6/23/08

Wow, we’re almost halfway through 2008, kooky. You may have noticed a lack of rant on Friday. I had nothin’ to say. Today, however, I have very little to say. What I have to say is this, the saying of which will commence forthwith. Which is to say that what I have to say will be said as soon as I say it. Said saying of my saying to be said in the fullness of time with commensurate saying of the thing of which I have to say. All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the far end. No wait, that was Miss Anne Elk’s theory of dinosaurs. What I have to say is that I sold Barbara. Kevin had asked if I would leave the keys to Barbara somewhere so they could try and get her running last weekend while John and I were in Houston. I did and they did. Well, they got it running until the fuel line from the tank to the hard line broke. This last Saturday they came back to replace that line and see what they could see. I met them at the shop and we rolled Timmy out. We pushed Barbara in and they got to work. I keep saying “they” because I can’t remember the kid’s name who is working on getting the thing running. He's Kevin’s daughter’s boy-friend or something like that. Anyhoo, they replaced the hose at the rear and refilled the tank. Well, they dumped in a gallon or so. They fired it up, with the help of the battery charger/starter thingy, and it settled into a nice idle. It wouldn’t accept any throttle though. We scratched our heads about that for a bit. Kevin bled the master cylinders and that got the pedals to “work.” He took it around the building and then we noticed the fuel line from the hard line to the fuel pump was leaking. They replaced that and the thing ran worse. I'm still not sure what that was all about. We looked at it for a while and finally started to yank the smog crap off. No wait, we temporarily removed the emissions equipment to facilitate tuning the car up. Yeah, that’s it. We’ll put all that stuff right back on as soon as it is running properly. We got the air injector pump off and the port blocked, we removed and plugged all of the vacuum systems we could find, disconnected the brake booster, and plugged that port. We did the last one because when Juan tapped the brakes, the engine wanted to die. As soon as we did all of that, it was a totally different car. It still wouldn’t run right but it looked a lot better under the hood. And we all know, “It is better to look mahvelous, than to feel mahvelous!” It was decided that Kevin would get a carburetor kit for the Hitachi and go through it and then we’d look for a Weber. I did find an adapter for them but all of my Weber DGVs are somewhere between my shop, Ray, Pat, and limbo. Ray swears he gave them all to Pat to return to me but I can’t find them at DLR. I didn’t look in Pat’s storage bay, they might be there. Of course what with him being all new-daddied up, I'm not sure just how much I'm going to see of him in an automotive hobby capacity. And speaking of “seeing” things, he just now sent me a picture of the new baby. Yep, of all the baby pictures I've ever seen, that is one of them. Ok, I'm not sure what else I have to say on that issue. Where was I in the Barbara story? Right, got it. We decided to go through the stock carburetor and flush some gas treatment through the tank to see what’s what then we’ll probably slap a DGV on it. Of course I just got off the phone with Kevin and he’s convinced it is the accelerator pump A) leaking air into the system and 2) not pumping properly. The engine will accept throttle if very slowly applied, but it bogs like hell if you tip in too fast. We shall see. Well, I think I'm going to release a hostage right quick and see if there is anything going on around campus. Y'all have a day.