The Shadow People

 3 Nov 2023

     I was on my way to the Sierras going to pick up my friend Alane when I became aware of the Shadow People. All my life I had seen signs of them, yet it took this trip to acknowledge their existence and the threat they are to the whole World.

    Let me start by saying I don't think I've ever actually seen a shadow person, O maybe that flicker on the edge of my vision was one and I just didn't realize it. Now that I am more informed I will try to turn my head a little quicker next time. They are really fast!

   So what did I learn about these shadow folk? Glad you asked! For 1, they must be everywhere! Throughout California and Nevada, both in cities and rural I saw signs of them and their animals. OH, YES! They have animals too!

  So the first giveaway for me was just seeing this warning sign along the roadways that Shadow People were up ahead. It seemed the roads leading into every town had them,

   Once I realized that the Shadow People existed I learned that they had children just like us non-shadows.

Indeed, in some places apparently whole Shadow families are known to scurry across the roads dragging their Shadow kids behind them!

   Their are even places where Shadow men get on their bicycles. I KNOW I've never seen a Shadow cyclist on the road. There was that one time when I was out mountainbiking though....

   Out in Nevada we didn't see whole herds of Shadow cattle, yet the signs were there!

   Some appeared quite dangerous!

There are places where the Shadow People are not allowed to go;

   So on Saturday morning Oct 14th I realized that the Moon was NOT going in front of the Sun. Instead I saw it for what it was: An effort by the Shadow People to permanently block the light from the Sun so they could go out and about freely and not live in the shadows! The Shadow People want to rule Earth!

   The Earth was lucky to escape this time!

     Upon further investigation I discovered that there are also Pale People, perhaps they are another race of Shadow People? There needs to be DNA studies!

    And evidently not all of these folk are to be trusted, here is a Pale man abducting a Pale girl seeking to get away on a Pale bicycle!

15 Nov, 2023

It's not fair! Now I am told that they have flying cars before we do!

Annular Eclipse Trip

 12 Oct 2023

Packing up my scope in the 109,

I left my house heading to the Sierras where my friend lives in Mountain Ranch. Once across the Central Valley and up into the mountains to her house, we put our gear out and packed what we needed into her 2002 Range Rover. Early the next morning at O dark thirty we headed East to Nevada.

    We had originally intended to head to Winnemucca, except the weather forecast wasn't so good so we searched GoogleEarth and found a place NE of Eureka up NV Hwy 892, just past the end of pavement.

13 Oct 2023

 It was a long drive across the Loneliest Highway in America, 50. We fueled up in Eureka before heading East and then North on 892.

   As always the scenery was spectacular and having learned so much more about the geology made it more interesting as Alane read from the Roadside Geology of Nevada book.

Here is a screenshot of the round trip;

Some of the terrain along the way;

We figured that we would be the only ones around such a remote place. Shortly after we got there I shot this video;

When perhaps a hour after we got there a caravan of Jeeps turned off and headed down a road I hadn't seen on GE. Mostly Gladiators none stopped to say hi. That night shortly after dark we saw a light bobbing our direction along the road we came in on, It passed us by and kept heading down the road. I figure it was some local who had been to the next ranch over and visited his girlfriend. Weird though.

After dinner we spent a little time checking out the stars with my telescope, Jupiter was up and we could see 4 moons lined up. As it was cold we got in the sleeping bags around 9 and went to sleep.

During the night I had set my trail cam up at the end of the Rover an we did have a visitor.

 https://youtu.be/lhn-K6s0L98

14 Oct 2023

     After a solid nights sleep I woke up around 0630 and got up. My Dobsonian telescope was set up and ready to view the eclipse.

The eclipse started early around 0804 and I oscillated between the scope and eclipse glasses. Here are some of the pics I took holding my point n shoot up to the telescopes lens.

  The sky darkened somewhat and didn't get as cold as we expected.

As the moon centered itself and the limbs closed around it I caught a brief view of the mountains on the Moon, Sadly I could not get a pic of that. 

And then it was annularity!  I figure we got around 4 min of annularity,

It was not so dark, the breeze had died down and it got COLD! We guessed that at around 40% coverage we began to feel warmth in the rays and shortly after that the breeze began to resume.

After the eclipse was over I ran my metal detector over the ground a bit and besides trash I found this hitch pin,

Packing up;

After packing up the Jeep convoy came out and 1 of them stopped to talk, they were from SoCal, We headed back to Hwy 50 and fueled up in Austin prior to turning off on 722 and there we headed down to Hwy 21 at that turnoff we had lunch,

We drove down the Reese River Valley and searched for the road over to Grantsville, an abandoned mining town.

  Not soon after we went to Berlin Ghost town. This is the 30 stamp mill.

    As it was almost sunset when we left we headed to Hawthorne and some din-din at Port o Subs, the only other place open was Mickey D's.

I finished up the day driving to Hwy 395 and then Alane took over driving us via Hwy 4(won't do that again) and back to her home. There we both hit the hay. It had been a Loooong 894miles.

15 Oct 2023

After breakfast since she lives in gold country we couldn't not metal some of her property. We found metal cans and a tent pole and a grommet and a few nails, no gold.......

The eclipse was very cool, if you ever get the chance GO! I've now seen 2 totals and 1 annular and a few partials.

After detecting I hopped back in my 109 and headed home. Traffic was good until I hit Manteca then things got brutal, an accident kept me in stop n go for around 45 min in the sweltering sun, At one point I measured 113°F on my chest! Passing the accident things got better until hitting Livermore when I missed my turnoff and had to sit in stop n go again.........

But I made it home to tell the tale.

Land Rover Jaeger speedometer repair

 26 Sept 2023

   I got in my 109 yesterday for a Dr appointment, a few miles into the drive I noticed the speedo was not moving. I figured I knew what happened, the input bushing froze up .....again, for the third time.

   So today I set out to at least change the busted cable if the bushing wasn't the issue.

First thing was to drop the dash and see if the cable had just fallen off.

No such luck!  I put the end of an old inner cable in the input and tried to turn it.. Frozen solid! So I pulled out the speedo and took it in my shed and tore it apart, thinking if I couldn't get it unfrozen I could swap parts from a couple of my spares.

    Mine has a trip meter so it is a little more complicated. I/you can get a lot of good information from;

http://triumph.daveola.com/NOTES/Speedo_Repair.pdf  I read in many years ago and only screwed up a little. But I got it apart.

   The input shaft had near solid paste on it and took some working back and forth to remove from the main frame. I also had to remove 2 brass screws holding it by the mounting flange. You can see the input shaft and main frame in these images.

   At first I thought the easy way would be to just swap parts, so I looked at my spares, One wouldn't work at all as it was for a Series 3, so I took apart my other. Here I found another difference, the mounting plate was riveted on not screwed on so I was back to trying to fix my original. I did drill out the rivets to see if I could use that input and to be able to test and find out where mine was binding up.

  Access to the back of the rivets;

During dismantling I discovered 2 hairsprings which control the motion of the trip reset and the odo timing. The 2 brass screws are for the mounting plate.

I cleaned the old grease off my original(rt) and compared it to the spare(lf) with flexible grease and did some testing by spinning them both in each others mainframe. I figured that there might be some wear on the original as it kept binding going in and out. I used some 1500 grit sandpaper to clean it up, yet the binding was still there.

The binding was only with the original mainframe. I had to figure out how to sand inside it! What I came up with was wrapping 1500 sandpaper around a small drill bit, putting it in my drill. Then with the drill held firmly in a vise I had 2 hands free to control the speed and the movement of the mainframe. I lightly reamed it, rinsed it with acetone and tried the input shaft. SUCCESS! It spun freely!

    I used Phil grease to lube the input shaft. The speedo pdf just calls for light grease.

Then unbeknownst to me came the hard part! Oh, no problem putting the input shaft and mounting flange back on the mainframe. It was those tiny little hairsprings! Remember them?

I tried this way and that and couldn't for the life of me get the first one on, then it took a flier and I didn't see where too. No problem I have a spare, right? My tools were too big and unwieldy. I finally decided I needed something like chopsticks only toothpick sized. I went in the house and got chopsticks and toothpicks. Toothpicks did the job, I was able to hold the spring on the toothpick and set one end, then using another pick I held the end on so I could mess with the hook end. On 1 spring I was able to use the toothpick to set the hooked end, on the other I had to use a dental pick to lift it into place and slide it into the hole with the flat end of the toothpick.

   Ok so that was the first one, time for the spare spring,..........wait it doesn't have any springs, different model, I'm screwed.......getting a powerful flashlight I started a search through the crap in my shed looking for a tiny spring........After about 3 min, lo and behold I found it next to my grinding wheel stand. And using my newfound technique with toothpicks I re-installed it. You guys with nice workshops and garages don't know how nice you have it!

 In this last image you can barely see the hook end of the spring in the hole by the #7.

Despite my best efforts I got it done. I finished pulling the outer cable and getting the broken end out of the speedo drive and re-installing my spare complete cable. Then put the dash back together, I moved the 109 in the driveway enough to see the needle move.

So I'll see how well I did and how long this one lasts! I'm getting too old to do this.......I'm sore an tired!