James C. Liu's Weblog

Thursday August 19, 2004

Marital Bliss in a 17" form factor

I love my Wife

My wife and I just celebrated our 7th anniversary last monty. And the only itch I'm having is from all the scraped knuckles that are finally healing from my do-it-urself car tuneup job a week ago. Later on that in a moment. But I just want to say, I Truly, Madly, and Deeply Love my Wife.

It's not my Birthday yet, but she gave me an early present in the form of an LCD flat panel monitor. Nothing fancy. But she did buy it a week ago when Costco was blowing them out with a $50 off coupon PLUS $30 rebate for a total of $80 off. Sweet. It's great knowing after all these years that she cares enough to buy me good stuff that I want. And I didn't have to leave that many hints around the house. Well, I mean that the couple of dead monitors out on the patio weren't a hint, and hardly intentional. I really didn't have garage space to hold them until I was ready to drop them off at the dump. And I wasn't pretending to squint at the remaining spare dinky 15" CRT screens that I have on my home systems. I was indeed squinting because those screens are so small.

So she must be psychic, 'cause now I'm stylin' with a new 17" LCD monitor and it just looks fabulous. It's absolutely the best monitor I've ever personally owned. I've been too much of a cheapskate to buy one. Most of the monitors I have in my house are hand-me-downs from my bro-in-law or friends, or el cheapo CRTs that came with an eMachines bundle. People would probably take me for some honkin' Iron kind of guy that has like a Dual Opteron home system wtih 4 GB of RAM, 0.5TB of disk and 21" massive monitor and all the nifty gadgets. But day in and day out, I work on tweaking performance out of Honkin' Iron boxes and shaving another few hundred microseconds off average response time for some ISV's code. The last thing I want to happen when I come home is to run some super-duper computer yet again.

I actually want a slow box that lets me enjoy my Sci-Fi Channel or Food TV Network between emails. So I'm not in a rush to do much of anything at home, except eat my Wife's awesome cooking. Did I mention she's a great cook? Not really a Potsticker Guru, but she makes some darn good Cantonese Style Food. Anyway, rolling potsticker skins is usually a man's job as it takes more upper body power to roll skins fast enough.

Linux and Solaris x86 on two old BookPCs

Speaking of slower boxes, I have two identical book PCs at home. These are small computers not much bigger than a phone book, with AMD K6-2 475 MHz cpus, 512 MB ECC RAM, 40GB disk, CDR/RW drives, floppy and integrated 10/100BT, Graphics and Audio. I have FC2 Linux running on one, and Solaris 9 x86 on the other. Amazingly, the Solaris box boots up to dtLogin in about 70 seconds, and then only consumes about 64MB of the total memory size. But Fedora Core 2 Linux takes about 2 min. 15 secs to come up and eats about 200+ MB of memory. Kinda of shocking considering that Redhat 6.1 still is pretty small and fast in my 64 MB NEC Ready 120LT notebook, which is the one we travel with on road trips. It's hard to think of Linux as a bloated OS, but I guess it's changed over the years and gotten pretty big, even if I shutdown all the services at startup time. A full FC2 install of everything is 6GB! A flash archive install of Solaris 9 x86 with Java Enterprise System, Studio, Star Office and other packages is under 4GB.

Has anyone else noticed the bloat? For Linux, the software size has gone from 1 CD to 4 CDs to install in less than 4 years. That's faster than Moore's Law. The only saving grace is that storage capacity is getting cheaper and bigger even faster.

Tune up the minivan

My wife may have had another reason to reward me with the flat panel display. I performance tuned her Toyota Sienna minivan recently and got some extra performance out just by changing the spark plugs. For most of us engineers who've ever worked with our own cars, changing plugs is usually pretty quick and cheap. Plugs don't usually cost very much and have a new, properly installed set helps with ignition and combustion. It's probably a good idea to always change them prior to a smog check.

But our Toyota Minivan is only 2 years old. But because we drive it up to Vancouver, Canada a lot, it's already got 62K miles on it. So we brought it into the dealer for a 60K service, and even with coupons and specials, it still cost over $1000. Yes. You read right. One thousand dollars for a major service. And what did the dealer do? I don't know for sure. They accidentally put a new ding in the car, that's for sure, and we had to argue about it with the service manager to get them to accept their fault. They did seem to flush some flush the radiator and change the brake pads. But other than that, not much else was done. They did itemize all the things they checked, but for a 1000 bucks, you'd maybe think they'd change the timing belt or the spark plugs. But Nope. They said the timing belt is rated for 90K service. And the new high tech Iridium spark plugs are rated for 90K as well.

Well I checked the service manual, and it does confirm the timing belt assertion, but it says that the emissions warranty is voided if the plugs aren't changed at 60K. So I haggled over the phone with the service manager and really was dissatisfied with the work. I wanted him specifically to change the plugs at 60K miles and it was the one thing I couldn't really do at home.

Well, didn't I say above that changing plugs was easy and cheap? Well, not with these new fangled Iridium plugs. You see, Iridium is very temperature resistant. Ceramic resistor spark plugs can take temperatures about 1700 C. The adiabatic flame temperature in most internal combustion engines is around 1500C. Platinum handles temperatures over 2100C and Iridium can operate at over 2500C. So Iridium allows the plugs to run hotter and longer without wear.

But after 60K miles, fouling and wear should warrant a change. And it would be easy and cheap, except Toyota transverse mounts it's V6 engines in the Sienna, Solara, Camry and Avalon. That means rather than having 3 spark plugs on the left and 3 on the right, there are 3 in front, and 3 in the rear. And the ones in the rear are covered by the intake/exhaust manifold. So you can't see them, let alone reach for them. It's a nightmare to change the back 3 plugs on these vehicles, and that's why Toyota specs iridium plugs. They last a long time so changes aren't required because it's still so difficult.

My dealer claimed that they would have charged me $350 more to change the plugs. Why? Because it costs 2 hrs in labour and $25/plug. Yepp. Iridium plugs cost a LOT more. So neither cheap nor easy.

So I basically gave up on that dealer and ate the loss. I fixed my own dent since I didn't want them to ever touch our car again, and I set out to order and change the plugs myself. And that's were Internet and eBay saved the day. I found the top of the line iridium plugs for sale at just over $9 each shipping/tax included. And then I found a number of discussion boards about changing the rear plugs. One guy claimed he did it himself on an Avalon, and another guy who worked for a shop wouldn't publish his method, but did offer to tell folks how to "cheat" if they emailed him personally.

So that gave me some ideas. To make a long story short, I accomplished the change out of all 6 plugs in 1 hour and 15 minutes. It was back-breaking and painful work for the back three that left bruises on both fore arms, and stripped the skin off my knuckles, but nonetheless, it was done. And the results are astonishing. There was immediate pickup in acceleration. Almost as if the car increased horsepower and torque by 5 - 10%. And it didn't take special tools, just finger strength, manual dexterity, and an ability to feel parts clearly and do work without having to visually eye-ball the part. My wife was very pleased with the results. The white puff of uncombusted and smelly exhaust that was making the vehicle start rough each morning disappeared as well. So I saved around $300. Not bad. That pays for the new 17" flat panel LCD.

P.S. - [2006 Mar 28] so many folks have contacted me about instructions on how to do this. I published them maybe a year and a half ago on the FAQFarm.com. The link should be [ here ]. Amazingly, it's gone from way down on the list to be ranked 75th in overall popularity in the last year and a half. I guess lots of folks have V6 Toyotas. August 19, 2004 06:27 PM PDT Permalink