Posted by derek on Thursday, March 23, 2006 at 5:44PM :
I haven't been keeping up with the forum like I should, so please forgive if you've heard this before.
The US Patent Office saved me today while trying to repair the armored ignition cable on my civi 46 WC. The local Napa store didn't have anything, neither did the catalogs around the house. I was contemplating cutting it open to fix the shorted out wire (old insulation was broken). At the patent office I found a very nice diagram along with several pages of rather verbose language describing how the assembly was unique.
My end result fix? I shoved several lengths of shrink tubing around the wire and down the spiral armor and then heated it with a heat gun. After looking at that diagram I decided it wasn't worth opening up a wrist watch full of parts.
The front page of the patent office is not easy to navigate. I guess it's designed for inventors and patent lawyers. Below is the link that lets you search by patent number. Take a look at 2,170,154. You'll be greeted with a blank page, because the site is set up for text. At the top of the page click the images button and you'll be rewarded with pictures (if you have the proprietary plug in for you supported browser [firefox was not supported]). Unfortunately the images aren't in PDF format and the site won't let you directly save the images. A little cut and paste using screen print, then a little straightening and cropping in photoshop finished with a save into a PDF document gave me a little gem to save in my Dodge folder. The whole process was slightly more complicated than the resultant fix on the part, but it made my afternoon.
enjoy
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