10/3/06

I'd just like to clear up one quick thing about the Theremin before I move on with the Mr. Wiggly narrative. I knew what a Theremin was before looking it up in the Wikipoedia. I looked it up to gain some more knowledge about them. Oh, I went ahead and ordered from Amazon: an audio CD of Theremin music, a DVD documentary about the Theremin, and a book about the inventor and his ties to the KGB. Too bad they won’t ship until the middle of next month for some reason. I may have moved on to other wacky interests by then. Ok, speaking of wacky, here’s how the rest of the weekend went with Mr. Wiggly. I told y’all about firing it up with the open headers to see how it sounded, right? Well I got to work on the zorst soon after. I took some measurements and decided to set the mufflers each 8” back from the collectors. Yes, they are staggered. I made my two 8” extensions and welded them to the collector flanges and the mufflers. I bolted them under the van and saw that one was “level” while the other pointed downhill and a precarious angle. I took it in and pie-cut the pipe to angle it up. Actually, it wasn’t a true pie-cut, I cut about ¾ of the way through and closed the kerf to make the angle. I reinstalled it and now both mufflers sit “level.” I'm using quotes because I don’t mean they are actually level with the ground, they are level-ish to the van. With the mufflers on I decided to see how it was going to sound. I fired it up again and had a listen. Sounds good. I next took a Hugh bend and cut it to a ninety-degree turn with a long leg. Anyhoo, it was a ninety with a leg to which I welded some more straight pipe. I took that to the van and fit it to the driver’s side muffler. I marked where it would be level and sticking out in front of the driver’s side rear tire. I slipped on the tip and marked how far on to weld it. I took the muffler off the van and welded all of them together inside. Back out to the van for another reinstallation. I like it. Now came the hard part, getting the other zorst to cross the drive shaft and exit out the passenger side. Before I had welded up the driver’s side pipe, I took the other half of that Hugh bend and stuck the short leg into the other muffler. The difference in the short leg on one versus the long leg on the other, combined with the stagger of the collectors, put the two ninety-degree bends in almost exactly the same position relative to the rear tires. I couldn’t have planned it better. I pointed the bend on the passenger side muffler so that it would go up and over the drive shaft. I took another Hugh bend and sized up where it needed to be cut to make that turn. I cut and welded those together. I missed by just a bit and the up pipe hit either the drive shaft or a heat shield/bracket thingy depending on the angle out of the muffler. I decided I could trim the heat shield and moved on. I welded another section of Hugh bend to angle back up towards the passenger side of the van and finished it off with a piece of straight and the second chrome tip. Oh, at some point I made a “T” shaped bracket thingy to go between the two mufflers and provide some support as well. I still needed to support the pipes where they turned out or they would have eventually rotated at the collectors and drug the tips on the ground. I decided to let that wait for Sunday as I was getting pretty tired and the sun was about to go down. Oops, got ahead of myself there. I had just welded the last of the passenger side and went to install it when I noticed I hadn’t clearanced the heat shield. I took some tin snips out but the metal was way too thick. I removed the shield and took it inside where I made two cuts with the hacksaw. I bent that flap around out of the way and took it back to the van. I would have left it off entirely but this shield was where the “T” shaped hanger for the mufflers bolted up. I reinstalled everything and fired the van up. It sounds really good, except for the pipe banging against the heat shield. Yeah, I didn’t trim it back far enough. Oh, and the alternator belt squeals every time it spikes to 16 volts. As I said yesterday, I'm not going to worry about the alternator just yet but the banging pipe I needed to “fix.” I shoved the pipe over a bit and stuffed a piece of foam between it and the shield. I'd fix it when building the hangers for the tips. I stood back and listened to it run for a bit, adjusting the idle and mixture on occasion. When I finally noticed that the whole van was full of smoke I shut it down. The PCV and crankcase breathers were still disconnected and had just pumped the van full of oily blow-by smoke. I'd fix that Sunday as well. I closed up and went home. I took a shower and watched TV. By bedtime my whole body had locked up from overexertion followed by sitting in the cool of the house. It was just about all I could do to go up to bed. Well, I think I'll save Sunday’s activities for tomorrow. Have a day.