This blog lost about 2/3rds of its daily visitors, on or about August 20, 2024. That, against a months-long backdrop of steady daily page views.
“Tarnation”, I muttered, “what in blue blazes happened?”
Hopping horny-toads, what flea-bitten varmint did this? I’m-a-gonna blow ’em to smithereenies.
I write this blog mostly to amuse myself and a select few friends and relatives. But almost all of my page views are from strangers who find my how-to/technical information articles via Google. For example, my most popular post, by far, shows how to make a cheap heated faucet cover to keep exterior faucets from freezing.
And, upon re-reading the last couple of weeks of posts, I think I’ve found the problem.
I’ve been cussin’ too dang much. (And/or, Google just upped its standards in that area.)
To put that more technically, many savvy observers believe that curse words negative affect your search-engine optimization (SEO). In theory, that’s not supposed to be true. In practice, it appears to be true. And the only thing that stands out about my most recent posts is frequent (but humor-focused) use of swear words.
Google search generates more-or-less all of my referred traffic, so the only plausible explanation for the drop is that something has put me on Google’s bad side. Upon re-reading my most recent output, the gratuitous curse words stood out as the likely culprit.
An alternative explanation is that Google’s August 2024 update to its search algorithm found something else that it didn’t like about me. Turns out, quite a few websites saw a big decline in traffic just about the same day mine did. In theory, if I can cut through the technical barriers, there is a way for me to use the Google Search Console to see if there’s an issue. But that requires modifying the website and/or the DNS listing, neither of which I particularly want to do.
The lesson is that if our monopoly provider of search services takes a dislike to you, you’re toast. Whatever Google decides more-or-less determines how the internet runs.
Google giveth, and Google taketh away.
I’ve now gone back and cleaned up the past couple of weeks’ worth of postings. I’m hoping for the best.
We’ll see if Google can find it in her heart to forgive me. Whatever it was that I did to offend her.
It took about an hour to construct the vehicle and foot traffic counts you see here. The hardware was an $18 Kasa camera, plus my laptop to view the resulting footage.
I let the camera film the street in front of my house. That was not intrinsically different from (e.g.) a Ring doorbell. (It is legal in Virginia to film anything in the public right-of-way, or anything you can view while in the public right-of-way, other than restricted areas such as military installations, as long as you don’t record conversations that you are not part of.)
I then did the simplest thing possible. I transferred the SD card from camera to laptop, and watched the video on fast-forward. It was like the worlds most boring, yet tense, home video. I stopped the film when something happened, and put down tally marks.
The fastest I could comfortably watch was 16X. Doing that, recording the events in eight hours of video took about an hour. (The camera itself is capable of noting the passage of cars, via built-in motion detection, but would not identify passing pedestrians at the distance this was from the street.)
If nothing else, this confirms what my wife and I had both noticed, that this street is used by a lot of dog-walkers.
This is just a proof-of-concept. Today it’s drizzly, and there’s a school holiday, so this would not be representative of typical Friday morning foot traffic.
The context is the value of sidewalk improvements in the Town of Vienna. With rare exception, there are no counts of pedestrian traffic in any of the Town’s various studies. (I did find one, once, but they referred to rush-hour pedestrian street crossing counts along selected corners of Maple Avenue, our main thoroughfare).
The idea being that there’s more value in putting a sidewalk where people will use it, than putting it where they won’t. Assuming that current foot traffic along a route is a good indicator for eventual foot traffic there, once a sidewalk is built. (There could be exceptions to that. But in the main, I think that’s right.)
And that, for planning purposes, you’d like to have some idea of what they’re using a particular route for.
There are currently at least two ways to get pedestrian count data on (e.g.) suburban side-streets that do not have traffic lights. Other than the old-fashioned approach of having somebody sit by the street and count passers-by.
One is to use cell-phone data, because many cell phones track and report their user’s location on a flow basis, and that information is sold commercially. Courtesy of the improved accuracy of GPS, data vendors can now tell you (e.g.) how long the average customer walks around a store, based on how long their cell phones linger there.
(I am not sure that this tracking is entirely “voluntary” or not. That is, did you download an app that, had you bothered to scrutinize the dozens of pages of fine print before clicking “ACCEPT”, would have revealed that you gave that app the right to collection and transmit your location to some central source? Or, just as plausibly, if you don’t manage to turn off every blessed way that your phone can track you, then somebody’s picking up your location on a flow basis, you just have no clue whom? For sure, the phone companies themselves always have a crude idea of where your phone is (based on which cell tower your area nearest), and I’m pretty sure they also get your GPS data, nominally so that they may more accurately predict when your signal needs to switch from one cell tower to the next.)
The problem with counts based on cell-phone tracking that it is of an unknown completeness. Plausibly, some people manage to keep themselves from being continuously tracked. Or, more likely, any one data vendor only buys that data from a limited number of app providers. Generally, it’s fine for making relative statements about one area versus another, but needs to be “calibrated” to real-world observations in order to get a rule-of-thumb for inflating the number of tracked phones in an area, to the actual on-the-ground pedestrian count.
Plus, it costs money, and it’s geared toward deep-pocketed commercial users.
Finally, it’s likely that certain classes of pedestrians will be systematically under-represented in cell phone data, most importantly school children, but also possibly joggers.
The other way to do it in the modern world is to use a cheap camera. Then count by eye.
So, as an alternative, I decided to see how hard it would be to gather that information this way. Turns out, it’s not hard at all, even with doing the counts manually. All it takes is a cheap camera, my eyes, and, for eight hours of data, an hour of fast-forwarding.
Not sure where I’m going with this, in the context of writing up the multi-million-dollar make-over of my little street. I just wanted to prove that it’s not at all hard to get data-based counts of pedestrian traffic on any street. All you need is a camera, and a place to put it. And the time to view the results, if you can’t figure out an automated system for that.
My approach may be a bit low-tech for the 21st century in the surveillance state. But it works. Fill in the hourly wage of (say) the employee who would have to watch that video, and you come up with a pretty cheap way to provide hard data on need for sidewalks, as evidenced by counts of pedestrian foot traffic.
If you’re going to spend millions of dollars on sidewalks … how could you not do this first, to see that the expenditure is efficient, in the sense of pedestrians served per dollar of expense?
More on this still to come.
Coda
As if to underscore the power of the surveillance state, about six hours after I posted this, I got my first-ever email from Kasa, with an offer for a video doorbell.
That, presumably, because this blog post had the words “Kasa” and “doorbell” in it.
This happens enough that I know the root cause of it.
Sure enough, yesterday I signed into Google, using this browser, to access something via my Google account, and I foolishly forgot to sign out. Google was therefore somewhat aware of just about everything I did on this browser in the meantime.
Presumably Google ratted me out to Kasa.
Somewhere, the ghost of Orwell is surely laughing.
Short answer, easy. The only thing wood won’t do, that plastic will, is flex. Everything else is not a problem.
But when They say “hand wash only”, They really mean it. See Death by Dishwasher below. Also search “sanitary” (below), if that’s your hangup with wood.
This is my fifth year of growing okra. Though it seems like more than that.
Last year, my okra plants made nearly it to the stage pictured above, …
… then it got too cold for them, and there was no more okra for the year. Great sadness descended upon our household.
But this year, for whatever reason — maybe I put them in earlier, who knows — they have reached the point of looking like a big ol’ flower stalk on top, and it’s still fairly warm.
So, while these pictures are not quite seed-catalog good, I figure, any time you see clusters of okra pods, that’s good.
This is Jambalaya okra. I would definitely plant this again. Virginia, Zone 7.
This is the lowest of common denominators, a blog post about my experiences dieting.
I guess these days, with easy access to effective diet drugs, this is useless information. But, FWIW this is all old-school. Eat less. Exercise more.
Some things that might make this post worth reading are that:
I’ve lost a bit over 55 pounds so far, from a starting point of 285, eleven months ago. Little over a pound a week, at a steady pace.
My wife is, completely independently, also losing copious amounts of weight, and has decided that she likes bicycling as a form of vigorous exercise.
I’ve said “check for pods” enough times now that it is no longer even remotely funny. (That is, this behavior is unlike the woman I thought I knew.)
We have been acting independently on the diet front. Each to his or her own. But doing something at the same time makes things a lot easier, for both of us.
In addition, things get a little weird with that much weight loss. Particularly when you’re old (I’m a 65-year-old man.) Stretch marks ain’t the half of it. OTOH, I can now look down and see something other than my gut.
And yet, I’m still obese, so I should keep doing this.Pretty much permanently. And even if I hit some ultimate target weight, that just buys me a few hundred extra calories a day (from the lack of a need to lose additional weight.)
Surprisingly, that is not a bitter pill to swallow. That’s new. I had accepted this outcome intellectually long ago, but I feel that I have now accepted it into my heart. So to speak.
And that’s all bound up with other lifestyle changes.
T-totaling after a lifetime of heavy drinking.
But also correcting some other bad eating habits.
I’ve had a remarkably easy time of it. It’s like something in my head broke last September, and in a (mostly) good way. Cravings of all kinds died. To the point, my sense of hunger has died down. On a good day, I’ll reach a point in the day where I feel that I should eat, but I will only have the mildest of sensations of hunger.
If that’s how you experience hunger, dieting is a snap. I just never had that happen before.
I am hardly the first to have noted that this can happen. I recall renowned magician Penn Jillette (like the razor, but with a J) talking about the potato diet, specifically, how he lost certain types of food cravings.
But, in my case, near as I can tell, loss of cravings was a gift. I didn’t do anything to earn it. Maybe I’ve done a bit not to screw it up, for example, avoiding high-starch high-calorie meals. But where this came from in the first place, I have not a clue.
Best I can say, I seem to have gone through a change-of-life experience, almost a year ago. I don’t want to say I “hit rock bottom”, because that borrows from the gravity of those whose lives were destroyed by alcoholism, who then went on to sobriety. But I think I may have had its kinder-gentler cousin, simple straight-up and reasonably immanent fear of an early grave. That seems to have done the trick for me. YMMV.
I should probably write up some notes on the transition from being a heavy drinker to sobriety.
But, as with the rest of my life, it’s boring and logical. No DTs for me.
Alcohol is a sedative. Remove the sedative, and you catch some wicked insomnia on the rebound. The story being that, when subject to chronic sedation, your brain fights back by growing more “stay awake” nerve centers. The insomnia then ebbs slowly, because it requires your brain to un-wire all that. I only had a night or two of straight-up total insomnia, followed by months of disturbed sleep. I am now at the stage where I merely wake up to pee, which, for a guy my age, is unremarkable.
But a lingering effect is that I’m up for the day at a comically early hour. Like 4 AM. Not much I can do about that, and that might just be normal aging.
Did I mention that alcohol is a poison? Remove the daily dose of poison, and if you’re lucky, and haven’t pushed it too far, your innards will eventually heal. Mostly. As with the disturbed sleep, it kind of asymptotes its way to a new normal over many more months that you would have thought plausible.
As for all the rest of the promises of lifestyle change — your energy will be up, and you’ll always look on the bright side of life — well, that hasn’t happened to me. I’m not holding out hope that it will.
It’s easier to get around, because I’m lighter. That’s about it. Occasionally I’ll do something and realize that, pre-weight-loss, that was a chore, and now it’s not. That’s a kick.
Where was I?
Ah, diet.
Just to prove this post isn’t like any other dieting post you’ve ever read, I’m starting off with some math.
I have to eat how much protein a day?
I’m used to eating a certain mix of foods. Nothing extreme. Not meat-heavy, but not vegetarian either. Boring, middle-of-the-road eating. If you’re old enough, you’ll recall being taught to eat “a balanced diet”. That’s kinda the idea.
Vegetables, meats, grains, fruits, roots, shoots — it’s all good. That results in a “usual mix” of protein, starch, and fat in my diet, and it suits me fine.
A balanced diet — in terms of the fraction of calories from protein, carbs, and fat — gets screwed up when you restrict calories. That’s because, at a given weight, you simultaneously cut back your calories, and increase the amount of protein you should consume (if you lift weights regularly to try to minimize loss of muscle mass in dieting.)
As a matter of math, I end up with an unpleasantly large share of calories coming from the proteins in my diet.
Example of 100 grams of protein a day
For the sake of argument, assume that I should ideally eat 100 grams of protein a day. Recommendations vary a lot, even from seemingly reliable sources. But that’s ballpark for a guy my size and age, trying to maintain muscle mass with regular weightlifting.
What’s the big deal? That 100 grams is roughly four ounces.
Four ounces of pure protein.
My first mistake was in thinking that raw meat was mostly protein. Actually, raw meat is mostly water.
Below, if I obtain that 100 grams of protein a day from lean ground beef, with the fat broiled out of it, I need to eat 1.25 pounds of lean ground beef a day. Five quarter-pounders a day, of beef patties. Like so, via the USDA.
Obviously, I can get that protein from other sources. I could, alternatively, eat 16 hard-boiled eggs a day.
Or beans. I’ve been told since childhood that they are good for the heart. I could eat just shy of a half-gallon of cooked navy beans a day.
The problem is, I’d like to keep total dietary calories somewhere around 1700 per day. That results in diet in which most of what I eat — the majority of my food calories —is in the mandatory load of high-protein foods.
Heck, look at the bean line. If my only protein source is beans, it’s an overdetermined system of equations. I can’t satisfy both the calorie maximum and the protein minimum, because the protein in beans comes with a lot of starch attached. If I ate nothing but boiled beans for protein, I’d exceed my current daily calorie target.
The result is that meat-fish-eggs comprises a much larger fraction of my dietary calories, compared to what I was used to all my life. Not because I’m trying to eat paleo or go into ketosis. Just because I’m trying to meet (what I think is) a reasonable daily protein target, under a calorie cap well below calories required to maintain weight.
Like the USDA food pyramid, on its head.
Too-many-proteins sounds OK, until you’ve had to eat that way for a few months. Everything about the diet just says “way too much meat”. As a fraction of the diet.
A solution to this overdetermined system of equations.
There are a handful of all-protein or nearly-all-protein foods that you can use. Nonfat dairy products are high on the list. And they’re OK. But most of them (e.g., yoghurt) are mostly water.
But there are at least two types of all-protein isolates readily available that give you pure dry protein, extracted from some source. One of which is whey protein isolate, from milk (I think), and favored by body-builders. Shown above. (Another common one is textured vegetable protein (TVP), from soy, favored by the cheap, and survivalists. There are, of course, others, for example, plant-based protein powders.)
Today I broke down and took a trip to my local Vitamin Shoppe. The place is weirdly well-stocked, despite the near-total absence of customers any time I’ve been there. I picked up a big jug of whey protein isolate. This gives me 25 grams of protein — more than in a quarter-pound (raw) broiled hamburger patty, for 100 calories, and essentially zero fat or cholesterol.
(It’s also modestly cheaper than lean hamburger as a source of protein. That $80 jug above contains as much protein as 16 pounds of 93% lean ground beef.)
You’re well-advised to disguise it as best you can before you eat it. Accordingly, almost all of this stuff is sold sweetened and flavored, to make a stand-alone protein drink. My take on it is that it’s such a cutthroat market, the flavorings are sub-par.
So I bought the plain stuff, and I’m dumping it in my morning coffee, with some cocoa powder. It’s … edible … that way. And it gives me one-quarter of my daily minimum of protein.
I feel as if I’ve just re-invented Carnation Instant Breakfast (now renamed Breakfast Essentials), but my wife informs me that putting protein powder in your morning coffee was a hot new wellness trend in 2020, courtesy of Google Search. So I’m just four years late to this hip new version of Instant Breakfast.
At any rate, this slug of fat-free protein should, in turn, should free up some calories that I can use to eat something other than meat and eggs. It’s a way to dodge an otherwise overdetermined system of dietary equations.
I’ll save the rest of my observations on weight loss, such as they are, for another post.
This post is briefly explains why I’m tossing out my worn plastic cutting boards and mats, and rehabbing a few wooden cutting boards to take their place.
This, based on two absolutely ridiculous research findings regarding the amount of microplastic in the diet, as measured in credit cards per year.
This will all make sense by the time I’m done.
A ratio of credit cards.
A few weeks back, you may have read that the average American eats a credit-card’s-worth of micro-plastic a week, on average. The obvious click-bait potential for such a bizarre and gross assertion meant that it got lots of attention on the internet. (The research has been around for a while, but for some reason, there was a recent resurgence of reporting on it.)
I’m not giving a reference for that, because, as discussed below, that’s total 💩.
But, because normal isn’t newsworthy, you’d be hard-pressed to find any internet mentions of the the debunking of that credit-card-a-week. Other scientists have taken the same (~) underlying data and calculated a weight of microplastic in the diet of around one-millionth of a credit-card a week. Just under five millionths-of-a-gram per week, not five grams per week.
(How? To be as charitable as I can, it turns out to be difficult to take counts of a few dozens of microscopic plastic fragments, in a few samples of food, and extrapolate those data to come up with the total weight of microplastic in the diet. As I read the scientific debate, the authors of the various “credit-card” studies simply made an exceptionally poor choice of extrapolation method.)
Now, you personally may have thought that that “credit-card-per-week” figure was implausible. And yet, because “microplastic in the diet” is such a squishy entity (starting with, invisible), you really had no way to prove that your instincts were correct.
Now, thankfully, somebody has jumped the shark. There’s a new study claiming that, in addition to plastic in the food chain, the use of plastic cutting boards addsa further ten credit-cards a year of plastic to the diet.(?)(!).
The cutting-board estimate estimate is also total 💩. But it’s useful 💩
💩 ? Yep. Same reason as the credit-card-a-week study. See above.
But its useful in the following ways.
First, this most recent “credit-card-consumption” study is self-debunking for the average user. Because, while I’m not exactly sure what “microplastic in the diet” looks like, I for sure know what a plastic cutting board is.
Do the math, and at 5 grams per credit card, ten is just shy of two ounces a year. This research is claiming that the average person’s plastic cutting boards erode from knife cuts at the rate of (~) two ounces/year/household member.
Really? For your consideration, I offer Orange Cutting Mat (below), weighing in at a svelte 1.1 ounces:
If the erosion rate really were two ounces a year, the mat above would have been worn to shreds a decade or two ago. It’s old. Origins are lost in the mists of history. It’s used more-or-less daily. It’s obviously scratched from use.
And yet this venerable cutting mat continues to serve.
Worse — and for shame — the authors of this 10-credit-cards-a-year study could have convincingly debunked their own finding with a day of work and a kitchen scale. Weigh a cutting mat (per above, 32 grams). Chop vegetables on that mat for five hours (300 minutes) to simulate 30 days of typical household chopping. If the estimated two-ounces-per-year is correct, you’ll have lost about one credit-card’s-worth of plastic, or about 5 grams. At the end of the day, if the erosion rate was as-stated, that plastic mat ought to weigh just 28 grams. That amount of plastic weight loss should be easily detectable on a gram kitchen scale.
In other words, you can literally check their work by subtraction. With a kitchen scale. And a month’s worth of vegetable. And some manual labor. Just weigh the cutting mat pre- and post- a marathon cutting session.
But as importantly, this study makes you realize that, yep, some of the plastic from those scratches is exiting as tiny fragments. And you’re eating those tiny plastic fragments. Some of them, anyway. There’s no reason to think that the authors did their lab work incorrectly.
And, if you follow the thread here, because 10/52 =~ 20% based on the well-known Universal Law of Credit Card Accounting, using plastic cutting boards ups your dietary consumption of microplastic by 20%. Or so. Under the assumption that both studies embody the same degree of (gross) overstatement of the actual weight of plastic.
I don’t know whether the actual amount of microplastic in the diet causes significant harm or not.
On the one hand, humans have been using copious amounts of plastic for decades. If there is some health hazard from microlastic in the diet, chances are good that it has already occurred. I suspect we’re hearing a lot about microplastic due to some change in technology that makes it easier and cheaper to detect.
(Take that cynicism with a grain of salt, as my entire house is carpeted in cut-pile polyester wall-to-wall (Post #1943, carpet fiber burn test). And, accordingly, I must surely live in veritable airborne-microplastic-polyester-fiber-fragment miasma.)
On the other hand, you at least have to recall the mechanism of action of asbestos for lung cancer. My recollection is that it was a micro-fiber disruption argument, The fiber in question, thought to spur generation of lung cancer, was an eensy asbestos fiber fragment that got inside the lung cell. And proceeded to screw up the works just enough, when that cell next divided. That’s how I recall the theory of it.
So, durable microscopic fibers (or other plastic bits) can’t be readily dismissed. Plausibly, it only takes a tiny amount of that stuff to cause whatever havoc it’s going to cause.
Conclusion: Putting the ick in clickbait.
The upshot is that while the jury’s out on the dangers of microplastic in the diet, there’s no sense in force-feeding yourself with it.
Not when you can easily cut your food up on something else.
As final insult to injury, I note two things.
First, as I read it, based on the underlying data used, that 10-credit-cards-a-year from use of plastic cutting boards would be in addition to the estimated 52 credit-cards’-worth already supposedly in the diet. So the purported total now stands at 62 credit-cards a year, for those who both eat food and use plastic cutting boards.
Second, I infer from this glimpse of the literature that there’s a whole slew of scientific papers in the pipeline that use minor variants on this same (bad) extrapolation methodology. So, changes are, there’s now going to be a string of articles showing the mind-boggling amounts of microplastic you eat due to fill-in-the-blank. These will, of course, be rapidly popularized on the internet, because they put the “ick” in clickbait. Literal accuracy is not required, only some plausible (i.e., science journal) source.
Recap: This is a series of posts about replacing the fork bearings on a TiLite Aero wheel chair.
In the first post, I removed the forks from the chair. What should have taken about five minutes actually took several hours, owing to a bearing that was rusted solid onto the fork axle.
In the second post, I worked through all the details on bearings. As long as you know the size of the steel sealed bearings that you need, you can pick them up for around $1 each on Amazon.
This third post is about driving the old bearings out of the fork, and pounding the new bearings into the fork, using only these tools and materials:
a soft vise to hold the forks as needed (I used a Workmate bench).
The snap-ring pliers are not optional, unless you’ve got a whole lot more dexterity than I do. There is one c-clip in each fork, whose purpose is to ensure that the bearings do not slide down from the weight of chair and user. That c-clip is difficult to get in or out without c-clip pliers.
Also, be warned that driving the bearings in with a hammer and “drift” is not for the faint of heart. You end up hammering pretty hard. About as hard as you might when pounding a nail into a 2×4. You have to do that, to get the bearing to seat all the way at the bottom of the hole it fits into.
If the very idea of hammering that hard on an expensive wheelchair part makes you squeamish, then you’ve got good sense. This is nobody’s idea of a good time. But once you’ve started this, either you drive that bearing all the way home or you buy/make a bearing press that can finish off what you started.
If I had to do this multiple times, I’d shop for a bearing puller (to take the old ones out) and a bearing press (to push the new ones in) before I started the repair. There are also kits specifically marketed for common wheelbearing sizes (e.g., a kit for pulling and pressing in R8 bearings).
But you can do it with just the crude tools listed above. That’s how I did it, for this one-off repair. That’s really the point of this post.
Get the old bearings out using screwdriver and hammer.
The basic idea is simple. You’re going to push the top bearing out of the top of the fork. (As shown above, you’d be pushing it from below, so that it moves toward the camera.) Then remove the c-clip, using c-clip pliers. Then push the bottom bearing out of that same opening.
In other words, the top bearing comes out first, then you remove the c-clip, then the bottom bearing comes out. And all of that comes out of the top hole in the fork.
To achieve this you:
Flip the fork over (from what is shown above), and hold it in some fashion. I used a workbench as a soft-sided vise. If you are careful, you can simply rest the flat top of the fork on a couple of cutting boards, or chunks of wood, but you must leave the full width of the hole unobstructed so that the bearing can come out.
Insert a flat-bladed screwdriver through the bottom of the fork (the side away from you, in the view above).
Catch the corner of the blade of the screwdriver on the inner bearing race of the top bearing. (The one nearest the hole that these must come out of).
Give the screwdriver a sharp tap.
Move the screwdriver so that it catches the opposite side of the inner bearing race of the same bearing.
Give the screwdriver a sharp tap.
Move the screwdriver blade back to where you started.
Repeat 2 – 6 until the bearing falls out of the top of the fork.
You keep moving the screwdriver from side to side, as you tap these bearings out, to try to ensure that the bearing stays level within the fork — perpendicular to the axis of the hole in which the bearings sit. The last thing you want is to get the bearing wedged kitty-corner in that hole.
What makes this hard is that these are interference-fit bearings in a metal casing. The hole they fit in — in the fork — is just slightly smaller than the diameter of the bearing. So, while the bearing is friction-fit to the housing, there’s a lot of friction involved.
Which means, in no uncertain terms, you are going to have to tap these vigorously to get them to move. And yet, not so hard that you break them.
How much force? Take a look at this fellow, around 30 seconds into the video to get an idea of what a “tap” is likely to be, for driving a steel bearing out of a metal bearing housing:
He doesn’t bother to move the screwdriver from side-to-side for that particular bearing. But you will want to do that here, particularly for the second bearing, which has to travel quite a ways before it is free.
A better view: This next video provides an excellent view of what you’re trying to do with the end of the screwdriver, at around 1:10 into the video. (Though, this particular bearing came out quite easily.)
Too easy: Here’s yet a third example of this technique, around 30 seconds into this video, where the bearings are driven out of a plastic wheel. You’ll have to hit harder than this to drive them out of the titanium fork.
I hope that gives an adequate feel for the process. Catch the edge of the back side of the inner bearing race with a screwdriver. Tap with as much vigor as necessary to move the bearing. Move the screwdriver from side-to-side on the bearing to help keep it aligned within the bore. Keep tapping until the bearing drops out.
Remove the c-clip. And do the same thing to the other bearing.
Clean up, grease up, test the fork axle.
Clean any gunk out of the inside of the fork. It is particularly important to make sure there is absolutely nothing stuck in the “corner” of the bottom of the hole.
Why is that important? Above you see the c-clip groove, inside the fork. The first bearing you put in must be driven completely below that groove. Then you place the c-clip in that groove. Then you drive the second bearing into the rest of the space. If the first bearing doesn’t sit absolutely flat on the bottom of the hole, you won’t be able to get the c-clip in. And that, in turn, prevents you from correctly re-assembling the fork.
Wipe any gunk off the c-clip at this point, as well. Just for good luck.
Coat the inside of the fork with a layer of thin grease. I think lithium grease is what is what is typically recommended. Some say that this helps prevent the bearing from seizing in the fork, so that you can get it out next time. I say it helps lube the bearing going into the fork, because you’re going to need all the help you can get to drive the bearing all the way into the fork.
So spray a little grease in, move it around, then swab it out with a paper towel. You want just the thinnest possible layer of grease.
Test to see if the new bearing will slide over the fork axle. You’ll note that I barely bothered to clean up the axle. In particular, I don’t want a nice shiny raw metal surface on that axle, because that just invites corrosion. Leave it alone if you can. The only thing that matters is that the new bearing can be slid over it. Assuming it does, slide the new bearing off, and apply a thin layer of grease over the fork axle. Wipe off any excess with a paper towel.
A brief calculation on freezing the bearing and heating the fork.
I’ve driven bearings like this many times. It’s always a stressful process. I’ve learned to take every advantage I can, if I’m unsure that I can drive the bearing into its housing properly.
Common advice for this next step is to put the bearings in the freezer to cool them, and take a heat gun to the bearing case (the fork, in this case) to heat it. The idea is the take advantage of the coefficient of thermal expansion of metals, and give you a little extra room as you are driving the bearing.
Based on this reference, and my calculation, taking a 1 1/8″ diameter bearing from 70F down to 0F, while heating the titanium housing an equal amount, should increase the clearance for the bearing by almost a thousandth of an inch.
Believe it or not, it is well worth doing that, given that these are more-or-less zero clearance bearings.
If you are unsure of your ability to drive this bearing into this housing, go ahead and take the time to freeze the bearing, and use a hair dryer or heat gun to heat up the fork.
If nothing else, it’ll give you the courage to bang all that much harder at the next step.
BUT THIS COMES WITH A WARNING: WORK FAST. The coefficient of expansion of steels is higher than that of most titanium alloys. The upshot is that if you heat both the titanium fork and the steel bearing, the steel bearing will expand more than the titanium hole. The bearing will actually get tighter, not looser, in that hole. So if you’re going to try this freeze/heat trick, you need to get the bearing seated before it warms up to the temperature of the titanium fork.
As a compromise, you could just freeze the bearing, and leave the fork alone. That will help some, and there’s no harm done if the bearing warms up to room temperature during this process.
Bearing abuse, or using a drift to install the new bearings.
Normally, at this stage, you’d say “installation is the reverse of removal”, and leave it at that.
But in this case, that’s wrong.
To be clear, what you just did to remove the bearing — pounding on the center bearing race — ruins the bearing. At least, if you beat on it hard enough it will. All the force of your hammer blows was transmitted through the “innards” of the bearing, in order to get the outer race to slide along the bore in the fork.
You are NOT going to do that when driving the new bearings back into the fork. Instead, you are going to drive the new bearings by beating on the outer bearing race only. Never on the inner bearing race. That way, the force of your blow is transferred through the steel race directly to the side of the hole. And you are not counting on the “innards” of the bearing to transfer the force of your blows to the outer race.
Clear enough? These bearings come out one way, but they go in in a different way. Beat on the outside race ONLY as you put them back in, because you don’t want to break your brand new bearing.
This is where you need to find a drift for your bearing. A drift is some sort of sturdy hollow metal cylinder that’s just a fraction of a hair smaller in outer diameter than your bearing. The idea is that as you beat the bearing down into the fork, using the drift, it only beats on the outer bearing race, and does not press on any of the “innards” of the bearing. You can buy sets of drifts in graduated sizes on Amazon. But, typically, you’ll use a socket, out of socket set.
Beating the first bearing flush.
Here are the issues.
First, you’re beating a metal bearing into a metal bearing housing — the fork. That’s going to take quite a bit of force. And the further you beat it into the fork, the harder you have to hit it to move it. So, you start off with taps, and you end up with hammer blows.
Second, until you have the bearing flush with the opening, it’s critical to keep the bearing level — going in evenly all around. Stop every so often and eyeball the bearing. If it’s high on one side, tap that side down, and then carry on. So, center the bearing on the opening, nice and level, and start with gentle taps — on the outer race only. (If you have a brass-faced hammer, this would be a good use for it. I used a steel carpenter’s hammer.)
Eventually, you’ll get the bearing driven flush. That’s when you need to center the drift on top of the bearing, and start pounding it home. No more tap-tap-tap. At this step, it’s bang-bang-bang. You must drive this all the way to the bottom of the hole or you won’t be able to re-assemble the fork correctly.
Once you have the first bearing driven home, use your c-clip pliers (and fingers, and screwdrivers) to get the c-clip firmly seated in the groove. There are no style points here — however you can get the clip to seat in the groove, that’s fine. Note that once the clip is correctly in the groove, almost all the clip is hidden.
Finally, drive the second bearing in flush with the surface of the fork. Same process as the start of the first bearing, being sure to tap-bang only on the outer bearing race.
Pat your self on the back if the result looks like this. The outer race is flush all around. And nothing is obviously broken.
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You’re done
Slide the fork onto the fork axle, put on the washer and retaining lock nut. Tighten the lock nut just enough to keep the fork from rattling.
And you’re done.
If all this pounding on expensive metal parts is off-putting, consider using bearing puller/press designed for this size of bearing. For sure, if I did this routinely, that’s what I would do.
An end-note on cheap bearings
I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos on this topic, and I’ve seen a lot of people do things to sealed bearings that they really shouldn’t. Take the seals off and grease them. Change just one of a pair of bearings, because only one was thoroughly worn out. Pop a bearing out of its fitting and put it back in the same fitting. I have also seen my wheelchair-using friend hesitate to change bearings, or wait until the bearings are obviously worn.
All of this arises, I think, from the notion that these bearings are somehow precious. If a set of bearings for your caster wheels is $40, you might think about taking some non-recommended steps to try to prolong their life.
And that, in turn, derives from the ludicrous prices charged for these commodity bearings by DME suppliers.
Hence the importance of the just-prior post.
You can easily buy commodity steel sealed bearings, in sizes to fit wheelchair fittings, for around $1 each. Sealed bearings are designed to be disposable. They are not designed to be serviced. And at $1 each, it’s no hardship to treat them as the disposables that they are.
This is Part 1 of a series of posts about replacing the fork bearings on a TiLite Aero wheelchair.
In this post, I only describe the “teardown” part of the process. That is, getting the forks off the chair. The removal and replacement of the bearings is for Part 2.
If you didn’t realize this repair might involve a complicated “teardown” step, and you were thinking of doing this repair yourself, then this post has done its job.
On this particular chair I ran into a worst-case scenario: The steel fork bearings had rusted solidly to the steel axles that they spin around. This stops you from removing the forks from the chair, which you need to do, in order to get to the fork bearings. Your choices are a) replace a few hundred dollars of wheelchair hardware, or b) break the bearings free from the steel axle that the bearing races are rusted to.
This step took several rounds of heating the axles with a propanetorch, spraying with lube, then pounding and prying until the rusted-on bearings broke loose.
Edit: You can see an alternative way to beat on the axle in this reference. There, the user removed the fork axle from its fitting first (i.e., took the fork axle off the wheelchair, fork and all), then beat the axle out of the fork. That’s a smarter approach than what I did. At the minimum, it shows that I’m not the only one have the problem of fork bearings that rusted solidly to the axle they sit on.
Other than spending a couple of hours doing that, the repair went smoothly.
The only practical takeaway isthat before you buy new bearings, bearing puller, bearing press, and so on — first try to remove your forks from the wheelchair.
If they come off readily — once you have removed any retaining hardware — move on to the next post,where I talk about options for replacement bearings, in some detail.
But if the forks don’t come off, even with a bit of lubricant and some gentle persuasion, then ponder just how hard you are willing to hammer on a wheelchair.
My lesson is that, even thought this repair eventually succeeded, I got lucky. With those fork bearing races rusted to the axle, it could just as easily have ended up with an unusable wheelchair, and a few hundred dollars plus a wait for replacement forks and fork axle assemblies.
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