nm and pull. What are those funny numbers instead of the signal strength bars? Field test mode!

Interesting that a bolt of this size and thread clamps five tons!

I find this app well worth having, packs a lot of useful info into your already crowded iPhone!
Couple this with MechTab if you need more thread data, like if you need to cut a thread in the lathe and don't have dies or taps. Those two apps can really make mechanical work easier.

Old Tech safety razor - stand aside Gillette Mach 3 Turbo!

This is a post about my "new" safety razor - a Brittish Gillette Tech made mostly of aluminium. The handle and blade tray is aluminium, the cap piece is brass with a nickel plating and it is a mild, quite "safe" razor. And cheap too!

I think it´s funny that you can have something that works fine, and then someone makes a new version with better specs, more features, a more high tech appearance, and of course a heftier prize tag. Well, it's marketing and sales of course. And to be fair, most of the time the new stuff is better, and smoother, and nicer looking. More convenient too. But still, the old stuff worked, and sometimes it worked very well. But that's not enough now that the new one is here, right?

I would like to have a new car. I currently drive a Volvo 945 (you know I'm from Sweden, don't you?) with more than 430 000 km (update 2015: 443 000km heh heh) on it. Yes, it really has driven that far! 5 speed manual, noisy, and roughly as exciting as an old ice box on the road. Rust spots too. But it's cheap, it gets me from here to there, and here in Sweden you can buy new brake pads next to the milk. No, of course you can't, I'm kidding, but parts are readily available and cheap. Headlight blown? That's like ten bucks at most. Blow a Xenon headlight on a newer Volvo however and it's more likely 200 bucks. I can swap the camshaft drive belt myself in a few hours or so. But the newer Volvo with the expensive headlights and costly services is smoother, more comfortable and much quieter. Still, my 945 was the new and better one a few years ago!

What am I getting at? Shaving. Razors. The Sensor Excel is great and has a small head that fits nicely under my nose. But then came the Mach 3, wow what a smooth razor! Larger head of course since it holds one more blade. It's really easy to rinse clean due to the more open construction. Really great shaves, but following the newer = usually better = more expensive rule, it costs more. And now there is this Fusion razor, and Fusion Power if you feel like it. Or why not the newest Fusion Proglide with FlexBall Techblah blah blah....

Now here's my point: Some time ago I got interested in safety razors. And I got even more interested when my older brother told me the blades are much cheaper! So, meet my new friend:

  

 

British Gillette Alu Tech Ball End - iPhone 4s, square

This is a Gillette Tech, a British made mostly aluminum razor. Made somewhere along 1950 or so. I paid a whopping $1,50 plus postage for it on the Swedish equivalent of eBay. Blades cost me about 21 dollars for 100 Astra Super Platinums. That's like two years if I shave every day. Oh yes, with the Gillette alu Tech I can shave every day, both with and across/against the grain, something I couldn't do with the Mach 3. This double edge safety razor is mild, meaning it won't cut you so easily or expose a lot of blade to your face. Since I´m quite ham handed the mildness is a plus. You still have to understand that it is holding a very sharp blade, and it can cut you. Press it hard enough against your face and it will happily cut into it!

My shave routine goes like this: wet the face or take a shower, lather with brush and soap, shave with the grain, rinse, lather again, shave across or against the grain depending on what the area can take. One more rinse and I´m done. On the right side of my neck I get ingrown hairs if I go against the growth, so I try not to do that. Ingrowns are a bad idea - if you get them, adjust your shaving technique. Sometimes I shave a little extra if I´ve missed some spot.

After shaving I apply after shave or balm if I feel like it. Smooth, close shave and very little money spent. And if you are into that kind of thing, a nice feeling of doing things like the old days.

Try this for an aftershave: 1dl water, 1dl 95% alcohol, 5ml glycerine and 5 drops of peppermint oil. Nice refreshing scent!   

You can get as snobby or in depth about shaving as you like, join the different forums such as Badger & Blade, buy $200 razors, slants, vintages, different soaps, brushes (oh yes even those come in $250 versions), after shaves, balms, pre-shave oils, different blades, have your favourite razor gold plated and on and on and...

What you really need is a razor, a blade, some soap, a brush and water. You could even use canned gel instead of soap for convenience, or a Mach something instead of the double edge razor. But the cheapest shave would probably be with a vintage razor of a common model such as the Gillette Tech (very little investment up front, or if you prefer a new one perhaps a Muhle R89), Astra Superior Platinum blades, a cheap brush and a run-of-the-mill soap such as the Palmolive stick.

No, no links since I'm not selling anything, the expensive brush link above was just for fun.

However. Depending on how good your technique is, it may not be as smooth going as with the newer, more expensive stuff. It may not be as fast either. You can nick yourself or get razor burn if you or your razor is too aggressive. That's the trade off between old style and new style. You lessen the risk of nicks and burn if you use a mild razor like the Gillette Aluminum Tech.

If you don't mind spending the money, the Mach 3 is great! The shave gel in pressurized cans is very convenient, no doubt. But if you want cheap, good shaving and are willing to invest some time and skill, a double edge or safety razor, brush and soap is the way to go in my opinion. 

For a comparison to a Bluebeards Revenge shavette check out this post.

If you have nothing else to do you can use the dull razor blades to practice TIG welding on. Don't forget to shield the backside as they're stainless...


UPDATE April, 2015: Yep, I bought one more Aluminium Gillette Tech Ball End. They´re so good!

Biicado Touch Pro - CAD for iPad/iPhone that works! Perhaps something for you?

The iPad is the perfect portable device for writing, simple photo- and video editing, web surfing, education and a lot of other things. In my case it has replaced the computer for some 90% or so, a figure that would increase if I had an AirPrint-printer, and more memory in my iPad. Recently it fills another "need" for me - technical drafting. Thanks to BiiCADo Touch Pro:

BiiCADo, showing magnifying window and snap point - iPad mini screenshot

While it's no match against say AutoCad 3D, BiiCADo Touch Pro is still a very competent tool for creating technical drawings in 2D. It sports layers, colors, snap points, ISO-standard measurements, the usual tools like move, trim, radius, grid and much more. You can export DXF or PDF by mail or Dropbox. If you are used to working with programs like AutoCad 2D, Solid Edge 2D or Draftsite you will quickly pick up Biicado Touch. You really can make professional quality drawings with the help of this app.


I'm not going to attempt a tutorial here, but you can be sure this is a potent application that packs a lot for the price! The drawing and manipulating tools are real tools, not some halfway-there effort made to separate you from your cash. This is a real CAD app.


It took some time for me to find it as there are a lot of apps that claim to be "the best" in AppStore. Well, I'm not missing anything since I bought this one. A good stylus helps though, but that's more a thing with the tablet format than this app in particular. I use the iPad mini, and while it's lightweight and compact I think the larger iPads would be easier to draft with - bigger is better when it comes to screen size. But if you favour light and small the mini works well. And I don't even have the retina display!



A useful feature I'd like to mention that works very well is the way Biicado Touch handles drafting and selecting points. Instead of trying to hit the exact point where you, say, would like to start a line, you tap and hold the screen until a magnifying window appears (it appears quickly), then you slide to the point you want with the aid of the magnifier and crosshairs and then lift your finger to select it. Sounds confusing? It's not, just select your tool, tap and slide into position and release when you are there. It's a very clever and precise way, and if you two-finger move or pinch zoom while you are drafting, the current tool pauses, and you just tap-and-slide to resume right where you left off. That way you can draw a line right across a large drawing without zooming out, you can two-finger move several times while drafting the same line or using any other tool.
The magnifying window is actually rather necessary since your finger or stylus is blocking the view most of the time. Clever idea, nonetheless!

You also tap-and-slide to select a start point and then enter lengths, angles, radiuses (depends on what tool you are using) and so on using the input field at the bottom and the keyboard. Or even enter the start point coordinates and everything else without doing any tapping and sliding.


The snap function can be set to your liking or turned off completely if it interfers with your style of drafting. You can turn on or off snap for different points independently of each other. You can set grid snapping units as well, helpful if you want whole number coordinates for objects.


I had an issue with the "move" and "rename" functions not working, but after contacting BAST, the Germans, there was an update a week later that fixed it. Way to go, these are serious guys!



Those of you that know CAD will find Biicado Touch a great tool, but if you only want to make sketches or simple room plans this might not be for you. If you've never used CAD-programs before you might be put off by the learning curve. I find Biicado Touch to be the perfect companion to SketchUp for my needs. Having access to real CAD in a very portable and lightweight format is a winner for me!


UPDATE 13 september 2014:

I have found a few minor bugs and contacted BAST about them. Very fast response and nice guys to deal with. Thumbs up! Biicado will get even better by the next update!

OSnap! - time lapse for iPhone/iPad

Some time ago I wanted to try time lapses, you know when you take pictures in intervals and then put them together into a film. I have a D200 which is capable of interval shooting, and there are a few well executed time lapses on Youtube that are shot with a D200. I never got a around to making a time lapse with it though. Interval shooting really drains the battery fast, and I don't feel like buying a power adapter just to try lapse shooting. Also, there´s nowhere to plug a power adapter out in the middle of nowhere if I don't bring a generator set. Well, my iPhone 4s consumes much less battery power while shooting, it fits nicely in my pocket, and there is a bunch of apps for it. There are several time lapse app comparisons out there, and after much reading and googling I finally decided to buy OSnap! and try it out.

Time lapse is quite fun! I set my iPhone 4s on a silly little tripod, guesstimated the interval, and forgot about it while me and my brother tried to fix a SIM-card he accidentally cut to the wrong size. I imported the video to Pinnacle Studio on my iPad mini, added some text and sound and made this:

No Oscar winner, but it was just for fun and testing purposes anyway…

In OSnap! you set interval, resolution, number of total photos (which you can leave unrestricted) and orientation. When you´re done shooting you can select export video framerate, quality, audio and more. You can have several projects going on separately, but of course only shoot in one at a time. There´s also an overlay guide to help you take for example a photo each day of your growing beard. All in all I´m happy with OSnap! You might not use it every day, but is sure is a fun app to have on hand. With some imagination, creativity and planning you can make really good time lapses using it!

Tags : TIMELAPSE-IPHONE-IPAD-TIME-LAPSE-OSNAP

iSymDVR - iPhone dash cam that works! ...and no longer availiable, though. See end of post!

Note: This post is best seen as a historical reference, see the update at the end of the post!



I'm back with an other one of those block rocki... oh sorry, got a little carried away there!

Seriously though, I've had quite some time to use iSymDVR now, an app that turns your iPhone into a dash camera. Well, it does it really well! I've ranted before in this post about how annoying I think it is when people review stuff sent to them without actually using it long enough to give good advice. Everyone can repeat specs and say thing like "this looks promising" and blah blah blah.

I'm not going to give you any specs, you're smart enough to find them out if you want to know them, but still it's worth mentioning that you can choose between different resolutions on the footage/film captured. There's plenty of other meaningful settings to fiddle with.

I use the highest resolution available, it's no problems at all to read license plates on vehicles in good light. The problems comes when it's low light and you have vibrations in the camera mount. I currently use a frankenmount with the suction cup and ball from a Garmin GPS that I superglued to a iPhone 4s holder. (Update 2015: I now use iPhone 5s with magnetic mount) Quite stable but not perfect, and trust me when I tell you that any vibrations will effectively blur the frames.

That's a useful feature: when you replay clips you can choose between 8x, 4x, 2x, 1/2x the actual speed, and also step frame by frame. Really useful when you want the plate numbers from some stupid driver or from someone involved in an accident. In Sweden you can text the plate number and get a reply with information about the vehicle and the owner, a really handy service. Especially when people park in front of your driveway...

Back to iSymDVR. It splits recorded material into clips of a length set by you, in my case 3 minutes, and stores them until they reach the space limit set by you. Then it simply overwrites the oldest clip and continues looping like that. If something interesting happens, you tap the screen to display a star and make it store the current clip in "Favourites", where it won't be written over. Nifty, eh? You can also set a G-force sensor to activate recording to favourites, so if someone smashes into you it safely stores what happened.


This is an expamle of a pulled frame while going 70 km/h in mixed, harsh light. The quality degrades when exporting, but you can still read the plate:

Screenshot exported from clip by iSymDVR - iPhone 4s, iSymDVR app

So what do I like about iSymDVR?

- settings for resolution, clip length, max space available for the stored clips
- export with or without info such as your own speed, time, date, GPS position
- export single frames as photos
- very stable! I use it almost every time I drive, and no hiccups
- you can have map directions running in the background
- you can display a speedometer while recording
- you can adjust screen brightness by up / down swipes. Perfect while night driving!

What do I not like about it?

- stops recording when a call comes in (iOS limitation, no way around)
- can sometimes overheat the iPhone 4s in sunny, hot weather when shooting high-res (I've since found that directing air from a vent helps cool the phone, no problem)
- can sometimes be unresponsive for screen taps when speedometer is shown



There's lots more, but this is enough I think. It works very well and is quite capable of capturing high resolution footage when driving. Which is what you want from a dashcam.


I'm using the app on my iPhone 4s, I suspect the iPhone 5s would have much better low-light performance. Say, if you could send me one I'd be really happy to try it out heh heh....

UPDATE september 11, 2014:

I thought I found a bug so I emailed Alex Crimean about it. Surprise, within 15 minutes or so he replied! That's good support! 

Turns out it wasn't a bug but my mistake, so this is still a very stable, functional app!

UPDATE 2015: Now using iPhone 5s, still works perfectly. Catches some interesting things in the traffic! :-)

UPDATE 2015 june: The developers account is terminated, so no more support for this app. That also means you no longer get iSymDVR! There is a replacement availiable though, I´ll see if I can get ahold of it to try it out. If I do I´ll post about it.

Bic stylus - cheap and great! ...and a little bit of rant, for good measure.

Whenever I saw a stylus that was reviewed or hanging in a store it was several if not all of these things:


- "Revolutionary" in some way. A paintbrush, why??
- Whatever crazy color the anodizers could provide.
- Heavy.
- Too short.
- Usually round and slippery. At least slippery. My Targus is.
- If it had a pen on one end, it was not of high quality.
- If it had a pen on one end, there was nowhere to put the cap that covers it. I mean, come on!
- Made of metal that goes "clank" against my iPad screen. Ouch.
- More money than I want to spend.



You know, since nobody pays me or sends me stuff to review I can say whatever I want. While I'm at it, isn't it a little annoying that most people who write "reviews" write about new stuff, not things they have had for some time and really used and tried out? It's so easy to mention this new thing with these specs that you can buy at this place for these kind of money. Kind of useless when what you really need is people with experience of that thing you are ready to spend money on telling you what is good and what is not so good about it. Ok, I'm done for now heh heh... And to be honest, there are very good reviews out there too!

My favourite stylus is not the latest whizz bang gizmo in pink or blue anodizing with amazing features. No, it is as long as the standard ballpoint Bic, as lightweight as the standard ballpoint Bic, as grip-friendly as the standard Bic ballpoint and writes as good as the standard Bic ballpoint. It is in fact a standard Bic ballpoint pen - with a stylus on the end. And yes, the cap fits right over the stylus end while you are using the ballpoint, and I paid a whopping 1,90 EUR for it. Actually, I bought five of them (hey, when you find good and cheap stuff you've better stock up) and it was still cheaper than the stylus I used until now. (UPDATE: next time around I bought ten heh heh)


This is what I'm talking about - The Bic Cristal Stylus:

Sure looks cheap but it's sooo good! - iPhone 4s, Camera+

I find the light weight keeps my hand relaxed and the hexagonal shape is easy to hold (you can try the grip and feel yourself - just grab a Bic pen!) The stylus tip responds with a light touch and the pen works.... well, as a pen should. The plastic has more friction to it than the slippery paint on my Targus  and improves the grip. Those guys or girls who made that Bic the first time new a thing or two, didn't they? Besides the obvious, it works great for drumming. You can make little buzzes and rolls with it, and that is something you can't do with that short, clunky metal one. Even if it's pink or whatever bright color the anodizers... ah, you've heard that before. You can also use a Bic, this one included, to test the sharpness of knives - but that's for another time.

Perhaps it won't make you feel as special as the guy who spent a fair bit of cash on his unique, elegant design thingimabob, oh yeah I spent some google time and words like "nostalgic", "dynamic" and "good looks" come up, but you won't have a $39,90 hole in your wallet either. What you will have is a perfectly good lightweight stylus on a perfectly good pen, and that's a winner folks!

Oh, and everyone I give one to agrees that it is very, very good! Now also has the wifes approval!