Busy, Busy, Busy....With Rain!

Well, last week it was nice........

 50* and raining, with more on the way. Total rain for May was 2.97", and my Taylor rain gauge, and the digital gauge in the Davis weather station are in agreement. And we're at 1" of rain for the last week.

SLW went down to DIA to pick-up her two best friends, and only came home with one.........her other friend had missed the flight by minutes, but she was able to get another in two hours. She took the shuttle up here because she didn't want SLW or I to make another round trip. One of the two was her Maid-of-Honor at our wedding, and the other is the Pastor that married us. It's turning into an "interesting" trip for The Three Amigos! 

 If SLW's third bestie were also here.....I'd start to look for suitable shelter.......

Come to think of it....these three all together here may have been what triggered that M8.2 solar flare....hmmmmm.  Info about the resulting CME, which was aimed smack at our face, can be found here.

Sprayed the back yard with Weed-B-Gon and nuked the gravel borders with RoundUp. Was going to do more, but I had other things to do, and now we've got some thunder-boomers rolling through.

Geesh......I really have to post more often, just to keep you all 'in the loop'. 

During these cool rainy days when I can't paint or clean parts, I duck back down into The Lab, and tinker away. The Fisher is under the microscope again, as I track down a stray voltage that's flummoxing things up. I'm getting a handle on it, but after this unit is finished I doubt if I'll be taking on any more "For Hire" jobs. It's just too much distraction. I should have been finished with my TEAC A-7030 Reel-to-Reel deck, and it's still just sitting there.

And yes, the Supra is in the Hangar Deck being worked on. I've done a lot of work on it, and spent some time reorganizing SLW's side of the garage. I'm going to move the Supra about 3' to the center of the garage for easier access to the interior, and extra room for "whoever" comes out to pull the windshield. I have to remove the plastic defroster vents to get at the screws that secure the top dash pad to the firewall so I can pull the pad out. This is required to remove the failed heater core, a "Work In Progress". Annnd I've damaged the pad getting one of the defrost vents out, hence the "Pull The Windshield!" command being given. So while I'm working out the logistics on that, I'm keeping busy cleaning up all the surface rust in the left side of the engine bay. I pulled both headlight assemblies out, along with the motors and connecting links. The links just needed a good cleaning, but the headlight "buckets" need to be sandblasted along with the suspension mounts. I've been holding out on going to the sandblaster as it's been rainy the last two weeks, with very high (for here...) humidity, and I don't want to the Naked Steel to rust on the way home.

Right side headlight mounting position. The big black spot is from when I painted the bumper. Guess I didn't mask things as well as I thought.

 The left side has cleaned up a bunch, but the entire left front corner will get resprayed and "faded in".

 

This is the headlight bucket from the left side.

This headlight always seemed to raise and lower slower than the other one. Turns out the pivot was rusty, so I used a bunch of Blaster! to free it up, and now it pivots easily.

There are two "tow hooks" mounted to the front frame, and one needs attention.

This is the right side one.

I can't find any pix of the left side, but this is what it looks like with the tow hook plate removed.

 And the plate.

 

And the bolts.

 

The grey paint on the tip of the left bolt is the Toyota "Electro-Dip" primer. The middle one is degrading, and the right one has lost all it's protection. These will be replaced.

Worried about rust in the frame rails, I dug out my endoscope and used it to inspect the internal structure of the frame rails after I pulled the rubber plugs.

 The right hand side is clean as a whistle inside, while the left one showed some rust, but nothing bad, just surface rust. The frame rails will be coated inside with some of Eastwood's Internal Frame Coating. In fact, I'm going to go along under the car, and pull all the rubber plugs that are used to cap voids, and spray this stuff inside there, too. They say Rust Never Sleeps, and on these cars it never even takes a nap!

This weekend and the coming week look be be warm and dry, so I'll be cleaning and painting things in the garage, and doing a dive under the dashboard to remove the clutch master cylinder and the power brake booster so I can get cracking on the entire left side of the engine bay.

Stay safe, my friends, and keepeth thy head uponst a swivel!