1/28/13

John finally showed me the hydraulic parking brake thingy he’s been gassing on about.  I guess it will be acceptable after all.  I'll order one this Friday after I get paid.  I mentioned last week that he has ordered an Etcetera master cylinder and the requisite brake pads for Lil' Wiggly.  Apparently one set of pads are already at his house and I'll bet the others arrive today.  The master cylinder might not come until tomorrow but even if it doesn’t arrive until Friday, we’ll still have it for next Saturday.  As for what we achieved this last weekend, well the 302 is just about completely dressed out.  We have fingered out how we’re going to route the serpentine belt as well.  What we did was take an “inside” idler and moved it up to a position which used to be an “outside” idler.  This now gives us a nice belt route which otter work… if we can find a belt in the right length.  We also need an alternator but John has an e-mail out to a dude selling some on e-Bay.  Said dude has a 1.21 gigawatt unit for Fjords as well as “one wire” units for… um, other things I guess.  John has asked if the shell we need can have the self-exciting thingamajigs installed in it.  I'm trying my best to not be “That Guy” by sending John an e-mail asking if he’s heard anything.  He’ll let me know when he hears something.  Anyhoo, we installed the chrome valve covers on the engine and decided to go ahead and run a PCV valve for a myriad of reasons.  Of course, the environment was NOT one of them.  Sucking down the crankcase does make a wee bit more power and helps to reduce oil consumption, but the main reason was the valve covers have the grommet holes at the front on one head and the back on the other.  We put the cap to the front and the PCV to the back.  I stole the PCV valve and hose from the A-14 we took out of Lil' Wiggly and it plumbed right up to the carburetor… but I'm getting ahead of the story.  Once the valve covers were on, I had a look at installing the intake manifold.  I cleaned up the surface and pookied around the ports before plopping the gaskets in place.  A wee bit more pookie around the ports on the manifold side and I declared, “Note to self: ‘Make John scrape the gaskets if we have to change manifolds since the pookie was his idea.’”  He laughed… I think.  We then discussed the merit of blocking off the exhaust heat riser passage between the heads under the carburetor.  It was decided that a piece of Dr. Pepper can pookied over the holes should do the job.  This I did.  I'm beginning to wish I'd put the bits of can on the head side of the gasket rather than the intake side and I hope to hell we don’t blow through the gasket into the intake tract or lifter valley.  I didn’t realize my mistake until it was way too late though… like last night in bed.  Oh well.  I installed the intake and hunkered down on the bolts.  It looks so good!  I installed the studs for the carburetor and greased up a gasket for it.  With the carburetor on and bolted down, we had a look at the 14” air filter which came with the kit.  It looks nice… but it won't clear the HEI distributor.  We had a look at that velocity stack air cleaner I made for Mr. Wiggly but it just would not fit any more.  I will order a 10” filter from Summit soon.  We dropped the HEI dizzy in and John took some pictures for the build thread.  It was at this point that we actually began looking at the belt situation.  I bolted the alternator and tensioner bracket back on the engine and looked to see if there was any route which would work.  There wasn’t.  I bolted the A/C and power steering bracket on as well and had a look.  If we swapped the “inside” idler from the A&T bracket over to where there is currently an “outside” idler on the A/C&PS bracket, we would have a good route.  As I mentioned before, this is what we did.  We marked what could be cut off the A/C&PS bracket and John took it to the vice.  I'll probably take the Saw-saw to it next weekend.  We may or may not “add lightness” to the A&T bracket but what there is to cut off isn’t very much.  It may just hang there as superfluous material.  We’ll see.  I think that was about all we got done on my engine.  John did some stuff with his engine and I believe it is ready to bolt into his car.  He just needs to finish up his steering conversion before we can do that.  We went to have sushi and then both called it a day.  I didn’t go back to the shop because my brother was supposed to come to the house at noon and she had some church thing she wanted me to go to with her in the evening.  I did stop by Sutherland’s Hardware to look for a 1/8” female to ¼” male NPT adapter thingy, preferably a 45°, for the oil pressure sending unit on my engine.  They didn’t have one.  I got home apparently five minutes after my brother left.  Oops, shouldn’t have stopped at the hardware store.  I cleaned up and took a nap with the cat.  Mom wake me up to say she was going to the store and that she wasn’t sure she wanted to go to the church thing after all.  I put up no argument whatsoever to that plan.  We did skip it, much to my relief.  Ok, as usual I think I'll save Sunday’s tale for tomorrow.  Have a day.