2/20/07

Well, it appears as though I've had nothing to say for the last few days. As it turns out, that is exactly the case. Friday I goofed off all day at work and never even thought about coming in here to talk to y'all. Deal with it. Yesterday was a holiday, of sorts, so no one at the railroad came to work. If there’s no one here there’s no point in my being here so I didn’t work either. I did come in for a bit but I'll get to that later. So, Saturday morning I met up with John to wait for the dude to come get Gigi. He never showed. We both worked on stuff while waiting. I don’t remember what John did, yes I do he changed the seats in the VW again and cleaned out that car. I think he also did a tune up. I took the Sawzall to the heat riser on the bottom of the A-12 manifold and made clearance for the header. All was fine until I nicked the inner wall of the plenum. Of course by “nicked the wall” I mean, “cut a nickel sized hole” in it. I suspected it would happen so I wasn’t too upset. I set up the TIG welder and zooked it closed. It looked pretty good, on the outside. Inside the plenum were some globs and whiskers. I decided I'd call them “turbulators” and let it fly. John had a look and approved, of the cut and the outside of the weld, not so much on the inside. What are you going to do? Next I took all of the studs out of the carburetor mounting face and attached a DGV adapter. I only had one cap-head machine screw so I asked John his opinion of welding the two together. “You’re never going to take it apart again, are you?” he asked. When I answered in the negative he said to weld it. I did. It turned out pretty good. Now here is where I screwed up. I welded the two vacuum ports closed. As soon as I did I realized I was going to need one for the vacuum assisted brakes. D’oh! I decided I'd worry about that later. By this time John was finished with his project and we were both getting hungry. Marty Smith came by and we asked if he’d eaten. He hadn’t so we all went to Nicky D’s for hamburgers. It was there that we found out that Sunday would be Marty’s birthday. After we all ate, John and I headed back to the shop while Marty went about his business. John searched for something he’d lost while cleaning out the car, to no avail. He left and I decided to continue working. I took the Sawzall to another A-series manifold, a smog unit with a huge heat-riser hole under the carburetor plenum. I cut it to fit the header and began looking for ways to fill the plenum. I found a piece of aluminum that might work and began playing with it. It was a plug leftover from using a hole-saw on a piece of really thick plate. I used a smaller hole-saw to clearance it for the runners and zooked it in place. Again, the outside looked rally good. The inside was hammered dog shit. I looked at it long and hard for quite some time before deciding to go in and make it better. I cut off the carburetor-mounting flange and tried to zook in some filler to make the new bit into a nice solid floor for the plenum. I got a bit overzealous and melted it down to a big glob on the floor of the plenum. It wasn’t what I had planned but it was slightly better than before. At some point, a guy came to pick up some transmissions that John had been working on for him. When he had left, I took another DGV adapter and began to weld it in place. It was then that the hamburger from lunch kicked me in the bowel. I had almost enough time to cool the manifold, shut off the welder, close the shop, and get in the car to go to the head. Almost. I called it a day. At home I took a shower and wasted the rest of the evening watching TV. I have most of Sunday’s tale written already but seeing as how I'm almost to the end of this page I'm going to save it for tomorrow. Well, it is lunchtime and I skipped breakfast so, buh bye.