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Category: Miscellaneous

Published: 12 April 2017

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We recently cruised out of New York, and came in from Long Island.   Looked at many options to get there.  Park in the city? Best was $140 for the week.  Take a car service in? Well, now we were closer to $200 each way.   Have someone drive us in and drop us off? Well then you owe someone a big favor, and costs gas and tolls.  So we decided to try the train. 

We took the LIRR in from Ronkonkoma for under $30, and took an Uber from Penn Station to the cruise terminal.  If you sign up at this link - https://www.uber.com/invite/1d0mx your ride to the terminal should come out to under $5.00 after the discount. I think we got $20 off.  My wife and I both signed up. Both times we had a great driver in a new Suburban with plenty of room. 

Round trip from the LIRR station to the port came out to a whopping $60. Round trip!  Plus the parking at Ronkonkoma was free, so figuring in the gas to drive to the station, the tips for the drivers, Including grabbing lunch at a deli in Penn we were pretty close to half of the cheapest alternative! 

Think you have a better deal? Let me know!

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Category: Miscellaneous

Published: 23 February 2016

Hits: 1885

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Back in October 2012 we bought a Grand Cherokee.   We had a Wrangler, but our family was growing, and the TJ just wasn't going to cut it much longer.  It was great, got a Grand Cherokee with the Hemi and loved every minute of it.  Everything was going great until one day it started to feel like it had a misfire.  it would come and go, sometimes it was fine sometimes it was noticeable.   I finally had it mostly narrowed down to something with the MDS system not turning on or off when it should. If I drove in Tow/Haul it would never act up - making it seem more like the MDS system was messing it up  It started not too long after an oil change done by a local chain, so I thought maybe they dumped the wrong oil. The MDS engines are apparently very specific when it comes to oil, so to be safe I immediately changed the oil again, drove for a few hours, drove around and changed it again.

I had diagnosed as far as I could without it being inside a shop. Swapped MDS solenoids, checked wiring, changed plugs (some were very widely gapped) and it just continued. I had seen countless posts online of people that had lost MDS lifters, essentially causing you to have a dead cylinder, so feared it was something like that.  Into the shop it went. Diagnostics was flat-rate, or so they said. Couple days go by and they call to say they are still looking into it.  Another day and they tell me they have to start tearing into the engine.  I guess at this point I should have asked if it was still "flat rate" but I didn't, nor did I have an indoor work area to tear into it myself.  So, we go back and forth with updates while they tear it down.  Finally they come back and say that the engine was completely sludged up, and had two burnt valves which caused low compression on two cylinders.  The repair would be a new engine, nearly $10,000, and I still owed the bank $8,000 on it, too.  I had only had it for 2 years and put on 30,000 miles, and changed the oil religiously on time.  I told them I needed a little while to come up with a decision and the cash if I have them do the job. At this point I also spoke to Chrysler, since there was a pattern of the MDS engines doing this.  After looking into it they determined maintenance caused the sludging. Nevermind that they had records of every on-time oil change...  Eventually decide to bring it back home, since we could swap an engine, and the weather was getting nice enough that we could work outside. Worst case it gets parked in the yard for three years until it is paid off.  Below are the pictures of the engine as we got it back - both the top end, and the the bottom when we started tearing into it. This thing was clean as far as sludge. I have seen much newer engines that were not this clean. Oil passages all clear. Pan, clean.  Up top, the pistons did have some carbon - and well a whole lot of rust from them apparently just parking it outside  while apart.  I get it; the plan was new engine, so why protect the cylinders. But still, a quick spray or wipe with oil and none of the rust would have been so bad. And, it turns out the diagnosis was wrong, anyway. In the end, I still love my Jeep, and would not hesitate to buy another - but would for sure avoid the dealer that I had it disgnosed at like the plague. I would make sure we got an aftermarket warranty, and would hold off on the "oil change package" that the dealer we bought from had "included".  Claimed any dealer would take it, then sent the coupons specifically stating that they were usable at the riginal dealership only.  That would be fine but we lived 2500 miles from them!

After pictures:

{gallery}jeepengine/before{/gallery}

So, as you can see - aside from rust, it doesn't look too bad.  We tore it all apart. Cleaned pistons. looked over everything. Had planned on a deep cleaning if it was actually sludged up, but did not need to. We honed the pistons until they shined again, and got everything back into shape. Spent quite a few weekends between pulling the engine, tearing down, cleaning up, and reassembly.  While we were in there we also replaced the questionable MDS lifters with the non-MDS versions, and replaced the solenoids with the plugs from the non-MDS engine.  I couldn't be sure that they were OK and not the source of the problem initially, so they went. And I wasn't concerned with a couple MPG. We did find a couple things wrong, I am not claiming that there was nothing.  First, we had one bent pushrod, so ordered replacements.  Second, the shop that looked at the heads to replace the "burnt valve" only found some carbon buildup that was making a couple valves stick.  Valve job, new seals, and heads were good. All added up I think we were around $1400 in parts and rentals (needed to rent a hoist) and it was back together. Reprogrammed the computer to make it not look for the MDS hardware, and everything has been going well since.

The pictures below are after we cleaned the rust, pretty much as it was going back together.  When it was all done I sent an update to the advocates at Chrysler and still, two years later they have yet to even acknowledge it.   I honestly was not expecting to get anything back from them financially - but a simple explanation as to why they were less than honest about what they found would have been awesome.  Oh, getting the skidplate that the dealership took off would have been nice too - we already made a trip back for the front strut support they removed and left out. Guess the skidplate would be asking too much!

{gallery}jeepengine/after{/gallery}

Needless to say, we won't be back to Browns Jeep in Patchogue again, regrdless of how many "specials" they tell us about.  

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Category: Miscellaneous

Published: 09 May 2016

Hits: 2615

Completely unrelated to brewing - but running on the same hardware, I have virtual machines set up to monitor emergency communications (police, fire) as well as aircraft tracking, which feed to FlightAware and Planefinder.  These use USB RTL-SDR dongles, ahich are not supported under VMWare esxi/Vsphere.  Recently while combining these machines onto one host I started having trouble.

I came up with a couple theories. First, I had the dongles run through a cheap USB hub.  Maybe I was losing power.  Second, the dongles had identical vendor and hardware ID's - plus identical serial numbers. Maybe that was causing trouble.   I changed the serial numbers but it continued.  I also ran one through the hub and one by extension cable.  Oh, and when they started to flake out, I would sometimes lose my BrewPi USB connection.   I don't mind losing communications, but when by beer temperature is uncontrolled we have problems! It would happen at a seemingly random time (but almost always just after I left the house) and would take out random devices.  The only way to recover was to do a full power down and reboot on the VMware host.

VMware only supports certain USB devices, and these certainly are not on the list.  I made a few changes. First, a new hub, one with multiple "high power" ports.  The RTL dongles push the power limits already.  Next, I built an extra VM to share the USB devices - and then set up passthrough of the USB controller, so that the dongles never interact with VMWare.  Essentially, the USB root hub is passed direct to the VM, the USB powered hub plugs into that, and my USB devices connect through that. Since there are multiple USB controllers we are able to leave some open for locally plugged USB devices as well. While I was at it I also configured a VM Network that was only between the VM's that need USB access - I don't expect the traffic to be very big but just to make sure that USB and general network traffic don't interefere with each other I set it up this way.   The USBServer VM is running DHCP on the "usb" network. Essentially the USB network traffic is isolated from the rest.

Next, I started seeking USB redirection software. USBIP looked promising but I struggled to get it working.   Finally I came across incentivespro.com and their USB redirector software. Conveniently, the linux version is free - all of my VM's are linux based.  Installed on the server, quickly configured and shared the devices.  Installed on each client, and connected to the shared devices.  To the OS they look just like a locally connected USB device.  To VMWare they don't exist. And to the USB Server VM they also look like local devices, since the root hub is passed through.  I went from randomly losing one (or some, or all) USB connections multiple times a day to having a solid connection.

When I started researching this it took me forever to find one tiny post mentioning passing through the USB controller. Hopefully having another one out there will save someone half the time I took doing research before stumbling onto it.   Granted the reason I needed it is very specific, I imagine it would work for many unsupported USB situations if you are running VMWare.   Is it overkill? Very possibly.   But it works, and was really simple to set up!