8/27/07

Well, the auction of Stinky has met my reserve. I hope it continues to grow, because we set the reserve about $500.00 lower than what I really need out of the thing. I guess I'm going to sell the thing. Speaking of Stinky, Saturday morning I went to the shop to change its oil. Not the shop’s oil, Stinky’s oil. Wasn’t that a movie about some dying kid or something back in the eighties? Anyhoo, I opened the shop up and hopped in Stinky to pull it inside. Yeah, right! Actually, I drove down to the lake and back to get a bit of heat in it and stir up the oil before changing, then tried to pull it in the shop. The thing is longer than the gap between the buildings! Ok, so that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it was close. I got enough of the nose in that I wasn’t blocking the whole isle and got to work. I changed into coveralls and crawled under the truck. The drain plug looked like about a 9/16” so that was the wrench I grabbed. It was. I had a pair of drain pans under there just in case the first didn’t hold a full two gallons. I removed the plug and drained the blackest oil I have almost ever seen. My dad used to use Arco Graphite oil back when I was a kid. It was infused with graphite, duh, and was black as hell when fresh but it was some super slippery stuff. The oil coming out of Stinky was just that black. Once I was satisfied that the pan was going to hold all of the draining oil, I grabbed the filter wrench and got cranking on the filter. Like I'd crank on anything else with a filter wrench, keep up people. Of course that dumped even more hot black oil everywhere but I did manage to catch most of it in a pan. I cracked open the first gallon jug of Rotella and filled the filter. I checked for “double gasket syndrome” and found that I was fine. “What’s ‘double gasket syndrome’?” you ask. That’s where the gasket from the old oil filter sticks to the engine and then leaks like hell when you put the new filter on with its gasket. I've never had it happen to me, because I always check for it, but I have heard of it happening. I screwed the new filter on and refit the drain plug. Up top I tried to thread the oil filler cap off and launched it into the engine bay when it came off with a quarter turn. I found the cap and set it aside. I decided against trying to fill without a funnel and got the one from the waste oil drum. I cleaned it up and dumped in the first gallon of oil. Rotella is thick assed stuff. It didn’t want to flow through my funnel very quickly. I finally got the two gallons of oil in and checked the level. It was already black! I couldn’t believe it. I fired up the engine and looked for leaks. There were no new ones so I declared the oil change complete. I decided to look at the air filter. I wish I hadn’t. Whoever designed that filter box needs to have his ass kicked. I got dirtier and more pissed off trying to check the air filter than doing the entire oil change! Once I got it all back together I parked the truck and moved on to the emblems on Matilda. Gregg called to ask what I was up to and told me he was about to load the Locost frame to take to his boss’s house. I knew there was no way he was going to load that thing by himself so I said I'd head that way. I went home and changed shirts and vehicles. The shirt I had been wearing was offending me with its smell and I felt I needed to drive Fifi for a bit. I also grabbed Stinky’s title for Gregg to sign. I headed that way and we moved stuff around then loaded the frame in the back of his truck. At one point I looked at my hands and noticed they were shaking. I hadn’t had lunch yet, or breakfast for that matter, and it was beginning to show. We headed to Griff’s and had a double meat, double cheese hamburger each. Either that was the best burger I have ever eaten or I was really hungry, but I inhaled it. We moved on. We got to his boss’s place and unloaded the frame then stood around for a while. We finally left and went back to Gregg's where we had a look at why the brown 210 wouldn’t run. We replaced the fuel filter and determined it was probably a bad fuel pump. I took my leave and went home. About halfway home, I realized I forgot to have Gregg sign that title. I wasn’t turning back at that point. At home, mom suggested chicken for dinner, which was cool because I have been craving fried chicken ever since that day John and I went to Church’s while Fifi’s zorst was being built. Unfortunately, we wound up going to Sonic for chicken strips and it wasn’t what I had in mind. In fact, it was down right disappointing. Sunday I went to the shop and finally installed the Datsun 1200 roundels on the nose and hatch of Matilda. I suppose I could go into detail about that tomorrow. Yes, I think I will bore y'all with the details of that installation later. So I guess I'm going to call this rant complete and shoost it off to Spiderman. Have a day.