So I have 10 days off of work and won’t be returning to the spice mines of Arrakis until December 24 (yes, I go back Christmas eve).
I have a massive list of things I want to try and accomplish during this period and a lot will depend on the temperature outside. Today is supposed to hit 50°F which looks to be the highest expected temp of the next week. Though the rain expected today will make it miserable outside.
I’ve still got most of the 1303 suspension/steering spare parts to disassemble and store and then there’s the tear down of the AJ spare engine.
And of course, the 1303 suspension/steering spare parts I got a week later. For some reason I really dislike the drum/spindle removal. I guess I can just air wrench it all quickly and get the control arms off and leave the strut as an assembly until Spring. I have this idea of hanging all of this from the garage rafters so it is all out of the way.
All these damn front brake drums that will never be used again? I have parting with them (especially via the trash) but nobody has ever responded to any ads I’ve placed in the past for them and their weight and overall size is too much of an inconvenience for the already space deprived Garage of Love™.
I’m thinking at least try to clean up the garage on the warmer days, and then focus on my disaster office/toy room and the basement.
If I can at least clean up a lot of the area of the basement where we are prone to just dump stuff, I can at least clear a space to do some AH engine work down there throughout the winter. At least to get the short block fully assembled. I think a long block’s weight and unwieldiness and the general stairwell access will be more of a pain in the ass than I want to deal with.
I’ve got massive piles of paperwork going back to 2011 that needs to be sorted for the necessary stuff and the old bills and other useless documents shredded and recycled. I can get rid of a lot of my son’s middle school and high school paperwork now and all other kinds of crap. I can take anything I really want to “keep” and scan it to PDF at work.
I’ve got an old barely functional 17″ laptop to rebuild too that I want to use as my DVD player when I’m working in the garage. That way I can throw in a Bug Me DVD if I need a reminder of something or get to YouTube or other stuff on a decent sized screen. (I hate watching video on my phone. Yes. I have old decaying eyes.)
My gun cleaning kit still hasn’t arrived. I need that, and perhaps a few other bore brushes, to really be able to get the metal shavings and crud out of the oil galleries once I start really drilling and tapping them.
I’ve had some people ask me why I’m even bothering with the oil gallery plugs. As with most things vintage VW-related, I cannot find a consensus on certain aspects of engine rebuilding work. I’m siding with the “really clean out the case” side given the AH case is 45 years old and does not appear to have been rebuilt during that period.
Plus, and I know a lot of people who respond to my Facebook Group posts don’t understand, is that all of my automotive work is also primarily an experiment in my own capacity for learning and overcoming the fears that sometimes immobilize me when I’m not sure what to do.
I bought a house that needed major work and instead of cracking under the pressure, I taught myself the skills necessary to repair an almost 100 year old river stone house foundation. For almost all of 2006 I spent practically every evening slowly digging out the decaying foundation and reparging. Foot by foot. Day by day.
It literally caused the lower back issues I still deal with these 12 years later, but it proved to me that at 36 years old I could accomplish a monumental project that took almost every day to complete. All on my own!
It didn’t hurt that all that back breaking work also contributed about $30,000 to the asking price of the house and that in 2007 I managed to sell the House of Love III for far more than I paid for it in 2003, thereby moving to Clintonville and the House of Love™ IV.
All of this crazy car shit is really an exercise in this now soon to be 49 year old’s capacity to continue learning new skills and overcoming fears and apprehensions. I mean, my daily job as essentially a Business Analyst is about as unfulfilling a thing as possible. There’s never really any self- satisfaction in any thing I do. At least knowing I can delve into something totally new and try and learn everything possible within my means to take something from point A to point B is definitely what I need to maintain some sense of happiness in my life these days.
Wow. I really went off on a tangent there.
Anyway, I want to do all of this case work to prove that I can do it. Obviously, I can’t (nor do I want to) create the capacity to machine work these, but if there are mods and improvements that can be made by hand tools and 48 year old arthritic fingers than I may as well give it a damn try!
So yeah, the case work still needs to get done.
Ugh. And there’s an aquarium to clean too. And dogs to bathe. And toys to sort and put up for sale. And more car parts to disassemble.