Wild_Bill_888
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Re: Conduct a safety drill, have your passenger yell out SWAY!!
It is a bit ironic that opnspaces hijacked his own post by including the word sway (dynamic instability) in his post. A careful reading of the opening post reveals that he is describing loss of traction on a curve. Trailer tires are generally made of hard rubber for long life, and they tend to have a lower coefficient of friction than good car/pickup tires. That can be a good thing as you might prefer to have the trailer skid sideways a bit rather than roll over, but on old worn wet pavement traction may be a lot less than you think. The hard trailer tires will be the first to break loose, which is a lot better than the rear axle of the tow vehicle. Reread all the comments with this in mind and you might come to a different conclusion.625Views0likes0CommentsRe: Conduct a safety drill, have your passenger yell out SWAY!!
Because it's a proven way to get the trailer back under control. Great, link to the carefully controlled engineering tests that prove the maximum possible cornering speed is with trailer brakes on. What engineering principle determines the optimum braking force? Sometimes it is helpful to consider extreme examples to understand what happens between those limits. Case 1: Trailer tires are rotating freely with no braking at all. All of the force generated by the skidding tires is applied parallel to the axles pushing the trailer back into position with the maximum available force. Case 2: Brakes locked, tires skidding like a hockey puck. the force generated by the tires is parallel to the skid marks. The Component of force parallel to the axle is small at small angles, increasing to 100% at 90 degrees of trailer rotation. My guess is some people in this situation recovered despite applying the brakes and credited the recovery to their lightning fast reflexes. There is another condition I’ll call Dynamic instability, where the trailer can start swinging side to side. This can happen on a straight dry road with maximum traction. Braking the trailer tires helps this condition by REDUCING the lateral force and speed.626Views0likes0CommentsRe: Conduct a safety drill, have your passenger yell out SWAY!!
Why on earth would you want to apply brakes to trailer tires that are already beyond their friction limit? That simply reduces the lateral restoring force available causing the trailer to swing wider, more likely to hit an oncoming car or a guardrail, tree or boulder. The best you can do is keep both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, and try to keep your vehicle pointed down the road, and hope for the best. Apply brakes after the trailer is realigned.337Views0likes0CommentsRe: Furnace Cycles
“Normal. Ours does that so that it doesn't overheat when running for longer periods of time. Safety feature of the furnace.” Circuit breakers are a safety feature, but if you are relying on a breaker to pop every five minutes you are relying on the last layer of protection, and are not safe. What happens when the contacts of the over temperature switch weld themselves together from excessive cycling?598Views0likes0CommentsRe: Furnace Cycles
If the air flow is vigorous and unobstructed, and the discharge temperature is high, consider lowering the gas pressure to reduce the heat rate to the point where the burner does not cycle. Thermal cycling at high temperature accelerates heat exchanger aging and promotes cracking. High altitude reduces heat transfer, increasing heat exchanger temperature, another reason to reduce heat rate.597Views0likes0CommentsRe: Pop goes the water heater!
“ fwiw the anode rod never did degrade over time“ Is it possible that the rod is not grounded (eg. threads wrapped in Teflon tape)? No current flow, no protection. Scrap off a few flakes and touch with a flame. Burns white hot, mag, melts, aluminum.659Views0likes0CommentsRe: Sale of Direct TV to Dish TV
Just finished a horrible three weeks with dish. They finally replaced a new defective Wally with a used one. Can’t wait for Elon to get his world wide sat network up. He has some up now and has applied for permits for 30,000 small low altitude sats. I figure he can get about 4 Billion customers. At an average $10 / mo that’s an income of 40 Billion/mo, not bad, I’ll be happy to pay it and say goodbye to Dish.292Views0likes0CommentsRe: Voltage Spikes as Gen Runs out of Fuel?
The answer depends on the detailed design of the voltage regulator circuit. A high quality design will prevent big spikes. To test yours, plug in a filament type bulb with various loads you normally have and watch for over bright flashes when it runs out of gas. A compact lightweight generator running at a high power setting has a lot of excess heat stored inside the case. Running out of gas or shutting off with no cool down subjects non power components (rubber, plastics, capacitors etc.) to a temperature spike, aging the equipment.549Views0likes0Comments
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