7/22/13

We are slowly but surely getting moved into the new shop.  Saturday I met John at the old shop and we loaded the Chickenhawk onto the trailer.  We dropped it in the back of the new shop and went back for George.  We dropped him in the back of the new shop and then had a pow-wow about what we wanted to attempt next.  It was my feeling that we should secure the man-door in the “office” before moving anything into the “large” bay… not to mention there is still a bunch of scrap from the broken desks in there.  It was decided that we’d drop off the trailer at the old shop and plan from there.  The problem was we couldn’t decide if we were going to go to the hardware store before or after eating sushi.  We decided on before.  At Ace Hardware we bought two carriage-head bolts, two washers, and two wing-nuts then headed to Wasabi.  Our usual waiter wasn’t there but the cutie-pie blue haired Anime/Cosplay girl was an acceptable substitute.  From Wasabi we went back to the new shop.  Oh, I think we’re going to stop calling the place Dimlight Racing and use D.A.T.S.U.N. (Driving Around Texas Saving Unloved Nissans) instead… but we might not.  We’ll see.  At D.A.T.S.U.N. we both got to work on different “home improvement” projects.  I started removing the panels to make the pass-through between the “large” and “small” bays while John started drilling the cross-bar to secure the man-door in the “office.”  The drill bit he was using turned out to be total crap so he came in to help me.  We got one panel out and I was ready to call it a pass-through.  Once we had that “done” we went back to the man-door lock-bar thingy project.  I tried a couple different bits until I found one which would actually cut metal and drilled the two holes.  We took the bar to the door and marked where we wanted those holes.  I drilled them and then we installed the bar.  John kicked the door from the inside and it didn’t seem to budge so we think the place is more or less secure.  We went back to the pass-through and John got the last screw out of the second panel and it out of the way.  Yeah, I have to admit that the first pass-through was too small now that we have the full opening.  Next we began to look for the saw-saw in order to cut out the purlins someone had zooked in to screw the panels onto.  We decided that the saw-saw is probably sitting on the floor of Benbroke.  We used the jumping-up-and-down saw and cut out the first purlin.  The welds were weak enough that minimal fatigue failed them and the high purlin was out of our way.  When we saw how easy that one was to remove, we decided to go ahead and remove the lower purlin as well.  We now have a very nice pass-through twixt the “large” and “small” bays.  I'm still not in love with the place, but it is growing on me as we get more and more moved in… sort of thing.  Once we had done all we were going to do, we parted ways and I went home.  I gave some thought to going out to burn up some ammo but wound up wasting the rest of the day and evening in front of the TV.  Sunday I wasted almost the whole day in front of the TV except for an hour or two having lunch with mom and then going for a hoon in The Seven later in the day.  So, with y'all caught up on the weekend, I can now tell you about my latest stupidity.  I found a 1965 Ford Econoline van on e-Bay in Tulsa.  It has a 289 V8 and three-on-the-tree manual transmission.  It is friggin perfect!  I put in a bid of $1,000.00 and was immediately outbid.  I think I bid myself up to $1,500.00 and was outbid again.  I decided to wait a bit and see what it bid up to over the next couple days.  It has sat at $2,000.00 or so for a bit now so I asked John what he thought a decent price would be.  We agreed that $3,000.00 wouldn’t be outrageous so I bid that.  I am now the high bidder at $2,125.98 but the reserve hasn’t been met.  That means he wants more than $3k for it or my bid would have gone in… I think.  Anyhoo, John's buyer for Fifi is pretty certain he can offer $2,000.00 to $2,300.00 for that deal so I am not looking too bad on the deal.  Yes, we all agree that getting rid of a “known quantity” vehicle for something of a gamble is well and truly stupid, but I'm not too worried.  I doubt I'll be the winner of the van in any case.  Oh, I want it bad enough to think long and hard (tee hee, I said "long and hard!") about paying up to $5,000.00 for it, but I'm going to rein myself in and hold fast to my $3k offer.  I hope.  We’ll see.  Ok, I think I'm done talking to y’all today so…