Monday, April 6, 2009
Being Sick and more Scirocco stuff
I hate being sick. I was sick all last week, thanks Laurel! But I’m mostly recovered now. It does mean though that I didn’t get nearly as much research done as I would have hoped. However, things started to come together today and my learning started to converge, so I may not be as screwed for my meeting tomorrow as I thought. I will at least have something to show for the last two weeks.
I did do some work on the Scirocco since I last updated. Took apart more stuff, ordered a replacement bearing for the steering column while I was at the dealer’s today. I think if I can get the throttle body off while the engine is in the car, then I’ll just remove it and the valve cover and stop there, not actually remove the engine from the car. That is a lot safer in terms of being able to reassembly everything and I think if I can get the intake off I will have access to clean most of the engine bay.
I did find the charcoal canister, that I thought was missing. It’s hidden in the side wall and requires removing the wheel to get to it. But there are still several vacuum lines that are cut and go to nowhere and yet not part of the cruise control vacuum system. One goes to the vacuum advance on the distributor. Another leaky line (has a big hole in the side) leaves the expansion tank and goes back down the firewall and under the vehicle. This is not on any of the diagrams. I’m wondering what this goes to. My current thinking is that it goes to the component in the exhaust that generates the vacuum (Is that where most cars get their vacuum?) Various posts on VW-Vortex led me to that conclusion, but I’m not sure yet.
Another disturbing thing that has come up is that I have a large access hole in the trans-axle. I’m not sure what is supposed to be plugging it, but it is on top so it may have allowed all sorts of junk to get down in there. Even though it is supposed to be oil sealed for the life of the engine, I think it would be prudent for me to plug that hole and flush/refill the oil now. I really want to know what that hole is supposed to be for. It looks like the speedo and clutch cable holes, but I know where those two are.
I really should take some pictures of my work. Little bits of blue tape at the ends of all my hoses and wires telling me which goes where. There are lots of extra parts in the engine bay already, but I’d prefer not to generate more by forgetting where a certain piece goes.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Peer Reviewing
I had my first experience peer reviewing a paper tonight. I’m still far too early in my research to be confident talking about the material at that level, so I didn’t have much to say about the science. I accepted their arguments and math, but that could just be naivety or ignorance. It was significantly better written than a number of papers I have been reading in pursuit of background knowledge for my own research, so I was inclined to give it higher remarks and assume the science bits I don’t know were right. Thankfully my thoughts will be combined with Matt (who is a PhD candidate several years in on this topic) and then Tumer, my advisor, will review them and he’ll be submitting his own thoughts. Still it was interesting to read and review. The topic is not that far off of some of my potential research avenues (it was in multi-robot coordination, specifically on-line algorithm selection) so their idea may be worth trying out. The simulation results certainly seemed promising. I wanted to see a harder simulation, but it sounds like this could be a preliminary paper from them and the research is still ongoing.