British Inside : Garage

Sending smaller photos when I blog from phone..

James — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 12:05:07 GMT

I *think* I just fixed my phone so that it sends smaller photos to my blog. We'll see...

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Christmas at the office

James — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 11:45:08 GMT

Even on my own in the office above my garage I can decorate, right? ;)

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Cleaning house

James — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 15:45:00 GMT

It's official, it's out of here at the end of the week. It only takes one bid when there's no reserve

Removing a few hundred pound body from the chassis was an interesting problem when you're on your own. Here's how I solved it - raised the car on the lift, attached the body to the ceiling and lowered the car. hehe.

My new office

James — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 15:27:00 GMT

I've been working in my new 600sqft office all this week, and I love it! Tara and I joke that I may never go home again, especially as the commute has definately got worse - now almost 100ft from the kitchen.

When we had the garage built the upstairs was for storage, but that only lasted a few weeks before we insulated and sheetrocked. Here are the before and after:

and the living room I have at the other end of my office - strictly for watching loud car chase movies:

Even the downstairs workshop got sheetrocked and painted. This area is the real reason I may only go home for meals now...

Stripping the engine

James — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 08:25:00 GMT

After a very sweaty morning in the attic fitting four more spot lights ("cans" I think) to the kitchen ceiling Charles came over this afternoon and we stripped the '37 engine that has been wrapped up since ~1996 when I crashed the '37 while testing in France.

I had prepared the engine for a long stay (backed off the rockers, filled bores with oil, etc, etc), and luckily it all paid off.

That's not to say it wasn't uncool to find rat droppings all over the intake manifold and the rag plug that I'd put into the distributor hole eaten. That left a big hole - big enough for rodents to enter my engine. *gulp*

After removing the heads and intake manifold my fears came true - shredded parts of a summit engine bag were under the manifold in a little snug nest! But that's as far as they went. No harm done.

A couple of the roller lifters were very lightly seized in the bores, but a sniff of 1000-grit and they'll be good as new. The bottom end looked like the day I built the engine. We removed one of the mains and very little wear on the bearing and my expensive Crower crank absolutely perfect. In fact it all looked so good that now we're considering not breaking down the bottom end.

Piston rings are my only concern though - after 10 years they should probably be changed. The crank turns perfectly though and no visible scoring on the piston bore walls.

How nice it was to smell of 5W-30 GTX again. Good times!

News from the garage

James — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 22:11:00 GMT

So, this weekend I did nothing of interest to geeks. No Community Server tag on this post.

Instead, it was all about me and my garage. First, Tara and I sheetrocked the lower 4 feet of the walls (the hardest 4 feet of course with all the outlets in it). This allowed us to build the workbenches around 30 feet of the wall. And then tonight I fitted the old kitchen sink that I kept from the remodel and plumbed it in.

Just one small leak incidentally, carefully babysitted with a bucket until tomorrow night when I'll tweak that joint gently with a monkey wrench and a 5lb hammer.

(Btw, I have no idea what American's call a monkey wrench. Frankly I worry sometimes that I've filled up my translation tables with spanner=wrench, 13mm=1/2 inch (don't even think anout correcting that), Stanley knife=box cutter, etc. And of course the aforementioned plasterboard=sheetrock.)

But the point is, I have running water in the garage for the first time ever! Nice.

Oh, if you ever want to fake a mild burn, you can do a pretty good job by painting your arm with that purple PVC pipe primer. I has a streak of it on my arm and both wife and daughter were very concerned about the nasty burn on my arm. Who would have thought it?

Retuning The Channel

James — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 11:59:12 GMT

..and within 15 minutes (how is that possible?) the ringtone spam comments poured into my blog.

So, this is it. This is the weekend that CYA moves to CS. It's not hard, thousands of people do this each day but the longer I leave it the bigger hurdle it appears.

I'm just going to install it, set it to single blog mode and pick a theme. It ain't gonna be groundbreaking. Then knock up a quick script to move these blog posts to CS. What do you think, 3-4 hours? I'll make notes to see how long it takes.

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btw, I had a cool experience in my cool new garage last night. There is NO better way to unwind than to go into the workshop. I'd just hung some pegboard and put my tools up and went to vacuum the bench to remove some sawdust. A new vacuum, but not a big silly one, just a 10 gallon vac from lowes, like $30. It sucks pretty good, but I didn't realize how good.

You know how when you're vacuuming (hahaha, guys I know you've done it at least once. Like when the Better Half has been out of town for a few days and she's coming home and you're all "Oh ***" and start manically picking up 3 day shreddies and washing up and generally getting all panicky and sweaty cos she's gonna to be sighing and eye-rolling and just plain DISAPPOINTED in your ass) and you just vacuum over big stuff instead of moving it. Look, I'm just wanting to pick up the worst of it, I don't think I get into trouble out here. This here is MAN LAND, right baby?

You just vaccum over stuff, right? Like anything over 2-3". Picking up the sawdust, whistling or jigging to the new "garage mix" CD you just made. No, not some girly boom-boom-boom disco stuff thats called Garage or House or whatever, I just called it "garage mix" because I'm going to listen to it.. whatever.

And then, this M10x50 bolt shot up the vacuum hose.

I swear to God. (or Summit actually, because we have one in our little town HAHAHAHA on you cos you don't and I make the kids take their hats off and place over their hearts when we drive past. I'm not joking. They even told a new neighbor that they worship at Summit so I may have taken it a bit far)

The bolt really shot up the vacuum hose. Along the hose, round the bend and stopped at the vacuum where there must be a filter or something. I tell you, I was impressed.

(For those of you that are into crochet or macrame and don't know a whole lot about bolts (you big girls you) an M10x50 bolt is a good size bolt. 10mm in diameter and 50mm long to be precise. *sigh* 3/8" x 2" for you Americans. It's a suspension-kind-of-bolt.)

Well, that was a whole lot about a bolt.

New Routines

James — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 06:13:00 GMT

New house, new routines. It's strange how blogging has suffered from me moving 3 weeks ago. I have 660 unread blog posts right now as I find that reading them has become a lower priority. As has writing them.

I used to want to blog every day, but that desire has vanished for now. Maybe it'll be back!

So, I moved house. We love the new house, the new area, being close again to old friends. We don't hang around and just jump straight into improvements. We've had 15 trees removed from the front yard, ripped out many bushes and a thick carpet of Ivy around the pool, replaced most of the pool equipment (a work-in-progress), installed new fridge and oven, repainted 2 rooms and supervised as my new garage/workshop gets built.

Ah, the '37 and Catalina are soon to have a new home, and what fun we're going to have. I have the old fridge/freezer for the 'shop too, so lots of room for beer, water and soda. And some "Wolfman" popsicles. (Sticky mothers, aint they?)

And then there's Monday nights at Summit Racing which is just a few miles away. Each Monday they have a gathering of customs and hot rods - about 150 turned up last week. It's fun to get the family involved and a great way to meet people in a new City.

Incidentally, I need to find a pinstriper in/near McDonough, GA to lay some down on the Catalina.

It's a busy first month here.

Flickr

James — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 17:37:58 GMT

I played with Flickr a long time ago, but never really used it until last night/this morning. I've been doing another round of building/testing the Community Server MSI in the last 24 hours and building/uninstalling takes a while. I've been using those "whiles" to start using Flickr and upload some photos.

I quickly hit the limit on a free account, but I was surprised how cheap the Pro account is. A couple of bucks a month is very cheap for so much storage.

I love the tools. I've mainly been using the Windows EXE tool that allows me to select a whole bunch of photo's and mass upload them to a new set. I have 11 sets so far:

Fellow Geeks, Maggie, My Doolie, 1966 Chevy Nova, Me as small child, Ford F100, Cobra replica, Pinup Girls, Ford GT40 replica, 1937 Ford and Catalina

I'm sure a lot of people I know have been on here for yonks, so feel free to add me as a contact.