11/6/2012

John asked if it was favoritism which made Sean Connery the only correctly named actor to play James F. Bond in yesterday’s rant.  I wanted to reply back, “Well, duh!” but refrained.  Sean Connery IS James Bond as far as I'm concerned.  It still cracks me up every time I refer to Bronson Pinchot as James Bond.  Look up Bronson Pinchot if you don’t know who that is, then you’ll see why it is so funny… or maybe not.  I don’t really care.  I think it’s funny.  So this last weekend, what happened?  Well, I'm glad you asked.  Saturday morning I picked John up in Fifi and we headed to Not Texas to buy an axle.  We were running a bit early due to (tee hee, I said "doo doo!") my being in “Shit!  I've got to get to John's house before 0830 h!” hauling-ass mode and couldn’t throttle myself back once we were on the road.  We stopped at a McDonald’s on 183 in West Not Texas (AKA Irving) and got a couple breakfast burritos each.  We ate them as we drove.  We still made it to Far East Not Texas (AKA Mesquite) plenty early so I went in to the Wal-Mart and got $200.00 out of the Automatic Teller ATM Machine.  I wonder when I stopped calling them MPulse machines.  See, back in the day, there were two types of ATMs, MPact and Pulse, depending on your bank.  Oh, there were also Doughboys I believe but I couldn’t think of how to incorporate that into the name.  Anyhoo, when you make a “Brenda-ism” out of them, it comes out “MPulse” machine.  But I digress.  After getting $200.00 from the MPulse machine, I headed back out to wait with John in the parking lot.  Eventually the dude shows up and I buy the axle.  It is pretty nice… for a 45 year old part what’s been living under a car for, um, 45 years.  We, read “John and the dude,” moved it from the dude’s truck to Fifi and I paid the guy.  We headed back towards Texas.  Since we got such an early start of it, John was able to come with me to the shop.  We pulled the brake drums before dropping the thing out of the back of Fifi.  It appears as though a 240Z brake drum will fit, but we’re not running no stinkin’ drums on the back of this car!  I pull the rear cover off to take a look at the ring and pinion while John pulls the brake backing plates.  Everything looks really good inside.  Hells bells, the oil isn’t even all that stinky.  We get the thing as disassembled as we’re going to disassemble it and then put it mostly back together.  We start messing with wheels now.  We decide that the Gram Lites are the way to go and test fit some brake rotors.  The Kia rotors will not fit.  They foul on the axle flange.  The Pathfinder rotors do fit, of course, but we’re not comfortable with how much we had to squeeze the Kia calipers to make the plumb wore-out pads fit on there.  New pads will never fit on those rotors.  We decide that we’ll go with Pathfinder front and rear rotors with Pathfinder front and Kia rear calipers.  Oh, and I'll get some of those mechanical parking brake calipers as well.  With all of that piddling and decision making done, we call it a day and go have sushi.  After I drop John off, I swing by Bloodbath & Beyond to see what they would offer for the Mare’s Leg pistol.  Oh, I'd brought the Mare’s Leg and the Lever Gun with me thinking that if John didn’t come with me to the shop, I'd try to swap the front sights.  See, sights on a Mare’s Leg pistol are less than worthless.  Unfortunately, Rossi saw fit to put really nice sights on the Mare’s Leg.  They are much nicer than the sights on my Lever Gun.  I wanted them to be the other way.  So, back to the narrative.  I go in to Bloodbath & Beyond and talk to the guy behind the counter about selling the thing to them.  He offers $200.00 so I thank him for his time and leave.  I swing by the Shooster’s Club to talk to the gunsmith there about swapping the sights.  He’s not in but the guy behind the counter looks the gun up and offers $300.00 for it.  I say I'll think about it and leave.  From there I went to Elk Castle to talk to their gunsmith.  He looks the gun over and after telling me just how worthless a Mare’s Leg is, recommends NOT swapping the sights.  They are different heights and would make the Lever Gun shoot way high.  I thank him and head home, thinking I'll just live with them the way they are.  Ok, I'm going to save Sunday’s tale for tomorrow since I'm at the bottom of a page and it is almost as wordy as Saturday’s tale.