5/9/06

You may remember a few months back my mentioning a guest speaker that resembled Parker Posey. Well, she’s back today! She’s still really cute but she’s also very VERY pregnant. Oh well. So, where was I in the George story? I think I left it at calling it a night Saturday. Sunday morning at around 0400 I got up to pee. I could hear water flowing through the pipes and wrote it off as mom flushing right before I got up or something. I went back to bed. Well, I peed first then went back to bed. In the morning, well later in the morning, I got up again and heard the water running. I saw mom and asked her about it. She didn’t have any water running so I began to investigate. I got to the hot water heater closet and could hear water flowing through it and the concrete of the garage floor was warm to my feet. I tried to shut off the incoming water to the heater but the handle wouldn’t turn. I went out to check all of the outside faucets. They were all fine so I went back in to report my findings. I decided to try the incoming water tap again and got it to shut off. The running water sound went away. I shut off the hot water heater at the circuit breaker box and we decided to call a plumber. Mom went to church and I came in to work. Oh yeah, right before I went down to check on the heater I got a call from work saying the projectors were screwed up and they wanted me to come in. I fixed what I could and went back home. I ate a burrito and then bought some stuff for George from Summit. I ordered three 2.5” “U” bends, two 2.5” collector union thingies, and the nylon line to connect the oil pressure gauge. I forgot to buy a coil though. Mom came home from church and ate while we discussed the water heater problem. She had ballet tickets and had to get ready and I was going to the shop so we left it for the time being. My plan for the day was, at the very least, to have the transmission mount, er, mounted. I began by rounding up all of the bits. I don’t know where all of the nuts and stuff went when I took it out of Gil, but they were gone. I found enough parts to do the installation and crawled under the car. John had the jack right where I needed to install the mount. I stuck a screwdriver through the shift lever yoke and dropped the transmission until that was supporting the tail then repositioned the jack. I installed the rubber part of the mount and hunkered down on the nuts. I installed the cross piece to the rubber and hunkered down on the nuts. I positioned it so the cross piece was between the frame rails and grabbed the drill. The car was too low. We had lowered the jack stands when installing the engine and now the drill wouldn’t fit between the floor of the shop and the floor of the car. I jacked up the transmission until it crashed into the floor and lifted the car. I reset the jacks and lowered the transmission until the car was settled. Now I had room to drill. Of course the first hole was right in the bend of the floor where the transmission tunnel bends up. I drilled it anyway figuring it was a pretty strong point of the floor. I drilled the outer hole and inserted the top part of the mount from the inside of the car. Yeah, it didn’t fit. I re-drilled the outer hole and hammered it in. I put the nuts on the bottom and hunkered down on them. I moved to the driver’s side and drilled the holes. These lined up a bit better and got hunkered down in due time. I lowered the jack and noticed that the carburetor was not in any better a position than it was before. Marty Smith had show up earlier and noticed the dent in the hood. I said I hoped that once the transmission was mounted it would sit a bit lower and possibly clear the hood. It didn’t. If anything it may be a bit higher. At some point in our discussions he suggested the hood scoop from the Chickenhawk. I thought about it for a bit and realized I didn’t need it with the V6 so I told him he talked me into it. I took it off the Chickenhawk and brought it in to George. I made an “Ullom hole” over the carburetor and mounted the scoop to cover it. It doesn’t look too bad. I removed the old mechanical water temp gauge and decided what gauges I was going to use. I figured since the down pipe has the oxygen sensor bung in it I might as well use the SDS mixture meter I have. I then decided that an exhaust gas temperature gauge and a mixture meter were redundant. I'm not going to use the EGT gauge after all. I might install it in the Seven for grins though. Well, I think that’s about all I did Sunday. We’ve been turning on the hot water heater just long enough for showers in the morning and then turning it off again. I'm not sure how long mom will go for that ghetto fix though. We’ll see. Well, two things are making me stop here. One is the page break I passed ten lines ago and the other is lunch. I'll talk to y’all tomorrow.