Boils

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Color-adjusted photo (the original is pretty much rusty orange) of the inside end wall of one of our boilers. This is inside the water tank of the boiler.

The key question here is how much scale buildup (the hard crusty crud) is on the inside of the tank. Scale deposits are mostly calcium from the water, plus iron that has eroded off the insides of our steam pipes and equipment.

Scale is a great insulator. So more scale means you have to burn a lot more gas to get the heat through to the water to boil it.

You see what looks like a lot of scale here. The good news is that we’re making headway. There used to be more.

Tubes, inside the same tank, coated in scale. This shows the true color of the scale: very rusty. That tells us we have a lot of iron in our water system, which means too much free oxygen in the steam, which means we need to treat the water we feed into our boilers with more oxygen scavengers. (Aren’t you glad you asked?)

The oxygen essentially causes the insides of all our steam pipes and steam-heated equipment to rust at a faster rate. So we end up with rusty scale inside the boiler (where it collects) and leaks and holes in pipes and throughout the steam system (which are annoying to repair and cause production delays).

We check and photograph these tubes every time we have a reason to open the boiler, typically about once a year. Previous measurements indicate about 1/8 inch of scale on the outsides of these tubes. I didn’t measure it this time, but it hadn’t changed much.

Normally you might expect the scale to be more white in color, which would suggest more calcium in it, less iron. You use different solutions to knock back scale with a lot of calcium in it. So it’s good to have a look from time to time to visually judge what you’re trying to fix.

The heat in this boiler comes from inside the tubes. A huge gas flame feeds all the tubes at once. Again, the more scale on these tubes, the hotter that flame has to burn in order to boil the water that normally fills this tank.

Because in this boiler the flame goes through the tubes, it is called a fire-tube boiler.

Knew you’d want to know that.

This, on the other hand, is a water-tube boiler. In this boiler, the tubes (three sets of curving tubes in this picture) are filled with water. The fire comes from underneath the tubes. (You can see the burners—long, flat rectangles under the tubes.) These tubes are much smaller than in the fire-tube boiler, but that maximizes the surface area being heated by the fire at any given time, so this boiler tends to respond faster when you turn it on.

As the water boils, it makes its way up into the big tank at the top of the picture, behind the manifolds at the top of each tube set.

Both of these boilers were modified a couple of years ago to meet more stringent California rules on emissions from natural-gas burners.

The problem in the water-tube boiler is the same as in the fire-tube boiler, but in reverse: The scale builds up on the water side of the process, which in this case is inside the tubes instead of on the outside. Same scale, same source, same end result: You have to put a lot more flame to these tubes to bring the water up to a boil.

The tube set on the right in the picture above this one has been cooked hotter and longer than the other tube sets; you can see the difference in the metal color. Ultimately that’s not good for the metal. (Also notice that the tube set on the left has had a nasty leakage problem down the front of it. The white deposits are what’s left behind as the water evaporated in the fire.)

Overall, I would say we had less scale inside the tubes this time than when I’ve checked them in the past. The boiler inspector who came around today was satisfied with what he saw.

Old and new, showing progress.

The new tubes in this picture (we’re back in the fire-tube boiler) are nice and clean. We put brand-new tubes into this part of the boiler several months ago. You can see there’s no scale on the outside of the tubes.

The big tube next to them wasn’t replaced. See the gray patches of metal that show through the red scale on this tube? Pictures from two years ago show solid scale covering this tube. So our water-treatment plan is making a difference.

Now you know all there is to know about boilers. Next week’s lesson: adhesive systems and the carriers that go with them.

Photo Forensics: 13.5 Years Ago, a Detour

Long time ago I took a trip with a friend through Eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, Alberta, and British Columbia.

My brother was working at Glacier National Park at the time, and we stopped in for a visit and some hiking. Mom was in the area. I believe she and I intersected in Spokane (?) and then went our several ways. She was headed off in one direction and I in another, but we were covering some of the same ground. I believe Glacier National Park was on her to-do list too.

This was June 1995. At the time I had just one sister living in Washington State. She was getting heavier that summer. Sometime around August she suddenly got much lighter. I came out for that episode too.

Lately that sister unearthed a roll of film from Mom’s camera, so old that a lot of the colors aren’t quite right anymore. Still, you can see what was in the pictures. I’m pretty sure this roll dates back to that trip.

Here’s a picture I took, also on film, of Swiftcurrent Lake at Glacier. This would have been from somewhere around Many Glacier lodge. Sorry about the size and lack of detail: I’m just grabbing the shot from my Website, not going back and finding the original negative or the original scans.


Now here’s one of the pictures from Mom’s roll of film:

Check out that distinctive white diagonal stripe of snow on the left. Notice how it matches a stripe in the center of my shot. Then look at the contour of the hills and snow above that. Clouds hide some ridgeline in my shot, but see the little triangular white patch in Mom’s picture, around the center of her picture, and check how it matches a tiny bright dot in my picture.

So I suspect the scene is the same, and because the snow is sitting in such a similar way all over, I would bet that Mom’s picture was taken around the same time as mine.

Another picture I took, from a slightly different point, shows the ridgeline clearly matching Mom’s. Notice that in my pictures there’s still snow up by the ridge. In Mom’s, that snow has melted. But it’s the same place:


This shot of mine includes the same diagonal white line of snow, plus some more detail that matches Mom’s shot:


Next it looks as if Mom headed south through Montana and into Idaho, stopping at Bear Lake on the Utah border for a strawberry shake at the Home Town Drive-In, which apparently has expanded some since she was there (looks as if the windows she saw are still intact on the right side of the building):

I don't know why anyone travels anymore. You can see all the same things in Google’s Street View.

From there, heading south along the lake, Mom stopped to at least take pictures of two more drive-ins with raspberry shakes, within a two-block radius. (A banner proclaimed “Raspberry Days.”) One of the diners, sadly, appears to have gone under. But its big raspberry tank (?) in the parking lot is still there, as it was in Mom’s picture:


From there, other than a few more landscape shots showing Bear Lake, there’s nothing until Mom gets to Salt Lake City, where she takes a picture of the state capitol from a northeast-facing window in the Family History Library:


I’m left puzzling over why Mom didn’t take more pictures on this roll. Did she have another camera with her? (Quite possible.) Between Glacier and Salt Lake, she could have taken Interstate 15, but Bear Lake is off that beaten path. Knowing Mom, and looking at the map, it seems more likely she came south from Glacier via Yellowstone in Wyoming, then cut over to 15 by way of Bear Lake.

She had time to stop for raspberry shakes in Bear Lake. Why not a single picture all the way through Yellowstone?

One way or another, it’s a nice set of memories to share these many years later.

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Update: My sister clarified where the film came from.


After Mom died, my sister found this disposable camera under a pile of other miscellany in Mom’s bathroom. It had been buried, probably when Mom unpacked the car after her 1995 trip, and it wasn’t unearthed until 11 years later. (My sister told me this last month when she handed me the pictures. The memory stick in my brain that held that conversation got full between then and now, and I swapped it out for a new one.)

That explains why this roll had so few pictures, and why they were so grainy. While Mom worked her way through the disposable camera, trying it out, she probably shot a dozen rolls on good film, in perfect focus, on her sophisticated 35mm workhorse. She saved this camera for some test landscape shots. All the pictures of family members and geysers and glaciers and wildlife were preserved for posterity in her fancier camera.

I’m sure there’s still some story behind why Mom was shooting with a disposable camera on this trip. I know for a fact that on my parallel trip I also shot some pictures with a disposable camera, as well as my regular Minox 35mm camera. Kodak was marketing the disposables at the time. Some of them had custom purposes. The one I had was designed to shoot panoramas, and it did. I experimented and was happy with some of the results. But Kodak didn’t put its best film into these cameras, and I never got hooked. Why Mom had one (a telephoto, if I understand my sister right), I don’t know. I might even have given it to Mom to take on her trip, at the same time as I got my own. Or she got hers independently, or someone else gave it to her. Who knows?

Four years later, in Wyoming, we had great fun, and got great results, by buying disposable cameras for a bunch of grandkids and letting them take pictures of everything they saw while we grownups took pictures of what we saw. It was a great chance to see what each child thought was worth documenting.

Oh. Deer.

As I wound my way up a low-gear hill this morning, I looked up and saw a deer bounding across a green meadow. These guys don’t complain about staying outdoors on cold nights.

Turns out she was hopping across the meadow to make sure I wasn’t there to put any moves on the yearling further up the hill, who must have belonged to her.

I had no doubt she could put a hurt on me if she wanted to, but I had other business on that hill, so I kept going.

Mr. Foley

Does anyone ever listen to Harold Faltermayer anymore?

This end of the axle gets attached to the wheel (in this case, the wheel on the driver’s side of the car).

The bolts that stick out from the axle are used to attach the wheel.

This is the bearing race. As the axle spins (and the wheel on the car goes around and around), small round bearings in this groove roll around the axle so it doesn’t rub against the part of the car that holds it.

(Notice in this picture that the bearing race is pitted, which means things weren’t rolling as smoothly as they should.)

The splines at this end of the axle mesh with the gears in the differential, where the axle meets the drive shaft. The drive shaft comes down from the engine (at the front end of the car) and brings the torque that makes the wheels go around. As the drive shaft spins, the gear at the end of it makes the axle spin, and the car goes forward.

No Rain, Just Deer

No rein either, or reign for all that.

The Smell of Eucalyptus Trees in the Rain

Uh, no . . . no, strike that. No, nothing about the rain. No, because if it were raining, that would mean that I was out riding my bike in the rain. No, no, no, no, no. Not gonna happen, to quote a former President.

Not gonna get a stripe of wet road muck up my back, not gonna feel the chill in my toes and shins and fingers, not gonna worry about whether I can see clearly through rain-spotted glasses. No, no, no. Not riding in the rain. That would mean I was getting my bike all mucky, throwing grit and wet into the chain that I’d have to clean up later. Wind, yeah—chill gusts blustering fallen leaves all over the road, pushing me back and forth across the asphalt on this light frame. But not rain.

No, definitely not raining, not as I ride. That’s not wind-whipped raindrops that feel like sharp sand against my skin. Eucalyptus trees smell just as good dry.

But if it had been raining, I would have noticed how the smell is different, just as pungent but more fresh, greener and less dusty, maybe with a foundation of wet clay in these brown adobe hills. Would have noticed. Didn’t notice. Because it wasn’t raining.

I wouldn’t be out there riding if it was going to rain on me. No, sir. No way.

Another County Heard From

Some people turn on their computers before they open gifts, and some after. Some wait and eat first, and others don’t want to see the screen before coffee. One more sister’s icon finally turned up as active, and we had a good chance to exchange holiday greetings, catching up also with the kids between frames: They were bowling with their new Wii.

I’m not sure what it costs to run the servers that make all this possible, but I have to think we’ve all burned a lot less gas to be together this way today.

Also I didn’t have to go anywhere where I’d have to put up with subzero temperatures. Brrr!

Merry Christmas to all!

Faraway, So Close

Say what you want about technology; it does let us all be closer together at the holidays. First this morning it was one sister and her family, puttering around the house opening gifts from me at the same time as I opened what she had handed me at Thanksgiving before I headed south.

We chatted for a couple of hours about current events, gifts, plans for dinner, and all the other usual stuff that might come up if you were sitting around the living room together.

Down here it was sunny when the conversation started, so I took the computer out in the back yard to show her how nice it was after the rain. Then it started raining again, and I took the computer out there again to show her that. Then it was sunny again, but she’d already seen that.

Eventually we said our Merry Christmases and hung up to go get the rest of the day started.

Then it was a brother in Vermont, who had put his son down for a nap and earned himself a free minute to call up and say hello for the holiday. This picture doesn’t show it, but his wife came on too, and we chatted about current events and who got what gift and why and plans for next year and who had what for dinner and the dog’s health. (The dog is just off camera here, although he got to share the spotlight for a few minutes too.)

This brother and I keep in touch also via Twitter, which can keep someone at your elbow during the day even when you’re not at your computer.

Eventually we hung up too (they had more gifts to open in the other room), but there was still coffee in the pot in the kitchen, and another distant sister not yet heard from.

Good moment to finally grab that shower and see if the ground outside is dry enough to go for a quick spin on a bicycle. Too much Christmas coffee leaves my legs restless and twitchy.

I can see from the trees tossing outside, though, that a mighty wind is blowing. We’ll see what happens.

Father Christmas

They said there’d be snow at Christmas.
They said there’d be peace on Earth.

—Greg Lake

Celebration

Honoring the magic that is the Christmas spirit is an exercise in taste and restraint.