The Muhlestein Family

Scott is our scientist.

Today, Scott decided to make an ice-bowl. He used a balloon to freeze water until it was about 1/2 inch thick. Then the boys enjoyed their frozen water treat.

Scott’s ice bowl

2 comments August 10th, 2008

The Winning Catapult

We had a busy week. That is somewhat of an understatement. A more accurate depiction of our week would be to list all the things we were supposed to get done and then line item all the things we didn’t get done because of the activities we were participating in. Amongst all our business however, I was able to get the Webelos together to build a catapult on Tuesday, and then attend the Jeremiah Johnson Camp Saturday. I thought I’d mention a little about how we did.

Before I write about the catapult competition, I thought I’d mention that the boys had fun participating in a wide variety of activities and making progress toward a lot of activity pins. We learned things about planets and stars, slingshots, bows and arrows, BB guns, engineering stuff and even made some miniature catapults.

The leaders guide for the camp said if we wanted, we could bring a catapult to shoot a tennis ball. They said they didn’t want something too terribly big, but something that you could bring and generally not have to assemble when you go there. Here is what we built Tuesday:

Actually, Tuesday we got the frame and most of the work done to where we could launch something but I had a little touch up work to do Saturday morning. Saturday, I put some caps on the end of the axel and screwed a few more screws into the frame so it wouldn’t fall apart. I also added an extra bungee cord so we could get a little more distance.

We won the distance part of our competition by quite a bit. I think we were shooting around 40 or 50 yards but nobody was measuring. (That counts how far the ball rolled after it hit too.) One time, our ball hit some kinds of bump or ditch and bounced backward. It rolled backward for a ways and was still quite a bit further than the nearest ball from another catapult.

For our efforts, we won a bag of jolly ranchers that the boys enjoyed!

Add comment June 29th, 2008

The Quest for HDTV

For a while, we’ve had our eye on a larger TV set. The old 21″ tube that we received from Gayla’s parents was just a little out of date. We decided we’d spend some of our tax refund on a new flat screen LCD TV. For the last while, I’ve been researching all the different options for receiving digital content and I thought I’d write it down for whomever is interested.

We ended up getting a refurbished TV instead of purchasing one locally. After the shipping costs, we still saved about $160. Pretty much any flat screen TV you purchase these days is going to have a wide screen ratio of 16:9. Most older TVs have a 4:3 ratio. When you rent a movie formated for 4:3, it usually says “This movie has been formatted to fit this screen” or something similar. Now, since all of our movies and TV are still being played in that ratio, we have black bars on the sides instead of on the top and bottom!

DTV Options

If you’ve seen standard definition programming on a high resolution screen, you might have noticed that it doesn’t look as good. You can see fuzzy edges and the whole picture looks slightly blurry. To get a nice crisp picture, you have to have high definition programming. As soon as I started looking around at different options for HD programming, I was dismayed at the costs. We currently have Dish Network. To upgrade to an HD receiver and HD programming, we have to pay extra for a nicer receiver, extra for additional channels (they don’t offer the family package in HD), and extra just for having HD. The entire cost comes to around $77/month. I’m unwilling to shell out $77/month for a bunch of crappy channels that I don’t care about anyway so I kept looking. I found out that the other options for purchasing HD programming are pretty much similar in price to Dish Networks. You can’t be fooled by Comcast’s triple play or any of the other offers out there. They give you a nicer rate up front but in the end, charge an arm and a leg.

The good news is that in most areas, you can get the local channels for free over the air. You may have heard about the February 2009 deadline for TV stations to broadcast digital signals instead of analog signals. This means that if you use an antenna to watch TV and you have an old TV, you’ll have to either upgrade your TV or purchase a set top box for around $40 that converts the new digital signals to analog that your TV can understand. If you think that stinks, the government will give you a $40 rebate toward the purchase. Many people are opting simply to upgrade their TV.

I want to distinguish between DTV and HDTV. Many stations are broadcast digitally but they are still in a lower resolution. The only difference with HDTV is that it is broadcast at a higher resolution. Usually, HDTV also has an accompanying 5.1 surround sound audio track being broadcast too. Either way, DTV or HDTV, you have to have a new TV or a set top box to receive it over the air.

Back to Bunny Ears

I decided to give the old bunny ears a try. Most of the shows we like are on locally broadcast channels anyway and we could get a Tivo to record them. (You can plug the antenna into a Tivo too.) I first bought a $15 pair of bunny ears at Best Buy. We seem to have a dead spot in our house around where the TV is. We could pick up a few channels OK but none of the digital channels. I took that back and picked a $30 version at Walmart that has an inline signal amplifier. It worked a lot better. We could pick up a few digital channels. They look great! We still have the receiving problem by our TV and I had to move them by a window to get results so I decided to go all out and by a bigger $60 antenna that you can mount inside your attic.

I had more trouble finding a spot to mount that antenna than I ever thought the result was worth. We could pick up 18-23 digital channels depending on where I could position that antenna but I couldn’t find a good way to route a cable from the attic to where our TV is. In addition, we should have been able to pick up more channels. I could find some in some places and other positions would get different ones. After cutting two holes in different walls (I still have to repair those), and trying different indoor and outdoor positions, I decided it just wasn’t worth it and took that one back too. I think we’ll just buy a nice outdoor antenna that mounts on the roof and hook it to the cable that our Dish Network satellite is currently connected to. We still have a few more months on our Dish contract so we can’t get rid of that just yet. I guess in the mean time we’ll have to deal with a not as high quality TV picture.

On the bright side, Wii games look great with component cables!

4 comments February 10th, 2008

CV Boots on the Hyundai Elantra

For some reason, I keep thinking that it’s better to spend 8 hours working on a vehicle than to drop it off somewhere and pay someone over $200 to do some work.

Anyway, last time I changed CV boots, I had to do 3 of them on my truck. I got all the tools, the parts, and the know how back then, so I thought I’d just go ahead and pick up a new boot kit and do the work Saturday night. Well, as usually happens with my projects, I run into something along the way that makes things take more time. All this applies to our 1999 Hyundai Elantra. (So if anyone finds this by searching, they can learn from my experience.)

The first thing that happened was me braking two lug bolts trying to get the wheel and hub nut off. Who ever heard of lug nuts that won’t come off? I don’t know why they were froze on there. I think that last time I had my tires rotated, the studs were damaged. Whatever the reason, they were stuck on there hard enough for my big 1/2 drive tire iron wrench to just break them off instead of unscrewing them. (I really tried not to break them by the way but they just wouldn’t unscrew.)

The next problem I had was that I couldn’t get the drive axel out. There are 5 bolts around the inner cv joint that came off on my truck. I took those out on the car but the axel still didn’t come out. all my prying and wiggling didn’t change anything.

I decided to just go ahead and change the boot while it was on still attached. No problem because I was changing the outer boot anyway and had already separated the outer axel from the hub (which was pretty easy compared to my truck. I didn’t even have to separate a ball joint or anything). After removing the old boot, I again became stumped at taking the CV joint apart. I gave up and put it all together since it was 11:00 pm by this time.

On Monday, I bought a service manual. I immediately discovered 3 things.

1. You don’t have to take out the 5 bolts to get the drive axel out. Instead, you just pry the joint out of the transmission. I did that and it wasn’t really even that hard.
2. You cannot take the outer CV Joint apart. This is the weirdest thing I’ve seen yet. The joint is pressed together instead of clipped. To change it, you have to remove the Inner joint, slide the boot over the axel to replace the outer boot, and then replace the inner boot again.
3. Buying the service manual is worth the $18.

Well, I had to head back to the store yet again to get more clamps and new boot grease for the inner CV boot. The extra boot clamps I picked up for the inner boot were the kind that you crimp on. Those are easy and go on real tight. Unfortunately, the clamps that came with the boot kit for the outer joint were those universal clamps that are variable length and supposedly you pull tight with a pair of pliers while pushing with a screw driver. Those things really stink. If I wasn’t so tired of driving back to the auto store, I’d have gone and got some more crimp-on clamps. Instead, I wasted an extra 1/2 hour or so until I finally got the dumb universal clamps to work.

Well, this morning (Tuesday) I drove the car in with only two lug nuts holding the front wheel on. The service manual says that you have to have special tools to get the hub apart (which I would have had to do to replace the lug bolts) so I just took it into the local tire place who said they could do the job for $30 or so.

As my neighbor Brian pointed out in my last post about trees, this might should have been filed in the “I thought it was a good idea until…” category It could probably go in the “I’m to cheap to spend money on…” category. But Hey, I didn’t have to spend $200+ to have someone fix it for me!

5 comments November 20th, 2007

Deer

Last night we went on a picnic and then I took a drive up the canyon to do some obligatory road hunting since we were there. Man I like having a range finder and some better binoculars now. We saw about 12 does.

Well, today when Gayla was driving home, she saw two deer run across from the temple into the fields there. She said they both had too many points to count. They were non-typical cactus bucks.

Hm, I guess I’ll have to start hunting American Fork instead.

Add comment August 24th, 2007

An update on my toe.

I decided to take a few pictures of my toenail after it got smashed as reported in this post.

Warning, these toenail pictures are not for the faint of heart.

You can click the “continue reading” link below to see them all.

Continue Reading 11 comments June 24th, 2007

Annoying Things

Today Gayla drove the Van to Spanish Fork. On the way back, she heard grinding noises, saw flashing check engine lights, maintenance required lights, and even a flashing drive light. The van wouldn’t go very good any more. When she pushed on the gas, it just revved the engine. Well, somehow she managed to still go forward back to American Fork. We took it in to the dealer today. Luckily for us, the transmission is still under warranty. We get to have a rental car for a few days (they pay for that too) but it is still annoying to have to fix cars. (I’m not complaining one bit that we don’t have to pay for it though.)

I bought a wheel barrow at Home Depot today. We got rocks scraped off our yard but there is a few where the bobcat couldn’t get. I thought I’d shovel a bit and haul some dirt around. My first load of dirt/rocks, the handle on the wheel barrow broke. That made my new load of dirt/rocks spill too. I went back to Home Depot and they gave me a new handle. Another annoyance but at least I didn’t have to buy a new one.

Add comment May 9th, 2006

Testing out Wordpress.com

Hi everyone, I thought I better reserve me a wordpress.com blog while I could still get a good name. I may start posting stuff here if I decide I like the interface and the features.

Wordpress has a few things that blogger doesn’t have. You can create arbitrary pages and you can also file postings under categories.

In the mean time however, my old stuff is still at My Blogspot Address and the latest stuff is still at Muhlesteins.com

Add comment November 21st, 2005