8/13/12

Well, I have backslid on my backslide with regards to the carburetors on Lil' Wiggly.  If you remember last Friday I was talking about maybe just going back to the duals and having a muffler installed.  Well, John and I talked and decided I WOULD do that… then I went to the shop on Saturday.  As I stood there looking at the engine, I thought about what a whip it would be to change that manifold again and decided against it after all.  I pulled the Solex carburetor off and removed the throttle cable linkage I'd installed last week then re-installed the pair of carburetors on the dual carburetor manifold.  Then I installed that manifold on the albatross head so John could sell the lot for me.  I contemplated installing the super bitchin’ aluminum spacers I had milled but couldn’t without four socket-head bolts.  I wasn’t about to go BUY four bolts just to sell the spacers… especially since I had five dollars on me and that had to buy my lunch.  Once I had all the hot rod stuff ready to take to John, I went back to looking at Lil' Wiggly.  I decided that I'd get another step ahead of the game by “finishing” the throttle cable bracket I'd started last week.  I reinstalled the throttle cable to the pedal and had a look at how I was going to mount the bracket.  It looked like I could just bolt the thing to the upright on the manifold if I were to drill some holes.  Then I had another idea.  Was it ghetto?  Just a little bit.  I'll start from the beginning with the bracket I made last week.  I took a length of steel strap, say 1/8” thick by 2” wide by 5” long, and bent a 90° bend about 2” from the end.  On that 2”x2” square I drilled a hole for the throttle cable stop and then cut a notch so the cable could thread through.  On the 3” leg, I cut about halfway through about 1.5” down from the bend.  This allowed me to make a bend perpendicular to the other bend… which I did.  I “prettied up” the part a little with a few more hacksaw strokes, cutting the square edges into nice angles… sort of thing, then took it back to the car.  The new angle piece, the one without the throttle cable hole, “wraps around” the upright on the manifold and puts the cable right where I want it.  To secure it to the upright, I put on a hose clamp and hunkered it down.  To test it, I “installed” the broke-ass DCOE and hooked everything up.  Did I get in the car and step on the pedal?  No, of course not.  I didn’t have anyone there to make sure it was getting WFO.  But it did hook up and… yeah, I hear it too.  I'm full of shit.  I, essentially, didn’t test it at all.  There, you happy now?  When I'd decided I'd done all I could by myself at the shop, short of trying to install the steering wheel in Fiona, which I KNOW would have sent John’s blood pressure over the top, so I didn’t, I called John to see if he would be at home so I could deliver the hot rod bits for him to sell.  We had a miscommunication and the short version of the story is I didn’t get them delivered.  I took them back to the shop and went home for the day.  Sunday, I hooned in Fiona for a couple hours but other than that did nothing.  And that gets y'all caught up on my weekend.