5/12/09

I was going to just dive in with a description of what I did on Sunday. I think I'll just give the Reader’s Disgust Convinced Virgin of it. Went to church, went to Granbury with mom, had lunch with mom, sister, and brother-in-law, came home, took a nap, went for hoon in Shichi, piddled around shop for a bit, went home again, and went to bed. Oh, there was a scary incident while hooning I feel I ought to mention. As I was turning onto 1187 from 377 in Whiskey Flats, I felt something warm hit my arm. I reached over to feel for what it was and my hand came back covered in… ooh, what could it be? Is it: a) guts from a road kill, b) my own blood from a gaping wound caused by a hunk of road debris flying up, c) my blood mixed with guts from road kill being flung up and impaling itself in me, or d) a glob of grease from somewhere? Yeah, it was “d.” Of course that sent me into full-on “hyper-sensitivity” mode. I heard and felt every bump, creak, groan, squeak, rattle, shimmy, shake, and whatever else “bad” the car had to tell me. I watched the front wheel to make sure I hadn’t lunched a bearing and was about to go all “Reliant Robin” with the thing. Everything looked and sounded fine so I kept rolling, at a slightly reduced pace, towards the shop. There, I had another whip round the car and couldn’t find anything amiss, or even a-mister! Wow, when did I last use that “joke?” Anyhoo, I finally saw evidence of grease in the tread of the left front tire and decided I must have run over a glob of schmutz in the road and flung it up on me and the car. Oh yeah, there was grease all over the rear fender and side of the car, all the way up onto the top of the mirror! I cleaned most if it up and moved on to other projects. I was hit with an urge to release a hostage and decided to drive Barbara to the latrine rather than risk pooing myself getting in and out of Shichi. Barbara fired right up and drove me there and back just fine. I missed with the steering wheel alignment though. I need to clock it about ten degrees to the right when I change to the wheel from Barbecue Bob. I played with the A-12 carburetor that Kevin and the kid had been running on Barbara but changed out for an A-14 carburetor for some reason. I think I'm going to try and re-fit the non-smog carburetor and see how she runs. Of course I'd like to swap all the turbo bits over from George and make a little power, but John makes a good point about that. He says there’s no reason to test the mettle of that billion-mile engine by cramming a bunch of boost into it. I sheepishly mumble something about not cranking up the boost and just running the 8 psi or so the wastegate is set for, but can’t even convince myself of it. My second choice, and what I'd put on George if the turbo bits do get swapped, is the single DCOE and Nissan Motorsports header. John also voted that one down but I don’t remember his reasoning. I think he might have been on slightly shakier ground with his argument there and that’s why he didn’t fight for it enough for it to sink into my mind. Then again, I could be full of crap. I think he’s pushing for the dual SUs on Barbara and the dual Mikunis on Shichi, with a timing reset as a first line of diagnosis on George. But, like I said, I think I'm going to try the non-smog Hitachi carburetor first, perhaps even changing the jets from one to the other, and seeing what kind of performance I can wring from the stock motor. I don’t know, we’ll see. Well, I took Ms. Clio back into the dealer this morning to see about the mushrooms growing under the floor mats. Hopefully they’ll fix it under warranty because I'm broke-ass right now and can’t afford to get the thing out of hock if it costs more than $200.00 to fix. We’ll see. Oh, another project I'm thinking of taking on is making a Kanji script “Shichi” to go in the grille of Shichi. I don’t think it will be too tough, making it pretty enough will be the hard part. We’ll see. Well, I'm bored with talking to y'all. I think I'm going to call it a rant and go play solitaire until lunch. Have a day.