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| Awake and ready to go! |
What I can’t abide is the lousy stereo. It’s original equipment (1992), an AM/FM radio with a cassette player. Just for grins, I stuck a tape in it earlier this week, and now it won’t come out. Worse, the left channel was gone. I put it down to a blown speaker in the driver-side door, especially since I wired a spare (home) stereo speaker box into the connector and got sound. So, it was off to Best Buy for a pair of Pioneer speakers. One of the “fun” parts of this replacement was that the Miata’s speaker mount uses three screws, and the new speakers came with four slots. With a workbench clear enough to use (yay!), I used one of the existing holes and marked the places for the other two. A few minutes with a Dremel, and I had the slots I needed.
Since the Miata uses a plug connector for the speakers, I drilled the rivet out of the old speakers and clipped enough wire to insert in the holes that the new speakers provided. A little quality time with a soldering gun, then a screwdriver, and I was done. Except that I still didn’t have a left channel. What…ever. A day or two later, I pulled the left-side speaker, and found that I hadn’t done a good job with one of the wires. More soldering, put it back in, and now both sides have sound! I’m still going to replace that head-unit, though. I’ve wanted a stereo with aux-in (or better yet, USB-in) for some time now. All it takes is money, right?
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| The Boy will have a hard time borrowing this one |
So today, the wife says, “you need to get that fan out of the living room.” It took me two seconds to decide where I wanted it, and about 20 minutes to put it up. (Mason helped by carrying the detached blades out to the garage for me.) I nailed a 2x4 across two rafters, used four screws to attach the hanger, and it doesn’t get much easier. I didn’t feel like dorking with splicing into one of the nearby light fixtures, so I got a 3-wire cord I’d clipped off some dead appliance in the past, and spliced it in. Run to an extension cord, plug it in, and away it goes. There was an initial blast of heat, as it flushed out what was up in the rafters, but it was soon moving ambient air around. So… if you’re ever wondering how to dispose of a working ceiling fan, putting it up in the garage seems to be a pretty good idea. Yes, it clears one of the light fixtures by about 3 inches.
And I leave you with a Mason pic (that is, a pic by Mason). He asked to take some pictures yesterday morning, and got a good one of EJ snoozing (or pretending to) on the futon.
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| Kids take the darndest pix. |
Hooray for fixing things electrical!
ReplyDeleteThe first thing I noticed about Mason's photo was the colours: the bright and cheerful foreground colors of the toys with the more complex and less bright grown up colors in the background. He may be onto something.
What a handyman you are! This explains why I haven't seen you so much lately ^_^ I think Manson may have found a new hobby with that camera! PS Don't forget to look in on Wizard don't want you to get left behind ;)
ReplyDeleteWow so much work!
ReplyDeleteYou sound like a wiz with electronics.
Katherine, that's a really interesting observation, one I didn't consciously notice myself. Put the dull grownup stuff on the back burner… yup, that sounds about right!
ReplyDeleteHelen, it's partly that, and partly because something at work blew up at a particularly bad time. I think I got past it, so things should be better work-wise, next week. Tomorrow, I wash the car and get some drills working!
Sonia, I'm more a dabbler when it comes to electronics. I can build kits, and connect stuff. The big challenge will come in a month or so, when I attempt to install an upgraded stereo in the Miata. That kind of thing is as much mechanical as it is electrical.