I am So Smart! S-M-R-T!

Doh!

Have you ever done something dumb with credit cards before?

I have a cash-back card, and I’m good about keeping it paid down, so I felt pretty happy when the card company would mail me rebate cheques a couple of times a year. I have a handle on consumer credit, go me! On average I was “up” about $200/year.

So, last February when they offered me a 0% loan (with a 1% “service fee” up front) it was almost a no-brainer. I wasn’t going to be making any risky investments if I had to repay in a year… but if I can borrow at 1% and get between 2-2.5% in a regular savings account, why not? After giving Revenue Canada their slice of the action, I should still make about $100. Sign me up!

All I had to do was make sure to keep my card balance paid down to the amount of the loan (since I didn’t want to be paying off my 1% cash early). How hard could that be? (cue dramatic music)

December rolls around and I started to think about moving some money between accounts, to pay off the loan by the end of January. So I took a closer look at my December statement to see where I was… huh?… what do you mean I paid $100 in interest? And $40 in November? And $60 in October? But I pay all my bills on time! It turns out I was too good at paying them off. Occasionally I checked my balance often enough it didn’t show my previous payment yet… so I sometimes repaid twice, and slowly nibbled away some 1% cash each time.

Because I was only looking at the total on my statements, and not checking the “interest paid this month” line… I didn’t realize what was going on. For the first few months of my loan I paid $0 interest… then I started to pay too much … and over the last couple months I had essentially been floating a $3500 balance on my card (1% money that I accidentally paid back, which I was now paying full interest on). Doh!

End result: my brilliant scheme to make $100 has now made me nothing.. in fact I’m $200 in the hole after interest charges. So much for the “cash back” card 🙂

I wasn’t smart enough to keep a steady non-zero card balance for a year, and it cost me. I’m paying the whole thing off _today_. Bah!

(Oh, and Happy Holidays!)

The morning after…

Last night just before 2:30am the fire alarm in our apartment building went off. That actually happens every couple of months or so, and normally building management gets on the intercom fairly quickly to say it’s a false alarm. Not this time. This time we had people running down our hall banging on doors, and other friends in the building calling to see if we “made it out yet”.

So we bundled up, grabbed the dog, and got out of Dodge.

Our 3rd-floor hallway had a haze of smoke, and as soon as we got into the stairwell we were picking our way down stairs covered with water hoses, and scooting around firemen going into the second floor with their masks on. We could see through the glass on the 2nd-floor door that the hall was filled with smoke. Hooray for having a fire station almost at the end of our street… as soon as the alarm goes off they roll… and are normally in the building poking around before half the people have gotten there boots and jackets on.

My sister had to carry her dog Lucy down the stairs… since she wasn’t going anywhere near all the commotion on her leash. So right after we got out and around back of the building to take a peek at the fire… we went for a walk to calm the dog down and since it looked like it was going to take awhile. Just as we left we started to see billows of steam go up the side of the building, as they started to hose things down.

By the time we had walked a couple blocks North and looped back, it was all over, and people were heading back in. Though there were still at least 4 firetrucks and hoses all over the place. This is what we saw this morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The fire looks to have started in a garbage area out back, then gutted the second floor apartment immediately above it. Maybe by the end of the day we’ll have heard more news (and hopefully the Rogers guys will be done: they have 3 trucks out back this morning:cable/TV went out at 2:15am as well). A friend at work said she heard somebody tossed a cigarette off their balcony, which may have lit some garbage below.

Update: Found a CityNews link about the fire. Interesting that they say there was damage to the third+fourth floor apartments… and have a picture of the second-floor unit with the balcony/front/window/door destroyed.

Update #2: My friend on the top floor has pictures of the fire here!

NKOTB

“I love you Joey!”

Wait… ahem… what were we talking about again?

Oh yeah: this weekend 3 of my RCs went up on Ebay. One of them I was essentially swapping up for it’s bigger brother… and that new kid arrived in the mail today:

 

 

On the left is the new-to-me RC8Te truck (“truggy”), and on the right is the outgoing RC8(Be) buggy. They’re both from Team Associated and based on the same platform (so I can recycle most of my spare parts supply). The truck has a longer chassis, longer suspension arms, and bigger tires… but the drivetrain and required electronics are essentially identical.

Should have it running by the weekend!

Love bug…

This weekend I’m trying to catch up on all my little chores. Winterize the dirtbike, throw out all the extra boxes that have been piling up, and “do something” with my RC toys. I put 2 of them up on Ebay, and started installing parts on another that had been waiting for them for months. A new VW Beetle body and body mounts… a couple cans of paint, and voila!:

 

 

The body was dropped until it just covered the chassis when viewing it from the side.

 

 

It’s the same truck underneath as before… but now I have a nice body for it that doesn’t have a helmetcam hole sawed into the windshield. 🙂

Somebody stop me…

I just got back from vacation, and there were four parcels waiting for me… full of parts to fix my toys. A bit of work with screwdrivers, soldering iron, spray paint and crazy glue got all of them on the road for the first time. I was hoping to have two R/C vehicles but somehow am up to five 🙂

 

 

Front-to-back: Tamiya Hornet, Associated RC10 Graphite, Associated RC8e, Traxxas Stampede VXL and Tamiya Bullhead (Clod Buster)

Some of them still need some minor work, and I should really sell at least two of them: but for now I’m going to enjoy what I have. I just really really really can’t buy any more.

“Have you ever seen the rain…”

…yes, yes Creedence Clearwater Revival, I have.

Today as I was goofing around on the Internet I heard a gentle rain start outside. Then it got louder. And the covered windows in my room started to rattle. Still sitting at my computer I opened a bookmark to Environment Canada. “SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH IN EFFECT”. Ok then, time to take a peek outside.

Yikes!

After it calmed down a bit I reached out the door and dunked a ruler in our swamped balcony. Just over 2.5″ in the middle, closer to 2.75″ at the edge.

 

 

Whatever drain tubes we have out there… I better make sure they’re not clogged. If the rain hadn’t scaled back it would have flooded our living room in about another 15 minutes… and we live on the third floor 🙂

Old School…

Last Friday I saw a Kijiji post from a guy blowing out RC stuff that had been sitting in his garage for over 15 years. The pictures were fuzzy, and he wasn’t really sure what ran, what was broken, or even the model of one of the vehicles, but I was interested. He was asking $200… and after the weekend passed with no bites… I picked it up last Monday for $100.

What did I get? A lot of plastic parts layered with dirt, grease, cement dust and sawdust from his garage. But after cleaning things up after work this week, this is what I ended up with…

An Associated RC10 Graphite buggy: first sold in 1990. It was ready-to-run with a Futaba radio, “Magic Johnson” motor, and JR ESC. Even had 8 old nicads in the transmitter that still worked. Back when I was first into RC, this would have been one of the premium race buggies… now you may see people racing it in a vintage class, giving it to their kid to run into trees, or restored as a “shelf queen” back to original condition. I’m going to run it into trees 🙂

 

 

A Tamiya Bullhead, aka “Clodbuster with a different body” that also came out in 1990. Clodbusters used to be the biggest bashing monster truck you could buy… and they’ve remained so popular that the manufacturer re-released them in 2004 as the “Super Clodbuster”. This one came with a 2-stick Futaba radio, dual-steering-servos, upgraded “Monster Mash 2” motors… and the stock manual speed control (yuck!). The old speed control may suck, but this one was also-ready-to-run, coming with a second set of 8 nicad batteries in the transmitter.

 

 

A Novak DC peak charger, and a Hobbico AC/DC adjustable current charger (aka pour-current-into-it-for-X-minutes-or-it melts-the-battery charger). The two old 6-cell nicads are effectively dead. One ran the RC10 for about 3 minutes at a jogging pace, and the other let me drive the Clod from the living room to the bedroom, then died. I could buy NiMH replacements and maybe get some use out of the chargers… but my RC8 and Stampede already have Lipo batteries, so this whole setup may go in the garbage. (or, since my new Lipo batteries can’t be used in the RC10 or Clod, I may splurge for a single $20-$30 NiMH just to tie me over for now… it hurts to just look at them on the shelf when I know they can run 🙂 )

 

 

Finally, the odds-and-ends. The typical tackle box full of assorted RC parts, and an old Tamiya Hornet (1984) roller with its original box (no motor, speed control or radio). Plus a stack of extra tires for the RC10 and Hornet.

 

 

20 years ago I had a Hornet when I lived in Kenora, and it was considered a crappy car even back then. Still, because it has extra disposable tires… and because I’ll likely have some donor radio/motor/ESC parts after the Cold and RC10 get modern electrics… I think I’ll keep it around. Sometimes an old bouncy car doing donuts in the parking lot… burning off its $5 tires… is all you need to put a smile on your face 🙂

So, an excellent deal for $100, but I have to stop buying RC bits. I already have 2 runnable cars (RC8 and Stampede) and the RC10 and Clod will bring it to 4 (maybe 5 with the Hornet). I am but one man 🙂

Hard Bodies…

Both RC vehicles are still out of commission, waiting for parts. So I decided to paint the new body RC8 body I had ordered a month ago. I didn’t really need it, since the green cover it came with was perfectly functional… but since I was getting back into the hobby after 15 years, and since it was a used RC, I wanted to do something to make it feel a bit more like mine. And I really wanted to try painting again, since I had only done it once before long long ago for my Traxxas Sledgehammer.

After a lot of Googling I had a basic idea of how I wanted to paint it. Complicated designs are nice, but I needed something I could mask off with relatively straight bits of masking tape. The fewer corners I needed to learn to trim with a hobby knife, the better. After a few rough drawings I had a basic idea:

 

 

Here’s the first pass: using green painters masking tape and some newspaper to lay down the center and side stripes (which will be white), then the secondary center stripes and side pods (which will be silver), then covering up everything else (which will be purple) to only expose the 3 vent mouldings in the body:

 

 

Here’s the vents painted black, then the first layer of paper and tape removed to show the areas to be spray-painted translucent purple:

 

 

Here’s after the purple was put on:

 

 

Then I took off the masking for the side pods and secondary center stripes and put on the silver:

 

 

Finally I removed the center and side stripes and added the white (then took out the masks on the windows too):

 

 

Then added a couple decals:

 

 

And the final result on the car!

 

 

I screwed up the purple a bit (put it on too thick) and didn’t mask the black off properly, but I’m really happy with the results! I’m going to put the buggy tires back on the RC8 when I run this new cover, since the larger truck tires tend to rub the body and rip it (the green body already has several cracks in it). Maybe I’ll do a nice shiny new cover for the Stampede next!

Smile!…

 

 

…you’re on camera!

My first attempt at mounting my helmetcam to my RC truck didn’t work so well: it was velcro’d to the flexible body and shook around too much. This time I screwed together some 3/8″ dowels and other scrap wood to attach the camera to the frame, by spanning the front and rear body mounts.

 

 

The camera pokes a bit farther through the windshield now (so it records less of the hood) but it’s held on with elastic bands… so if it gets hit it can slide back into the body:

 

 

The video was better, but still very choppy. It’s never going to be perfectly smooth when the truck is flying across a lumpy lawn on little 5″ wheels. So I also washed the video though a VirtualDub plugin called “Deshaker“, then played with cropping and resizing the video to get this second demo clip:

Deshaker nudges the video frames in various directions to try to stabilize the image, but it leaves black bars around the edge to the scene (i.e. if it moves a scene a bit to the left to remove a shake, it backfills an empty black section on the right of the screen). So raw Deshaker processed video has black bars dancing around all 4 sides of the screen as it tries to stabilize the image, which is distracting. To get rid of the worst of it I cropped the 1280×720 video down to 1030×580 (so I lost a bit of my peripheral vision), then resampled the result back up to 1280×720 again. The resulting video is a bit less crisp… but a lot less shakey!

Mother of Invention…

It’s Canada Day long weekend, I had a broken RC truck… and all the hobby shops were closed. How could I have some fun until the shops opened up again? Well, only one of the two camber arms on the truck were broken, so I took off the good one and sized it up against some square poplar dowels: 3/8″ on top and 1/4″ on the bottom.

 

 

The 1/4″ inch one fit with no further trimming, success!

 

 

 

 

I ran 2 battery packs through the truck and nothing broke. Then I brought it back inside to swap to some street tires for goofing around. But with more grip on pavement the front tires were taking more of a beating on hard cornering… and eventually the little wooden camber arm broke 🙁

 

 

Luckily I still had the larger 3/8″ piece: with a little trimming on both ends it bolted right on… and lasted until I made it to Advance Hobbies on Saturday, hooray!

 

 

Next up: turning it into a dune buggy with a VW beetle body. First step: ribs on the front and something a bit knobbier on the back: stay tuned!