| I like my car. It's a '99 Subaru Outback all-wheel drive wagon. More to the point, I'm frugal. Or maybe you would call it cheap. Or maybe you would call it demonstrating good stewardship of my resources.
In any case, I'll be dissapointed if I don't get at least 200,000 miles out of my car before the engine shows serious wear and needs to be replaced. Tribologists (engineers who specialize in studying the way things wear out) have noted that 1/4 to 1/2 of the wear on your engine occurs during colds starts when the engine has essentially no lubrication because there is no oil pressure.
To overcome this, I use synthetic oil and I built a pre-oiler. It's basically a big piece of pipe that's tied into the oil galleries of my engine. It has a volume of six quarts. It's half full of oil and half pressurized air. When I open a valve just prior to starting the car, the oil rushes in there and when I get 50 psi of oil pressure, I hit the key and start the car. As the oil pump takes over, it pumps oil back into the pressure vessel through a check valve to refill it for next time. Works beautifully except for one thing. Just like an old fashioned pressure tank on a well pump, my pressure tank can get "waterlogged" and lose air pressure. Oil-logged just doesn't sound the same. So once a week, I have to drain it by opening the valve, close the valve and repressurize the tank.
After three years of this, I've decided that's way too much maintenance, so I'm building an electric pump to do the pressurizing without the need for a pressure tank. And here's where I need your help. I need 5/16ths ball bearings to build the check valves in the pump body and I don't want to buy a whole new bearing assembly just to disassemble it and rob two ball bearings out of it. Where oh where could I scrounge these things?
This is silly in a sense. My favorite bearing place will sell me 65 loose ones for less than eight bucks. But what will I do with the leftover 63??? Build one for my wife's car too I suppose. But what about the other 61?
I was hoping somebody out there would be struck by inspiration on where to find half a dozen nice used cheap/free 5/16ths ball bearings.
Thanks in advance and keep having fun.
troy |
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