3/24/06

Well, I'm committed, or at least should be. I am now the “proud” owner of an Edelbrock Torker II intake for a small block Chevy. Ok, so I'm not exactly the owner just yet, but I did win the auction. I got it for about half price before shipping. I'm satisfied with that. Now all I need is for Mr. Olathe to come up with a shipping figure. Oh, I was talking to the lady in the TOB whose husband does hot rods and it turns out she’s from Olathe! She was surprised that I found an engine there and volunteered to go on a road trip with me to get it. I said if the shipping is over $150.00 I might consider it. We’ll see. There are worse people to spend sixteen hours in a car with, I suppose. Yeah, like it would ever happen. She’s all talk I'm sure. So, in a monumental case of “false economy,” I now have an HEI distributor and am buying an intake manifold for an engine that I wouldn’t have even considered a week ago. Perhaps with an engine from the Dark Side in it, I will be more able to let Barbecue Bob go to a new owner. Then again, it might be the bee’s-knees and I won’t want to ever drive anything else. Well, except for Mr. Wiggly and all of the 1200s that I have. That last sentence is a fragment and I don’t care. John has found our plane tickets for the trip to Oregon, or wherever, for Canby. I'm kind of looking forward to going to a Datsun event away from here. I've seen all of the cars that show up at the local events before. I want to see “new” stuff. Of course hanging with Datsun geeks for two or three days might be a beating I'll not soon forget. We’ll see. I need to get batteries for my camera and take a bunch of pictures of all my junk so I can print them out and have a portfolio of DLR to bring with me. I'm glad I don’t hang out with John Ullom more often because it wouldn’t be too tough for him to talk me into the Walter Mitty at Road Atlanta instead right about now. I've read about it in Grassroots Motorsports and Classic Motorsports magazines this last month and it really looks cool. Of course I'd want to take a Datsun of my own out to that event. It will be much easier to hop on a plane to Washington, or wherever, for the Canby event. Besides, the weather in northern California, or wherever, will be better than Atlanta. Well, maybe not better, but it should be a hell of a lot cooler! Oh, speaking of intake manifolds for the SBC, which I was earlier if you remember, I had an idea for a quad SU setup for Barbecue Bob. It is kind of moo now that I bought the Edelbrock, but here it is anyway. While shopping on e-Bay, I found an SBC tunnel-ram lower manifold. My thinking was that I could build a box plenum that bolts to the top of that and had four Z-car SU carburetors sticking out of the sides. I figure if two will feed a 2.6-liter L-26 in a 260Z, then four of them should feed five liters of V8. I was even thinking that if I used the top plate from a VG-30 with the word “Nissan” on it, I could lie about it being a rare JDM V8 they built back in the early seventies. I'm thinking about making some Nissan valve covers for it by grafting the Nissan from a pair of A-series covers into some Chevy covers. Oh, I'm also going to paint this engine Nissan blue just for the sake of the lie. No wait, it wouldn’t be a rare JDM engine, it would be the South African version of the 610! There’s my back-story. This was one of the homologation specials from South Africa for the 1974 rally season. Well, I think I'm going to head back to the internot again for a bit. I doubt I'll come back and say any more to y’all today. Have a weekend, and I'll talk to y’all Monday.