1/28/15

Holy crap!  January is taking for-fucking-ever!  This has to have been the longest month of the whole year… I mean… shut up, you know what I mean.  It seems like it has been January… well, for-fucking-ever!  Anyhoo, I’m sitting here at my desk, too bored to take a nap but too lazy to put in a DVD or anything, much less do any actual work.  I guess I’ll tell y’all about the weekend.  Saturday morning I hopped in Scooby Two and fired it up.  Once it actually would idle on its own, I got out and moved Fiona out of the way.  Ten minutes later I took off up the street on my way to the shop.  No, literally ten minutes later.  It takes a full ten minutes for that car to warm up enough to be drivable.  I did discover that it likes a liberal dose of “The Beans” rather than being babied.  Tip into the throttle just a bit and it kind of goes, “Meh, ok.  I’ll take you up the street, I guess.” but give it a little Wellie and it’s like, “Oh yeah?  So that’s how you want to play this?”  I know that’s how pretty much every car is but this one doesn’t hunker down and haul ass when “flogged,” it’s just as slow, but it seems to be happier about it… sort of thing.  So, I swing by the credit onion for some cash then stop at the McDonald’s by the shop for my breakfast burritos and large diet Coke.  I pull up to the shop and discover I am the first to arrive.  I eat my burritos in the car in front of the gate then get out and open up.  John arrives soon after I have the doors open and we look around at stuff he’s done with and to the place at large.  We look at a few of the new car acquisitions and then talk about what we want to work on.  It is decided that I will install the new block heater I bought, not the one I’d bought previously, but a different one.  I grab a bucket which has a quantity of coolant already in it and drain the system before removing the heater hoses.  With a cut-cut here, and a splice-splice there… here a cut there a splice, ev’ry thing’s a lookin’ nice… wait, where was I going with that?  I don’t know.  So we get the thing installed and the coolant refilled then plug it in.  That damned thing gets really hot… I mean REALLY hot!  It got hot enough that it began puking water out of the overflow.  We shut it down and fired up the engine to see just how hot it actually got.  Yeah, “not very” is the answer to that question.  I’m not sure how it didn’t get up to temp… but it didn’t.  We let it cool off while we installed an actual coolant recovery tank stolen from a 280Z.  We plugged it back in and watched it for about an hour and a half but it never seemed to get as hot as it seemed to get before… sort of thing.  I’m not sure this was such a good investment.  We’ll see, I guess.  Eventually we went to Mexican Inn for lunch before calling it a day.  Sunday I was thinking about something I’d seen on them intergoogles earlier in the week.  It was a “left hand” bolt for a Mosin Nagant.  Ok, it was a regular Mosin Nagant bolt with a handle which went up and over the top of the receiver.  To cycle the action, Juan pushes the handle down on the left side of the gun then pulls it back.  This got me thinking… well, after thinking, “SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!” that I have a spare Mosin Nagant bolt I could experiment with.  I grabbed the gun and the spare bolt and headed to the shop.  I took the bolt and cut off the handle at a 45⁰ angle, cleaned it up, then welded it back on so that it pointed straight up.  I installed it in the gun and gave it a try.  It.  Works.  Perfectly.  In fact it works incredibly perfect… -ly.  With the gun shouldered, you grab the bolt handle with your left hand, pull it to the left, flick it back, pull it forward, and shove it to the right.  The nose of the gun dips just enough when you take your hand off the fore end that the bolt sails right over your shoulder when cycling the action.  It is frigin’ awesome!  It kind of makes me want to take the Texas Gun Trader ad down… except that I got a text just today asking about the gun.  The guy asked if I would be willing to sit on the thing until his tax return comes if he were willing to pay $850.00 for it.  I mulled that over for about one one-thousandth of a second and replied back that I’d be willing to do that.  That’s $200.00 more than the ad listing.  Of course it is also about $150.00 less than I have in the gun, but we won’t go there.  Oh, oops.  The reason I am willing/wanting to sell it still is the fact that it takes up three spaces in the gun cabinet.  Well, that and the PITA stripper clips.  So, I guess that’s about all I have for y’all today.  Yeah, that’s it.  Cope.