3/6/07

Ok, so now I'll tell y'all about Sunday. Mom requested that I wait for her to get home from church so we could go have lunch so I watched another Dean Martin spy movie. I was waiting to hear from Gregg about meeting him to get Cave In as well. Mom and I decide to give Ache and Stale, oh sorry, Steak and Ale another chance since she has a coupon or something. Yeah, that place has really gone downhill. It is like a geriatric ward in there. Apart from the two, very uncomfortable looking teenagers at the table full of fossils across the room, I was the youngest person in the place. My medium-rare steak was closer to medium-medium-well and mom’s medium steak was closer to well done. You know, I really hate that term for “burned to a crisp” steak. If you’re going to cook all of the flavor and juice out of it, why bother having a steak at all. It is not “well done” it is “poorly done” and a crime against nature. Anyhoo, we choke down our shoe-leather and head for the house. My steak begins knocking on my back door about halfway home. I make a bombing run on the Dresden Porcelain Works and settle in to watch the last half of the Dean Martin movies I had started earlier. Gregg calls and I inform him that, on top of everything else, Cave In has a flat. We decide to blow off trying to pick the truck up that day. I nap and watch TV until about 1530 h when I decide to go ahead and go to the shop. I don’t go for a hoon like I consider doing but head straight there. Once there, I remove the DCOE to turbo manifold stuff and proceed to figure out why the carburetor won’t fit. I remove the studs and clean the holes with a tap. I find four bolts and discover that they will thread in through the carburetor. Unfortunately, the top two have to be so short to be inserted that they barely have three threads engaged. I sit back and grok it for a bit. I try the studs again but don’t thread them all the way down tight. They have just a hair of wiggle room. Oh, while messing with the bolts I made a couple gaskets as well. With the studs wiggling, the carburetor fit. Now I had enough room for the “O” ring gaskets that come with a DCOE so I used them instead of the ones I had just made. Oh well. I bolt the carburetor to the manifold and the air filter to the carburetor then take all of that to the car. I install all of that to the engine and step back to have a look. It looks good. I still need to take the turbo off one more time and make a gasket between the intake manifold and turbo adapter then snug the turbo down real good. The inlet of the turbo and the carburetor to turbo adapter don’t quite line up right now because the turbo is just a tad too high at the moment. I think I'm also going to make a support bracket or two for the carburetor. I don’t like the way it is hanging off in space with so little support. I'm going to take a strut from the threaded bung on the side of the valve cover and go up to one of the bottom studs on the carburetor. I may take another strut up from the block to the other bottom stud if it doesn’t foul the number four spark plug wire. We’ll see. Actually, I'll probably make a “Y” shaped strut that comes up from the valve cover and hits both bottom studs, now that I think about it. The interconnection between the turbo and adapter, as well as the support from the intake manifold, should keep it all from twisting on the valve cover bolt. Yes, I like it. That is what I'll do. But back to the narrative, once I was happy-ish with the carburetor, I took a look at the fuel line. I re-clocked the inlet pipe of the carburetor so it was pointing down toward the pump and installed a hose from one to the other. I also installed a hose from the supply hard line to the pump. I still need clamps for the pump to carburetor hose but the other is all snugged up. By this time it is getting dark so I decide to call it a weekend and go home. I watch the third of the four Dean Martin soy flicks and finally call it a night. Perhaps I'll give a revue of them when I'm done with the final film. We’ll see. Well, I think I'm just about done talking to y'all today. I haven’t been to the internot yet to see if George has made any comments about my constantly mentioning him in here. Perhaps he has and perhaps he hasn’t. I'm betting on the latter. Well, have a day.