11/22/2012

Well, as usual, I ate too much at Thanksgiving.  I've been napping all afternoon, in between importing more CDs into i-Tunes on the laptop.  I'm up to almost 1,000 songs.  I did wind up trading in the 8 giga-flippy-floppy i-Pod for a 32 giga-flippy-floppy unit, so all of those songs are portable wherever I go now.  Speaking of going, I forgot to tell y'all about one more trip I took to the shop the other day.  Around 1600 h the other night I decided I'd go back to the shop and see if I could make a Nissan valve cover for the V8 engine.  I found a Nissan embossed A-series cover and compared it to one of the Ford covers.  There is just almost enough flat surface on the top of the Nissan cover to fill the embossed area of the Ford cover.  I marked where I'd need to cut and took the cutoff wheel to it.  With the center section of the Nissan cover in hand, I compared it a little closer to the Ford cover.  It needed some trimming.  I trimmed it.  Now I had a pretty good idea of where the Ford cover needed to be cut.  I marked and cut the Ford cover.  After a little trimming, the Nissan bit fit inside the hole in the Ford cover.  I hemmed and hawed a bit before firing up the TIG welder.  I tacked one end in place and had a look.  I refit the other end and got to work welding it in.  I tried to just tack it but the weld was going so well that I kept going.  I shouldn’t have.  The Nissan part had ridden up out of the hole and was sitting on top somewhat.  The gap at the bottom was horrendous.  I shut down the welder and let the part cool while I washed up.  I think the embossed “Nissan” part of the Nissan bit is salvageable so I'm not too pissed off.  The Ford cover is ruined, but that doesn’t bother me too much.  What we’ll do is buy a set of plain steel covers for the 289 and pookie a pair of Nissans to them.  It will look a little ghetto but I think I can live with that.  Then again, the “Nissan” is a bit small for the Ford covers so we might not do that either.  We’ll see.  Ok, so I'm thinking about what I'm going to do tomorrow.  I think I'm going to go to the shop and remove some wiring harness from Lil' Wiggly.  Almost all of it under the hood is superfluous as is most of the under dash harness… especially if we ditch the fuel tank and replace it with that fuel cell.  I don’t really want to rewire the whole car, but at this point it would only be the turn signals.  Hmm, I don’t have to get the thing inspected anymore so I don’t really need turn signals.  Of course I did go to all that trouble to install TS indicators in the dash.  It is a conundrum.  I'll take a look at it… sort of.  I mean I'm not going to pull the dash out or anything… although, I do need to change that fuel level gauge to a volt meter.  I don’t know.  I'll look at it and make a game-day decision.  Ok, since all of the music I have been importing has loaded to the i-Pod, I guess I'll go for a hoon and waste a few hours and gallons of gasoline.