4/29/08

Sunday morning I head for the shop at 0800 h to meet John at 0830 h. I send him a text and think, “I should wait until I hear from him before leaving,” but I don’t. I head for the shop. It has gotten cool overnight. I'm in shorts and a tee-shirt so sitting in the shop I start to get cold. Sunburned legs radiating all of my body heat doesn’t help. I decide to don one of the jumpsuits I keep around as insulation. The tan suit is really dirty. I pass on it. The orange suit is dirty but not nearly as bad as the tan one. I put it on. I'd have grabbed the blue suit from the back of Darth Versa and worn it but I was in Matilda. That fact, me being in Matilda, got me to thinking about the plan Gregg and I had come up with for the day. Originally, he was supposed to take me home Saturday after the swap meet. I would have then met John at the shop and Gregg would have come to pick me up around noon or so. We’d have gone back to the speedway and picked up the trailer and Mr. Wiggly. I’d have dropped Mr. Wiggly at the shop and driven Darth Versa home from there. It was a good plan. I should know; I came up with it. Gregg getting sick and not taking me home threw all of that out the window though. I decided I'd call him later in the morning and tell him I'd come to his place and we’d go to the speedway from there. So now I'm waiting for John to arrive so I can weld up some patch panels on his 510 to get it ready for paint next week. Oh, John is having his 510 painted next week by the way. I'm not sure if that is important or even any of y'all’s business, but there it is. John arrives and we get started making patch panels. I do a test weld to see if I'm even going to be able to do it without blowing through the thin assed metal. The test goes well so I'm overconfident. We grab a spare fender and I start to zook in a patch. Problem number one: I don’t tack weld. I know I should. I know it will make for better parts. I know it makes for easier disassembly if/when I screw it up. I just can’t stop once I get going. Well, I can’t stop until I blow a friggin’ hole in the part. Problem number two: old Datsun sheet metal is paper thin to begin with, once it has been ground to get to good shiny metal it is virtually tissue paper. I get the patch zooked into the spare fender and it looks like total shite. John says he can work with it so I move on to the actual car. I hook up the ground and proceed to blow big assed holes in his fenders while tacking the patch panel in place. It pisses me off pretty badly during the process, which only makes matters worse. I mutter and swear that I hate bodywork and that I think it is a stupid waste of time. Being stiff, sore, and sunburned is really putting a damper on my mood. I just hope John doesn’t think I'm pissed at him for asking me to help out. I'm not. It’s just out of my realm of… I was going to say “comfort” but it is more “giving a damn.” Sorry, but that’s just how it is. So I finally get the patch tacked in and he grinds the welds a little smoother. It is going to take more “bog” than I think he’d originally intended, sorry. He glops on a thick layer of spray paint and turns the car around. From inside the trunk he’s able to back up the patch panel so we can get a slightly better zook on these. They are still going to require more “bog” than he’d like but it was a “Tim cannot weld” day after all. Once my work was done for the day, I called Gregg to see what his status was. He was still in bed from the “food poisoning” or whatever from Saturday. I tell him it makes no sense for him to come to the shop to get me if I have Matilda. He agrees. I say I'll come to get him after John and I eat lunch. John does a few more things to the car to get it ready for painting and then we head to Red Hot and Blue for some barbecued piggy. My eyes were a bit bigger than my stomach, which is hard to fathom if you’ve ever seen my stomach, and I ordered too much food. Oh I ate it all, but it was still too much. About halfway through the meal Gregg calls and says I'm going to have to go pick up the Mustang from the speedway. I ask just how I'm supposed to do that and take Mr. Wiggly home too. He asks if John is with me but I don’t even pass the inquiry along. I say he has to get home and that he, Gregg, will just have to suck it up and get his car himself. Not in so many words, but that is what I meant. We finish lunch and head out. I arrive at Gregg’s house and he hands me the keys to his truck. We hop in and head for the speedway. I joke that there will be an empty lot with one trailer parked next to one van out there by this time of the day. He says that will be the greatest thing possible. We get there and, lo and behold, there is one trailer parked behind his trailer and Mr. Wiggly. We hook up the truck to the trailer and I start to clean the shoe polish off the windshield of Mr. Wiggly. Well, I attempt to wash the shoe polish off the windshield. They must have reformulated shoe polish in the last twenty five years because I remember the stuff coming off with water and a towel. [ No, water was stronger back then... - SM ] This stuff is ON THERE! I give up and we head out with me looking through the writing. Mom had called to say that the cleaning lady had returned Fifi so I called John to see if he wanted me to swing by and pick him up to go get it. He agreed to that so after following Gregg back home to make sure he made it, I went to John’s. We drove across town to my house and discussed Mr. Wiggly fate. I think I'm going to install a good stock Weber 32/36 in place of that modified one and see if drivability and mileage improve. I think they will. We’ll see. Well, that pretty much gets y'all caught up to Sunday evening so I think I'm going to call it a rant for today. Toodles.