The Jeep Guru – Page 47 – Jeep Performance Improvement Ideas

February 21, 2012February 21, 2012

Books about dogs

I read Cesar Millan’s Be the Pack Leader with great interest. My dog and I have a special bond and always want to learn more about dog psychology. This book helped me understand more about Smash’s need to have a strong leader. It also helped me understand Smash’s desire to be first on the trail when we are hiking and how he needs to have a purpose in life to feel fulfilled.

Before I read Cesar’s book, I never realized the inbred need to have a purpose that dogs have. I know I must have a definite purpose in order to feel good about my self, but I never thought about Smash needing one. I thought he was content just to lie around and eat between walks to the creek.

I began helping Smash to find his definite purpose. I noticed that he is very loving and affectionate with me, my friends and family. He strikes and aggressive pose toward strangers however. I realized that he has a natural tendency toward being a guard dog. I now tell him every night as I go to bed that he is to be on guard dog duty. He seems to really like having a job. I can also tell him as I leave the house to be a good guard dog and he instantly wags his tails and prances around proudly. If I neglect to tell him to be on guard dog duties, he will whine and try to go jump in the truck with me.

I have also found that if he barks at night, he will only get louder if I try to ignore him. If I go outside and compliment him on his good guard dog barking, He will prance around proudly before settling down with very little more barking.

I think Smash is a pretty well-adjusted dog. He seems happy living he rural life where he is free to run and explore. But he really does seem to like having a job. I would not have thought of that if I had not read Cesar’s book.

Recently I read Jack London’s Call of the Wild. I was sure I had read it before but if I had I am sure I would have remembered that the story is written from the dog’s point of view. The story is told by Buck the St Barnard German Shepard mix that is stolen from his comfy home and is sold to be a sled dog in Alaska. Buck’s travels, trial and tribulations are the story up until the point where he heeds the call of the wild and joins and eventually becomes the leader of a wolf pack.

In reading Call of the Wild, I began to wonder if Cesar got some of his ideas about dog behavior from this classic novel. In the story, Buck and the other sled dogs have a strong sense of duty. In some cases the dogs preferred to die in the sled traces rather than running free because they had such a strong sense of duty to their jobs.

The pecking order of dogs is explained from the dog’s point of view as well. Each dog had its place it the sled traces or in the wolf pack. If a dog stepped out of line or exceeded his boundaries, he was punished by the other dogs. If he needs helped, he as aided by the other dogs; but only if he had earned the help.

Bucks struggles to earn his leadership position are clearly document in the book. Buck earns the lead dog spot in a violent struggle and refuses to accept any other position once he earned it in the way of the dogs.

Another book by London – White Fang – documents more clearly the life of the wolf or the wild dog. While it never says so explicitly, the reader is lead to assume that the wolf in the story if a direct descendant of Buck. The struggles of her cub to learn the hard facts of life are the subject of the book. However, again London gives details of the way that the order if kept in the wolf pack and how each member has to earn his own place in the pack.

Reading these books has helped me learn more about Smash and how to relate to him. It has also helped me learn more about myself and how I can better elate to others around me. Cesar used the term “calmly assertive” when describing how to relate to a dog. I think this is a good way to approach many situations in life.

The metaphysicians teach us to form an image of our desired outcome in our minds before taking action. Being calmly assertive requires this image. By knowing what outcome you want and being assertive enough to make it happen cause many more positive outcomes than simply waiting for something good to happen. This way of thinking allows a person to take control of many situations that otherwise appear to be out of control.

In White Fang, London talks about how the wolf cub lives in the moment. He eats when there is meat and he goes hungry and goes hunting when there is no food. He does not stop to complain or worry, he just goes hunting.

I think we can learn a lot from dogs. The two most import lessons I see from these books is to live in the moment and have a definite purpose in life.

February 20, 2012

Remembering Y2K

As we count down the days to the end of the Mayan calendar, I am thinking back to the last potential apocalypse. I still remember all the hoopla that surrounded the change from 1999 to 2000. It seems many people were convinced that all the computers in the world were going to crash and we would be returned to the dark ages because the computers would not know what year it was.

At first I thought the whole idea was just silly. I had no idea anyone had taken the issue seriously. This is until I got a directive from my company that I had to certify each and every item in the plant to be Y2K compliant. Even in my relatively small plant employing just under 200 people, there were a lot of individual items that had to be certified.

Considering the relative importance of the situation, I first assigned the task to my co-op engineer. As he began to collect the data, and report back his findings to me, I began to realize that there were in fact many people who took the issue very seriously. Some companies were paying big bucks to have their equipment certified.

In order to not take resources away from solving real problems, he and I developed a checklist to quickly verify that the equipment would not self destruct at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999.

Naturally our first step was to see if the device even had a clock and even knew or cared what day it was in the first place. We also developed a form letter to send to manufacturers to get a document that added credibility to our own assessment.

Once we realized that not only did our own upper management actually task the situation seriously, but other companies were also taking the issue seriously we began looking into selling our services outside the company. Unfortunately by the time we realized people would actually pay us to do the work, most of the big contracts had already be let to people faster on the uptake than us.

So we just resumed our own process of certifying all the equipment we had and depended on. Naturally most of the stuff we looked at did not have a clock and could quickly be eliminated from the high priority list.

For most things with a clock, it was a simple matter to set the clock to a date past 1/1/2000 and see what happened. Only after we had tested most things on our list did we get stern warning from corporate not to test in this manner unless specifically told to by the manufacturer. Luckily we had completed most of our testing by the time they told us to quit.

One system of particular interest was the phone system. It did have a very important function of keeping the date and time of each voice message. About a week after we had run our clock forward and back again with no ill effects noted we received a dire warning from the manufacturer not to perform such a test. The assured us that it would indeed self destruct.

Sensing this was a scheme to cause us to hire one of their technicians to test for us, I called our sales rep and told her we had already done the test and nothing bad had happened. She informed me we were very fortunate that it had not crashed but was sad that we did not need their tech to test it for us.

Once we had complied huge notebooks of documentation for the equipment in the plant, we began thinking of how to best present the data to management and the auditors. Yes, they actually had auditors to make sure we actually did the certifications and did them correctly.

We first ranked items by criticality. The highest priority items were placed in the first notebook. These were items that would have the most impact on the operation should they fail on 12/31/1999. Of course these were items that might shut down production or make the facility uninhabitable for some reason.

My co-op engineer examined the data and decided in order to quickly point out how thorough we had been we would sort the data in inverse alphabetical order. After all our most important piece of equipment was made by Zerand and there was no point making them flip through the huge notebook looking for the Z’s.

The most rewarding consequence of the inverse alpha sort pattern was that it put the Zurn company at the top of the list. Zurn made the automatic flushers for our toilets and of course we ranked these as critical since no one wants to inhabit a building if the flushers are not working. The added benefit was the not so subtle hint as to where we thought all the data we had worked months to gather really belonged.

The managers go the last laugh on us however as they required us to be on site at the stroke of midnight on 12/31/1999 just to make sure we had not missed anything. We got to ring in the new millennium with a group of engineers and maintenance workers rather than our families. But, they did give us written authorization to have an actual Champaign toast at midnight.

February 16, 2012

A Process Trouble Shooting Example

When I was at Westvaco, one of the important quality constraints on our product was the cut to print registration. By this, I mean the way the print lines up with the die cut of the package. Naturally some customers had tighter tolerances than others and one customer was particularly picky about theirs.

On these boxes, we found that some jobs ran just fine but on others we had a severe oscillation in the cut to print registration. We even had a term for it: “register rocking.” As the production run progressed, the cut would move from one limit to the other. And as the press speed increased, the registration would even jump to one side and then gradually creep to the other limit before it would jump back.

Our presses were fitted with the very best electronic registration systems available in the world. At the time, these were made by the Swiss firm Bobst. We had numerous conversations with Bobst engineers and had the electronics tested over and over.

Bobst always blamed the mechanical interface which was made by our press manufacturer. Of course Bobst also made presses and they wanted us to use theirs. However the Zerand press we had was much better suited to our style of printing and cutting.

We looked into every detail of the registration system. We considered the way the photo cell detected the registration marks. We looked for slop in the mechanical linkages. We looked for errors in the control program.

The intermittent nature of the problem made it even harder to trouble shoot. Several press runs would go fine and then one would pop up were the registration would not hold under any conditions.

Eventually we found that by carefully controlling the web tension we could stabilize the rock enough to make good product. However, the setting that worked went against common good printing practice and it was difficult to get the operators to run the press under those settings because they just seemed wrong.

Once we found that the odd pressures seemed to help, we began to look at why that would make a difference. Also, we began to recognize the types of jobs that gave trouble. We found that these jobs often paired older engravings with new cutting dies. We began to form a theory that maybe the two did not fit.

Due to the nature of the printing process and the tightness of the tolerances there was not way to directly measure the two. Both the die makers and the engraving manufactures assured us the parts were made to specification. Also, the printer operators assured us that there was no way that they could be wrong.

Despite a lack of cooperation from the press operators, we designed s few experiments to see if the die was in fact the wrong size for the print. What we discovered was the print was actually shrinking slightly as it went through the press. By the time it reached the cutter, the die was too big and most of the tolerance was used up in the error. We were actually getting the press to hold a much tighter tolerance than it was designed to achieve but most of that tolerance was used up in the error of fit.

The weird pressures we had been running had actually been stretching the paper slightly to help it fit. Due to the cost of the engraving and dies involved, it took a while to get new parts made and mostly the corrections were only made to new jobs. We also had to fight the people who simply could not see the complicated concept of how the parts did not fit.

Eventually we were able to get the engravers and die makers to change their algorithms for making the parts so that they actually fit by the time the product exited the printing press. Our press speeds went up about 20% once the operators no longer had to fight to keep the alignment that simply did not exist.

February 15, 2012February 15, 2012

Bridge Repair – correcting an oops

“Mister Straw, I need your help,” the county engineer said to my grandfather. “We have a dragline in the creek and we hope you can help us pull it out.”

The engineer went on to explain that they were installing a new bridge on one of the county roads. They had fabricated a new concrete bridge to replace the old wooden structure. They had cast a new concrete deck but had retained the original wooden abutments. During the back filling of the road bed, one of the abutments had been pushed off vertical and collapsed under the weight of the new bridge.

One end of the bridge had fallen into the creek. They had brought out the drag line to try to raise the bridge and now it was in the creek too – on its side.

Daddy Straw surveyed the situation and assured him that he could recover both the machine and save the bridge. Back at the shop he had my Dad and my uncle collect cribbing and jacks. HE then had one of the other employees drive the shop crane to the job site.

The shop crane or winch truck as he called it was made from a Ford lat bed truck with most of the body removed. There was a large boom mounted on the back. The rear axle had been replaced with one from a motor grader. A huge winch form a bulldozer was drive by the truck’s PTO. The operator’s seat faced the rear of the truck. Driving it to the job site meant an uncomfortable neck strain for the driver.

First they recovered the fallen machine using the old winch truck. Next, they set about raising the bridge.

My dad and his brother took on the task of wrestling the heavy hydraulic jacks and cribbing timbers down the creek bank and under the concrete bridge.

They built a base and began raising the structure a few inches at a time and re-cribbing with wood. It took about three weeks but they were able to raise the bridge back to the level of the roadway without damaging the bridge section.

Next my grandfather fabricated steel supports out of heavy H beams and my dad and his brother were assigned the task of snaking them down the creek bank and setting them in pace under the bridge. The dug down and created a concrete base to set he beams on.

Once that end of the bridge was stabilized, they move to the other end and temporarily lifted that end off the wooded supports. They cut out the wood and fabricated another steel support for that end. They then carefully set the bridge in its final resting place.

I am always amazed at the stories of how my Grandfather who had only a third grade education was called upon to bail out engineers and others who were supposedly more educated than him. I guess his education at the School of Hard Knocks as he called it was a pretty good one.

February 13, 2012February 16, 2012

Rewelding the Door Hinge on a Jeep Cherokee

I previously welded the door hinge on this Cherokee a while back. I am not sure what abuse it has gone through but it came back to me this weekend with the door tied in place with a rope.

On initial examination, I found that the latch had tripped and was not allowing the door to close. I pressed the release button on the door handle and used a screwdriver to flip the latch back to the open position. I was then able to carefully close the door and it latched properly.

I removed the fender and examined my old welds. The old welds had held it had just broken further out. Possibly in the heat affected zone at the edge of the welds.

I spent quite a bit of time with both the angle grinder and my small air grinder to clean up the area around the break. I again used a 2×4 and a ratchet strap to compress the weather stripping. I was then able to press the broken part of the hinge back into place.

With the hinge in the proper position, I prepped my MIG welder. I started by adding a bead on the bottom hinge that was now beginning to crack. I then began working with the upper hinge. I had trouble getting a good bead at first because the thin sheet metal would burn away rather than bond to the weld. After some adjustments to the voltage on the MIG I was able to get the two parts to blend.

One the hinge was welded on three sides; I removed the 2×4 and opened the door. I added some weld to the inside of the hinge.

After it cooled, I sprayed some paint on to reduce rusting. The door closed nicely and latched properly. I then put the fender back in place and aligned it so the door would open and not hit the fender.