5/28/08

I got a page at midnight last night crying about one of the big screens shining too brightly in a dispatcher’s cube. Boo-fucking-hoo you panty-waste crybaby, squint for the next eight hours and I'll fix it when I come to work! Ok, so I did try to call some folks to see about remedying the situation but got no answers. I contemplated coming in and charging four hours of time and a half overtime but didn’t really want to drive across town. Not to mention I didn’t have pre-approval for the OT. I had an e-mail waiting for me this morning asking about it and told him I'll come in for these “mission critical” situations if he’ll pre-approve OT and agree to pay for it. We’ll see what he has to say about that. Ok, so I was telling y'all what I did over the holiday weekend. Sunday morning I felt bad about blowing Gregg off Saturday night so I called to invite him to the shop to hang out. I forgot that the Danica Patrick Racing Series was having the Indianapolis Danica Patrick 500 that afternoon. We watched the Danica Patrick pre-race show while we were on the phone and decided to wait until after the race to go to the shop. Now don’t get me wrong, Danica Patrick is so fine that I'd lick the sweat out of her butt-crack, but there were thirty-two other drivers they could have mentioned. I thought they were going to shut off the feed when she got punted out of the race into the pit wall. Alas no, it just gave them more time to shove a camera in her face and ask inane questions. Oh well, what are you going to do? Anyhoo, I actually didn’t get to watch the first half of the race because my sister and brother-in-law picked me up to take mom to lunch. We picked her up at the church and went to Applebee’s. I made a “courtesy grab” for the check but was too quick. I figured Lester would have it by the time I reached. He didn’t so I wound up buying lunch. We went back home and I watched the Danica Patrick Show. After the race Gregg called and we went to the shop. We looked at stuff and decided that the three-on-the-tree shifter was best for Mr. Wiggly. It was one of the cool things about the van in the first place. We talked about other things and wound up looking at Shi-Chi. I asked if he thought he could fold himself into the thing once I was in the driver’s seat. He said he could so we decided to go for a hoon. We took off down Old Granbury Road towards, well, Granbury actually. We hit 1187 and turned towards 377. The car ran as well as it has for the last few months. It still stuttered a bit under throttle but we attributed that to sitting for a few weeks. It seemed to clear up a bit the further we drove. We did the short chute on 377 to continue on 1187. We hit FM5 and did a hoon. We turned back and did another hoon until we caught slow traffic. When I turned onto Aledo/Iona road and got back into the throttle I noticed the zorst note suddenly sounded different. We then noticed the water temp go up from 190° to 220° or so. I eased up on the hooning and we went into “limp home” mode. About the time we turned into the spillway of the Benbrook Lake dam, the temp shot up to 250° plus. Limp home mode was really in effect then! I said to Gregg, “It is basically a junkyard engine, I'm not that worried about these last few miles. She’ll get us home.” I waited until we were actually within sight of the shop doors before saying, “Would a 200 horsepower Zetec engine have gotten us back here at 250°?” We pulled the nosecone and I popped the radiator cap. Of course it was under pressure and shot a fart of steamy hot air out. It didn’t burn me though. We dumped water in and the temp came right back down to 190°. Gregg said, “If you don’t have a cracked head, or at least a blown head gasket, after that I will be amazed.” I thought about it and asked if it were possible that the head gasket blew last summer/fall right about the time it started running like crap. We both agreed that that was very likely and started looking at other A-series heads around the place. I decided against the Über-ported head from Marty’s badass A-14 mainly because it doesn’t have any valves in it right now. I also decided against swapping Gil’s A-14 engine in whole for twofold reasons. 1) It is John’s engine and B) the bottom end of the A-15 in the car now is, well, an A-15. Perhaps someday, when Shi-Chi’s bottom end ‘splodes, I'll go for a short-stroke A-14 but for now I'm going to stick with the “torque” motor. Yeah, I know, A-series engines don’t make any torque no matter what displacement. Ok, the real reason is I don’t want to pull the whole engine from Shi-Chi. That will be a major undertaking. Swapping a head on an A-series is a two-hour job. Damn, I just jinxed it didn’t I? Oh well. So we found a head we liked which had the least compromises: it was an “unshrouded intake” oval-port head, but it has air injector ports in the zorst and open chambers. The other option was a “shrouded intake” head with no air injector ports and closed-chambers. Thing is, I think once the open-chamber head is shaved the difference in chamber volume won’t be that different. If anything I think the shaved open-chamber head might be smaller than the deep closed-chamber head. Once we had a plan in mind we went to dinner at Joe’s Pizza Pasta and Subs. Yummo! I had a Stromboli, well most of a Stromboli. We went our separate ways from there. I'll tell y'all about Monday’s events tomorrow. I'm “working” a half day today since I have a doctor's appointment this afternoon. I'll let y'all know how that went as well.