We went down to Harraseeket Lobster Co. for anniversary supper yesterday, and my wife was kind enough to tool around the cold, rainy, wet wharf for a few minutes so I could take some pictures. A couple more after the break!

The original bolt is brass, and you can see in the photo where the threads are stripped. It screws into a captive steel nut in the plastic housing, so it’s no wonder the brass stripped when it got cranked down one too many times. And now you too can make a fancy replacement!

Get Your Bolts

Obviously, find a bolt the same size and thread pitch. Beg, borrow, buy…

Make Your Knob Shape

I chose a diamond because it’s easy to put torque on, and it’s also pretty easy to lay out symmetrically and to cut out on a table saw. I don’t know what kind of wood it is, I grabbed a random chunk of hardwood from my scrap bin. Maybe Red Oak?

Drill Holes

In order to fit the knob onto the bolt I drilled all the way through with a bit just larger than the bolt thread. The hole works best as a loose fit because the bolt has to be pressed straight in, not threaded.

You can’t see it in the picture, but this clamp is also clamped to the workbench. Remember kids, always secure your workpiece!

After I drilled the bolt hole, I drilled a counterbore with drill a little smaller than the bolt head. If you get it right you could probably skip the next step, but there’s more of a risk of stripping out the wood if you crank too hard on it.

Shape Counterbore to fit Bolt Head

I don’t have a picture of this step, I forgot. Basically, cut the counterbore into a hexagonal shape so the bolt head fits tightly. I used a utility knife because I didn’t have any chisels small enough, and it’s a bit tricky. Take it slowly and don’t chop fingers off. A small milling bit on a dremel might work well here, too.

Stick it all together

Put a bit of wood glue around the bolt head and threads closest to it, and squish it together. I think put the knob across the vise and used a hammer to pound the bolt in tightly. (You’ve been dry fitting it all along so you’re sure it works like you want, right?) Once it’s together and the glue has set up it won’t be easy to take apart; capturing the bolt head tightly with the wood keeps it from spinning, and glue in the threads keeps it from pressing out over time.

And that’s it, aside from cleaning off excess wood glue and finishing the knob if you like. So far they’re holding up quite nicely after a couple months of use.

If you, like I, have a boat full of water (and sticks, and leaves, and dirt, and other crud I was scrubbing out of it), then you also may not want to just tip it up and let all that trickle through the hull drain at a slow an increasingly clogging rate. Never mind the residue left inside the hull.

My trusty garden-hose siphon was not going to cut it this time, either. I could have used a bailer… but that’s just not as much fun. And no, thank you, I didn’t want to use my trusty Rainbow vacuum cleaner to pump a gallon at a time again (an often dicey and tedious prospect). And more splashy-messy. So I used good ol’ R2VAC2 as a suction pump/super-siphon starter.

There are a number of thing I generally preface my posts with, one of which is “don’t try this at home” because if I’m writing about it I probably did exactly that. However,  in this case I feel the need to urge you do not try with a regular vacuum cleaner. I don’t care where, just don’t don’t. Because vacuuming water is a bad thing for normal vacuum cleaners. This is what shop-vacs were made for.

Of course I don’t have a shop-vac – just ol’ R2 - or I wouldn’t be writing this. So I hooked him up to a bucket and hooked the bucket up to some sump-pump hose I had kicking around and Ta-Da! Instant Shop-Vac.

This has a couple major drawbacks.

First, the bucket is still pretty small. This can be remedied by using a bigger bucket, or trashcan, or, as I discovered very late in the pumping process, you can just get the siphon effect going, detach the vac, and let it go.

Second, you know those plastic toy hoses that you swing around your head and they do something between whistle and howl? Well, sump-pump hose is pretty much the same thing except when you hook up to high-speed air (like a vacuum cleaner) it is an awful lot louder. This is solved by either keeping the hose full of water or using the siphon method.

Nothing fancy. The vac hose is just stuffed into a slighly-undersized hole cut in the bucket lid. I cut hole for the sump-pump hose too large so a I made a gasket from a scrap of Ice and Water Shield (adhesive rubber roofing underlayer). The ribs on the hose make it hard to fit, too.

And that’s it. Saturday afternoon hack for the win!

Lesson learned:  banding strap doesn’t really clamp tight enough against a smooth surface to stabilize a mass on the end of a lever. Not with engine vibration and bumping chains and general Real World Environment.

I should have used bolts and stuff the first time, like this:

When I first got the car I replaced the stupid little foot-long rubber-ducky antenna (not good reception, especially with the rusty mounting stud) with the more respectable telescoping whip from my old car. This worked pretty well, unlike the ducky, which did not really. It still didn’t seem to work as well as it had with the old radio, though. So after living with it for over a year I decided to pull out the VHF whip that I picked up from the middle of the road in Westbrook a couple years ago and see if it would improve my radio listening experience.

Converting the VHF antenna primarily involved:

1. Finding a bolt to screw whip base on to (5/16-24 in this case)
2. Making blocks to clamp/mount to the car
3. Connecting it to the antenna cable in the trunk

The bolt was easy, I took the base to Fastenal and the guy figured it out. Since I only needed one (which probably cost all of about twelve cents) he was cool and just gave it to me.

Making the mounting blocks was harder because I didn’t want to use wood for longevity and wear reasons, as well as aesthetics. (Not that the end result is any better.) I ended using a plastic scrap punch-out I got from a friend. It might be HDPE, but I’m not sure. It’s hard and slippery, which makes cutting it a trick. A course-tooth wood saw seems to work well; I made the straight cuts with a sabre saw and did the diagonal with my cross-cut saw.

After trimming up edges and drilling a hole through both pieces, test mounting worked perfectly the first time. (When does that ever happen?) It holds quite securely and is the right angle and everything. I used a piece of craft foam for a gasket between the car body and top block, and the O-ring from the old loading coil to keep rain from getting down the bolt-hole.

Wiring the antenna turned out to be very easy once I got past my brain cramp about the special antenna connector. Turns out that connector is about the right size to fit a banana plug, so I plugged a test lead in there and clipped the alligator-clip end to the lug I made from a piece of computer case (5-1/4″ drive bay punchout). Eventually I’ll solder a shorter lead and banana plug on to, but for now it works. I get much better AM reception – before I had mostly engine electrical noise – and weaker FM stations seem to have improved slightly in limited in-driveway testing. We’ll see how much difference it makes in that dead spot on the interstate down near mile 43.

Like, for instance, running out of power connectors. The blessed progress also gave me only two standard molex connectors, two SATA power connectors, and a floppy drive plug. (Like I said, modern progress.) I had to use my trusty power splitter and hack in another molex from my collection of wire bits.

Thanks to said molex also having a floppy power plug attached, we have sucessfully adapted Floppy Power to Non-Floppy Things, both cleverly and non-destructively. If you, too, find yourself in need of adaption, get one normal-size paper clip, straighten it out, cut it into four fairly equal pieces, and stick them into one of the floppy power plugs, like so.

Then, plug it into the other floppy power plug. Make sure you match up wire colors or things will blow up. (Or, at least, smell bad and not work again, ever.)  Your paper-clip pins will probably get pushed out the back of one of the plugs, which is OK as long as you push them back in with your screwdriver or something. That’s why they are so long to begin with.

Then, plug it all in. Nothing wasted! All I need now is more RAM, though that’s not so critical running a light-duty file/backup/media server with Crunchbang.

I though I’d document it since the forum people say, essentially, you hook it into the manifold or vacuum line, you can figure it out, it’s not hard. They’re right, but I like photos. So here they are.

First, I found an inexpensive gauge on eBay, which was $16 shipped. I would have also said cheap but it turned out to be fairly well made, with all the necessary parts, and appears to be accurate. Win!

And a note on compression fittings: yes, they just go together like this and you winch them down. I wasn’t sure about it since the tubing slipped out when finger-tightened but wrench it down and it locks and seals fine.

The first (hardest) part was figuring out how to get the vacuum line through the firewall. I finally found a helpful forum post (it was too cold to just go hunt around too much) that mentioned the gasket around the throttle cable. It’s the same one that a couple of the large wiring harnesses go through and (with a bit of poking and prying with a screwdriver) the vacuum hose fit through as well.

While we’re in the engine bay, here’s how it connects to the manifold. The kit came with the handy screw-in fitting and there was an extra hole in the manifold, ready to use.

Here’s where the hose comes through the grommet on the inside, above the gas pedal. The extra tubing is loopy & confusing, but it goes through the grommet on top of those two fat black cable bundles.

From there I ran the tubing over the steering column, through a few other things, and up the trim gap by the door pillar. (Backlight wiring also came up through there.)

My super-fancy mounting bracket also takes advantage of the trim gap between the dash and the door pillar. 1/4″ luan, artfully cut, and a binder clip.

And the finished install (except for backlight wiring). I’ve done the wiring, but haven’t photographed as that taps the dash lighting circuit behind the headlight switch and is impossible to take meaningful photos of.