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wesleywillis
Dec 30, 2016

SUCK A MALE CAMEL'S DICK WITH MIRACLE WHIP!!
More threads engaged means more wear surface

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Darchangel
Feb 12, 2009

Tell him about the blower!



Nice.
I won't lie, I've always like those spaceship eggs.
Kind of want to build one with a 1UZ poking through the floor. Probably just 2WD, though.


Also really like those Knipex pliers. Don't know if I can spend $60+ on them, though.

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

Bear Radar Progress


It makes a decent desk lamp!



Here's how the partial boards come from the JLC factory. The boards are small (60x40mm), so the factory added extra pcb material along the edges. These tooling rails are V-scored, so you can snap them off with your fingers.

The boards appear mostly empty, but look closely to see the 0402 components (1.0x0.5mm). Those little parts are a pain in the rear end to solder by hand.

I was overall quite pleased with JLC. They only messed up one thing, and it doesn't matter. But somehow they put solder paste on my front side fiducials. That is a seriously weird mistake for them to make. I assume they used their own fiducials on the tooling rails for pick-and-place alignment (I hope).



I soldered the larger modules and other components that JLC does not stock. The limited component selection means JLC is very fast and cheap. These boards cost $15/ea in qty=20. Probably $5 of that was component costs.



Soldering the Adafruit dev board is especially annoying because it doesn't break out the USB data lines. So to relocate the USB port, I need to solder wires to pads on the board. Here I am using Norland 123L UV adhesive to strain relieve the wires. I cured it with a relatively cheap 365nm UV mini flashlight*. Grab some orange UV safety glases, too.

At some point I will redesign my board to use the Raytac microcontroller module directly. I'll probably be able to chop off 10mm of board length, too.

e: It turns out acrylic is fairly opaque at 365nm, and I am having issues curing through the plastic. I think a 400nm UV light might work better, but I'm waiting on material specs from Pokono (just in case their impact modified acrylic has added UV blockers or similar).



An I2C connector on the back lets me plug in Adafruit Stemma QT peripherals. Right now I'm using a 128x32 oled display to show debugging info.


FIrmware Status

GPS is working, and I have an input capture running on the GPS PPS signal. This gives me a sub-microsecond accurate hardware timer, synced to GPS time. I will need this to generate the encrypted frequency hopping schedule for my LoRa network.

The Nordic task/event system is very powerful. I'm going to make a 4-phase PWM controller for the LED floodlight using PPI and two timers. The Bear Radar floodlight has 4 independent LED banks, so I can minimize flicker with fancy out-of-phase PWM. OTOH, if every light in camp is synced to GPS time, I bet I can do some cool stroboscopic effects at low frequencies, too.

My LimeSDR Mini 2.0 should be arriving in early January. It has 6x the bandwidth of my current Airspy Mini. The wider bandwidth will let me take screenshots of my radio making GBS threads up the entire 900 MHz ISM band with a single packet, ha ha.

ryanrs fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Dec 10, 2022

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

This 395nm UV flashlight penetrates acrylic MUCH better. It kicks off the Norland resins nicely.

The Linux Fairy
Apr 7, 2005

With just some glitter and a wink, your data will be turned into a 40GB looping .gif of penguins fucking.


I also have a cure station for my SLA setup if you run into trouble and really need to cook the snot out of something. I think it's 405nm, and has a turntable.

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

The 395nm flashlight is working very well.

Here's an assembly jig I just made from a scrap pcb and spare acrylic window. It's for aligning the motion sensor with the pcb. This is important because the dome lens needs to poke through a cutout in the enclosure window.



First, put dots of UV adhesive on the pcb corners away from the shoulder screws, taking care to glob the glue to approximately the same height as the screw heads. These will be spacer so the pcb sits flat on the acrylic. Cure the dots.

Then put bigger globs of UV adhesive over the cured dots, and over the screw heads. Press the acrylic into the glue, relax pressure so it sits flat, then cure with flashlight.




Action shot, with a populated pcb and motion sensor loaded into the jig. It holds the motion sensor while you solder the three pins.

This stuff is basically precision epoxy that doesn't need to be mixed, and cures exactly when you want it to, instantly. So useful!

kastein
Aug 31, 2011

Moderator at http://www.ridgelineownersclub.com/forums/and soon to be mod of AI. MAKE AI GREAT AGAIN. Motronic for VP.
drat that looks good coming together.

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

Right now 90% of the work is firmware, which is not especially exciting to post about.


GPS

The GPS works. It easily gets a lock from a cold start with the LED switching power supplies running and transmitting 1 LoRa packet every 15 seconds. The PPS signal feeds a big timer on the microcontroller, so now I can schedule events and hardware actions with ~250ns precision, locked to GPS time.


LEDs

For the white LEDs, I made a 4-phase PWM controller using 2 timers and PPI (Nordic's name for the autonomous peripheral controller). A normal 4-channel PWM peripheral starts all the pulses at the same time. Generally you can't have the pulses out of phase because that would use twice as many compare registers. I specifically want this capability, so I made my own.

I linked the NRF52840 Timer2 and Timer3 to make a 10-channel monster:

Timer2.cc0 : turn on PWM1
Timer2.cc1 : turn on PWM2
Timer2.cc2 : turn on PWM3
Timer2.cc3 : turn on PWM4

Timer3.cc0 : turn off PWM1
Timer3.cc1 : turn off PWM2
Timer3.cc2 : turn off PWM3
Timer3.cc3 : turn off PWM4
Timer3.cc4 : reset Timer2 and Timer3 (sets period)
Timer3.cc5 : software read

Independent timing of each phase lets me stagger the PWM, dramatically reducing flicker. This is important because my LED drivers have pretty slow 1ms turn-on time. So you end up with a practical max PWM frequency around 100 Hz. But 100 Hz looks silky smooth running on 4 phases.

PWM updates are almost glitch-free, but it's not quite perfect, so I'll have to revisit it later. If I hammer on the updates at 200/sec, faster even than the PWM frequency, there is some occasional flicker. I want to fix that.

In addition to PWM brightness control, I have mosfets that let me swap in a couple different current sense resistors in the LED power supplies. This gives me 3 different brightness 'ranges', so I can ramp from ~150uA/LED at the dim end, to high enough to trip the protection circuit inside my Anker power bank.

Amusingly, at peak brightness I will have to actively manage current consumption, e.g. dimming the LEDs if I want to transmit a packet at full power. There's also a temperature sensor nestled between the LEDs, because board temp might be a limiting factor once the acrylic window is attached, sealing the device.


LoRa Radio

Working on this now. I just got the AES hardware accelerator running, which is neat. The downside is it only supports AES-128, while my software version supports AES-256. But AES is for the frequency hopping schedule only, not message authentication and privacy. Authenticated encryption will be handled by Monocypher. The frequency hopping is for jamming resistance / coexistence on the 900 MHz ISM band.

I'll probably get the frequency hoppping running this weekend.






Holiday Van Trip?

I'm thinking of heading back to the Mojave, east of Joshua Tree, and further out into the Colorado Desert. Just spend a couple weeks cruising utility right-of-ways, old mining claims, interesting rock formations, and other neat things you might find in the desert. I think everything in the van is working right now, except the A/C.

ryanrs fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Dec 16, 2022

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

ryanrs posted:

I'll probably get the frequency hoppping running this weekend.

Ha, no I won't. I'm pretty sure I blew out various parts of my first two radios while debugging the i/o expander code. The good news is that the bug got fixed. The bad news is that the bug cross-connected the radio power amplifier back through the LNA, which most likely killed the radio. Looks like one of the radios also blew its output transistor, probably from running without an antenna.

But now that I want to do radio stuff, I think I want to start with undamaged boards. So I'll solder together a couple new ones tomorrow, and work on the firmware after my trip.

The weather looks nice. I'll try to leave sometime next week.

everdave
Nov 14, 2005
shots fired

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011


Mounting a full-size spare on those vans is really tricky because of the tailgate. I think big basket-like roof racks are popular. Or you can carry a full-size spare in the passenger compartment, but it's really big and awkward. (We know the seller doesn't do this because the 5th wheel + tire would have been included in the listing.)

Seller has been rolling around with a 3.5" lift, KO2s, and the OEM donut spare, heh.


In related news, I have to decide whether I want to bring a 2nd spare with me to the desert. I have one under the van, but the 2nd would have to ride in the back with the rest of my gear. And for this trip, I think that means it stays at home.

Safety Dance
Sep 10, 2007

Five degrees to starboard!

ryanrs posted:

And for this trip, I think that means it stays at home.

That's a funny way of saying "I'm going to build a small electric crane for moving spare wheel+tire combos onto and off of my roof basket."

everdave
Nov 14, 2005
I just thought it was ironic Doug pointed out wait it’s actually useful…when you e been rock crawling in the 2wd and you know this on cars and bids is just for looks

Darchangel
Feb 12, 2009

Tell him about the blower!


ryanrs posted:

Mounting a full-size spare on those vans is really tricky because of the tailgate. I think big basket-like roof racks are popular. Or you can carry a full-size spare in the passenger compartment, but it's really big and awkward. (We know the seller doesn't do this because the 5th wheel + tire would have been included in the listing.)

Seller has been rolling around with a 3.5" lift, KO2s, and the OEM donut spare, heh.


In related news, I have to decide whether I want to bring a 2nd spare with me to the desert. I have one under the van, but the 2nd would have to ride in the back with the rest of my gear. And for this trip, I think that means it stays at home.

Jeep Cherokees have a tailgate, too. Just use a swing out mount like they do.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS
Put the spare on the hood like you’re on safari. :razz:

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

Darchangel posted:

Jeep Cherokees have a tailgate, too. Just use a swing out mount like they do.

There's nowhere to attach it. You end up either installing a hitch receiver and hanging something off of that, or doing a custom fabricated bumper which will cost about as much as that Sienna is going to get at auction.

Though I did see one Sienna where they attached a swing out mount directly to the rear quarter panel with like a dozen sheet metal screws...

Safety Dance
Sep 10, 2007

Five degrees to starboard!

Platystemon posted:

Put the spare on the hood like you’re on safari. :razz:

I did this once on my Jeep. It was a look.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS


lmao

wesleywillis
Dec 30, 2016

SUCK A MALE CAMEL'S DICK WITH MIRACLE WHIP!!
Speaking of Siennas with lifts on them, I was working at a hospital a few days ago and saw a whole shitload of jacked up Siennas I'd swear some of them were lifted like 5 inches. Probably not but they sure looked like it anyway.

They were all wheelchair accessible vans so obviously that was part of the package for all that extra gear needed.

Also, you've probably seen this, but if you haven't:

https://www.journeysoffroad.com/store/p6/Sienna-FWD-GEN2.html

E: poo poo, looks like that kit is for the generation after yours.

Darchangel
Feb 12, 2009

Tell him about the blower!


ryanrs posted:

There's nowhere to attach it. You end up either installing a hitch receiver and hanging something off of that, or doing a custom fabricated bumper which will cost about as much as that Sienna is going to get at auction.

Though I did see one Sienna where they attached a swing out mount directly to the rear quarter panel with like a dozen sheet metal screws...

How difficult could a big chunk of square or rectangular tube with brackets be? Bumper doesn’t have to be all fancy and super-fitted to do the job.
Attaching to the sheet metal is doable as well, just would need doubler plates on the inside. The factory Cherokee and Chevy S10 Blazer spare tire mounts attach to the quarter panel by taillight.

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011




Desert Expedition 2: Ludlow to Ocotillo

Imgur Album | Google Map with markers




Day 1

Ludlow is a long drive from the Bay Area, and winter days are short. I poked around some roads looking to get to the ghost town of Stedman, but I ran into some chained gates and imperceptible roads. I was kind of lost in a wash in the late afternoon, so I decided to camp there and look for the road in the morning.




Day 2

Impassable washouts.



Precision GPS network to monitor mm-scale movements of tectonic plates. This is the RAGG station (Ragtown).
SCIGN | What is SCIGN? | Map (select Center on RAGG)



I had a great idea to get a pic of the van under a railway bridge with a train passing overhead. This is the Southern Transcon, one of the busiest rail lines in the Western US. There is a train passing every 10-20 minutes. Unfortunately the sand under the bridge was really soft and I got stuck trying to pose the Sienna. A train passed while I was digging out the van, so I guess I got the pic..


Later in the day, I got Really Stuck on this rutted, washed out road/gully (everything in these pics is more sideways than they appear). I got to use my Rock Exotica 2.6" pulley for the first time, to develop enough force to pull the van sideways. (It will come out again later for the RV.)


An excellent anchor. As the rope is loaded, it squeezes the rock very tightly.


It was late in the afternoon when I finally got unstuck, so I set up camp nearby. One issue with sleeping in the van is that I can't leave it stuck overnight. There is a huge incentive to get it unstuck before nightfall, so I can sleep comfortably.


Day 3

EHMT Box 3.


:rip: some tacoma


Single cylinder engine running directly from a natural gas pipeline. Somewhere along the Ludlow-Needles Truck Trail.



Day 4
Camping near the Castle Mine, on the edge of the Trilobite Wilderness. Set up 1 mile south of the actual mine to catch some morning sun.


Day 5
Abandoned shack on Cadiz Rd. Cadiz Rd is pretty boring.


Camping near Cadiz Dunes.


Day 6
Continue south along Cadiz Rd, then Midland Rd.

Waiting for rain just off Midland Rd, 20 miles from Blythe, CA.


Day 7
Resupply in Blythe, which has big grocery stores, including an Albertsons.

Back up Midland Rd, camping on a spur off the east side this time. There's an amazing bowl completely surrounded by mountains, except for a tiny gap that lets in cell signals from Blythe.


Day 8
Palen Pass attempt. I couldn't get up a steep hill on the far side, so I drove back up the pass to find a spot to camp.


It rained a bit in the late afternoon, and a rainbow caught the sunset.


Day 9
Conquer the steep hill and finish Palen Pass.

It turns out the van can make it up the steep, loose slope if I unloaded half my gear and carried it up by hand.


That evening I camped near the Colorado River Aqueduct.



I'll make another post for the second half of the trip.

meowmeowmeowmeow
Jan 4, 2017
Sweet photos, looks like a rad trip. I'd love to do some exploring in that part of the US, jealous.

As a comment, your rigging around the boulder is a little sketch as you've made what's called the American death triangle. It adds load to your green webbing and carabineers between the strap around the rock and the webbing. If you take the part of the loop that goes directly between the carabineers, give it a half twist and clip it into the point your pulley is attached to it'll make the whole system take high loads better.

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

meowmeowmeowmeow posted:

As a comment, your rigging around the boulder is a little sketch as you've made what's called the American death triangle. It adds load to your green webbing and carabineers between the strap around the rock and the webbing. If you take the part of the loop that goes directly between the carabineers, give it a half twist and clip it into the point your pulley is attached to it'll make the whole system take high loads better.

I didn't know it had a name, and even a wikipedia page: American Death Triangle.

I made it up on the fly for this recovery, reasoning about it from first principles. It might not be obvious from the pics, but that rock had 'hips' and I wanted the rigging to cinch it tightly, to keep the yellow strap from slipping. That force amplification was what I had in mind when I made it.

Note that this is a strap around a rock, not two independent anchors. There is no redundancy no matter how you configure the green strap. Please use better anchors than this if you are climbing, ha ha. In this case, if the anchor failed, the van would have slipped sideways an inch or two.

Lately I've been thinking of replacing my homemade webbing slings with industrial polyester slings. I think that green webbing is the weakest link in my system, maybe too weak with pulley multiplication?

e: dyneema chain is also neat stuff, but too expensive for my uses at $130/meter.

ryanrs fucked around with this message at 08:08 on Jan 12, 2023

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

Day 10 - Corn Springs

On my mapping app, I noticed Corn Springs Rd cuts through the middle of the Chuckwalla Mountains Wilderness. Generally when a road cuts through a wilderness area, there's something at least mildly interesting there.

There was a paid camping area, which I skipped. Instead, I camped a few miles down the road at a nice spot.


A bit past the paid camping area, I came across a cardboard sign in a big wash advertising "Hobo New Year". I also saw a guy digging out a stuck RV, so I stopped to help.

The guy had already dug out most of the sand and jacked up the rear of the RV. His friends with a truck were out hiking, and would be able to pull the RV out of the sand when they got back.

But wouldn't it be so much funnier to pull out the RV with minivan, I thought? I placed an anchor around a big palo verde tree, and used pulleys to create a 2:1 mechanical advantage. When combined with my amazon traction boards under the RV, this was just barely enough to pull it out of the hole and onto firmer sand.

But while I was pulling, just after the RV got free, my van got stuck. Then the RV started to get stuck again! At that point we stopped, having proved the van could recover the RV, mostly.



Later on I met some of the other hobos at the gathering. I've train-hopped once, about 20 years ago, a two-week, five-state loop of California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, and back to Roseville, CA. It was a one-time adventure, but to pull it off safe-ish-ly I did a ton of research into West Coast rail infrastructure and the hobo community. So it was neat to chat trains again, because we knew the same places, and some of the same people.


Day 11

Leaving Corn Springs, once I was back on pavement, it became clear something was wrong with the van's suspension, or alignment, or steering. The steering wheel was crooked when driving straight (and it wasn't like that before).

There wasn't a lot to do about it right then, since it was Sunday and also New Years Day. So I camped a couple miles off I-10, outside Indio.


Day 12 - Indio

First thing in the morning I took the van to an alignment shop in Indio. I told the tech that something had happened while offroading, and I think it needed an alignment. I mentioned to look for broken or bent parts, because the van had taken some hard hits.

He adjusted with the camber, said nothing was bent, and gave the van a clean bill of health, at least wrt alignment.

I decided to spend the night at a hotel in Indio. I ate real food, washed a bunch of clothes at the laundromat, and took several hot showers. It was pretty great!



Next: Sand and Fighter Jets in Ocotillo

ryanrs fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Jan 12, 2023

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

Land of Sand and Wildflowers

With the van fixed* and some clean clothes, I headed south on 86 towards Mexico.

The Salton Sea.



Ocotillo Wells SRVA lies to the west of 86. That is not where I'm headed. I'm heading further south, to Superstition Hills BLM land south of 78.

Pro Tip: If you head south on 86, you will pass by a Border Patrol internal checkpoint, which is pretty bullshit IMO. Try to exit BLM land by hitting 78 west of 86, as shown below. Note that south of the checkpoint, 78 and 86 are the same road, which might be confusing. When you turn left from 78E onto 86N, you'll merge into northbound traffic just as it exits the checkpoint, heh.


So much sand.


But it was very firm sand, an ancient seabed, not wind-blown dunes. I ran my tires at 15 psi and I never had much trouble floating on the sand.


When I did get stuck, it was because side-by-sides had dug very deep ruts in the trail, and I'd get high-centered on my skid plates. It wasn't hard to dig the van free, since it's just sand. My traction boards also turned out to be quite effective in the sand, more so than on loose rocky trails.


The van doesn't have quite the performance of a side-by-side (especially if I want to park at the apex and take pics).



Low-flying jets don't photograph so well on a cell phone, but there were two F/A-18s (I think) chasing each other over the valley all afternoon.


One of my low-priority goals for these trips into the desert is to get better at IDing aircraft. I saw my first V-22 Osprey in flight back at Palen Pass, and I could tell it was something unusual from the very weird noise it made. It didn't sound quite like a helicopter, but it had a deep heli-like thumping that you don't hear on e.g. big cargo turboprops. Through binoculars, the rotors spin so slowly you can clearly see them counter-rotating. The one I saw was cruising with rotors facing forward.

The next day the Blue Angels were flying four planes in formation for most of the day. They are based in El Centro during the winter season.


Lost the spare tire, again!

There was a rock poking a couple inches out of the sand, and I hit it at about 25 mph (that's fast). Now, if it it had been a fist-sized rock, that would have been fine. And if it was a giant boulder, that would also have been ok (probably). In that case, the van would have surfed over the rock on the skid plates.

But this rock was neither. It was a medium size chunk of granite, big enough to cause trouble, and yet small enough to be knocked loose. My skid plate kicked it up out of the sand, and it rolled up and hit my spare tire. The rock managed to catch the tire just right, break it off the mount, and cause the back of the van to pole-vault off the tire as it flipped out from under the van. Lol.


I may need to relocate the spare, since it's broken free twice now. At least the skid plate hosed up the rock pretty good, heh.


Some places in the desert.



Hairy Desert Sunflower and Desert Sand-Verbena


ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

Driving Around in the Sand

https://vimeo.com/788818977

https://vimeo.com/788823471

I feel like the van driving through the sand at 15-25 mph does not make for very compelling video.

SpeedFreek
Jan 10, 2008
And Im Lobster Jesus!
The spare coming off was probably a good oh poo poo moment. I would have expected the rear bumper skin to come off with it.

This week's rental is a Toyota minivan, I thought of this thread but decided against off roading it this time.

Rick
Feb 23, 2004
When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.
Glad to read the traction boards worked since I have been wondering about them myself.

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

Yeah the back of the van jumped up, so I pulled over to check it out.

While walking back to take a pic of the rock, I saw the tire on the side of the road and thought to myself "someone else hit that rock worse than I did, lol".

Took a couple seconds before I realized it was my own spare. :smith:

FogHelmut
Dec 18, 2003

Be careful close to the Salton Sea because there's a lot of stuff that looks solid on the surface but you'll be instantly up to your rockers in briny mud. People are always driving into that stuff.

meowmeowmeowmeow
Jan 4, 2017

ryanrs posted:

Yeah the back of the van jumped up, so I pulled over to check it out.

While walking back to take a pic of the rock, I saw the tire on the side of the road and thought to myself "someone else hit that rock worse than I did, lol".

Took a couple seconds before I realized it was my own spare. :smith:

hahahaha

I only posted the advice about the strap routing because it would be a big shame to snap your strap in the middle of nowhere, once you start putting a meaningful amount of mechanical advantage or using a come-along into webbing and carabiners they're easier to brake than you think, I've done it a before with a 9:1 and a couple people pulling on the line.

Webbing is so cheap if you want something stronger I'd just get more and double and triple your loops if you get worried about ultimate strength.

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

Return Trip

Leaving Superstition Hills, when I got back on pavement something definitely felt wrong with the van. I felt like the same issue I had when I took it to the alignment shop, but I had never really nailed down what that was.

Something was wrong, but it took some driving to really nail it down. There was about 1/10th turn of play in the steering, that wasn't there before.

Once I realized it was a steering problem, I stopped for day and set up camp. I did not want to risk losing all steering, in case it was about to fail completely. I posted to the Stupid Questions thread, and received mixed replies. There was good advice to check the u-joints on the steering column and the tie rod spherical ends.

A couple posters were adamant it needed to go to a shop. But I had already taken it to a shop. And if I was going to take it in again, I wanted to have a much better idea of exactly what was wrong.

I ended up shoving some lights down by the steering rack, and recording it with my phone while I turned the steering wheel. The video showed exactly what was loose: the steering rack bushings had disintegrated, so the entire rack could move back and forth 1/4" or so. But the mounting bolts themselves were tight, the rack moved smoothly even for tiny steering inputs, the tie rod joints were solid, etc, etc. So while the loose steering rack was really not good, it wouldn't suddenly become worse on the way home.

I know there will be disagreement as to whether I should have driven it home, or taken the van in for a steering rack replacement in Barstow. But the steering play wasn't actually that terrible. I had no issue keeping the van in my lane, and it wasn't as if I had to constantly jerk the wheel back and forth to keep going straight. The drive home was uneventful.



That's my next repair project: replace the steering rack. It's been leaking power steering fluid for over a year. I filled it with PS Stop Leak which miraculously fixed 99% of the leaking. This stop leak is a homogenous, very high viscosity PS fluid. It doesn't have particulates or gunk in it. I think it has a bit of solvent in it that causes the steering rack rubber seals to swell. My gut feeling is that this stuff probably hasn't destroyed my PS pump, but I dunno. The pump was run dry once (enough to make a whirring noise when turning). I topped off the PS fluid that same day. It hasn't been regularly run dry.

I also need to fix the A/C, will require fabricating a refrigerant pipe blockoff plate.

Maybe relocate the spare tire? Or at least fix the snapped cable.

Safety Dance
Sep 10, 2007

Five degrees to starboard!

ryanrs posted:

Return Trip

Maybe relocate the spare tire? Or at least fix the snapped cable.

You could upgrade the gas shocks on the liftgate and mount it there (assuming there's some structure to mount it to).

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

Oh man, the Sienna Service Manual shows how to rebuild the steering rack. I could take it apart and just fix the leaking seals!

That would be a cool project if the special Toyota tools didn't cost way more than a new steering rack from the dealer.

wesleywillis
Dec 30, 2016

SUCK A MALE CAMEL'S DICK WITH MIRACLE WHIP!!
Don't forget the new bushings.

kastein
Aug 31, 2011

Moderator at http://www.ridgelineownersclub.com/forums/and soon to be mod of AI. MAKE AI GREAT AGAIN. Motronic for VP.
Can you fabricobble the tools?

Pulling the rack to rebuild it without a spare on hand is a risky move, at least without a spare vehicle, so I normally buy a new part, install it, and then rebuild the old one as a spare.

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

Oh, that sounds like a good idea. I can shrink wrap the old one and stash it in the metal shop for an indefinite period of time.

Tie rods, ball joints? Dunno if doing these preemptively is worthwhile, if the parts feel tight. Access looks super easy, so it's not really a "while I'm in there" situation. Or is it?

kastein
Aug 31, 2011

Moderator at http://www.ridgelineownersclub.com/forums/and soon to be mod of AI. MAKE AI GREAT AGAIN. Motronic for VP.
If they're factory with no play I'd leave them alone, probably will last longer unfuckedwith than new aftermarket.

The inner tie rods can be a pain in the dick to get off of the rack on IFS cars, better to at least break them loose before removing it. Usually need a special tool for them and may need to pull the outer tie rods to get the special tool on.

Might want to pick up new bolts for the rack mounting as well if the rack has been sliding into the threads repeatedly. I have no idea if this is possible on that thing or if it's just been a bushing clamp getting blasted by the rack flapping around.

ryanrs
Jul 12, 2011

Youtube: A video of this exact repair.
This is a very well done repair video. He shows the work and the tools. Zero chit-chat.

This is the $631 dealer part. It looks like it comes with everything except the tie rod ends.

e: It just occurred to me that if I am stockpiling major spare parts, I'm really committing myself to the 1st gen Sienna platform, perhaps beyond this current vehicle. If I have too many spare parts, I'll almost have to buy a replacement Sienna when this one dies. But I dunno about that. The Sienna isn't actually good offroad, if we're being honest.

ryanrs fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Jan 14, 2023

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wesleywillis
Dec 30, 2016

SUCK A MALE CAMEL'S DICK WITH MIRACLE WHIP!!
Replace it with a second gen and put a lift kit on it.

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