The Crimper

Normally, crimpers for large size terminals are super expensive; but Harbor Freight, as usual, sells a hydraulic crimper with large dies for just about fifty bucks.

Here it is, in it's full glory.

Crimper

Dies

Technically, the way it's designed is it's supposed to produce these nice hexagonal crimps. Or at least, I think that's what they were trying to do.

But those familiar with crimpers know that the key is in good dies; and that's were most of the money is. Damn, "regular" stripping dies for StripMaster are what, $10; while milspec dies are what, $150? Now; of course there's diminishing returns there - in the case of StripMaster, regular dies work just fine for most applications.

Here's the problem with HF Crimper dies. The holes in them are severely undersized, which makes them produce "flat", rather than hexagonal crimps. We can't know if this is by design. What I tried to do is to research what others are doing, and to run a few "is this a good crimp" tests.

The Test Setup

I was crimping chunks of 8 AWG MIL-W-22759/16 wire into AMP Battery Terminals.

The Terminal

After crimping, the terminals were hacksawed in the middle of the crimp, and polished to see if there were any voids or visible wire strands. A good crimp must be "gas tight". In other words, all the metal has to be pushed together hard enough to become a single piece of metal for all intents and purposes.

Using 8 AWG dies

For baseline, I used the HF die marked for 8 AWG.

8 AWG die / crimp

8 AWG die / crimp

As you can see, using the "nominal" die produces this weird, flattish-with-a-bulge crimp. What's worse is it adds this strange "jog" to the terminal lengthwise, and scrapes the metal inward where the crimp starts. That's lots of stress risers.

8 AWG die / cutaway

The crimp quality is good though. There are a few specks of shavings I didn't clean off - those are not defects.

Using 6 AWG Dies

I went next size up, to dies marked for 6 AWG. That produced the same crimp as for 8 AWG, but with "wings" being thinner - almost paper-thin. I also didn't like how it mangled the terminal even more.

Somebody online mentioned that they rotated the crimp 90 degrees and did it again to "push the wings in" and I tried that.

6 AWG die / crimp

6 AWG die / crimp

I think the resulting crimp, while tight, is too rough to be acceptable. It almost feels tortured.

6 AWG die / cutaway

Inside though, it's all nice and compressed.

Using 4 AWG Dies

Finally, I tried 4 AWG dies.

4 AWG die / crimp

This crimp almost looks good. The jog is almost not there, and it has nice hexagonal shape. "Wings" are almost not present.

However, the dies closed fully and it felt to me that the metal was not compressed enough (I recall the resistance I felt in the crimper doing the previous two tests, and the resistance I felt on this one was much less).

The cutaway confirmed that.

4 AWG die / cutaway

Those imperfections on the cutaway are voids left from not enough compression force applied.

Conclusion

Well, it's a sad one really. If you want to use the HF tool, then you probably should use dies that make those "winged" style crimps (like the one produced in my first test), and suck up the jog and other imperfections.

I have posted my findings on AeroElectric list, and the conclusions seems to be supported - the dies are horrible, and to make them real good one would need to rework them significantly.

• Main thread
• Sub-thread one
• Sub-thread two
• Sub-thread three

Or, alternatively, just solder them (here's a nice howto by Mr. Nuckolls) , which is what I am seriously considering.

Update - October 2019

After trying and failing the soldering approach, I have devised a technique of using this crimper to achieve good results. Musings linked in the previous sentence, and here's the jist:

• Given wire gauge of, say, 6
• Use die 2 sizes up - so, die marked for #2 wire
• Put the wire in the terminal. Start by squeezing the terminal turned 90 degrees (so "side to side" rather then "top to bottom"). Just give it a gentle oval shape
• Now, turn it 90 degrees and squeeze until the jaws close
• At this point, you will have a somewhat undercrimped joint, as I described in my notes on the crimper; but it's shape will be a perfect hex.
• Now, go 1 size "down" (so, dies marked for #4 wire). Squeeze.
• Stop when you feel it's done shrinking.

Pretty!

Easy Route

I didn't have anything in the hangar besides a couple of old bookshelves, a couple of small tables, a few filing cabinets I have inherited from my good friend Pete, and a cart. Not very nicely set up for working on airplanes, and everything was overflowing with parts, tools, and hardware even after just a bit of disassembly I have done for the annual.

I needed a lot of shelf space, and a lot of bench space.

I decided to take an easy route this time, and instead of building everything, just bought a bunch of shelves at Costco, and benches and a tool cart at ... Harbor Freight. Yep, I know. Throw a rotten egg in my face next time you see me.

The First Shelf

The Light

I work evenings a lot, and the only light source there was there was a four T8 tube fixture in the back of the hangar. But the most interesting stuff is on the front of it (engine, yep :) ). So I added some lights around the front.

Lights

The Benches

Next, came the benches from Harbor Freight. Don't buy them. They're built like crap, and, frankly, I think I could've built better ones out of 2x4s in about the same amount of time it took me to put these together... But hey, I already bought them, and disassembling the first one (I got three total) rather than putting the other two together... I didn't want to...

Benches

You might notice the pegboard at the back "wall" of those benches. Well, they attach it every about 12 inches around the perimeter with machine screws and nuts. Guess what happened to the first pegboard after a humidity cycled high, and then low? Yep; it all warped!

Ended up resorting to straightening it out with shelves that acted as "stiffeners", and putting the warped pegboard bench as far away from the "main" bench as possible).

On the other two I actually made the pegboard "floating" - re-drilled the mounting holes to be large, and used large washers and just enough small washers underneath to MacGyver me a "bushing". That worked, and the other two benches' pegboard is straight after quite a few large humidity changes now.

And then, the sink.

The Sink

I long had a large 7 gallon jug with a tap. When I was doing a lot of work, I'd drag it out of the hangar, put it on a small folding table, and use it to wash my hands. Very nice to be able to do that when your hands are covered in oil and crud, and you need to climb into the airplane or grab something generally clean. I also like clean hands when doing detail work like soldering, painting, etc.

The Jug

But dragging out a 7 gallon jug every time I got into the hangar got very old very fast, and I ended up typically resorting to rags and not so clean hands, or "washing" them with mineral spirits... ugh.

But hey, we're cleaning up! So I decided to put in...

The Sink!

But a sink needs a drain!

No problem.

The Drain.

This came out very nice, and I love that I can now just wash my hands whenever, no jug dragging required.

The best part? The hangar door slides, so I can have it closed and then slide it a bit past it's "closed" position, so that there's a gap between the hangar divider wall and the outside for the drain to be put out.

But how do I close the door?

Retractable!

Do I need a Complex endorsement to operate in my hangar now? ;)

The Wiring

Before you wire your plane, wire your hangar, says a proverb. Or something like that.

Well, my hangar floods. And it's not my hangar, so I can't quite make holes in the walls and run wiring and conduit. And I only have one outlet. Yep.

So it was all to be a bunch of extension cords, making sure that all connections are suspended a few inches above the floor, hooked to something (previous tenant of my hangar had some holes in the walls drilled, so I reused his, or hooked them up to legs of whatever was there, etc).

I ended up making a bunch of splices on extension cords. Hey, I love soldering!

Almost a splice

And now, with liquid metal!

Air and Shelves

I had a compressor. I moved it to the back corner of the hanger, and hooked up a reel in the front, so that I can have my hoses neat... Not much more.

The back wall of the hangar got lined with the big shelves, too... Mostly, to stack the parts I take off the plane and need to keep off.

The first one up is there on the right, near the yellow barrel.

The First Shelf

Some child labor might have been involved in cleaning this hangar

The Shrine

... and since the Charger is a Grand Champion, I needed a shrine in the "mancave corner" of the hangar. Every hangar must have a corner with a couch, a fridge and what-not, to relax and ponder and procrastinate. And that's where all the artifacts need to go.

The Shrine

And I didn't drill a single hole! All those rails and shelf are re-using the screws that are holding the hangar walls together :).

The Bench

I needed at least one good bench for grinders, bandsaw, and aluminum work; and there was a perfect spot for it. Didn't have my wood tools though, so had to use 2x4s straight out of the store... Normally, I mill them down :).

The top and the frame to be

Legs

All together...

... and then, you flip it, add the bottom shelf, attach the leg stands, and voila:

The bench

Even though it's not very flat, it's perfectly fine for anything but being a reference flat surface for assemblies...

Set up

The End

Well, and I guess, that was it. I spent a few more days and evenings cleaning up, and putting everything in place. And I guess, we're due for some "before" and "after" pics :).

Lighting: before

Lighting: after

The mancave: before

The mancave: after

The back: before

The back: after

The main work area: before

The main work area: after

Benches' closeup

So, there. Took me a month with the breaks for fixing HVAC wiring on a Subaru (funny how that happened in anticipation for rewiring the plane, eh? and I really started to dig Molex connectors doing the fix - but we'll talk about Molex when the time comes), and a bunch of other stuff.

But hey, I can work on things comfortably now. And, wash my hands whenever I want!

Segway

... so yeah. I needed to add a static page, and I had a bunch of ideas about extra stuff I wanted to do for a while. But mostly, I just needed to add a damn static page, and thinking about coercing the existing setup into doing that with all the pictures I needed there was not making me happy...

... it was also about time I set this thing up so that I could actually log more projects than just a single airplane. Hey, I bet we all know - websites of this kind are mostly created to be later enjoyed by their authors in periods of 'I ain't got nothing better to do than review my old notes' mood ...

Multiple Projects

First of all, I wanted to be able to log multiple projects. The way the old setup was done was it had basically one project, under the section called "Build", and then this dangling catch-all "blog" thing for everything else.

But as you can see, most of articles here actually are NOT about the airplane I was working on at the time - the Skybolt - but rather, other little things here and there.

First thing I did, is I changed the way the files are laid out, and added semantics converting source content's directory structure to "Project / Section" semantics.

Each project now has it's own "sub-log" (that's what time logged is tracked based on). There is still a catch-all "blog" section, and a "default" project that can be configured if one so desires.

Logging

One more thing I realised is that the original version would only allow to log time if it was associated with an article-type entry... Flooding the Internet with tens of pages of "built three more ribs tonight" type stuff just to log time seemed kinda silly, so I added support for plain text log entries.

Articles still can track time; but you can also now have a separate text file with just "Date", "Summary", and "Time Logged" entries - one per line.

When creating the "log" page for a project, entries, being both from articles and from logfiles, are sorted by date, and then ones with articles associated with them will pick their summaries up from articles. Entries coming from text files will be displayed with summaries from log files.

Major Code Cleanup

All this time tracking functionality, structuring articles into projects, and such, were becoming an entity of its own large enough for me to justify clumping it all into a single Pelican's plugin, now called "b_log". I also added a bunch of config options to set up it's behavior.

No Google Analytics

Yeah. I killed it. This site Does Not Track You now. Because there's too much of this crap online.

Fixes, Fixes, Fixes

Too many to count...

• Fixed how logos and icons behave
• Fixed templates in numerous places
• Fixed bugs in image processing and copying
• Images in pages now handled properly - they just weren't. At all
• Decimals in logged times would sometimes show up to 10 digits past the decimal point
• ...

Silliness

And finally, some silliness! I wrote another plugin that adds a "quote of the day" at the end of each article, randomly :) Enjoy; and I hope they will encourage you to read more articles (or at least, scroll thru them to get to the bits of wisdom).

And So, (v2)

I got happier now.

I have changed the B-Log notes to match the new setup, just so that there's one place I can send people to in case they are interested in my setup.

And I'm very close to posting that damn page, but...

...of course, I am restructuring the old content and modifying old pages instead to match what I got now, and writing stupid notes on what I did to the thing. Because, as we all know, making yourself a tool is as, if not more, pleasant, as using it...

The Problem

... was that I needed something to organize my builder's log. Being a software engineer by trade, I didn't want to go old school with paper logs and pictures, and whatever-random-collection-of-stuff-on-a-computer I could do. I wanted something that's easy to add entries to, calculates everything automatically, and allows me to publish it on the Web. Plus, I find it pleasant to view HTML as opposed to .doc, .pdf, or whatever.

Being a nerd, I just had to make it as nice for myself as I could...

The KitLog Pro

Many-a-builder is using this apparently successful piece of work. Apparently, as of writing this, they have over 1100 logs published on their mykitlog.com.

I have played around with it quite a bit. The program is trivially simple; but I can't stand the way it's architected.

• Windows only
• Uses Access database for storage (sic!!)
• Only three pictures per entry (really???)

Oh, the Access databases. Basically, what this means to me as a user is if it ever .. erm.. decides to stop working, I will loose all my data. "Revert to a backup", you say.. Yes, but if the problem is that I can't add my N+1st record because the DB just corrupted itself, no backup will help -- I'm stuck.

On top of that if, god forbid, KitLog ever goes out of business, I am stuck with the data that I can't export w/o some serious reverse engineering.

No thank you. :)

The Early Attempts

So, I was toying around with other stuff.

Mutilation of the Pelican

The Pelican. I fell in love with this thing almost immediately. Here's what it does:

• Takes a directory with a bunch of ReST, Markdown, or ASCIIDOC
• Parses all those files into internal state, obtaining metadata from both files and paths (ie, if you organize your files in category/<date>/name way, you can tell it to properly parse that path and populate the metadata)
• Uses Jinja templates for generating a bunch of HTML output
• Allows plugins and custom templates
• Is all Python!

I did the initial version in 2014 (the date of this article). Then, I've spent about a week tearing it to pieces and figuring out how it works, and adding a few plugins to add things that I needed for the B-Log that it didn't have. I added time tracking, changed layout, got a Bootstrap-based template and modified it, etc.

In 2018, I fixed some suff and added a few more things.

You be the judge of results :).

Here's what I've done, in the end:

• I'm writing text in ReST, so I've added the custom directive to it allowing for 'figures'. Problem is, ReST image directive produces HTML that wasn't much useful to present images the way I wanted them. Instead of modifying core Pelican code, I elected to add a custom 'Figure' directive. This is done as a Pelican plugin. This plugin also automatically adds thumbnails for images. This is the figure_process plugin. It also requires the image_copy plugin.
• Another plugin I've written is image_copy. It enables sane handling of images placed next to the entries (pages and articles). Back when I started in 2014, Pelican wanted you to separate images and text (and it's internal mechanism of not separating them was broken back then). Pelican guys might've fixed this in the last 3 years, but hey, my setup worked for me - and I kept it.
• And most importantly, the plugin that allows the bulk of functionality - the b_log plugin. It does a lot of stuff:
  • Generates the project structure ("Project / Section" concept with multiple projects)
  • Enables a special metadata tag to track time in an article
  • Loads and parses logfiles that don't have articles associated with entries
  • Calculates totals
  • Creates internal data structures for theme templates to use
  • Renders log pages
• Then came theming. Pelican is geared towards bloggers, so I had to tweak a lot of things to be better suited for B-Logging (build logging, remember? :) ). In the process, I've switched to Bootstrap, since it makes it very easy to organize content on a webpage. I added theme templates to produce the build logs with totals, etc, etc. Also integrated FancyBox - a really cool JavaScript image overlay.
• I added a couple of extras for myself - like silly QuOTD messages at the bottom of each entry - but that's not strictly related to B-Logging...

I like the end-result. I enjoyed hacking at it, and this was the first time I touched Python (so had to learn that on the way). Pretty neat (though I still prefer Perl (now, why do you need lists and tuples and sets again? :) ).

The only drawback is that it's regenerating everything every time. You can easily see how that might become a problem when you get a lot of entries, but I'm feeling like I'm ways away. 30 pages take about a second. I think I will need a lot of records before this becomes a problem; and at that point I will rewrite the whole damn thing to cache stuff.. probably :)

The code is here. The repo includes my theme, plugins, some tools, and sample content. It requires Python (I used 3.6 and did not test anything else), Pelican (which is checked into the repo in pelican/, along with it's dependencies), and Pillow (pip install pillow). Oh yeah, and pelicanconf.py's PATH_METADATA will likely require tweaking of slashes on Windows.

Read the config file (pelicanconf.py); and read thru Pelican docs to get the idea. sample-content/ contains my sample generated content that I was testing with. content-gen/ contains the simple Perl script that generates as much sample content as you want.

/project-one/section-one/

        2001-01-01-entry-one/
                    entry-one.rst
                    picture.jpg

        section-one-log.log

/project-one/section-two/

        2001-01-02-entry-two/
                    entry-two.rst
                    picture.jpg

        section-two-log.log

/project-two/section-one/

        2002-01-01-entry-one/
                    entry-one.rst
                    picture.jpg

/project-two/section-two/

        2002-01-02-entry-two/
                    entry-two.rst
                    picture.jpg

2011-01-01 | Some Summary Here       | 1.02
2011-01-02 | Some Other Summary Here | 2.02

And So,

I am very happy with this so far. I have all my logs in practically plain text format, parser for which is open source and available. I have it nicely organized, and I can back it up as I please (to GitHub, anyone? :) ). I can re-write the programs that parse and produce final .html. I can extend the generator and change the theme to produce a printable version of the log, styled for paper rather than web. The list goes on!