Hey......the Chevy Vega (and it’s counter the Ford maverick) made for some nice sportsman drag cars, almost as if that’s what they were designed for!
I figured that as a given 😀
The Mavericks had stock 302 version that made it fairly easy, I think the Vega had a small block prototype but not sure if it ever went into production. The Monza had a 305 version that was based on the Vega platform.
The Mavericks had stock 302 version that made it fairly easy, I think the Vega had a small block prototype but not sure if it ever went into production. The Monza had a 305 version that was based on the Vega platform.
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I don't recall a V8 but do the Cosworth. Also the home town free spirit who stuffed an Olds Toronado front wheel drive power train into the back of a Corsair. That's at the point backing away slowly is wise. 🙂
My stepmother had a tiny POS Maverick, Baby blue with a white vinyl roof. But Ford had put a 302 V8 in it. Always thought later that it could have been a great hot rod with an easy engine swap. Probably terminally horrible handling and I didn’t like automatics , so maybe not for me. Didn’t know that others had taken advantage of the swap. Obvious I guess
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Great input, Tubelab_com. I'm pretty sure that Sony did not make this mistake on purpose. It is just an engineering oversight (wrong power resistor rating) and it created a consistent failure that appeared to be deliberate. My experience was with a Proton monitor bought in the early 90's, that was identical with my employer's at the time. The Protons were bought a few months apart, and perhaps 8 years or so later, developed the same problem and had to be replaced. I am sure that it was another engineering oversight that caused the same problem in both. If it was a military oriented product, they would probably 'flag' this oversight with a MTBF review before release. Of course, it could be a 'defective' part as well, which, once again, if it had been military spec'd, it would probably have not failed prematurely, but it is just too expensive to use these parts in competitive consumer stuff.
Mark Levinson had a serious problem with Siliconix plastic cased jfets, back in the middle 70's. The company (Siliconix) made a batch of jfets with a different plastic manufacturer that had an active impurity. It ate though, with time, and destroyed the jfet. What a mess!
Whole modules in the JC-2, etc failed, so Mark decided to use metal can jfets and an open layout in future. Actually Siliconix fixed the problem with additional 'passivation' of the chips but Mark was once bitten, and decided to not take a chance. Trust me, it is just too much trouble to engineer a defect into a piece of equipment, it naturally happens when the 'bean counters' insist on a cheaper product assembly.
Mark Levinson had a serious problem with Siliconix plastic cased jfets, back in the middle 70's. The company (Siliconix) made a batch of jfets with a different plastic manufacturer that had an active impurity. It ate though, with time, and destroyed the jfet. What a mess!
Whole modules in the JC-2, etc failed, so Mark decided to use metal can jfets and an open layout in future. Actually Siliconix fixed the problem with additional 'passivation' of the chips but Mark was once bitten, and decided to not take a chance. Trust me, it is just too much trouble to engineer a defect into a piece of equipment, it naturally happens when the 'bean counters' insist on a cheaper product assembly.
Too bad about the Sony camera. I have a Sony A6000 which I get about 5 years ago. And it’s a flat out amazing thing. The menus are a bit difficult, but it’s capabilities are very impressive. To the point that they continue to sell the same model because at its price point it’s still a great deal! Of course now with 5 lenses I’m locked in to Sony!
Of course a used point n shoot pocket camera is about free now, so Some Person here wouldn’t approve!
Of course a used point n shoot pocket camera is about free now, so Some Person here wouldn’t approve!
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Oh god, the expense to the maker when something fails under warranty! No one is clever enough to design something to fail right after warranty, and the expense of warranty repair is one more additional cost built into products.
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V8 Vegas and Pintos were popular conversions in the late 70's at the local drag strip. I had a neighbor who killed himself in a V8 Vega going fast in the Florida rain. Concrete power poles are much stronger than the Vega's thin sheet metal.
Remember the Pinto based Mustang II in the late 70's. Ford stuffed a 302 in that too, and still couldn't sell them. The kid across the street got a used one for a couple hundred bucks in the 80's and gave it a nitrous injection. Awesome burnout machine, but really unpredictable on a wet south Florida road. My turbo 4 cyl Dodge could beat him most of the time in a drag race.
I'm guessing that it was a simple mistake by a rookie engineer that never got caught in whatever corporate design review / testing cycle that Sony had at the time. I worked as a design engineer at Motorola for a long time. The product design / review / testing cycle for a two way radio product for public safety (police, fire, etc) where someone's life can depend on it working is MUCH more stringent than that for a consumer product like a cell phone. I was often part of a several day long independent design review of a product developed by another team. It wasn't common, but these reviews did catch serious design flaws that were overlooked during a two year development cycle.
Motorola made semiconductors from before I was hired in 1972, through the mid 2000's. Our facility had a fancy zillion dollar electron microscope with spectroscopic analysis and plasma etch capability. Before I was an engineer I was a repair tech in the calibration lab, with a reputation for being able to fix anything, despite my "70's beach bum" looks. I went to Ft. Lauderdale beach by day, then ran the cal lab at night.
Some "suits" had flown in from the semiconductor plant in Phoenix with some parts to be analyzed only to find the machine dead. It was under contract, but the company was in Boston and a tech couldn't be on site for a few days. They came to the cal lab who told them that their only hope was the night shift guy, who could fix anything. Imagine their surprise when the night shift guy was a 25 year old kid in shorts a tank top and flip flops. After hearing a load of crap about how expensive and critical the machine was, and that I should not try to run it, just fix it, I asked for the manuals, and said that I had to make my daily rounds through the factory. I would get to the machine somewhere between 5 and 7 PM. They gave me their pager numbers (1970's) and left.
I dug into the machine, found the shorted electrolytic cap (obvious, it had spilled it's guts), gathered my night shift buddies (one with hivac experience), proceeded to pump the machine down and fire it up. The "suit" almost crapped himself when I finally got him on the phone (they had found the disco bar across the street) and told him that I had a nice picture of their sample (a single transistor) on the screen. In about 8 milliseconds all of the "suits" were gathered around the machine doing their thing. We all got a whole bunch of thanks and free semiconductors for as long as they were around. We got the latest MC6800 stuff before it was announced for our home "computers." I communicated with a couple of those guys well into the late 80's, and eventually learned the whole story of the panic analysis of a simple transistor.
Motorola had been making a certain RF transistor for a few years with good yields and it was a big success. For an unknown reason the beta of the transistors started declining, and the failure rates started to climb. This occurred without a process change. It was traced down to a certain production line in Phoenix, but the problem could not be determined. The spectroscopic analysis performed on our fancy machine revealed some impurities in the transistor that occurred at a particular step in the manufacturing process that involved immersion of the wafers in a gold based solution. Replacing the solution fixed the problem, but it would return within a few months. A hidden video camera revealed the source of the problem.
An employee was seen taking his belt off and hanging the buckle into that solution for several hours on a late night shift. It seems that it provided a nice gold finish on the buckle, which he then sold, and repeated the process. The daily dunk of several foreign materials into a chemical process inside a clean room environment had caused havoc in the semiconductor process.
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Well, sometimes even engineers make mistakes. A former colleague tells me of a circuit blowing up on the bench - and the engineer remarking "it worked in the simulation". Checking that, it was found one component was conducting 10K amps...
One I caught early in my career was a 12V, 30A power supply output going through one component PTH in the circuit etch path. I recall the engineer / team / dept didnt like it when I pointed this out during a review. Yeah, it might have worked for a while, maybe shown up in the RQTs we did on internal designed power supplies back then in the 80's.
I would not be surprised if those Sony Trinitron resistors were discussed and - who knows due to what part of their design review process and department interrelations - they were left as-is in the design. In the power supply, they re-spun the etch placing several PTHs at that point.
One I caught early in my career was a 12V, 30A power supply output going through one component PTH in the circuit etch path. I recall the engineer / team / dept didnt like it when I pointed this out during a review. Yeah, it might have worked for a while, maybe shown up in the RQTs we did on internal designed power supplies back then in the 80's.
I would not be surprised if those Sony Trinitron resistors were discussed and - who knows due to what part of their design review process and department interrelations - they were left as-is in the design. In the power supply, they re-spun the etch placing several PTHs at that point.
The neighbor across the street was a serious old Mustang fanatic. In about 2004 he gets called out of town on the weekend of the Ford Power Festival at Moroso Motor Sports Park (now Palm Beach International Raceway), so he hands me his tickets and his Sony DSC-F828 camera and tells me to take their teenage kid and go.
I take a bazillion pictures with the Sony of the car show and some serious drag racing. I like them so well, that I buy myself the same camera, and I still have it. I would later get a Canon DSLR and it kind of pushed the Sony into the background, but the old Sony still shines when you want those vivid colors that only Kodachrome on Cibachrome could give.
I got a point and shoot Nikon so I would have a pocket camera and it was such junk that I gave it away. I wound up buying a pocket Panasonic Lumix for $100 when It was discontinued. I still have it and it has been a workhorse despite being dropped, wet and left in a hot car for weeks several times. I now have 3 Lumix cameras and like them a lot.
I started doing time lapse photography with the Lumix DMC-FZ1000 and wanted a pocket camera with the same capabilities. I see a pocket Sony Cybershot DSC-HX80 on sale at Best Buy a couple black Fridays ago. It clearly states "in camera time lapse" on the box, so I buy it.
Reading the manual, it seems that Sony has taken a page from the Apple playbook. In order to get "in camera time lapse" you need to establish a Sony account, fund it, then purchase the camera APP for time lapse. After jumping through these hurdles, I am finally browsing the Sony APP store on my camera to find that the time lapse app is not supported on that model camera. Several emails to their customer service department went unanswered, so I tried posting on their forum where my posts just disappeared.The little Sony does take good pictures, and 4K video, but I don't use it much since I got another Lumix that DOES do what I want. Sony's attitude of customer neglect has cured me of buying any more of their stuff.
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Another colleague told me about a similar investigation (semiconductor chip contamination) where they couldnt understand how "cooking oil" was getting onto their wafers. They traced it to a worker who'd routinely warm their McDonalds french fries in the wafer drying cabinets.
Another came from a boss who previously worked for a RF microwave amplifier company. Every once in a while, an assembly worker would wire one of two main electrolytic caps in reverse. Finally, they brought the person into the lab and turned on one of the amps that had been miswired in this way. The resulting explosion and "here's what happens" was enough of a message that the worker never did it again.
That same boss told me she got a call from a customer, who couldnt tell if their amplifier was working or not. He told her "I looked into the output port and saw a blue glow inside". She said "You better get yourself to a hospital, right away"
Oh, the things manufacturers have to deal with, just to make a successful product!
After 41 years in a manufacturing facility I could tell stories that would go on forever.
Here is a favorite that upheld my "blow stuff up" reputation.
A high level manager gets a Nextel phone back from Nextel with burn marks on it, and has a mid level engineer open it up for inspection. Upon finding more burnt stuff inside, she shuts down the entire production of ALL Nextel phones until this "serious safety problem" is investigated and rectified. The line shutdown is in it's second or third day when all of engineering is shut down and called upon to solve this issue.
A high level meeting is called at 8 AM for all engineers above a certain pay grade, including me. Some twit that talks a good story but does not understand basic electricity has prepared dozens of slides with everybody's theory of how this could have happened. There are pictured of traces burnt off the board, the flex circuit with similar burnt spots, even a burnt spot in the display. Dozens of schematics with circles and arrows pointing out how a certain combination of coincidental component failures could possibly do this, at which point I cried BS! The battery has an overcurrent safety circuit inside that would not allow enough current to blast runners off the PC board. You could not put enough current into an LCD display to make a black spot inside it.
There was a common thread amongst the burnt stuff, each one was about 30 mm from it's neighbor. This IS the strongest clue. I demanded to see the actual phone that was sent back, so someone fetched it. I took one look and proclaimed that it had been nuked in a microwave oven.
The queen bee who had shut down the factory told me that this was serious business, and I should offer a real opinion as to what caused the failure or shut up. This meeting degenerated into an arguing session, then several chest thumping sessions between different tribes as to which of the popular theories as to what caused the failure was correct. I and a few others had real engineering explanations as to why NONE of them were correct, but they were ignored. A plausible explanation was needed so that production could resume. More and more "experts" were dragged into the meeting, which had gone on well into lunch time with no useful conclusion. Most just added to the chaos, but one agreed with me that it had been nuked. At this point we were both dismissed as not serious and told to leave.
I walked directly to my desk, grabbed an identical phone and a screwdriver, headed to the break room, tossed the phone into the microwave and zapped it. I got some serious looks from the software engineers present in the room. I then went directly back to the meeting, made sure that I was noticed, slapped the phone down on the table and proceeded to take it apart.....a stink of burnt electronics filled the room. My phone had identical burnt marks in nearly the same places, all about 30mm apart.
When someone asked how I did this, I simply replied "20 seconds on defrost." After a lengthy explanation of how a microwave oven is actually a 750 watt radio transmitter on 2450 MHz, and the 30mm spacing of the burnt marks are a quarter wavelength at that frequency. My theory was accepted, the factory was turned back on and most of us went out for pizza.
I would not expect a high level manager to understand this, but I would think that at least more than one out of 35 or so electrical engineers in a company that specializes in RF engineering to understand what happened.
I guess that nobody in that room had ever done this:
Here is a favorite that upheld my "blow stuff up" reputation.
A high level manager gets a Nextel phone back from Nextel with burn marks on it, and has a mid level engineer open it up for inspection. Upon finding more burnt stuff inside, she shuts down the entire production of ALL Nextel phones until this "serious safety problem" is investigated and rectified. The line shutdown is in it's second or third day when all of engineering is shut down and called upon to solve this issue.
A high level meeting is called at 8 AM for all engineers above a certain pay grade, including me. Some twit that talks a good story but does not understand basic electricity has prepared dozens of slides with everybody's theory of how this could have happened. There are pictured of traces burnt off the board, the flex circuit with similar burnt spots, even a burnt spot in the display. Dozens of schematics with circles and arrows pointing out how a certain combination of coincidental component failures could possibly do this, at which point I cried BS! The battery has an overcurrent safety circuit inside that would not allow enough current to blast runners off the PC board. You could not put enough current into an LCD display to make a black spot inside it.
There was a common thread amongst the burnt stuff, each one was about 30 mm from it's neighbor. This IS the strongest clue. I demanded to see the actual phone that was sent back, so someone fetched it. I took one look and proclaimed that it had been nuked in a microwave oven.
The queen bee who had shut down the factory told me that this was serious business, and I should offer a real opinion as to what caused the failure or shut up. This meeting degenerated into an arguing session, then several chest thumping sessions between different tribes as to which of the popular theories as to what caused the failure was correct. I and a few others had real engineering explanations as to why NONE of them were correct, but they were ignored. A plausible explanation was needed so that production could resume. More and more "experts" were dragged into the meeting, which had gone on well into lunch time with no useful conclusion. Most just added to the chaos, but one agreed with me that it had been nuked. At this point we were both dismissed as not serious and told to leave.
I walked directly to my desk, grabbed an identical phone and a screwdriver, headed to the break room, tossed the phone into the microwave and zapped it. I got some serious looks from the software engineers present in the room. I then went directly back to the meeting, made sure that I was noticed, slapped the phone down on the table and proceeded to take it apart.....a stink of burnt electronics filled the room. My phone had identical burnt marks in nearly the same places, all about 30mm apart.
When someone asked how I did this, I simply replied "20 seconds on defrost." After a lengthy explanation of how a microwave oven is actually a 750 watt radio transmitter on 2450 MHz, and the 30mm spacing of the burnt marks are a quarter wavelength at that frequency. My theory was accepted, the factory was turned back on and most of us went out for pizza.
I would not expect a high level manager to understand this, but I would think that at least more than one out of 35 or so electrical engineers in a company that specializes in RF engineering to understand what happened.
I guess that nobody in that room had ever done this:
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Tubelab, you have told us a really interesting story!
All that I can add is that a colleague (long retired) was a consultant for semiconductor company many decades ago, and also had to find a contamination problem in the semiconductor wafer process. First, he found that only the run after lunch had the problem, and he traced it to people eating french fries at lunch, and bringing in the extra salt to the facility on their person.
All that I can add is that a colleague (long retired) was a consultant for semiconductor company many decades ago, and also had to find a contamination problem in the semiconductor wafer process. First, he found that only the run after lunch had the problem, and he traced it to people eating french fries at lunch, and bringing in the extra salt to the facility on their person.
The facility I worked in did not do any semiconductor fab, just the chip design. We did however do a lot of hybrid microelectronics production in the 70's and 80's. All of the things that caused serious contamination in the semiconductor fab plants were commonplace where I worked.
Did I ever clean my spark plugs in the vapor phase degreaser that was used to clean production parts? Did we ever make gold plated Quarters to spend in the vending machines so that the people receiving one as change would freak out? Did I ever plasma etch, then sputter nickel, then gold plate some razor blades for my coke head friends? Did we make PTH circuit boards for our DIY computers in the 70's in the plasma etch / sputter machine? Did one of my buddies burn his initials in the ceiling with a 200 watt CO2 laser? One of my routine tasks involver tuning up that laser by blasting holes through a 1/2 inch thick piece of asbestos.
After several complaints about the hazardous chemicals that were commonplace, food was banned from the factory floor, but seeing an operator eating a cheeseburger with one hand while running a wirebonder with the other was not uncommon.
Did I ever clean my spark plugs in the vapor phase degreaser that was used to clean production parts? Did we ever make gold plated Quarters to spend in the vending machines so that the people receiving one as change would freak out? Did I ever plasma etch, then sputter nickel, then gold plate some razor blades for my coke head friends? Did we make PTH circuit boards for our DIY computers in the 70's in the plasma etch / sputter machine? Did one of my buddies burn his initials in the ceiling with a 200 watt CO2 laser? One of my routine tasks involver tuning up that laser by blasting holes through a 1/2 inch thick piece of asbestos.
After several complaints about the hazardous chemicals that were commonplace, food was banned from the factory floor, but seeing an operator eating a cheeseburger with one hand while running a wirebonder with the other was not uncommon.
Though not as advanced technically as you Tubelab, I have often found myself in a minority with a more accurate understanding and solution to things, and this very much so with management.
Remember 2005, when Sony put a rootkit on millions of their music CDs, deliberately designed to infect the computers of customers who bought and played one of those CDs on a Window's computer?
For those who've forgotten, or who never ran across the story, here's a good writeup by a Wired magazine columnist: Sony's DRM Rootkit: The Real Story - Schneier on Security
I don't believe I have ever bought a Sony product after that.
In 2005, the idea of a corporate giant who secretly planted spyware on your computer, spyware that "phoned home" without your consent or knowledge, was so outrageous that it sparked a storm of protest from consumers.
Fifteen years later, people accept this level (and more) of invasive spying as though it was just normal, acceptable, the way things are done. People even pay for and invite spyware devices from Apple and Google into their homes, and carrying others about in their pockets: (How Google and Amazon are ‘spying’ on you | Consumer Watchdog )
-Gnobuddy
Thank god I don't have to worry if these things are true or not. (the spying)
I don't live with a phone on me, the one I do have is old as crap and doesn't have GPS, and my home will never have one of those lame-azzed google or alexa gadgets in it.
Don't need it, don't want it, live perfectly fine without it.
You could say, I'm pretty much "off the grid" in that case.
😉😉
I remember the evil rootkit. I think the story was that you could PLAY the CD on a Windows PC without incurring the rootkit, but attempting to copy it's contents into your PC, or duplicate the disk invited Sony's evil software on to your PC and activated it. As to what it actually did, nobody really knows, but my PC became infected with porn within a week or two after reading in some new CD's. It would boot directly to nastiness without even showing the Windows screen, the hard drive light was lit continuously, and some serious data transfer was going on. The infection was severe, but Norton couldn't detect it, much less fix it.
About the time that I had fixed everything by essentially replacing the boot drive in the PC I got a call from Norton tech support claiming that an evil virus had exploited the Sony rootkit to gain access to the PC for an early version of a bot net.
About the time that I had fixed everything by essentially replacing the boot drive in the PC I got a call from Norton tech support claiming that an evil virus had exploited the Sony rootkit to gain access to the PC for an early version of a bot net.