Wrong Handed

Our bodies are mind-bogglingly complex. So many diverse things have to all line up to keep it funtioning it's a wonder it works at all!

But speaking of mind-boggling, in the midst of all that complexity the brain-muscle connection, motor-skills, can be frustratingly inefficient and touchy, even at it's youthfull peak.

For example, something as simple as putting your shirt on. If you normally do it left-arm first, try right-arm first. It's not that bad, but is noticeably more awkward and takes some thinking to get it done. And guys, don't get me started on buttoning a left-handed shirt instead of our usual right-handed shirt! (Rant alert! Just one more example of how useless a drain on and damaging to society the "fashion industry" is, sucking up resources and energy that could be put into far more productive uses without feeded envy and body dysphoria. The whole left-right button thing is an artificial artifact left over from a time when men of all classes dressed themselves [garments overlaping from the left side gave men, predominantly right-handed, quicker access to weapons tucked under their left arms] but women of status were dressed by servants facing them, making right-overlaping garments more intuitive for the servants. And the hell with women of lower status that had to dress, and often defend, themselves!)

Ahem - OK, rant over. Back to that whole motor-skill thing.

I am left handed, very left handed. Always have been. Fortunately I managed to just barely miss out on the days when lefty kids were persecuted and forced to become clumsy righties.

Well, fortunate right up 'till when I decided that I'm so left handed it would probably be a good idea to be prepared in case I get injured, or have a stroke, and can't use my dominant hand for a while.

Don't ask me why I decided this because I have no idea. I can't remember any triggering event and no one in my immediate family has had a significant stroke, not one they survived anyway. But the idea stuck.

(BTW, in case you missed it, that first photo is of two left hands)

That's why, several years ago, in the anonymous privacy of the closed-door bathroom, away from questions, wierd looks, and ridicule, I started brushing my teeth with my right hand.

It was a disaster! And not just toothpaste all over the mirror kinda stuff. Ever tried shoving a toothbrush up your nose? It hurts! Especially with mint toothpaste on it. And when I wasn't doing that I was stabbing my gums, or gagging on the damn thing because I tried jamming it down my throat.

But I stuck with it because building new neural-pathways and muscle memory takes a long time. Eventually I got to where I could brush right-handed without hauling myself off to urgent care, then gradually my left hand stopped jerking around spasticly in sympathy.

It took a long time, but now I brush right-handed in the morning and left-handed in the evening without even thinking about it. (So much so that just now I had to mime to figure out which hand when.)

Since building new neural pathways is good for maintaining cognitive brain health, once I had the brushing thing down and wasn't actually building new pathways anymore, just exercising ones that already existed (which is also important!), I decided I needed a new neural challenge and started to try eating wrong handed.

You know how when you're a kid eating is so much more important than brushing?

Well, it turns out you never grow out of that. So I haven't been near as diligent about working on wrong-handed eating as I was about brushing. I guess I figure that if I'm ever in a position to have to eat wrong-handed I'll damn sure figure it out! In the meantime, get the hell away from my plate!

But still wanting to do what I can for my cognitive brain health, I recently redirected my neural pathways/wrong-handedness efforts to drawing and painting.

Yeahhh - turns out that shit's hard!

Reminds me of fat crayons and magnets on the fridge.

This pencil-sketch was supposed to be a quick (left-handed) thumbnail-outline after I botched the the initial sketch to see if I could get the porportions somewhat closer on the next try, but for some reason, maybe because I just got a new pencil-sharpener, I kinda went nuts with it.

On the plus side, one could say my first effort was impressionistic and painterly. But oddly enough, really good loose 'painterly' works require excelent drawing and brushwork skills to pull off well. So the spastic moves of my right hand are actually no friggin' help at all!

(All double-images, with the exception of the one just below, which is left-top, right-bottom, have the lefthand version on the left and righthand on the right)

Not that I'm an accomplished artist with either hand, but my initial right-handed efforts were - well, even more pathetic than my left-hand versions! Though I have to admit the wonky buildings in the right-hand version of the drawing above certainly have more energy than the left-hand.

And somehow, unlike the eating thing, I've been able to stick with the drawing/painting stuff reasonably well. It helps that I try to draw/paint at least something every day so I'd be standing there with a brush in my hand anyway. All I had to do was switch hands.

Because I'm  not that great an artist in the first place, even left handed, for a while there I decided I need 'control' paintings to compare my right-handed works with to see if there's any progress. But I quickly figured out that I'm not too keen on doing the same painting multible times, I get frustrated and bored, so I do mirror images instead, flipping the page from one hand to the other. Same content, but it tricks my brain into seeing it as a different painting.

But sticking with it and improving are two seperate things!

Also, turns out it's a lot of work drawing/painting with my right hand. I mean, in addition to the concentration required, it's  actually physicly draining! (Wonder why my shoulder is sore tonight? - oh yeah! - )

One flaw in that short-lived control process of dual paintings is that once I do the lefthanded version I inevitably see things I could have improved on and end up 'tweeking' the righthanded version (notice that the color of the top of the earthware jar above is more vibrant in the righthand version) making it difficult to tell if any improvement is coming from those tweeks or better hand-control.

So I decided to try doing the righthand version first so any 'tweeks' are in the lefthand version and improvements in the former will have to stand on better hand control alone.

This is a rather extreme example of that.

I did the right-handed version first, then not only did I jazz up the sky colors in the left-handed version, I made significant changes to the composition, not just a few little tweeks. (BTW Art students are - erroneously- taught not to use that dead center-symetrical composition because it doesn't generate any movement or exitement, but this scene just screamed for tranquil peace and contemplative quiet.)

But eventually I dropped that whole left-handed control painting crap, when you let too much science into art the art starts to get lost (either that or I just got tired of doing so many paintings), and started diving straight into the right-handed versions.

Including this jump-in-with-both-feet-and-no-safety-net attempt at a night-time Milan street scene (by its very nature, creating dark scenes in watercolor  is not very easy so I'm not sure it would have come out any better done left handed!) based on a phone-photo of the paused TV screen (inset) taken during the Winter Olympics.

Yep, definitely more refrigerator-art, except that I don't have a mom anymore and The Wife has her limits!

It's a long slow process without a lot of visible progress, but I'm determined to become a marginally functional wrong-hander - beyond just brushing my teeth!

That way if my left side strokes out I can earn gummy-money selling right-handed pity-paintings!

I'm going to keep at it, though I fear "improvement" may be an overly optimistic goal, but don't worry, I don't plan on inflicting my attempts on all y'all anymore!

It Was Bound To Happen

It's a truism that when you work on something to fix one problem, another, sometimes related, sometimes not, will often pop up.

That was the case when I was tracking down the DC - DC charging issue I was having with the teardrop.

At one point I had my battery monitoring app open on my phone and noticed that when I closed the hatch, where the solar panel is mounted, the charge current from the panel dropped to zero, the voltage dropped to 13.2 (just below the battery voltage and likely cross-over through the charge controller from the battery), and the solar charge controller turned off.

Maybe a wiring issue? Because I was operating the hatch at the time, the wires between panel and charger had to flex and maybe they were failing at that point.

Anyway, a problem for another day.

Except that the next day, no matter how much I abused the hatch, I could not replicate the problem.

Oh well, just another one of those glitches the universe likes to throw at us once in a while.

Except when I went back on the 23rd and checked the charge controller's 30 day history I saw that charging stopped short of full between the 11th and 15th (the bright part of the bar-graft is bulk charging - take all the current the panel will give until the battery hits 14 volts - and the dim part is float - hold a maintenence voltage of about 13.47 - . In between is a short period of absorption - hold a voltage of 14.2 for a maximum of 2 hours, less if the battery wasn't discharged all that much overnight.) then there were several days where I got absolutely nothing out of the panel. Which only happens if I put a blanket over the panel. Even on the cloudiest of days I'll get something out of it.

Then it suddenly started working again on the 19th all on it's own.

So I started keeping a closer eye on things and consistantly found the panel not producing when it should have been. And it quickly got worse to the point when it never produced at all.

The options here are limited.

A wiring problem? Well I have three seperate inputs to the charge controller, three seperate sets of wires I can plug the panel into. Nope, unless all three sets of wiring failed at the same time, that wasn't it.

A charge controller issue? Not very likely, but since I have a spare controller on the shelf that's an easy thing to check.

Original controller, rated for 75 volts and 15 amps (input from the solar panels), on the left. Spare unit, rated for 100 volts and 20 amps on the right.

In fact, if I ever paired the 140 watt mounted panel with a 100 watt portable the combined output would be getting awfully close to that 15 amp limit in strong sun, so I'd be more comfortable with the larger, 20 amp, controller anyway.

Same input and output wiring. Just have to make a paper template to mark for new mounting holes back there where I can't see,

add a safety ground for that big finned heatsink (the ground is that white wire on the left side. The smaller controller's heatsink is a flat aluminum plate covered by the blue case so no safety ground needed), and we're good to go.

But as expected, this did not solve the main issue, just made the system a little more robust, but only if I could get it working again.

And to that end,  there's only one thing left in the system.

Compared to some things we depend on, solar panels are remarkably reliable devices, even though they are left out in the elements around the clock and pretty much ignored for years at a time. In fact new data indicates that panels are consistently lasting longer than we expected. Many manufacturers offer 25 year performance warranties, but now it appears that 30, 40, even 50 year old panels reliably perform at 75, even up to 90% of their original rating. (70% is often concidered the threshold for replacement.)

But they are man-made devices subject to failures other than performance degradation, such as material failures and workmanship glitches, so they usually also come with product warrenties - for defects and such - usually for 10 - 15 years.

I have had well over a dozen solar panels over the past 3+ decades, eight of which I still use (the rest have been sold on with various RV's), all of them in mobile installations subject to the added stresses of motion and vibration. And up until now I haven't had a lick of trouble out of any of them. - Yeah, up to now -

Of course, the only way to know for sure that this is my problem is to plug another, known working panel onto the teardrop.

I've been threatening to buy a portfolio style

portable panel that I can use to keep the Jackery topped up with when the Ranger is parked for several days while I'm camping. (The fridge lives in the Ranger at night and runs off the Jackery.)

This seemed like an un-impeachable excuse to go ahead and do just that. And even if it wasn't, $90 for 100 watts of solar plus a handfull of wiring adapters is hardly worth impeachment proceedings!

And yep - a couple days later Amazon handed off this portable unit up at the gate (We have a big deck-box up there for packages since we do a lot of online shopping to avoid having to mingle with people. Sometimes I feel bad for the postman because out here Amazon drops everything off at the local post office and makes them do the last leg of the delivery. ) and it took all of 5 minutes to walk the 800 feet back down the hill to where the teardrop is parked, open the package, sort out the right addapter, and prove that the teardrop's panel is in fact the issue.

It, the teardrop's panel, produces the expected 26 volts when open circuited (not plugged into anything) but as soon as it is asked to produce the current that voltage should be driving it shits a brick and sits there even less useful than an actual brick - which could be used to prop a door open, keep papers from flying away, or smash a window - or even a head - if one was so inclined.

Not that I could do anything to fix it, but I did some experimenting and monitoring and decided the likely issue was a failed cell or connection between cells that could support a little current-flow (less than 0.2 amps) if it was cool enough (somewhere below 60) but heat it up or try to get more current out of it and something inside there opens up. Stop trying to get current out of it (open circuit), at any temperature, and it will produce 26 useless volts again.

Which, by anybodies definition is a dead solar panel. Well what the hell are you suposed to do with one of those?! (Contrary to oil company propaganda of a couple three decades ago, solar panels are not toxic. They are predominately made of highly recyclable materials such as aluminum, glass, copper, and a bit of silicon.)

 

But this is one expensive panel! Assuming one could even get their hands on it (notice the sold out notice).

Yes, it's still under product warranty but - even assuming the Canadian manufacturer has a few on the shelf somewhere that they aren't selling (because you don't fix solar panels. You scrap them and get a new one.), I still have to pay international shipping and customs fees, both ways, as well as a "testing" fee. And who knows how long all this would take and I have a trip coming up shortly!

Lightleaf is a great panel. 140 watts, built in kickstands and quick-release mounts for removing it from the teardrop and setting out in a sunny spot,

all on a tough carbon-fiber substrate formed to the same curve as the teardrop's hatch, with the whole thing weighing in at about 5 pounds, but for $109 dollars, less than the fee's neccessary to warranty-replace the Lightleaf,

I could get one of these Renology 100 watt flexible panels (I've already got 4 of these on top of the cargo trailer) and have it in my hands in two days! 

True, 100 watts isn't the original 140, but I don't use all that much power anyway and if neccessary I can just plug in the portable panel for an extra boost.

The Renology has 6 of these handy grommets that I used to mount the panel, this time on the fixed roof just forward of the vent-fan which gives it better orientation for ray-gathering than the angled rear hatch. (Many buyers of Timberleaf - well, all, teardrops have roof-racks so this area is not always available for panel mounting)

After pre-drilling the surprisingly thick aluminum skin I cut a small tab of butyl sealant,

and tucked it over the hole

before driving each of the 6 stainless steel screws.

Being flexible the panel formed to the slight curve of the roof with no problem.

Using some half-inch wire loom, a few clamps, some tie-wraps, a couple of splices, and an SAE plug (to mate with the SAE socket already mounted on the teardrop - though you have to be carefull of the polarity when splicing these in because there's no fixed standard), all stuff I had laying around, I finished up the installation of my new - working - panel in about two hours.

But - in the photo above you can see 3 of the 6 mounting standoffs on the rear hatch for the original Lightleaf panel.

 

And frankly, useful and practical as they are, without a panel to hold they're kinda uggggly.

Each one of these is held down with two screws, leaving me with 12 holes in the hatch.

There's probably more eloquent ways of dealing with this, but using what I had on hand, the rubber-backed washers from some steel-roofing fasteners and some black-coated stainless steel pan-head screws,

I sealed up

the leftover holes.

It's going to take a little getting used to seeing the hatch so naked,

but in terms of solar activity, we are back in business!

Now I just hope I didn't break something else while I was at it - - -

Well - Fiddlesticks!

 This is what you do

when you dump a box of 115 (actually 113, I already used two) assorted 8/32 machine screws all over the floor.

Some of these suckers differ in length from others by only 1/8 of an inch. My brother can spot the difference by eye, but not me.

I've got to line them up next to each other one by one to sort them into groups

and get them back into the damn box!

Now, where was I before being so rudely interrupted?

Time to Change the Display

 

This display has been up in the corner of our living space since just before Christmas and I figured it was about due to be changed out.

But first, a little cerebral side trip.

I've always been drawn to creating small slices of fantasy worlds.

I'm not sure how old I was but I was pretty young when I first crafted one of these private worlds with words when I wrote, with my limited vocabulary at the time, about a family that moved onto a small sailing ship to travel the oceans together.

And as far back as I can remember I was building models and diorams, little miniture, ordered, controllable, worlds. (I'm  from a generation that was raised part feral. After an admonition to "don't sniff the plastic cement", we were then left to our own devices unsupervised in the downstairs rec-room with limited ventilation. What a fantastic way to grow up! Discovering the posibilities and limits of the world unfetered by overly restrictive restraints!)

I'm no psychiatrist, but I speculate that the attraction to crafting these things is being able to immerse myself in a world of my own creation and control to the exclusion of real-world pressures. Creating backstories for groups of miniture people without the angst of actual social interaction. Creating places where I can sit quietly on a mythical porch, free from the drone of lawnmowers (I grew up in the midwest where people are obsessed with lawns and lawnmower-drone is constant from sunup to sundown from early spring to late fall), free from medical appointments, car repairs, insurance brokers. A place where my mind can settle, can reset.

And as a septuagenarian I'm still alright with playing with models. Fantasy worlds rock!

So, (back to our originally scheduled program) time to move the old display to a protective storage container out in the dusty barn.

But before I do that,

I need to gussy up a couple of rather plain looking wooden 3D models

with some paint,

people,

and lights.

Except that didn't quite feel like enough for the display soooo - - -

I grabbed some foam-board, gathered together some scenery materials, more people, three miniture lamp-posts, some glue, paint, a few random pebbles from the driveway,

along with some trees, and more lights for the trees,

to create a little park to stroll through.

And since I was on a roll, and they were there in my box of crap, I slapped some little whicker balls, a string of lights, and india ink of various colors, onto the bench just to add a little more clutter and sparkle.

All of which

went together

to create

the new display.

Hummm, what world should I create next?