Ulu

I gotta believe that the climate will cycle again in 10,000 years, and California will have rain again. But in my lifetime, It'll probably get even drier the way it looks.

It helps keep dirt and bugs out of the crankcase too. They'll go straight in a hole much easier than way up a tube, turn, & then through a hole. The one on my flathead Pontiac actually had a filter on it, similar to the oil breather cap, to help keep dirt out.

While the door is open, check for loose hinge pins too. They have a tenancy to pop up a bit and then the door can rattle & close funny. If you open the door & can lift the "tail" of the door up and down a bit without the car moving, you've got a loose hinge. Clean the rotor and striker up well before making adjustments. Otherwise caked lube can throw the adjustment off.

Lots of private wells have gone dry here. That's the main control: it just dries up. Farmers pay for ditchwater, and they pay a yearly subscription, so that they pay whether it rains or not. They are getting a "zero percent" allotment this year, but are still paying the fee. What a racket, but without that they'd never afford water when they really needed it. (Now that they really, really need it, it's just not there of course.)

Any of the front end pivots could be called a knuckle too. Generally not though, because a hinge knuckle is one of a set. hinges commonly have at least 2 knuckles on one plate and 3 on the other, so it looks sorta like a fist of knuckles when closed. A single knob-ended pivot, like a control arm pivot, could be viewed as a knuckle, but it'd be a lonely one and certainly not representative of the term in it's most descriptive sense.

I don't remember the rates here, but it is tiered, so that the price jumps up as you use more. Baseline is 10,000 gals each 2-month billing period. Right now, if you use more than 73% (EDIT:...SORRY 63%!) of your corresponding month's 2013 usage, you will get a fine of $50 ($25 for the first offense) & I expect the tiers will also jump up soon. I didn't put any special lint trap in the system. Big chunks will get caught in the utility sink strainer, and that's easy to clean. I just have one unbroken hose from sink to cistern, so that's not gonna clog. It'll clog the restrictor in the garden-hose soaker system I have hooked to the cistern though. I'll have to blow that out from time to time. My only complaint so far is that when the cistern is getting full, it siphons rather slowly. There's not much "head" of water at that point. I'm going to add another one in series, down hill slightly, that I'll tap for a tree root feeder. That will speed up the siphon action too.

Synthetic oil is the same way. It's thin when cold. Your engine leaks more when cold too, as everything shrinks up as it cools. This means worse cold oil leaks with synthetic or multiweight. BUT: With straight 30 weight oil you're supposed to change it to 10 or 20 in the winter (depending on how cold it gets where you live) and straight 10 weight will leak out just as fast as 10w40 when it's cold.

My situation too. I'm a CAD/CAM/CAE guy who got stuck supporting DOS, then Netware, then Windows, & now Win Server 2012, a VOIP PBX & VPN system, & a whole buncha apps I have no call to run myself. I'm spread kinda thin such that I now know far too little about way too much. It gets worse and worse, and it's to the point where I now seem to know know practically nothing about almost everything. Or practically everything about almost nothing. A distinction with scant difference in my mind. I went back to college myself, in the Apple-IIe days, but everything since then has been self-education. Without the WWW it woulda been impossible for me to keep up with it all. But in the end, I dig computers, I always have, and I've been very happy to be in this business.

Well it's no secret that California is in a terrible drought, and the city has asked us to cut back 36% on water use or face fines and higher water rates.We have a baseline allowance of 5000 gals a month right now, and it's half what we've been using. In line with that directive, I installed a cistern yesterday (50 gal plastic rain barrel) so I can collect the wash water & run it out through a soaker hose on the lawn. Normally you get a ticket here for having a dead lawn. Now you'll get one for watering too much. This is a way to cut back and still keep the lawn green. It works great & I only spent $200 & it has no pumps. The whole thing works on a siphon from my utility sink. I attached a short 2" ABS pipe inside my utility sink & stuck the washer drain hose there, so it fills the sink instead of the sewer. I added a second tailpiece to my sink with a rubber stopper. I now have 2 drains with stoppers. I used a 1 1/4" spa-type vacuum hose, as it's quite strong & will not collapse under a siphon, yet bends around corners easily. One end is epoxied over the new tailpiece, it runs through the wall, and it ends in the bottom of the cistern. But I don't have much drop from the sink to cistern, so for the system to work without a pump, it must siphon & the siphon must be started. You plug both drains, then let the washer fill the sink. Lay the empty cistern down (It's very light when empty) and pull the new drain plug. The cistern starts to fill, purges the water from the hose, and you must then stand it up to seal the siphon. Now the system will always siphon wash water to the cistern when you pull that plug; as long as you never let the cistern go dry, as that breaks the siphon: Then you must lay the barrel down to prime it again. Now I need to divert the shower drain to the back yard

100 CU FT ~ 750 GALLONS Our baseline allowance is, 5000 gals a mo, or about 666 cu ft.

That's why manifolds are water heated. (Or air-heated on air-cooled cars.) When you suck a vacuum through the carb and spray gas into it, it chills. If you want to run an updraft, get the updraft manifold setup. Updrafts don't flood the engine as easily, but they don't choke quite as well either. They're better for engines that run all the time and don't start & stop a lot. There's other reasons too, that they quit putting them on cars.

Knuckles are the parts of any hinge that the hinge pin fits through. The hinge pin of your steering is called the king pin. If the pin is OK, but one bushing is shot, you can just change the bushing, but it's tough to align the new bushing to the old without over-reaming the old one, so you normally change both bushings at once. Also, you have to tear the car apart just as much if you replace one bushing or the whole kit, and so the labor is the same. BUT: When you go to remove the kingpin lock bolt, chances are good that you'll mangle it a bit getting it out, so you almost always need a new one, and it comes in the kit. MOOG makes a nice kit for these, and they were readily available for $50 in the 90's. You might find one at the local NAPA store. They made lots of these because they fit lots of models over several decades. A very common part.

I was up there last week (Tamarack ridge ~ 8000') and there was no snow. We saw one tiny patch in a shadow but the ground and the mountaintops were bare. I checked my bills, and last month we only used 10,000 gals, but in the same period in 2013 we used 28,500, so we are already well under the 36% mandated reduction for our town. That's a 65% reduction and we didn't do much except water a lot back in 2013. (We'd planted some new lawn at the time.) Anyhow, the profligate wasters of past years will find it easy to reduce 36%, while the conservatives are already skimping, and so will find it difficult to reduce further.

Actually, with huge storage space gone cheap (I got a WD 2TB HDD for $80 new today) now you can just use an HD video camera, shoot the whole time, & then pull out the frames you want to see & discard the rest. I've made silly movies for the grandkids like that. I shot a movie of my boss's 60th bday party, and at the end I used the stop-motion trick to make him dance around. Funny stuff. I have all of Gumby on DVD & watch with the grandkids. To anyone who has never seen Gumby, the old ones from the 50's & 60's were classic, but the ones "revived" in the '90s suck.

You can't put the pipe up from underneath?

We got a letter from the city stating that all residents need to reduce water use 36% starting this May 1st, or pay fines. It's not here yet, but we're going to be paying a fortune for water soon, if it doesn't rain here. Bottled water might be all we can get if this drought goes on!

What are you studying Matt? (Whatever it is, this will pass, and when you look back you'll know it was right to go.) I hardly remember my few years of school, compared to the last 40+ years of engineering things for a living. That was the real task. I went to college so I wouldn't have to work hard, right? Except it's nonsense. Without hard work your body destroys itself. It took me way too long to figure that out and get myself "balanced." Because there's no real exercise in a desk job, it's impossible to stay fit, & I spend lots of my down time doing things other people go to school to avoid, like sanding, painting, plastering, carpentry, wiring, welding, horticulture, etc. My ego has taken a blow, but my body is thanking me.

I use Ru-glyde for rubber, but it's probably just 99% soap. Taking the filler pipe off makes it much easier to install the grommet, but if the hose is old then you will probably have a leak at the filler to tank connection unless you clean it all up and restore that rubber too.

If you run a string around in the groove, cross the ends, then feed the ends of the string through the fender as you put the grommet over the pipe. Then have someone press the grommet to the fender while you pull the string out from underneath. Do it neatly & as you pull the string out, it'll flip that lip over the metal. This method is similar to how you mount a windshield gasket to the car. Rubber gaskets & grommets always go on easier when warm and wet. (Rubber also cuts far easier when wet, BTW.)

Oh, yes. I didn't watch the whole thing. It certainly is a Spitfire. You see the whole top of the car for about 1/4 second.

Price is sorta regional. Locally, these were going for $150+ some 25 years ago. I'd imagine a good one would bring at least $300 around here now. But fixing old cars is very popular here (as it is in Phoenix) so prices are high here too. The same trans might bring far less $ in other cities.

The amp gage isn't needed for the car to run. You can bypass it just by removing the two wires and connecting them together. BUT ALL your electricity to run the car, lights, radio, coil, fan, etc (except the starter) goes right through that wire & that amp gage. If you get a short in that wire things will get hot very fast, gages can melt, and you'll smell smoke. The battery will go dead in a very short time, if the wire doesn't just melt clear through.

Thank god you didn't tell her what's in a hot dog!

OK, I see now the windshield is shorter on the convertible. That means the shorter wiper arms would sweep a very small "fan". But the closer the pivot is to the edge of the glass, the broader a swath it would wipe. So they cantilevered the pivots up over the edge to get a bigger "wipe"; sorta like this: (No, it's not to scale. Just a schematic diagram.): (poor resolution of the thumbnail makes it look black, but the green lines show the coupes and sedans, while the red lines show the convertible.)

Hmmm...how far do you have to carry an item to qualify as "carried in"?