5/12/06

I got distracted by other things yesterday and never made it in here. I'll start with an account of Wednesday’s activities at the shop. I went by the house on my way to the shop and picked up the two packages that had been delivered. Once at the shop I opened the one containing the “Ram’s Horn” exhaust manifolds. They are really cool! I took them out and set them in the passenger seat of Barbecue Bob then put the intake manifold in there as well. John and Dave were trying to finger out the rough running issue with Dave’s car. I noticed the throttle wasn’t opening all the way and we found a different linkage to make it work. That wasn’t the problem though. I begged off with the explanation that troubleshooting was not my strong suit. They kept asking me what I thought on various things but I had no clue what to tell them. Of course I was a tad distracted by my own project, I'll have to admit, but I was truly stumped on theirs. “What was I working on?” you ask. I dug out the 2.5” “U” bends I got from Summit and started on the down pipe for George. First I took the down pipe/mounting bracket part off the car and cut off the 3.5” bolt circle collector flange and welded one of the new 3” B/C collector flanges. This I bolted back to the car. Next I cut a "U" bend in half and started looking at routing. I found that if I came up from the bottom I could get the turn to start at the bell housing and be nice and vertical. I looked at routing the other half of the bend from the front and found I could get it in there. I tacked them together clocked ninety-degrees off from how they were originally bent. I needed to make the front bend into a forty-five degree so I cut it in half. Now I had a pipe that, looking at the flow reversed, comes straight up, makes a ninety-degree turn forward, and then a forty-five degree left to miss the exhaust manifold. I could also still snake it into place, barely. I decided to go ahead and cut the long leg off of the last turn, looking at the flow going the correct way. So with the 45/90 “S” curve in hand, I started looking at getting from the down pipe/mounting bracket to the new bit. It appeared as though all I needed to do was weld the other forty-five degree bit back on reversed and the collector flanges would line up. I tacked the forty-fives together and checked. They would line up! I cut the collector to length and tacked it to the multi “S” curve hoozis. Of course now there was too much crap on it to snake its way back in. John volunteered to crawl under and remove the bottom section of the up pipe after we had removed the top from the turbo. Oh, they got Dave’s car tuned a little better and he left by the way. While I was tack welding the bits, John trimmed the corners off and smoothed the edges of the flange that bolts to the turbo on the up pipe. It looks very nice now, not like the rough crap I had built. We bolted the mid pipe to the down pipe and then re-fit the up pipe sections. Everything fit nicely. I think it is going to work. It was beginning to get dark at that point and I had managed to not mess up my white work shirt too bad so we called it an evening. We tried to go to Hunan for some Chinese food but they had closed at 2100. We decided on Bennigan’s instead. I had a Mount Crisco sandwich. I'm not sure if it is the breading, the fact that it is deep-fried, or the calamari appetizer we had before, but I couldn’t finish mine. Yesterday I played on the internot all morning and watched Bob and Doug McKenzie’s “Strange Brew” in the afternoon. I was on the Summit website looking at more bits and pieces I “need” for these projects when the “Apply now for your Summit credit card” offer popped up. I looked at it and thought, “I really do not need to apply for a Summit credit card.” I clicked on the link. While reading through the legal disclaimers and rate disclosures and such, I thought, “This is dumb. I really don’t need a Summit credit card.” I filled out the form. When I finished with the form, I sat with the cursor on the “Submit” button for five minutes while I told myself, “I do not need a Summit credit card.” I was just about to close the window and not get the card when I went ahead and clicked the button. The next page was a series of questions to determine if I was really who I said I was. I was certain I had blown that quiz because some of the questions were close to being me but weren’t quite. One was dead on but the answers offered didn’t look right so I chose “None of the above.” I was, as I said before, sure I had blown the whole thing and wouldn’t get approved. When I clicked “Submit” this time I was greeted with a screen congratulating me on my new Summit credit card. Damn it! Of course I didn’t write down the account number so when I went to use it for the items in my Summit shopping cart I couldn’t. Whew, saved at the last possible moment! I closed down the internot about that point and went to lunch. After lunch, as I said before, I watched a movie. I had forgotten just how funny that movie is. When it was over I took it across the street to the lady who had reminded me about it so she could watch it again. We chatted for a bit and I came back to my desk. By that time it was 1600 so I didn’t have time to make an entry for y’all. So, was it worth the wait? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Well, I've said about all I have to say. I'll talk to y’all Monday.