How'd it go today?

There is a big difference in the steel factory/dealer lines and the parts store line quality. In the salty road climates parts store line(even the coated stuff) is only3 or 4 years.

The copper/nickle is worth the extra money. Much easier to bend and flare and your sure not to be doing it again. It is about $1/foot for 3/16.
 
No_Bivy said:
your the perfect person to ask then......This will be my first every night shift. Planning on trying to do three 12 hour nights back to back. My question is how do you flip your schedule on the front end to go from days to nights?
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John. I recommend having a few tools for sleep. Blackout and soundproof a room as much as possible. Use earplugs and a sleepmask if this isn't possible or very effective. The night before your first night I'd stay up as late as you possibly can then get up decently early so you get a real 'short' sleep, then go back to bed for 4-6hrs before your shift getting up 1-2hrs before shift start and treating it like a morning(breakfast/coffee whatever). That's what I do. I work fri midnight to sat noon and then Sunday noon to mon midnight every weekend now. So I get to 'swap' shifts every time.

I've done super well at managing my sleep. Eating healthy and avoiding any stimulants besides my couple cups of coffee in the 'morning' works well for me. I never dabble down the energy drink wasteland/zombie path that many of my co-workers do.

MasterBlaster said:
Snow? It's time for snow already???
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No it's not. But it seems to be coming anyways. I blame it on me for buying my new to me motorcycle. We haven't got any yet but it's not far off. And in Alberta/Calgary they just got something like 35cm! That's a foot+ to you guys.
 
No-Bivy, my shift is usually 4 days of 12 hour night shifts followed by 4 days off, then 4 days of 12 hours day shifts, then 4 days off, then back to nights. The 4 days of gives us time to try to prepare and try to get on a different sleep schedule.

No matter what I do, I'm never at the top of my game on my first midnight shift, and coffee helps me a lot with focusing and not making mistakes. Then after that first night shift, I'm tired, and usually it's not hard to fall asleep once I'm clean and comfortable. I'm usually pretty focused and motivated by the 2nd day.

Like squished said, blackout curtains help alot. Melatonin is a great help, but a doctor told me i shouldn't take it at 8 in the morning, something about screwing up my body's own natural production of it if taken during daylight hours. So I'll use 10mg of melatonin if I'm not tired at night time. I like to read if I'm having trouble falling asleep (no screens, no phone or tv), my eyes get tired and the rest of me follows suit.
 
Three tulip poplars and a dry, dead red oak today. Couldn’t pick the top back of the oak due to it being so far from the crane, so I hung on the jib and jumped a bunch of it out into the forest. Photos loading sideways from phone ??
7ADFE716-7D81-440F-9286-1F411616A6FF.jpg C4F15792-0461-477F-8F4B-90B2AF1ADB8C.jpg 51B841BC-6CB1-44FB-908D-2CE62916391C.jpg
 
2 jobs today. First job was for a bank, doing a full perimeter setback pruning and crown raising -- to reduce interference with vehicle traffic and to increase their visibility/exposure on the front side to the busy road. Not a bad gig, just going from tree to tree and along the back woods/screening thicket. Just a lot of moving the chip truck, quick chipping of limbs out of the main vehicle driveways, frequent raking and blowing to keep it tidy as we went. And found out that at 11' clearance on the drive thru teller window was just sufficient for our 10' 8" chip truck to clear. Probably made it hard for the tellers to understand their customers at times in the other 2 lanes, but we idled down the chipper often after chipping a full table. No vibration alarms went off, near as we could tell!

2nd job was a swamp maple removal in the front (leave all wood, cut to firewood length), climb & lower deadwood/crown raising of a pin oak. Around back was lower deadwood and clearing above a back deck and patio on a declining ash (very likely has ash borer). I dumped the truck (5 miles away at a farm), then back for final cleanup, then I went to back to the shop for the stump grinder pickup and grabbed my son after school. Ground the stump in about 45 min. Done by 5:30.

Johnny Hart said:
...I like to read if I'm having trouble falling asleep (no screens, no phone or tv), my eyes get tired and the rest of me follows suit.
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If you do need to use a screen, try a red shifting app (gets rid of the blue light that can interfere with sleep). On the Mac, I use f.lux -- also available for Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.
 
Carport is nice Brian!:thumbup:

Got checks cashed, picked up truck from garage, got some groceries, then headed to work at the golf course.

Still flooded out too much to mow so ended up doing some tree work for about 4 hrs...lifted a couple spruce from the ground t about 10' and loaded it all on a trailer...wow, I am so out of shape...sore everywhere:lol:

So glad it was 80+f today:|:
 
High Pressure Situation

GP said:
The implication here is that the truck repair shop needlessly replaced the high pressure oil pump -- it was the wiring harness all along. The low power and sputtering were completely tied into the electrical loss of current with the pigtail, not due to the oil pressure cutting out due to a bad pump. We are in discussions with the manager about the unnecessary repair -- whether they should just put our old one back in, or maybe meet halfway on the $3K bill. If they would've just done their standard procedure of changing out the wiring harness when installing the pump, we never would've known -- it would have appeared that the new oil pump fixed the problem. As it is, it was a giveaway that the oil pump itself was not the problem.
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After a week or two of back-n-forth with the shop manager on this (hours of calls overall), we had escalated this to the owner of the franchise. Had his ear for one call, he said he'd look into it. Still no relief. Then we called the regional office of the franchise and spoke with a general manager. He heard our side of the story, then said he'd look into it. Asked us to give him a week, possibly two to really search out the matter. We'd almost given up hope, then the foreman got a call from the lady in the office at the local shop. She needed our credit card in order to issue a refund -- for the full $3000, minus the original $300 diagnostic fee (which was a mis-diagnosis, but why quibble at this point)! Wow, what a relief. It surely felt like justice was hard one on this one!
 
Many years ago when I had my first bucket truck, I was having an issue with the truck dying unexpectedly. Had a well known local shop (and the only local authorized Allison truck transmission shop) look at it. They charged me $4700 to replace the fuel injectors. 2 days after I got it back, it died on me again. Took it back and the next day they said the issue was rust in the fuel tank clogging the fuel pickup. They cleaned the tank and said "No charge". But they refused to give me back my $4700 on the fuel injectors, and the new ones were smaller than the old ones so I lost about 7mph off my top speed.

Glad you got a fair shake on the deal. We have not all been so lucky in situations like that.
 
Johnny and Squish...
I appreciate the info. That is pretty much what Im thinking. Also, my doc said to avoid a lot of caffeine. I got a prescription for modanifil which supposedly has no crash and boost mental ability. Military uses it. I only plan on taking it if I need on the front end of day one. Also, hoping for a busy night to make it cruz by. The only glitch is that Im at the mercy of my preceptors schedule and I can't pull more then three consecutive nights.

oh well...it'll work out. Im more concerned for my family for this next month....
 
Skwerl2 said:
Glad you got a fair shake on the deal. We have not all been so lucky in situations like that.
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We are happy it worked out the way it did -- and at the end of it, the shop retained a customer because we will still choose to use them (albeit even more carefully!). There are 3 main shops to choose from in the KC & Topeka areas, so we could've boycotted them. If it would've turned out badly, we could've taken them to small claims court, talked with the BBB, or just blasted them on social media and via reviews. But that's the 40mm Howitzer that we don't trot out very readily. We know how we would want to handle things on the other side of it, so we act in kind.

As for fuel injectors, last winter we had trouble with the truck sputtering, no power, low RPMs. A different shop ran through the diagnosis and wanted to change out all injectors to the tune of $6K. Our gut feeling (and advice from another diesel mechanic friend) was it was something electrical -- likely the control board module that regulates the injectors. They tested the board and changed it out -- problem solved. But now I'm starting to have the nagging feeling that it was possibly the same issue -- a bad pigtail connector to the board (which also got changed out at the same time). If you Google it and look at YouTube videos, you will see that a LOT in DT466 engines -- power issues, sputtering, cutting out. And it's just carbonized contacts in the pigtails!

Ultimately, this is teaching me to go back to the fundamentals when it comes to diagnosing something: start with the simplest part of the chain and work your way up to the more complex components. Never forget Occam's razor.
 
40mm is big enough for me

FPS-Russia-40mm-Artillery.jpg

Although I am capable of pulling a Steve Jobs if circumstances warrant:
"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." --Steve Jobs
Click to expand...
 
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