8/10/12

Oh, hey!  I almost forgot y'all were out here.  I'd like to say I've been really busy and that’s why I haven’t been contributing to the rant… but truth is, I just didn’t get around to typing one all week.  So, what’s new?  Well… uh, nothing here.  John and I are not going to the shop tomorrow… well, John's not coming to the shop.  I will go to the shop to remove the carburetor from Lil' Wiggly, put the pair back on the dual manifold, and put that manifold on the albatross head so I can take it to John and have him sell the lot.  We need to sell the duals, and the albatross head for that matter, in order to finance the new single carburetor for the car.  I just hope we’re not going backwards here.  Yes, Gil drove really well with this cam and a single side draft, until it bent the pushrods, but… well shit, I just don’t know.  This I promise, “If the car won't drive with this setup it is outta here!”  I've got way too many other projects waiting on the back burner to keep chasing my tail on this one.  Yes, I like B-210s and this particular one is pretty cool, but at heart I am a 1200 guy.  I feel I've already “wasted” too much time on this “simple engine swap.”  If it continues to perform similar to a stock B-210, which is just about how it ran when we pulled the carburetors, I'm through with it.  Does it sound like I'm really regretting NOT going to the muffler shop last week with the duals and having the thing quieted down to a livable level?  Cuz that’s what I was going for here.  Ok, at this point John is going to ask me if I want to put the duals back on and have a muffler installed.  The answer to that is an emphatic… I'm not sure.  It would be the most expedient course of action.  Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!  I'm just about to talk myself into doing it.  I keep thinking, “I drive Fiona, Fifi, and The Seven ‘high’ in the revs most of the time.  What is different?  The zorst of course!”  Yes, all of those cars have a louder-than-stock zorst, The Seven especially, but they are all still relatively quiet compared to the raucous noise Lil' Wiggly puts out.  Ok, maybe not The Seven.  And, upon reflection, I do tend to “lug” The Seven since the carburetors like running under a load better than free-revving.  But the other two still make my argument… I think.  Ok, I need to find out if John has any leads on the sale of the dual carburetors and albatross head.  If he has, I'll pull back and go with the “easier” solution of moving forward on a single DCOE installation.  If he doesn’t, I may reinstall the duals tomorrow and see about schlepping it across town to have a muffler installed.  Of course I'm going to have to wait on that as well because I don’t get paid again until next Wednesday.  Part of me is hoping John has a lead on the sale.  We’ll see.  As for what’s next… as I've said for some time now, I think it otter be George since that car is so close to being “done.”  Unfortunately, I have had a look under the hood of George “recently” and discovered that my “we need to run a water bypass hose from the back of the head” theory is shot to hell.  There IS a hose from the back of the head, teed off to feed the heater and the cooling jacket of the turbo, and back into the lower radiator hose.  I'm afeared that boring the A-12 block to fit the A-14 pistons has weakened the block to the point of ruin.  I can't imagine the ceramic coatings I had done on the head and pistons making trouble.  They are supposed to have the opposite effect.  Ok, I don’t want to think about it anymore because it is causing me to remember just how much money I have sunk in that engine rotting away out there.  Shit, now I'm thinking of how much money I have in ALL of those engines doing nothing down there.  Shit, now I'm thinking about how much money I've blown on rent for that shop over the years!  Oh, do not do the math, do not do the math, do not do the math… I'm going to do the math.  Ok, it isn’t quite as bad as I feared… as long as I don’t consider how MANY years I've done it.  It comes out to about $7,000.00 a year I've been paying in rent.  Damn it!  I just realized that’s $70,000.00 over the last ten years!  I should NOT have done the math.  Well, now I'm pissed off at myself for farting away that much money.  I'm going to… aw fuck.  I don’t know what I'm going to do.