2/25/08

I took six 42 gallon contractor bags full of garbage out of the shop Saturday. And that only got the pile next to the air compressor down to a thin layer on the floor. I need a snow shovel or some other scooping type device to get the remainder up. Then there’s the rest of the shop to pick up. I also collected another 42 gallon bag of aluminum cans. Now before you start thinking I'm some tree hugging hippie nature loving freak, they are for a lady here at the railroad whose kid is collecting the tabs. As far as I'm concerned, they can all go to the landfill with the rest of the garbage. I want a Bigfoot sized carbon footprint. Screw future generations. Ok, so Pat brought his code reader to the shop Saturday and we read the codes on Fifi. Looks like I have a bad oxygen sensor. Well, the thing runs well enough, hopefully it is polluting the hell out of the atmosphere, so I'll worry about it later. It’s not like I drive the thing all that much. He was there to install the Nerf bars on Nora’s Jeep, as I mentioned Friday. They looked pretty good too. Once he was done he went home and I continued picking up trash. I got tired of that and had a look at other things I could play with. I took a hunk of aluminized steel tube and sealed off one end to make a plenum for the A-series fuel injection manifold I have been building off and on for the last few years. I had a look around for a plate to attach the throttle body but couldn’t find anything. I did find just enough plate to make the flanges to attach the plenum to the two manifold stubs, but didn’t cut them out just yet. I got bored with that and had a look at George. Yes, I actually thought about working on George. I didn’t crawl under to finish the rear axle but I did rivet the hood support to the hood skin to solidify that a little bit. Next I climbed into the driver’s seat to have a look at the gauge situation. I almost mounted the mixture gauge but decided to wait until I had it wired first. I had a look at the other gauges but didn’t really do anything with them. I sat and made racecar noises for a bit and then got out. I noticed that the steering wheel does not block the gauges nearly as bad as I had remembered so I think the way I have Marty’s dash arranged is going to work out fine. Eventually I got bored with all of that and went home. Sunday morning I headed back to the shop around 0930 h. I used a hole saw to “fish mouth” two runners to go between the plenum I made Saturday and the manifold stubs for the A-series. John arrived as I was welding the first of these to the plenum. We had a look around at stuff and he got to work rebuilding the taillights for the Chickenhawk. Why? Because the taillights in the Chickenhawk are the ones for his car and he wants them back. I started to mess with a dashboard for Marty and John made some innocent comment about something. “Fine!” I said. “You have guilted me into working on George!” at which point I put away Marty’s dash and opened the door behind George. I really did intend to crawl under and finish the differential installation, but we took the broken taillights out instead. We banged and bashed the taillight panel while building a set of lights for the car. Oh, we took the reverse light clear lenses from the Chickenhawk’s lights and replaced them with the red turn signal lenses from another set. The red lenses from that set were replaced with the clears from the Chickenhawk. The plan is to replace the single filament bulb sockets in the Chickenhawk’s lights with duals and wire three low-beam park lights across the set. The middle will high-beam as brake lights and the two outers will high-beam as turn signals. In George we’ll just wire the reverse socket to the turn signal and have two amber bulbs behind the clear lenses light up as turn signals flanking the center tail and brake lights. In Marty I might just swap the frames side to side so that the clear lenses are to the outside and have amber bulbs for turn signals. I'd probably wire the inner red lens, the one that used to be reverse, to be brake lights. Perhaps I'd wire in a double filament socket for tail and brake in that hole. I don’t know. We’ll see. So, I guess that’s all I accomplished over the weekend. I did a smattering of work on George, took out a ton of garbage, and started on a totally superfluous fuel injection manifold. Well, I say it is superfluous, who knows? One day I might decide to fuel inject and turbocharge Shi-Chi. Hopefully the hole in the hood will still be needed at that time. Again, we’ll see. Well, I've been to lunch in the middle of this rant and have sort of lost my way. I think I'm going to call it complete for the day. I'll talk to y'all again tomorrow, most likely.