Felder Trouble

This is the part where I hijack my own blog to post videos of my broken machine so that others can see what it's doing/not doing and provide their interpretations...

This is a 3-phase Felder CF 731 Pro from 2001.

It's done this in the past but is not recovering itself at this point.  The video shows the motor start relay (or one of them?  don't have a schematic) latching up  by itself and then shutting off.

Machine is, in short, not working. 

wide is now

I had planned headier stuff for the first real installment of this, my life's blog, but let's leave that aside for now, as important progress has recently been made in the garage: shown below are 6" wide wheels fitted to a 1963 Volvo PV544.

thank god I emailed this photo to myself before I dropped my iPhone behind one of those trees

This allows me, at long last, to fit contemporary tires to this waxy apple. Since I've owned the car--and the 3 previous 544s--I've been skidding around on the cheap skinny Members Only-style black-vinyl tires which seem to be all that's left in the car's original size. No more. The gription has landed.

There's a good deal of back-and-forth on this Internet of ours about the proper backspacing for widened wheels on the PV. According to most sources it needs to be 3.375-3.5" in order to fit without rubbing.

After literally years of sitting on the fence considering my options--a steady hiss in the background as more air leaked out of my Cheng Shins--I headed out to the junkyards of Chicagoland to find the old Chrysler, Ford, Jeep, etc. wheels that are constantly cited as readily available alternatives to the original wheels. This was a bust wrapped in a washout, slathered with futility. Unless you are looking for wheels for a 90s SUV or minivan, the pick-n-pull yards of our flatland megalopolis have nothing for you. Many 16" wheels off larger Fords had the correct bolt spacing, but much larger backspacing than the 3.5" I was searching for.

Meanwhile, for the previous ten years my subconscious had been turning over the concept of having wheels made for the car. This would usually go something like:

I should just have wheels made for the car.

Fuck, am I crazy? I can't have wheels made for the car.

Where can I get wheels?

Suddenly, as I was pulling one of my boots out of the sucking miasma of a junkyard mudhole on a prematurely hot spring day, the following thought occured to me:

I should just have wheels made for the car.

For once this led in a productive direction--after I rounded out my sunburn and rolled around in some more of the type of mud that should merit an antibiotic drip--when I called Frank at Stockton Wheel in CA. I told him what I needed, planning to use whatever wheel centers he had on hand. Impressively, Frank was familiar enough with the car to cite the hubcap diameter off the top of his head, and suggested that he probably had some centers around that would fit, maybe with a little grinding of the bumps. We left it at that: 15x6 wheels with 3.5" backspacing. Why 6" wide? I'm not going to lie to you: it seemed like it would look cool.

After placing the order, I talked to Frank a little longer about his operation, and found it illuminating--as is often the case, his high profile in rodding magazines, wrenching blogs, etc. can give you the impression that he's running a gargantuan wheel factory, teeming with workers cranking out wheels day and night to supply the American Man's Love Affair With Cars (undue apologies to the wack special features section of the Gran Torino DVD). This effect is created by first making a good product, then branding it intelligently (apologies to my past selves as recent as last year's, who still found that the term "branding" made him gag). The entity producing the product takes on an air of solidity, inevitability. Future posts on this blog may reveal that I aspire to create a similar effect for my own business.

The wheels arrived after the kind of delay that seems appropriate for 4 pieces of a hand-assembled, high-precision product, domestically produced in a 3-man shop whose longtime owner still puts in 60-hour weeks.

Delight turned to what the? when I measured the wheels and found the backspacing was 3.75" I asked Frank about this and his reply was typically clear and confidence-reconstructing:

"Minimum standard backside on the 15x6 is 3.75 + -. If we had made them with less we would have had to "reverse" the wheel and the trim rings would not look correct.
That was my call on the wheels. Check the fitment when suspension is assembled."

Now I feel OK. Frank is willing to say that he made the call, and has left the door open to the possibility that it may not work. I surely don't want to see it not work, but at least I don't feel like I'm on my own if things don't fit.

Reader, they fit. Yes, it took me a good minute to test this out, since about a day after finally pulling the trigger on my fly wheels, I saw this:

had to try 3 flashlights for this

which always leads to this:

and then, if you're lucky, this:

attn.: Child Protective Services, that is not Multi-Strip she's brushing on there

and finally this:

Please don't use my license plate number to do crime.

Christ, look at the time. OK, car is on the road now, awaiting a proper alignment, but driving very well, tracking, stopping and cornering better, plus looking a good deal cooler.

To sum up the plus side: Stockton Wheel; 3.75"; girl help; gray paint on everything, incl. bushings--these are good.

Negatives: rust; festering Chicagoland clay-mud with bits of zombie flesh mixed in; the absence of time to tool around in old car due to time spent under old car. Post it.

week at a glance: Slovenia and Chicago

Sighted near Tivoli Park, Ljubljana. The cozy side of Bauhaus...situated alone in the forest, next to a large, uphill meadow. Stucco is in tough shape but it's a lovely one, the overhangs aren't sagging and many of the original windows are intact.

Fabricating parts for a window trim/geometry lesson project.

This is how I chose to make the backing cuts where these pieces run into a vertical plane. They're far beyond the 45 degree tilt range of the saw, so tilted the workpiece instead and left the blade at 90 deg. to the table.

Jig holding the workpiece is hinged and adjustable for the various acute angles I needed.

Made a similar arrangement to cut acute compound miters on the chopsaw, but forgot to photograph it. In that case I left the saw set at 45 deg. and "pivoted" one or both fences (using blocks, lines drawn on saw table, and the ubiquitous doublesided tape) to obtain the steeper angle. Miters cut in this way were then used as setup blocks to cut the actual pieces on the sliding tablesaw; they would have been much too wide to cut on the chopsaw.

After a rainy walk through Tivoli forest, thinking about how much I'd like to walk these trails with my daughter, I looked up and saw these platforms in the trees. She is treehouse-fixated right now and would have flipped. There were about 25 of these, for an eventual zipline path, I guess.

Rigs of Ljubljana, pt. 1:

Sardines for lunch at the market, Ljubljana. Thought I was late for soundcheck and gobbled these down a little too fast. Hot and bony. Fantastic.

This Is The Intro.

Stated goals:

1. to suggest by inclusion that a coherent set of statements can be made on design, carpentry, music, woodworking and automotive engineering, with visits to relevant topics in gardening, drinking and travel.

2. where possible, to provide documents, visible or audible online, to support the above.