I Just Keep Plugging Along

Last evening my buddy and brother-in-harms (races a Corvair, hence the harms – get it?), Jonathan Kendig, stopped by. He was out on a shakedown drive in his track car after installing thermal spacers under his engine's Weber carbs. Previously, he’d had issues with gas boiling in the carb reservoirs due to their getting too hot. With the spacers, his hope was to keep the carbs at a temperature much lower than the hellishly hot heads. The test drive and associated stops indicated his fix was successful. He brought with him the Tweety award I’d received at the last track event. The picture to the left is not the actual award; mine looks the same, but has a “FAST” AND UGLY nametag affixed to its chest. He’s now proudly on display in my cubicle at work. Much thanks to the LeVeques.

After chatting cars, tools, and racing for a while, the lovely Loriann reminded me I was on a tight schedule, so I had to knock off the tongue wagging and put sandpaper to paint. About an hour later, I had completed scuffing Heidi’s exterior paint and exposed all the rust spots that will get POR-15 tonight.

While I was sanding Ariel arrived home and told me Ringo was running like crap. He would die at stops and only chug down the road even with her foot pushing the pedal to the metal. I did the pull-the-plug-wires-one-at-a-time test and found that at least three of the cylinders weren’t really contributing. She and I discussed the fact that she’s been driving him nearly every day and it’s probably time to clean the oily deposits off the spark plugs. We made other automotive arrangement for today, but she said she’d try to tackle the task this morning. She got called into work early, so she wasn’t able to, but I can deal with it this evening. This little additional job won’t kill my current schedule.

After cleaning up, it occurred to me I’d forgotten to sand the door jams. Hopefully, I can squeeze that in this evening’s agenda as well.