Menke Projects

I've been told that cut potato pieces with eyes should be in the ground by Valentines Day.  (Lytton Springs, Texas 29.992 N.)  Dear Wife insisted that the cut pieces should air-dry before they are planted, so this year I cut them and basically forgot them for a week.  (They were really dry, almost like potato chips.)  When I planted them, it turns out there were not enough, so I went to the feed store and bought some more Red seed Potatoes (La Sota) that were in a gunny sack from Minnesota.  I cut them, leaving one eye per piece, and planted them immediately.  I finished the bed in the garden with the chain link fence, and put the rest in our old garden that is fenced only with rusty barbed wire.  The seed potato pieces that were cut immediately and planted were the first to show, but the others (over dried) eventually caught up.  The soil in the old garden was topped with compost mixed extremely heavy with biochar made from converting logs from a...

Willie had two old Juicebox units laying in a pile in his Partybarn, and suggested I might look at them to see why they don't work.  Both were 60 amp units which means the wiring would handle 14,000 watts.  (BIG cables...the size of garden hoses!) Here is a YouTube titled EMotorWerks JuiceBox Premium - a Build Manual This is the exact unit.  https://youtu.be/SScYZKV7iDc My first step was to open both of the units and look for any obvious damage, but both are very clean inside and there is no evidence of any burning or overheating.  The cables were another story, with a heavy layer of black grime, calling for a spray bottle of cleaner and a Scotchbright pad.  Now they look like new cables. On to the power plugs.  One is sealed, but the other had screws and when I inspected the internals, the ground prong was bent so the little screw could contact the big black 240 volt prong (internally).  I removed it and bent it back into shape, and for good mea...

I now have both of Willie's 12V wooden power boxes containing mostly dead 260 AH LiFePO4 cells, plus a spare cell.  The 4 cells in the box I got yesterday are all dead, reading only a few millivolts. Since Scott Little and Willie had previously worked with a load of dead cells from the Escort, I looked at his messages, and here is what I found (so far): Mar 31, 2018, 1:28 PM to William , me I have not had good luck so far with the super-dead 260’s…ones that have <0.01v initial voltage.   I first tried a 50A charge rate and that cell got up to 3.3 volts but hung there and started to get hot instead of going up to 3.7.   I disconnected it and, by the next morning, the voltage was less than 1 volt just due to self-discharge. A second 260 was charged with a constant-current supply set to 10A.  After the voltage got above 3.0, I disconnected it and observed a similar self-discharge rate.   I then charged it again t...