About $60 later (parts and turned rotors) the brakes are ready for another fifty thousand miles.
All told I think I spent $100 on car maintenance materials today because the Toyota needed an oil change, too, and the Jeep needs an air filter and some fuel system cleaner. We rely on these vehicles to get us to and from work; we need to take care of them. Period.
...the sorry state of the front brakes on her car, though, makes me want to pull the rears apart and inspect them. That's going to be a massive job, though, and our schedules are wonky this week. Front's the most important, anyway, since it does about 70% of the braking. The rears aren't making any noise, so f it.
To my surprise, the job went pretty smoothly, considering it was the first time I've done brakes on this car. I needed to pull the rotors off the hubs (rust etc and tight tolerances on the mating surfaces to begin with) but Toyota very thoughtfully provided tapped holes for a puller, and I have that tool, so it took me longer to figure out which bolts to use than it did to get the rotors off.
The new pads went in pretty easily, though I had to file off some excess powder coating to get them to fit where they go. This brake system has some of the tightest tolerances I've ever seen on a car, and the new pads were just a hair bigger than the old ones. With that done, though, everything buttoned up nicely.
I'm going to have to warn Mrs. Fungus to be careful tomorrow; the brakes come on fast now.
* * *
More proof that NASA doesn't really care about making launches cheaper even though they claim they want that.
Four RP-25 (space shuttle main engines) just thrown away after each use. That's marvelous. Of course, as a government agency, NASA isn't interested in doing anything other than paying government bureaucrats, so actually accomplishing something useful is outside of their requirements.
Of course NASA has no trouble altering climate data to suit the AGW bandwagon and so we cannot trust any scientific pronoucements from that agency as long as they are promoting shit like this as "science".
Global warming is "man-made" only because climatologists are altering data to make it appear.
Meanwhile still looking like Mr. Sun is the primary driver of Earth's climate which is so shocking a revelation I think I need to go hide in the corner for a few days to overcome the stress and anxiety.
*rolleyes*
* * *
The big problem with a good rocket fuel is that it's practically a high explosive.
Acetylene is touchy stuff; they have to mix it with acetone to make it safe to transport and use. Mixing it with an oxidizer (nitrous oxide) and using it as a monopropellant in a rocket--whew.
* * *
So, one reason the shooting of that black Rhodes scholar by a white cop in Chicago was covered up by the Chicago city government was due to the fact that Rahm Emanuel wanted to win the election, and it would be problematic if there was a big "black lives matter" protest raging. The colored folks won't stay on the Democrat plantation and vote for you if your city government is suspected of killing black people.
And as usual Francis Porretto has some rather apt commentary.
Someone in chat on WoW said, "with all these protests I'm becoming blacktose intolerant." Hard to argue.
Meanwhile, old Rahm has hung his chief of police out to dry, throwing him under the bus, because he did as he was told and kept a lid on a politically inconvenient story. That's got to be a great feeling.
* * *
The SJWs in the SF/F community just about had an aneurysm over this, and well done! Someday I hope to be popular enough among readers of SF that someone makes custom AR-15 lowers related to my stuff.
* * *
Now I can relax a little bit; my work for the day is done.
