9/23/13

Well, we still don’t have 220v outlets at the shop… but we’re getting closer.  John W, my nephew, and Bruce, my brother, came back again Saturday while John R, my co-conspirator, and I were working on putting the 302 in Lil' Wiggly.  So, which story do I tell first?  I guess since I opened with 220v, I'll go there first.  The electrical team took the extension cord I'd built for the welder with them as they went to the hardware store again and bought cables, boxes, breakers, and a receptacle for the compressor.  We finger they can reuse the receptacle on the extension cord thingy at the welder end.  When they got back, John W. took the cover off of the breaker box to see if anything they bought would work… of course not.  The breakers were wrong for the box.  But that was NOT the big eye-opener of the day.  Oh no!  The way that building is wired is… well, “scary” is a good word for it.  The power comes off the grid through the meter on the outside of the building.  From the meter, however, it goes into the breaker box through a 100 amp breaker.  Now, you’re sitting there going, “Yeah?  That sounds like a GOOD thing.” but it is coming through the breaker BACKWARDS!  The breaker is acting like a cutoff switch for the whole box.  And if that weren’t scary enough, the other 220 breaker in our box is feeding the breaker box for the other shop!  I suggested to John W. that we move the power from the 100a breaker into the hot lugs where they are supposed to be and use that breaker to feed the welder and compressor.  He frowned and said, “Someone wired it through that breaker for a reason.”  I agreed and so we looked at it and scratched our heads over it for at least fifteen minutes before John and Bruce looked at me hopefully and I said, “Yeah, there’s no point in y’all staying.  We’re not going to do anything with this death trap.”  They left.  Ok, now is where I COULD go into the story of the V8 in Lil' Wiggly, but I won't just yet.  As John R. and I were driving to Campo Verde for lunch, I had an idea of how we could wire up the box and make it work.  I fingered we’d do similar to what I'd suggested but with the addition of an actual cutoff switch.  John R. and I discussed it over lunch then decided that he would call the electrician/electrical inspector dude John W. and Bruce ran into two weeks ago to see what he had to say about how much it would wind up costing us.  Then I had the second epiphany of the day.  “Or we could just buy a generator,” I said.  We agreed that was genius so I went shopping.  At Northern Tool & Supply on I-35W south of I-20, on Risinger Road, I spoke to a dude about generators.  He kept trying to steer me towards a generator/welder combo unit which I had to keep reminding him was a stick welder, not TIG.  He kept doing the math on wattage and kept coming up with over 11,000 watts!  A generator that big would cost over $2,500.00, if I remember correctly.  I said I'd go get the book for the welder and come back.  I got the book, but I didn’t go back.  The book said the unit needs 30 amps at 208 volts or 27 amps at 230 volts.  Those calculate out to a much more reasonable 6,240 and 6,210 watts respectively.  I headed to Pearl Harbor… I mean Harbor Fright… Freight!  They had a 7,000 watt continuous, 8,275 peak generator for $700.00, but it was a no-name Chinese import.  I headed to Lowe’s.  They had one with similar ratings for $700.00 as well, but it was a TroyBuilt.  I've at least heard of them.  While mulling that over, I went to the electrical aisle to see about an adapter to go from the 240 volt “twist lock” to one or the other of the plugs I have.  It was there that I had the third epiphany.  While looking at the cutoff switches for the first plan, none of which were rated high enough anyway, I saw that they also had small breaker boxes.  While looking into one of them it hit me: Why don’t we come off of those “gazinta lugs” which aren’t being used in the “death box” and wire a second box with the breakers for my welder and compressor?  I practically skipped out of the store and went home to draw it up in MS Paint.  I e-mailed the drawing to John, John, and Bruce to get their take on the idea.  John W. replied back that it should work.  Sunday I went back to Lowe’s and bought a breaker box which should fit the breakers they bought Saturday as well as an “Anti-getting-killed-o-meter” so we can make sure the “gazinta lugs” are truly cold when the “cutoff switch” breaker is thrown.  The breaker box cost $20.00… the “Anti-getting-killed-o-meter” was $65.00!  They are both rattling around in the trunk of Fiona as we speak.  This morning I “invited” the electrical team back to the shop one more time this Saturday but said I would totally understand if they told me to install it my dang self.  I won't do it alone, but I will do the wiring myself if I have to… if someone is there to knock me off of the hot 220 lead and call the authorities if something goes wrong.  What I'll probably wind up doing is wire up everything BUT the lead going between the two boxes if I'm at the shop alone this Saturday and finish it up when John gets back from California.  Well, it is rapidly approaching lunch time so I think I'm going to shut down the rant for a bit.  Since John is leaving in the morning for California, I may come back this afternoon and tell the Lil' Wiggly story.  We’ll see.  Yeah, I'm back.  So here’s what happened with Lil' Wiggly.  Before I left for the shop, I called John to ask if I should stop at Lowe’s for longer bolts and nuts to attach the bell housing to the transmission.  If you will remember, two of the bolts felt a bit “strippy” when I went to tighten them down last week.  Well, he said to do that and we’d meet at the new shop.  Oh, the plan to meet at Beenbroke to move the welder and air compressor went out the window when I failed to move Fifi off of the back patio before it rained.  Oops.  So I went to Lowe’s and bought four more 2” long 7/16x14 bolts, four metal locking nuts for those bolts, and a 7/16” drill bit to hog out the threads on the bell housing.  I arrived at the shop and got to work.  I had to remove the bell housing completely from the transmission to do the drilling necessitating the removal of the hydraulic throwout bearing thingy as well.  I drilled out the threads and reinstalled the bell housing.  I was just about to start hunkering down on the bolts when John arrived.  He assisted in the finalization of that then we took the tranny to the engine.  It slid right on, more or less, and we began bolting them together.  As we were doing that, the “electrical team” arrived.  I excused myself from bolting tranny to engine to go talk to them.  That story is where we began this rant.  While they were at the hardware store, John and I fitted the engine to the car.  We discovered where the tranny was hitting the frame and cut out the shifter hole for a better fit.  It looked pretty good hanging there.  We pulled it back out while the first electrical inspection was going on up above.  After the “E-team” left, John and I had another look around for whatever we would need for the final installation of the engine.  We walked to the hardware store and bought some nuts and some washers.  When we got back we had a look at trimming the transmission mounts from the unibody and decided that a hole-saw into the offending “corner” would make the clearance we needed.  We jacked up the nose and I crawled under with the hole-saw.  Needles to saw, both John and I are a little gun-shy with the hole-saw and hand drill.  I managed to drill the first one without it ripping the drill motor out of my hand… the other, not so much.  We did finally get both mounts trimmed and got to work with the final installation.  With the motor mounts built on the free hanging engine, we started the process.  It went in easily enough but took quite a bit of fiddling to get the motor mounts to line up.  They eventually did and we got the thing bolted down nice and snug.  We made a “bridge” to support the ass-end of the transmission and stepped back to have a look at our handiwork.  It’s very nice!  We dropped the radiator in place and discovered that the upper inlet to the radiator shoots straight into the alternator.  John said he’d find a radiator for it though, so we moved on.  We looked at exhaust options and I think we have decided on a set of Explorer/Mountaineer manifolds mounted backwards.  We seem to have enough room under the cross member for the zorst, we hope, so backwards manifolds should be fine.  I'll probably make a pair of oval cross-section pipes though, just in case.  I finger running over a 2.5” zorst tube with Fifi otter squish it just about right.  I'll probably use a pair of bricks to keep from mashing it too flat.  Anyhoo, after we grokked it for a bit, we cleaned up and went to lunch.  Today I spent the morning looking at radiators and header-building material on Summit’s website.  John found a suitable radiator on e-Bay though and I bought it instead.  Also, as I mentioned above, we think we’re going to go with Explorer/Mountaineer manifolds rather than build headers.  So, that’s about all there is to say for now.  Since Spiderman will be in California the rest of the week, I'm not going to bother him to post any more than this one rant.  Y'all are just going to have to deal with that.