6/4/12

Wow, for some reason Werd opened up at 190% on my screen.  I may not even need the reading glasses.  Of course the fact that the motherfucking computer thinks that first sentence is a fragment is just about to cause the death of another laptop.  I hope every computer programmer, especially those at Tiny and Flaccid, has to watch their children die of nut/cooter cancer, whichever is appropriate for the sex of said child.  I fucking hate computers, computer programmers, and most computer users.  Fuck fuck fukedy fuck fuck!  Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggg!  So anyway, Saturday morning I headed out at 0700 h or so to get oil and a filter for Fiona.  Turns out Hyundai is using a cartridge filter in an housing thingy for their modern engines.  I'm not sure how I feel about that.  Anyhoo, I get to Vato Zone on 377 but they don’t open until 0730 h.  I roll down the road to O’Reilley’s which also doesn’t open until 0730 h.  I head back to Vato Zone.  There I wait for the doors to open.  When they do I go in and look for the filter.  They didn’t have one on the shelf so I went to the counter.  The dude looked it up but showed they didn’t even have one in stock.  I left.  I went back to O’Reilley’s who had the filter.  This was where I learned of the cartridge filter situation.  I grabbed a five liter jug of Mobil 1 and checked out.  When I got to the shop to find John not there, I whipped out the cleaning rod for the Saiga 12 and built a new, longer one.  I also cut and zooked the castle-nut wrench to the muzzle device/flash hider wrench and hung it up to paint.  John arrived and I showed him the filter for Fiona.  He thought it was odd, like I had.  He grabbed the ramps and guided me onto them then crawled under to remove the under trays.  I didn’t fight it.  I handed him tools while he changed my oil.  When “we” were done with that project, we moved on to the hydraulics for The Seven.  Oh, did I mention I ordered a clutch slave and hose for The Seven?  Well, I did and they arrived during the week.  We jacked up the nose of The Seven and I crawled under to remove the slave.  Yep, it was totally shot.  We struggled with the hose for a bit until I finally just removed the whole hard line and we installed it in the air.  We snaked the line back into place and I installed the new slave.  I bled the thing and we declared that project done.  It was now 0945 h.  We moved on to the installation of the seat in Lil' Wiggly.  I decided that just setting the seat on the risers and using long bolts was a bit… iffy, at best.  Ok, I decided that, John had to be convinced.  We decided to zook a bolt into the load-spreader plates, zook those plates to the risers, and then zook the risers to the seat rails.  All was going well until in between zookings, the welding helmet slumped down on my face once too many times.  I tossed the bastard across the shop and shattered the dark lens.  Fuck fuck fukedy fuck fuck!  John stepped in and gas welded the risers, and the one bolt not needing a riser, to the seat rails.  We forewent painting the rails and installed the seat.  It fought us the whole way.  We managed to get the riserless bolt in place with a nut on the bottom but none of the others would go in their holes.  John came up with the genius plan of using a socket and the floor jack to “reposition” the floor up onto the bolts.  It worked like a charm… on the two risers with straight bolts.  The riser with the wonky bolt never did go through the floor properly.  I declared that I was good with it and we gave the car a test drive… sort of.  I moved it around back of the shop and parked it.  John hopped in The Seven and drove it back into the shop then we cleaned up to go to lunch.  It was now 1230 h.  Yes, Fiona's oil change and replacing the clutch slave on The Seven took about an hour and a half while installing one seat in Lil' Wiggly took three hours.  We decided that I would drive Lil' Wiggly to lunch and come back for Fiona at a later time.  This we did.  Lil' Wiggly was just barely drivable.  It had to be kept on the boil, over 3,500 but preferably over 5,000 revs, to make anything happen… and even then nothing spectacular was happening.  At lunch we decided to try disconnecting the vacuum advance on the distributor.  This we did and it got a little better… not much though.  I drove it out to the freeway and took a bit of a cruise.  It worked pretty well on the freeway at an indicated 80 miles per hour with the tachometer at or over 4,000 revs.  As the gas gauge was reading ¼ tank, I went to the Exxon station at I-20 and Chapel Creek and filled the tank.  I don’t remember if I put in cheap or mid-grade gas though.  It took about six or seven gallons so I declared it full and went to take off.  The gauge now read empty.  Yes, the gauge and sender are opposite what each other want for proper functionality.  “Full” is empty and “Empty” is full.  I was annoyed but am willing to live with it.  I took off and headed back to the shop.  I parked and headed home in Fiona.  I debated going back to the shop in Fifi to bring Lil' Wiggly home for the JNC car show Sunday night but took a nap instead.  When I woke up I realized I'd forgotten to turn off the battery master kill.  I headed back to the shop in Fifi.  I parked Fifi and hit the lug nuts on Lil' Wiggly just to be safe then headed home.  I drove it more like Fiona than flogging it like I had been driving.  See, in Fiona I'll let the revs climb but I'm not really hard into the gas pedal.  This seems to be the way to drive Lil' Wiggly.  If you aren’t in a big hurry, but are willing to SOUND LIKE you are, Lil' Wiggly drives fine.  It sounds like you are flogging the hell out of it even if you are only giving it part throttle since you DO have to rev it pretty high before shifting.  Anyhoo, at the house I decided that I may have a $1,000.00 paperweight in that cylinder head.  But I'll save that for tomorrow.