11/2/06

I said I'd tell y'all if I found anything on e-Bay, well I did. I found and bid on a pair of “portholes” for Mr. Wiggly. I lost the auction this morning however. Oh well. I was going to describe them to you but there really isn’t much point now, since I lost the auction. Oh, what the hell? They were parallelogram shaped but I don’t remember the dimensions. There are some similar ones on a “new parts” website which are 14” by 8” or something in that area. My thinking was to mount them on opposite sides of the van, duh, and use them to define a diagonal stripe down the side. Oh, have I mentioned I'm reconsidering the gold metal flake tangerine color? Well, I am. I'm thinking now of going with an original Chrysler color from the muscle car era. Yep, I'm thinking of painting Mr. Wiggly “Plum Crazy!” I'll leave the roof white and have a white “A-Team” style stripe on the sides. My internal debate, back before I lost the auction of course, was whether the stripe would be thin, by orienting the windows 8” wide by 14” high, or wide by orienting them 14” wide by 8” high. In my head, having the windows “standing up” looks better, I mean 8” wide by 14” high of course, but would that be enough stripe to offset all that purple? I don’t know. John and I have joked all along that the thing needs air brushed murals on both sides. We were thinking along the lines of those “cultural heritage” type murals Juan sees on lowriders. You know, Aztec or Inca warriors, that sort of thing. Of course being of northern European descent, I'd have to have a blonde Viking Valkurie on one side and a kilted Scot on the other. John always shoots the idea down because we’d never find an automotive airbrush artist who’d be willing to do it. Well, mom may have come up with a solution; although I'm sure she’d deny having anything to do with it once finished! She suggested that my sister in law would probably be willing to do it since she’s of the artistic bent. While it’s true that she’s not an automotive airbrush artist, and to be honest I'm not even sure she can work an airbrush at all, she’s one of those types who would give it a try just to see if she could. Perhaps I'll just stick with an “A-Team” stripe after all. Oh wait, I was going to be “finished” with Mr. Wiggly once the latest round of repairs were done. Which reminds me of an amusing story! Ok, so I called NAPA to see if they could get me a speedometer cable. The dude looked it up and asked, and this is not a typo, “Is that the one hundred foot or sixty foot cable?” I giggled a bit and assumed he meant inch then answered, “I dunno.” I said I'd have to take it off and measure then get back to him. Well, last night I went out to Mr. Wiggly to remove the “broken” cable so I could measure it and get a new one. I am ever so glad I took the top apart first! As soon as I had the dash out, I noticed the problem: the cable had come undone from the back of the speedometer! I plugged it back in and made sure it snapped into place this time. I reattached the instrument cluster and went for a drive around the building. Yep, worked fine. I had a laugh and moved on to bigger and better things. We moved George out and John's blue 510 in so he could get to work on it. He’s planning to send it to the body shop for paint in the next few weeks so he’s doing some prep work. I'm not sure what I'll work on while he’s in the main bay but we’ll see. I had an idea or two about Mr. Wiggly's dash. See, when I installed the quad gauge thingy I removed all of the electronic bits from the back of the dash. Now I have no light on the speedometer, no high beam indicator, and no turn signal repeaters in the dash. I'm thinking about fingering out what wires do those three, four if you want to be pedantic and count left and right turn signals separately, jobs and wire in some LEDs or something. I don’t think it will be all that big a job. Perhaps that is what I'll do this weekend. Well, there it is, the page break. I guess I have wasted enough space for today. I'll talk to y'all again tomorrow.