Author: grant

Antique Gas Engine BBS, Smokstak

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Antique engine forums related to collecting, restoring and showing hit and miss engines, vintage Diesel, steam engines, antique tractors, old generators, pumps, industrial antiques and collectibles. There are thousands of old engine photos and thousands of discussions about all types of engines and old iron topics. This is a world wide community with members of all ages from Australia, Europe, North America and other points across the globe.

CB750F: Day 24: That Changes Everything

Tonight I really wanted to see if I could make progress like the article did on polishing your aluminum engine case so I bought some Dremel attachments. The results were generally nice, but didn’t get it all the way there. Since I had borrowed the Dremel, I removed some of the crudified paint from the right horn and grip assembly for future painting. At the end of the night I felt good, that it looked pretty decent, even though it is not a perfect mirror finish.
At the end of class Pat told us that this might be the last semester, ever. As such, I’m going to shelf the polishing, and spend spring break acquiring the necessary gear to complete the most important service tasks, eg: brake fluid change, new sprockets and chain, front fork fluid, and more.
At the end of my work, I sprayed down the engine with a very diluted Simple Green mixture to get the carb spray off and ended with using compressed air to get all of that included; I didn’t want anything that the plastic wouldn’t like on there.
Continue reading “CB750F: Day 24: That Changes Everything”

CB750F: Day 23: Engine Polishing Continues

On the way to the shop I stopped at Harbor Freight and bought a 7-pack of 500 grit wet/dry sandpaper, and boy it finishes fast. The “you are going to need patience” advice kicked in tonight. It was so strange, after hand-sanding and also trying out the tiny little brash brush with the Dremel, I thought that it was getting close to the metal but Pat showed me how there was still clear-coat on there. What?!
You can’t see it, and it is very shiny, but you can feel it. It feels like the fine grain of a leather jacket, and it has kind of a different finish than the edges where you can feel that all of the clear-coat is gone. Numerous breaks were necessary, and the dish-washing gloves helped. The Dremel was pretty helpful for digging crud out of some of the tight spots, and I’ll need to buy some new tips.
Pat brought in his recommended choke and throttle lube, Remington Wonder Lube.
Continue reading “CB750F: Day 23: Engine Polishing Continues”

CB750F: Day 22: Engine Polishing Begins

Tonight I came prepared with 600 grit wet/dry sandpaper and quickly realized two things: sandpaper doesn’t last very long and I had more work to do with the wheel brushes. It was very iterative work, the more work I did and thought that I was finished the more I noticed that more needed to be addressed. It helped to take breaks and jump around to different areas to work on, because, well you do need to be quite patient.
Without pulling the engine I still could reach plenty. I decided to do just the sides and top and tonight I think that I got close to everything I want finished with the brass brushes leaving the sandpaper for next time.
Took some pics at the end, the engine, though rough and needing to be sanded down, does look a little more refreshed than before.
Continue reading “CB750F: Day 22: Engine Polishing Begins”

Ontological Management with Protege OWL and Jess

Part of my quest to learn more about rules-engines involved the desire to find a really good approach for knowledge management. The short story is that when you work with a subject matter expert (SME), you need to find some good way to capture the domain data and behavior, the rules, actions, and everything else necessary to make sense of things. This need isn’t unique to knowledge engineering and AI, of course, all engineers face it, especially software engineers. Object-oriented analysis and design is one good approach, and there seems to be a lot of overlap. One interesting outcrop of the need is the Insurance Application Architecture, an OO model (and more) to help insurance companies manage their intellectual assets.
The client developed a custom tool to manage the concepts (although customizable tools like MagicDraw certainly are an option, too), and I had always wondered if there was some standard way of approaching that kind of problem. While researching rules-engines I was delighted to learn about knowledge engineering, the semantic web, and consequently ontological engineering and management.
Specifically, digging into the tool Protege-OWL, I found something quite similar to what I’d seen developed as custom. Although it is too soon to say they are equivelant, it is pretty interesting to find out. The fact that there is a Jess plugin (JessTab) to let you play, even better!