10/14/13

So, Saturday we moved the welding table and a few other items from Beenbroke to the new shop.  I stopped on the way at the radiator shop on Wichita to see if they could make a 90° bend in the inlet neck of my aluminum radiator.  They cannot.  At the shop we unloaded the stuff and… hmm, did something for the next hour or two… or three.  Oh, we routed an air hose through the wall from the compressor to near the tool box and moved the drill press into the fabrication room.  We had a look at the carburetor top-hat on Lil' Wiggly and decided that a spacer would be lovely if we could find one.  Eventually we went to lunch at Campo Verde.  From there, since it was decided that I'm never going to finish all of the projects and the Spit is superfluous, we went to the British car shop just around the corner to see if they might have any interest in it.  This is the guy who bought all of the TR-3 shit from me a few years ago.  Another Triumph guy was there and when I said, “$300.00,” just about broke his own wrist getting his phone out to ask his wife’s permission to buy it.  She didn’t say, “No,” but he didn’t cut me check either.  Meh, whaddayagonnado?  John spoke to the other dude’s son about Datsun truck stuff and it was decided that they are coming in two weeks to get the 620 truck from out back of Beenbroke.  I'm sure I'll be showing them the Spit at that time and coming up with an arrangement.  I should probably have the trailer attached to Fifi that day… just in case.  I'm also going to offer to give them the laser alignment machine in the paint booth because it is either that, or abandon it.  I have no intention of ever trying to finger it out.  I asked the Triumph guys’ opinions on British Leyland versus Honduh power for the Mini.  Their consensus, contrary to John’s thinking, was that I should sell the take-out and put in the Honduh.  Their reasoning, which mirrors mine in many ways, is the argument against having the transmission and engine sharing their oil.  It just isn’t a good design.  To placate John, I said I would look into Mini Mania’s price for “Power Units” on line.  The plan was to be: pull the engine and transmission from the car, try to sell it, use that money to offset the cost of a Mini Mania “Power Unit.”  Well, when I did get on line, I found that the cheapest MMPU is actually a grand MORE than the kit to install the Honduh engine and only about a grand less than all the mechanical bits in my Mini Mania wish list.  Then I noticed something in said wish list: the drum-to-disc conversion kit, which I'm going to need no matter what FWD engine I choose, was on sale for $400.00 off the list price.  I thought about that for a bit and then popped it into the shopping cart along with the rear brake rebuild kit from the WL.  I sent John an e-mail and text asking his opinion and then, being the impatient idiot I am, finally just gave up the credit card number and ordered them.  With that decision made, I'm now dedicated to FWD and it will come down to a decision between rebuilding my “Power Unit” and buying the Honduh kit.  I suppose Juan could argue that rebuilding my PU and foregoing the coil-over suspension all around would be the cheap way out… and it would further John's “abandon most of Tim’s shit at Beenbroke” agenda by allowing us to walk away from the Honduh engine.  Speaking of abandoning Hondas, I guess I'll tape the Goldwing’s title to the frame to make it easier on the facility folks when it comes time to auction that off.  No use pissing them off any more than I'm already going to.  But I digress.  Sunday I decided I wanted to take the air filter for Lil' Wiggly, which arrived while I was out Saturday, to the shop and see about installing it.  I wanted to use a rubber mount to secure the flollopy end of the filter so I stopped in at Sutherland’s.  There I found a $29.00 laundry sink, a $15.00 hose, and a box of hand towels… but nothing to mount the filter.  I bought the stuff I did find.  From there I went to O’Reilley’s and found a carburetor-to-air filter spacer kit and some stuff I fingered would work to mount the filter.  It wasn’t exactly what I'd wanted, but I think it’ll do.  I headed to the shop.  There I built the sink and “plumbed” the hose to it.  Yeah, it is just lying there, but you get the idea.  I tested it out and discovered that you cannot use the petcock at the end of the hose, nor can you turn the water on very high because the connection at the spigot leaks like crazy.  Declaring that job done, I moved on to installing the air filter on Lil' Wiggly.  I found that the tall spacer was just a hair too tall but the thinner one would work fine.  I installed the filter to the top-hat and began looking at mounting the other end.  I found a hunk of aluminum and bent it to fit.  I drilled all of the holes for bolting it all together and installed it.  Is it perfect?  Of course not.  Will it suffice?  Sure, whatever.  After that, I went home.  And that just about wraps it up for the weekend.