water

One topic on the trail is how to treat water; on our first day we passed at least one dayhiker who mused, "I remember when you could drink the water in the streams...." Surface water in the Sierras is now assumed to contain various microorganisms (such as the protozoa Giardia and Cryptosporidium) that are apt to make people sick. To be safe your choices are to pump your water through a filter; to boil it for a few minutes; or to use iodine tablets. All of these options are a little bit annoying; a filter is another thing to carry and takes time to use; boiling requires a large amount of fuel and results in hot water; and iodine has a funny taste and may not be completely effective. We carried and generally used a filter.

But of course the cowboys didn't. After leaving their camp and coming to this stream coming off a high ridge with no trails, we were inspired to forgo the tedious filtering process and instead just fill our bottles directly from the stream.

The article "Giardia Lamblia and Giardiasis With Particular Attention to the Sierra Nevada" by a fellow physicist from U.C. Berkeley provides an interesting discussion of the mountain water quality situation, alleging that the Giardia scare is way overblown.

Anyway, so far so good.

master cylinder replacement

the old master cylinder with its brake fluid reservoir removed, in situ

Spending a few days in Pasadena, I was able to do a little work on my old car. As I had left it, the master cylinder (which provides hydraulic pressure for the brakes) was dead, but I was unable to unscrew one of the brake lines from it; the head of the connector merely rounded under the force of a flare nut wrench. This time I applied vise grips (locking pliers) which loosened the connector nicely, and I was able to unscrew it the rest of the way with a wrench. The rest of the removal was easy.


the fresh transplant (left); and the diseased organ, removed (right)

But of course nothing is easy. The threads on another of the brake lines was just damaged enough so that I couldn't screw it into the new master cylinder. I guess you can get a 'thread follower' which fixes up damaged threads. But that will have to wait a month or two until I am back in town. Slowly slowly learning the techniques to surmount the problems one invariably encounters in fixing cars.

tools used:
* 11mm flare nut wrench - disconnect brake lines
* vise-grip pliers - loosen a stuck brake line
* liquid wrench - loosen a stuck brake line
* 13mm extended socket - unbolt master cylinder from vacuum booster
* squeeze bulb - suck old brake fluid out of reservoir
parts
* new master cylinder - mail ordered from autozone ($72)
* DOT-4 brake fluid
* new 8mm nuts to fasten new master cylinder to vacuum booster (64¢)