Rear Spoiler, Part II

Well, I gave it a good soapy water scrub and rinse, and after that, I realized there's no way I'm going to be able to clean the sides and bottoms of the "wells" that the screws are at the bottom of.

Oh, well.....out came the power screwdriver, and THIRTY FOUR screws later I had it apart.

 

 I know there are Engineering Guidelines for how many screws-per-inch to use, but this looks like I designed it. Yes, I generally prefer to overdesign things, but not in this case.

Oh, and they were all slightly loose, allowing 33 years of road dust to collect in the void spaces where the two pieces screw together. Took about 20 minutes to brush and vacuum it out of there.

So I then sanded off all the old gasket residue stuck to the fiberglass, as seen here in before and after pix:

It actually went easier than expected. I used a flexible block like a sponge, coated with "220 grit" abrasive, and took my time. It's a bit like hand finishing wood in that you carefully watch the amount of material being removed, and STOP when the stain/imperfection fades away.

This also breaks any sharp edges, and might prolong the life of my low-buck replacement gasket. Sharp edges pressing firmly against soft material usually results in soft material losing.

And then the fiberglass spoiler starts rubbing directly on the paint, and paint loses, too, as seen by the orange lines of rust on the hatch where the OEM gasket had been completely compressed, and then cut through, by the spoiler.

So now I have to bust out the Dremel, and use one of the small felt buffer pads to clean out the wells the screws live in. Luckily it's just fossilized road dirt, so it should "Buff Right Out" using mild cleaners.

D-Day

I don't know if I've ever posted about D-Day. So many others do it far better than I can, so I generally let observances of this nature pass by without posting.

Two things are different this year. One, the C-47 "That's All, Brother" finished it's restoration and is flying again. She WILL be in France next year for the 75th anniversary.

This was the lead aircraft for the paratroops that went in, and when I found out about, I started donating to it's restoration. The history of the aircraft is similar to a lot of other WWII veteran aircraft, and makes for very interesting reading at the link. I guess my Engineer's background as a hardware guy makes me want to help preserve the machines we used to win WWII, so when something like "That's All, Brother", or "Fifi", or the Iowa comes along, I donate to them so we can keep these important artifacts around.

The other thing I found out is that one of my Dad's brothers was one of the paratroops that went in shortly after midnight, well before the main force hit the beach.

He never talked about it.......

So, in grateful respect of those who served so long ago, thank you all, and God Bless.

Rear Spoiler Work Commencing

I went over to Harbor Fright yesterday and bought a set of saw horses to prop up the spoiler while I scrub it.

Like most things from HF, "Some Assembly Required", but the instructions were complete, and correct, and all hardware reported for duty.

Like most things from HF, it's made as lightweight as possible (they must channel Colin Chapman), and is scary flimsy until ALL the pieces are assembled, squared up, and all the hardware is securely tightened.

So here they are in use.....

This is the side that faces the car, and most of it can't be seen when it's on the car, but it's still filthy from several years of being off the car, mostly outside.


This is one of the parts you could see, if you squatted down and peeked up...

I vacuumed it down with my shop vac and a bench brush to get the Big Chunks off, and took a zillion measurements and pix for the archivists.

The reason for pulling this years ago was to clean all the stuff that had collected in the open areas between the spoiler and the car. If you look on the glass, you can see a 'ghost image' made of baked-in dirt of where the spoiler was covering the glass. That stuff is darned near impossible to get off, and I finally resorted to 600 grit Wet-or-Dry, and a flood of water, to get most of it off the glass.

 I have special polishes and pads, but I've never buffed/polished glass before, so I'm a little hesitant to go at it without at least watching a few YouTube videos.

And the inside of the glass has areas of residue from when it had a tinted film applied. The film is still on the side rear quarter windows, but has been sun damaged to where it's no longer dark grey/black, but a bluish-purple tint. I'll pull it off when I go gonzo on the interior. I really like a dark tint on those three windows, so that's something else I have to shop. Maybe the tint shops here can give me some tips on getting the stuff off. "Automotive Goo Gone" does nothing, so I'm sure most of the other cleaners like Simple Green won't budget it, either. Previous experience indicates some kind of solvent mixed with an appropriate amount of Elbow Grease will be required.

Look at that CRUD!

 
This stuff was baked on so hard I had to soak it with a mix of dish soap and Windex for several days before it popped loose. The corner of the rubber gasket is caked with similar dirt. It took a couple of days of soaking and scrubbing to get the window gasket clean. It looks pretty good now, but 'black stuff' keeps coming off when I clean the glass and hatch area, so I'll have to scrub a coat or three of Back-To-Black into it to seal it up.

 
More of the same on the passenger side. You can see one end of the wiper assembly poking in to the picture. Having both the spoiler and the wiper installed makes it very difficult to get the bottom edge of the glass clean. When the wiper is parked, you can't lift it to clean the glass under it, or change the blade. Since I'll never deliberately take it out in the rain, I'll never use the wiper, so off it came.

  An astounding amount of crap was trapped in there, and every time I washed the car it came flooding out. Even 15 minutes pressure washing *this corner* (pic immediately above) just kept bringing stuff out, so I pulled the spoiler. You can also see the mud caked on the window gasket, and the dust that's baked on to the glass.  One of the main reasons so much got it there was the 'rubber' gasket had degraded so badly that it was buckled and shrunken, allowing water and small debris to enter, but not leave.

So that's what been going on lately in the garage. Still going through stuff in the basement, including clothing to donate to Good Will, and trying to find some of my equipment. My cool little Weller temperature-controlled soldering station is AWOL. I'll probably get another one to keep on the garage workbench, because sometimes you need to solder stuff.

Photobucket SUCKS!

Well......first these morons tried to extort $400/year to allow linking to third party sites. This broke the links to an uncountable number of pictures that users had posted to forums, websites, and blogs.

Many of my friends on the Supra forums immediately downloaded their albums and moved them to other hosting sites.

WELL......I finally got off my duff this morning to grab all my albums from the site, and what do I find? The "download album" function has now been disabled for all but paying customers!

Now I have all the pix, but they're on several hard drives, some of which I've removed from the machines they were in when I upgraded them, so at least I still have all of them.

After doing some sleuthing, I've found several ways to get the pix back, but I haven't tried any of them yet. The one with the most promise is a method of using a terminal window and a small BASH script to exfiltrate your images to a safe house.

I'll fire up on of my Linux boxen to try this, as I'm much more comfortable sitting in front a Linux machine doing that that playing around with on Winders.....

After I grab all my stuff, I'm closing the account.

Warm Weather Runnin' 'Round

Going to be in the low to mid 90's later this week, and with the humidity so low here (~20%),  I have to remind myself to keep hydrated. When I was dripping wet working outside in Long Beach it was pretty easy to remind myself to have some water or Gatorade, but here you just don't get "dripping wet". Well, I don't seem to get soaked when I'm bashing away on something and it's in the upper 80's/low 90's, but then I run at a slower pace these days....

Anyway....we're well stocked with electrolyte drinks and powders, so now I just have to force myself to keep a container of water or a 'sports drink' handy.

Gonna head out to Home Depot and Harbor Freight in a few. Need some yard things from HD and gonna get some cheep saw horses at HF to hold the rear spoiler for the Supra when I scrub it down and put my substitute gasket on it. One of my buddies on the celicasupra.com forum suggested putting some blankets down on the hood, and using that as my 'work table' while I put the gasket on. That would have been a 'zero cost' thing as we have plenty of big, padded moving blankets, but it doesn't take into account I'm going to be applying a couple of gallons of Elbow Grease to it while I scrub it down, and I don't want to risk damaging the hood.

Had a mild but unpleasant reaction to Singulair, which my Doctor put me on the see if it would help with my allergies, which are NOT liking Spring In The Rockies. It did very little/nothing for my allergy symptoms, but did give me a feeling of "general uneasiness", so I quit taking it and was back to normal (whatever that is) a day later. Didn't expect it to have that effect on me, so I read up on it, and it's a listed side-effect. No biggie, as it didn't help with the allergies anyway. The FloNase is working well, when I remember to use it! After a few days, I'm 'all better', so I forget to use it, and the symptoms come roaring back in a day or so.

If allergy attacks are the worst thing about living here, I'll gladly put up with them.....

Alan Bean, Apollo 12 LEM Pilot and Artist, Passes At Age 86

Just heard about this from one of my Boeing Buddies.

Captain Alan LaVern Bean, USN, was quite a guy. He piloted the Lunar Module on Apollo 12, and was the Commander of the Skylab 3 mission. His 1969 Corvette is one of the very few "Astro-Vettes" (Corvettes owned by Astronauts) left. The car, and Capt Bean, were the subject of several articles in various car magazines. He said the neighborhood kids never cared much about his spaceflights, but they ALL remembered his Corvette.

I think this one is my favorite painting of his.

Godspeed, Captain Bean!

"Making Do" When Parts Aren't Available

I've done this many, many times in the Electronics and the Mechanical field, and you do it for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes you do it with what parts you have on hand and it qualifies as an "Upgrade", like when you increase the voltage rating of a capacitor because that particular capacitor  was the only one you had to work with.

Or you have to make a gasket from a heavy brown paper bag (or two) when you're miles from nowhere.

Or sometimes it's for economic reasons. Years ago (late 1970's), we had a customer bring us his Ferrari to see if we could do something about his wheel bearings. The dealer in Chicago quoted him $1500, and he felt he was being taken. We pulled it apart, cleaned the bearings, and took them down to the local Big Industrial Bearing Company, and walked out the door with new bearings and seals for about 75 bucks. Same bearing, different box. Printing a little prancing horse on the box makes even commodity parts skyrocket.

VW and Porsche people can tell similar stories.

Examples abound, and I'm sure you've done it yourself.

One of the problems with trying to preserve/restore a 33 year old Japanese car is that some parts are NLA, No Longer Available. I just put in a $300 parts order to a place I use regularly, and the entire order was canceled, as every single item on it came back from the Toyota Mothership as "Discontinued, No Warehouse Stock Available". Just last year I put in several orders that size, or larger, and only a few items bounced. Looks like the well is finally running dry on OEM parts.

Anyway....there are a few vendors around who cranked up production on some reproduction "soft trim" items like gaskets for the glass, fender flare welting, and the 1985/86 spoiler gasket.

Since I'm in the "get the car spruced up" mode, one of the things on the list is to get the rear spoiler/sunshade installed again. The OEM gasket had degraded so severely that it was gone in places, and rock hard where it still was. Between that, having "30 year old torque" on all the fasteners, and the desert dust where this car lived, the spoiler has chewed into the paint pretty badly in places. I got that touched up, and after I scrub the rear spoiler, it goes back on.

You can see here how the OEM gasket has shrunk and puckered up. It also crumbled away easily on the sunlit side!

As far as the gasket goes, well, I have a very good quality reproduction kit, BUT...they're no longer available, and they were like $120 when they were. Since I'm in "preservation mode" with the car, I really didn't want to burn my gasket kit, so I improvised. I made some measurements of the thickness of the spoiler, and how far the OEM gasket wrapped around from the bits of it still stuck on. I found some 1/16" neoprene U-Channel, and it looks like it's going to work just fine.

It even goes around the curves easily, which was my main concern.

Total cost? About 35 bucks, and it should last a good long time.

Whittle & Co. Smack Another One Outta The Park

Great commentary from Bill and the guys on the Progressive's latest gun grab, and their reasoning (if you can call it that) behind it.

Great quote from the show..."When you pry the AR-15 from my cold dead hands, please don't grab it by the barrel as it's HOT.....", to which I'll add "And don't trip on the huge pile of smoking brass surrounding my body".

Enjoy.....

Getting Back In The Saddle

Now that I've got the garage to some semblance of 'usable functionality', I broke out some of the smaller subassemblies for the Supra that need work. I have all of the passenger side mirror, minus the M5x.8 screws that hold the mirror to the car (new ones on the way), so I started scrubbing away on the 'rubberized' mounting bracket that holds the plastic mirror housing to the door.

Hot, soapy water, a toothbrush, and some Scotch-Brite for that "really ground-in!" dirt. Then after it was completely dry, I scrubbed a heavy coat of Mother's "Back to Black" trim cleaner and reconditioner into it with a new "99cent Store" toothbrush. Several hours later, the complete mirror mounting assembly looks great, and the rubber is nice and supple again. And it's a beautifully clean matte-black finish, too.

At one time, several years ago, the mirror housing was ready for paint, and then Field Day or something came along, and here we are again. I scrub the mirror down with some denatured alcohol, and then a cycle of prime/sand/prime on it until the surface finish is "good enough", and paint it a nice epoxy satin black. I'm no good at painting gloss black surfaces with a spray can, even on something as small as these mirror housings. I've seen other people rattle-can them with amazing results, and I can do it with a spray gun, but me, gloss-black, and spray cans just can't quite get our act together. So satin black it is.

And then I can do it all over again on the driver's side mirror......

Lots and lots and lots of time gets spent just sitting at the bench cleaning and refurbishing small parts and assemblies like these. It's time consuming, sometimes boring work, but it has to be done.

And people wonder why it costs $50k, $75k, or much, much more to properly restore a car.

RYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRY

Which stands for....nothing. It's the "Idle Channel" sound of radioteletype meaning there's no traffic being sent.

And that's what I've been doing the last several days....sitting here "idling", and taking care of my wife who tweaked her back somehow while dogsitting at The Kid's Place, a.k.a The Country House up in Bellvue.

Now this is a BIG freakin' house, almost 3600 sqft including the basement, and it's spread out over four levels. It's an open floor plan downstairs, and sound echoes around in here like crazy. So, how do we keep in touch here? Simple, with RADIO! The other day when I was on a(nother) Home Depot run, I found these little Cobra "MicroTalk" GMRS/FRS radios on sale for $30.

GMRS stands for General Mobile Radio Service, and requires a license. FRS is the Family Radio Service, and is license free, like a UHF version of CB, but with FM used instead of AM or SSB, resulting in much clearer communications.

Ironically, the original Citizen's Radio Service (ALL FCC licensed radio bands are considered "Services") was in the UHF band.

So why on Heaven's Earth did I buy two more hand-held radios when I have four of them, and my wife has two of her own? Convenience, Benjamin, convenience.

With these little guys you just pick up the radio and talk. When you're done, you put the radio down. Using our Amateur Radio Service radios would entail using our callsigns, following the regulations, and finding a clear simplex frequency. That's a bit of overkill for "Honey, bring me some more Ovaltine" comms.

Both cars, which were in the driveway yesterday, got through the hail without any damage that I could find today. They're both plastered with the leaves that got blasted off the trees and blown around, but no hail dents. The backyard is a mess, with lots of leaves and branches from the neighbor's cottonwood tree, but no damage. And while the 33' vertical antenna was whipping back and forth about 45*, it, too, got through unscathed.

Pardon me while I go back to my Idle Channel Mode......

First Big Spring Storm

Well, pretty big compared to what I've been living in for the last 35 years.

This is not snow. It's hail, a whole bunch of it.

We had a pretty good size storm cell roll through here from about 1800 to 1830, and we got dumped on. The mix of rain and hail formed little islands of hail in the street, and the rain water swept clear channels on it's way to the gutter.

And the backyard had quite a bit of hail in it, forming one 'deposit' that's stained by all the dirt it stirred up in one of the several large bare spots in the yard.

Knocked the petals off the tulips in front, too, and beat the snot out of my little maple tree.

The iris' made it, probably sheltered by the house. These also bloomed about two weeks ago, like the tulips, so the blooms were getting a bit 'tired' anyway before Mother Nature decided things needed a little pruning.

My wife was dog-sitting last week at the Country House in Bellvue while the kids were visiting their maternal Grandmother so  Great-Grandma could meet the three new little ones.

The house is the one that got battered last year about this time by a big hailstorm.

The roof got through that storm, but the siding looked like somebody opened up on it with an M-60. Anyway....the siding has been replaced, and the roof, while it was still "OK", also got replaced, but this time with a steel roof. My said it was pretty loud when it was raining there last week, so I can imagine what it was like getting hailed on.

This wasn't a particularly big storm, but it developed very fast, and came roaring up the I-25 corridor. This morning we were at a "10% chance" of thunderstorms, and by early afternoon it was a 40% chance. I'm not sure what time they posted the Severe Weather advisory, but by 1730 it was up.

I grew up with fast developing, fast hitting storms like this, and when I got out of the car from a grocery run, I looked South, saw how dark it had gotten in about 20 minutes, and chuckled about the "40% chance".

I'm waiting for Summer, when the Super Boomers come up out of nowhere......