The Sodexo “Unity” cafeteria at UPC in Barcelona offers a “complete menu” for 6.60 Euros that includes a starter, main, drink, bread and desert. You could typically choose between three different starters and main courses, mixing and matching.
The common vegetables were potatoes and artichokes. Ham, bacon and fish were the relatively common meats.
Below are photos of the ten meals I ate.
Grilled fish, french fries, and kale.
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Barcelona has many curbside recycling bins that are color coded.
The blue bins take paper, magazines & cardboard (folding boxes), but NOT the plasticized cardboard juice and milk boxes. (Which go into the yellow plastic bins instead. Also, no tinfoil, because it’s metal, not paper!)
The yellow bins take all types of plastic, including plasticized juice and milk boxes, but don’t throw in plastic toys or DVD/CD-ROM’s. They also take metal cans (I’m not sure if this is just aluminum cans, or all types of metal cans.)
The green bins take all types of glass, but no metal lids or lightbulbs, or ceramics.
The brown bins are for organic remains (think compost), and all of your regular trash goes into the light gray bins. Currently very few people in Barcelona actually recycle, and most just throw all of their trash together into the gray bins.
I have opened my 2013 Nissan Leaf battery pack and removed the modules. The tools needed are:
You can watch the 13 minute youtube video here, or spend about the same amount of time wading through my wall of text below….
First: Remove the twelve 10mm bolts Continue reading
I have opened my 2013 Salvage Nissan Leaf battery, and removed some of the modules. I’ll post a complete guide with more pictures after I finish, but I wanted to post some photos of the differences between the 2011/2012 batteries and the 2013 battery.
From the outside of the battery the big difference is that there is a Continue reading
NOTE: The battery pack has 400 volts inside of it. Be sure you know what you are doing and have the proper protective equipment, as it can kill you! It also weights 600lbs, so it can crush you!
I needed to remove the battery pack from my Salvage Nissan Leaf. The 2013-Nissan-LEAF-DG.pdf (Disassembly Guide) I found on the Nissan website has good instructions, but they assume you have an auto-lift (and custom battery moving system).
I didn’t want to purchase an auto lift, so I did it with the following tools on my concrete driveway.
I was able to move the leaf under it’s own power (using two of it’s own wheels as well…) I titled the video “Drifting the rear end” because I want to see how many racing enthusiasts I can troll. This is probably the last time this Leaf will move under it’s own power, as the next step is to drop the high voltage battery pack.
Hojas, the wrecked 2013 Nissan Leaf that I purchased at an auto auction site was delivered to my house, and appeared completely dead. The first thing I did was to check the 12 volt “accessory” battery, and found that it had drained down to 1.5 volts. I think this was because in the collision one of the rear doors was knocked ajar, and the interior lights were illuminated because of that, but it could have also been due to the 2-3 months it had been sitting in the auction yard, or perhaps somebody initiated the emergency shutdown procedure.
After charging the 12 volt battery back up, I was able to put it into “accessory” and “on” mode, Continue reading
This is Hoja, a new (to me) 2013 Nissan Leaf. Hoja was rear-ended sometime around December or January, and was “totaled” by his insurance company, The Travelers Indemnity Company. They used Copart, an auto-auction company to sell the remains with a salvage title.
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This is my finished hex frame mirror, which is the last piece of the downstairs bathroom we renovated.
I built a hexagonal wood frame out of ceder planks for the new bathroom mirror. I had originally wanted to build an irregular three sided “triangular” mirror, but once I figured out that my compound miter saw wouldn’t make cuts sharper than 50 degrees I decided I needed more than 3 sides…and 8 pieces would have been a nightmare to assemble.
I used a table saw to rip a groove in each piece to hold the glass, and then I used the flattest surface I had available (the mirror glass) to assemble and glue the pieces together. The mirror glass was original to the house, and has a 1961 date printed on the back.
Once I had the frame built, I traced out a template so that I could mark the mirror glass exactly where it needed to be cut. (Due to a few holes I was avoiding in my scrap wood, the frame is not perfectly symmetrical….)
If I hadn’t already built the frame, I would have strongly considered making a “Superman” mirror at this point in the glass cutting phase.
The electric hub motor I purchased had a set of six holes built in for adding a 140mm disk brake rotor. Unfortunately, the bike frame I had used was not set up to mount a disk brake caliper.
I purchased the cheapest cable actuated disk brake caliper and rotor set I could find on ebay ($50) and then had to figure out how to mount the caliper. After a bit of thought, I eventually decided to keep it classy and not weld the entire thing directly to the bike frame.
Disk brake calipers are mounted using two screws, hopefully with lock washers to make sure they don’t come out. M6 SHCS (Socket Head Cap Screw), typically 1.0 thread pitch and 18mm long)
Although my bike frame did not have built-in holes for a disk brake caliper, it did have some threaded M6 holes for other purposes (racks/mudguards, etc..), so I could use one of those, and only had to add a 2nd mounting hole at exactly the right place.
From chopping apart a lot of bike frames, I had some spare steel, and one of the spare front forks also had an M6 hole tapped into it, so I didn’t even have to drill and tap the 2nd hole. I used a cut-off wheel on an angle grinder to liberate the hole and surrounding steel, then screwed it to the 2nd hole in the caliper, using the caliper body itself to hold the steel piece in place while I welded it. (The caliper also has two screws that adjust the body slightly, so the weld doesn’t have to be 100% perfect…)
Getting the small piece of steel, and cleaning off all the excess paint to get the parts ready to weld took a lot longer than actually doing the small weld. (I could have brazed the two together, but since I have the welder just sitting there, and the welded joint will be stronger, always important for brakes…)
Of course, because the brake caliper itself has M6 threaded holes, you don’t want the holes on the frame to ALSO be threaded (because then you can’t use the screws to tighten the caliper to the frame of the bike effectively) so after I had the holes positioned where I wanted them, I used a drill bit to ream the threads out of the holes on the frame. (N.B….never use a drill bit as a reamer…unless you don’t have a reamer….)