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So my littlest one has a loose tooth. It's a top-front and apparently it's worth a lot!

Lets start at the beginning. She was in the bath tub and called me in there because she had something to ask me. She said, "Daddy, I have a loose tooth, see? Will you punch my tooth out?" I told her, "I think you are just going to have to wiggle it out."

She went on to tell my wife and I about how she was talking to a friend who wrote a letter to the Tooth Fairy and asked for a necklace. Well, she got it. In both girls eyes, that was a great deal...but she could do better. She then presented us the letter she wrote to the Tooth Fairy and it went link this:

Dere Tooth farey Plese give me 60$ ho and plese give me a kmoto dragon

We explained what a kmoto dragon was and I held up my arms wide. She said, "No, not that big." and I said, "Yes, that big." Later, I figured out she was thinking of a Bearded Dragon which, by the way, are $59.99 at the local pet store. We also explained that 60$ was also a bit much, even with inflation and all.

She disappeared down the hall and emerged a little while later with her revised letter as follows:

Dere Tooth farey Plese give me 20$ ho and plese give me giant stuft white animl bunny rabbit May I plese cepe my tooth

She is so stinkin' cute! (I told her that once and she said, "I'm not stinky!")

So our six-year-old daughter is talking about "forward focus". The other two jump into her conversation with "No it isn't!" "Yes it is!" Of course at their ages everyone just had to be right. The debate then moved on with our six-year-old talking about a "forward expedition": "Uh huh!" Huh uh!" "Uh huh! See there!" That's when it dawned on me that she was not talking about a forward anything but a Ford Focus and a Ford Expedition. How funny!

From time to time the brakes in a VW need to be bled.  This can be an easy job or you can do it the hard way which can lead to patchy baldness where you pull your hair out.  If you read on, I'll share with you what I have learned over the years about doing the job on the old air-cooled Volkswagens.

I used to have to find a friend to help out.  They would get the easy job sitting in the drivers seat pumping the brake pedal while I'd call out the orders, "OK, pump it up.  Hold it.  Is the pedal down?  OK, Pump it up.  How does it feel now?" and so on.

After a while, I had come to rely on tools more than friends.  Enter the brake bleeder:

Now this little beauty looks like it would do the job quite well but, in reality, is truly just a big waste of money.  It's made entirely of the cheapest Chinese materials available and is designed to sell, not to actually work.  The first time I went to use it. the e-ring at the back of the plunger shot across my garage never to be seen again and the red hose soon cracked as bad as any I have ever seen...in places, just from being slightly bent.

Then I wasted my money on this unit:

This thing is not at all big enough.  The magnet isn't up to the job either and lets go just from the force of the hose bending especially on a cold day when the vinyl hose is stiffer.  Also, the magnet is held on (sort of) by the little black thing you can see being pushed into a hole in the cap.  Well, the black thing is a little too small or the hole is a little too big because it almost falls off.  Both of the above come from a rather well known tool store with the initials HF that sells mostly Chinese, er, stuff.

There are many others available of varying price and quality like these for example:

There, now doesn't that just look so easy and almost even fun?

Just sitting around casually bleeding the brakes with nice clean hands and your favorite shirt on.  Yeah, right!  If you've ever done this before you know to wear nitrile gloves, grubby clothes and maybe even safety glasses.

So here is where it gets good.  I made my own bleeder tool that actually works and costs very little.  I used a master cylinder cap, an old tire valve and an o-ring to come up with this:

Now, this works really well and the net cost was zero!  It was made entirely of junk I had laying around so I also got to feel good about my recycling effort.  Just remember DO NOT use an air compressor.  I think you can figure out why.  All that's needed is s pump or two from a bicycle pump, then go open up one of the bleeder valves and keep an eye on the reservoirs fluid level.  No more need for clumsy gadgets or clumsy helpers.

Ironically, this thing just sits in the 4th drawer up of my tool box now since I discovered the easy way of bleeding the brake system.  This may even work on other makes, models and years too.  Now days, I just open up all four bleeder valves and go eat dinner.  When I come back, I close all the bleeder valves and all is as it should be provided I didn't go out to dinner or take a nap and leave the valves open for so long that the reservoir is completely drained.  If you think about it, the difference in elevation between the reservoir and the bleeder valve, the size of the bleeder hole and the viscosity of the brake fluid will all act together to slowly bleed the system if the bleeder valves are left open.  The air will naturally evacuate since the valves are intelligently located on the tops of the slave cylinders.

So now you know the secret.  Give it a try.  What have you got to loose?  Just remember to keep an eye on the reservoir fluid level and enjoy the "easy way".

For the longest time, our littlest one would talk about "turning around chicken".  She would say "turning around chicken" and she would turn around.  Then on day while in Costco, she got real excited and shouted "Turning around chicken!  Turning around chicken!".  I said "What are you talking about?"  She replied "Look! Turning around chicken!" and pointed at the... 

Click Here to See Turning Around Chicken

So ended a year long mystery.