9/22/14

Yarr, did ye all talk like a pirate Friday avast?  It were National Talk Like a Pirate day ye land lubbers… yarr.  Ahem, so with that out of the way, lettuce move on to last weekend’s activities.  Saturday morning I went to the shop and huffed up the right rear on Lil' Wiggly as I knew it would be flat even though it has been up in the air for a while.  It was.  I cleared off all of the tools and stuff from under the hood and flipped it off of the roof into place.  It wouldn’t close.  I looked to see if the distributor or air filter was holding it up, but they weren’t.  I was perplexed.  Then I remembered that we made a carbon fiber plate, with a Hello Kitty stenciled in the middle, to cover the latch mechanism holes… but never removed the safety catch from the hood.  Oops.  It was hitting the new cover.  Yes, it scratched it a bit.  No, I’m not too worried about it.  I removed the latch and the hood closed fine.  Once I had the car back on the ground and ready to roll out, I called Patrick to see if he was towing that morning.  He said he’d be there in half an hour.  I dug out the box of spare Weber 32/36 carburetors and began to go through them.  Not one of them had the interconnection linkage… NOT ONE!!  I went ahead and picked the one I liked the best and began to disassemble it.  I got it about halfway apart when Patrick arrived.  We rolled Lil' Wiggly out next to the Spitfire and chocked the wheels.  I locked the car and the shop up and we headed to my house.  There we loaded the Subaru on the tow truck and headed back to the shop.  We dropped it in the bay, removed the hood (‘cuz that’s how I roll), and I got to work removing the carb.  Man, they went wild with the vacuum-operated smog crap back in the day!  I got the thing stripped down to the bare essentials and began looking at other stuff.  It does have electronic ignition, which made me happy, but the distributor looks a bit “fuzzy” with white corrosion.  I’m not going to worry about that until John has a chance to grok it.  I turned the compressor to see if it had seized… which it had NOT.  That also made me happy.  Unfortunately, some of the A/C hoses are a bit suspect.  But we’ll burn that bridge later.  Finally I got to work on the side molding strips.  At first I thought I might try to push the offending strip back in place… which didn’t work at all.  I grabbed the drill and got to work removing them.  The first came off easy-peasy.  The second… not so much.  One of the rivets still had its mandrel in the middle and caused the drill to walk.  When the strip came off I noticed that I had actually drilled the door a little bit.  Meh, it is on the passenger side, it won’t affect me all that much.  Once I had the passenger side trim off, I decided I was hot and tired… and hungry.  It was also approaching 1300h.  I cleaned up and closed up then went to Off the Bone to buy mom two pounds of ribs.  I waited in line and when my time came I placed my order.  It came to $26.47 or so, so I gave her a ten and a twenty… I think.  I saw that she rang it up as $40.00 tendered and tried to give me $13.53 in change.  I tried to stop her before she closed the register so we could see if I had actually given her a ten, as she was giving me two fives, but it was too late.  I told her I was pretty sure I hadn’t given her two twenties and it blew her mind.  She totally locked up.  I said, “You have too much change there.  Keep the two fives and give me the rest.”  She was still flummoxed but went ahead with that.  She thanked me for my honesty and I told her that their ribs were too good to risk getting banned for ripping them off.  I was tempted to go back later to ask I there was an extra ten in the drawer but the line never got short enough to do so.  I may call today and ask if they came up ten dollars off on that register Saturday… or I may not.  Yeah, “not” wins the day.  So, Sunday I meet mom at the church and we go to lunch at Applebee’s.  After dropping me back at my car, I go for a hoon.  I was thinking of pulling the Seven out but it was just a tad too hot for my candy-ass.  And that gets y’all caught up.  Oh, no it doesn’t!  Saturday evening I was shopping e-Bay for stuff and asked John if I’d be better off buying a Chinese knockoff DGV carb or a beat-ass genuine Weber.  He said I should gopher the CKO… so I did.  I ordered it and discovered that the seller on e-Bay was Pierce Manifolds, the very place I’d bought the adapter and rebuild kits from Friday.  Oh yeah, Friday I ordered a rebuild… well, you’ve fingered that out already.  So, then I started shopping for either 13” rally/snow tires or bigger wheels.  As it turns out, if Juan were to knock out two studs from each of the Subaru hubs, bolt up a 6 on 5.5” wheel, mark the hubs where the other four stud holes line up, drill them out to 9/16 inch, and knock in some more studs, we would have six bolt hubs!  At that point, the world is my oyster as far as wheels go!  I could step up to 14” or 15” wheels and get some really aggressive tread tires.  I’m not saying I’m going to go this route… but I’m probably going to go this route.  I’m sure John and I will be looking at it very closely in the near future.  And on that note, I think I will call it an rant.  Toodles.