02/7/11

Frerbrurary 7, 2011 Well, today would have been my father’s 84^th birthday. Happy birthday dad. OK, so why haven’t I had any rants for the last week? Well, it’s like this... um, I don't know. I just haven’t. Deal with it. I suppose I could blame the ice and snow but I actually came in to work every day last week. Tuesday was a slow drive in but it wasn't too bad. Wednesday was a little worse with the thaw/freeze cycle making nice slick spots everywhere. Thursday was slightly better, probably like Tuesday. Friday it snowed its ass off again (relatively speaking, we are in Texas you know) and made the drive a little worse only because you couldn't see where the old ice was. The snow did actually make for a little better traction though. All in all, the best section of my drive, by far, every trip, was the Lake Worth bridge. And that it NOT sarcasm. That bridge was dry and passable the whole week. My theory is that the massive heat-sink of the lake kept the bridge above freezing for the most part. I don't know, it makes sense to me. OK, so Friday when I get home I find my Delco one-wire alternator waiting for me. Saturday John picks me up and we go to the shop. We install his Delco one-wire and a replacement radiator fan. It literally took longer to install the radiator fan than the alternator, and that includes rewiring and stuff. OK, so the rewiring involved taping off the stock hot lead and running a new wire from battery to the alternator, but still. He fired up the engine and we checked the voltage. 15.6 volts! That thing is a flame thrower. It settled down to 14 something at idle and I'm assuming the super voltage was to recharge the battery from all the abuse we’d put it through last week. We test fit my Delco on Nadine and it fit perfectly. Actually, we did that before messing with his car and that was how we knew his was going to be a walk in the park. The lower bracket lines up perfectly with the stock bracket and the pulley is... well, everything lined up perfectly. That’s all there is to it. After getting John's car going, I decided to mess with Nadine for a bit. I cut off the driver’s side horn bracket and drilled, with a hole saw, a clearance notch for the distributor. While I was drilling, John removed the vacuum advance unit by the way. Thank you sir. We did another test fit and declared it good. I don't recall us doing anything else though. It was decided that I'd follow him home and then he’d take me home again. The car is ready to be daily driven, we hope, but it is still unlicensed and not inspected. I did follow him home. The car ran great and made me jealous. I've got to get Lil' Wiggly back on the road. I would work on it Sunday, I promised myself. After we dropped his car off, we went to his bank and then tried to go to Two Brother’s Bistro for Gyros. As we were discussing it, I remembered that one of the items I'd removed from my wallet just that morning was the $50.00 gift certificate from there. D’oh! Well, the point was moo since their lunch hours were up thirty minutes before we arrived. We ate at Pho King Way instead. Yes, there really is a restaurant, a couple of them actually, called Pho King Way. I know what you are thinking, “There’s no ‘Pho King Way.’” But there is. Anyhoo, we ate there and then he took me home. I snoozed for a while then after dinner wasted the rest of the evening. I thought about taking Ms. Clio to the shop and airing up the tires, but didn't. See, when the temperature dropped below “butt assed cold” to “butt assed butt butt cold,” my tires lost enough pressure to activate the TPMS light on the dash. I didn't worry about it because lower pressure makes the tires grip like gloves onto whatever irregularities there are on the road surface. With it all thawed out, I felt they needed to be pumped back up. I waited for Sunday instead. But I'm going to save Sunday’s tale for tomorrow.