Front Yard Landscaping

We knew the front and backyards would need some, uh, "cleanup work" when we bought the house, and we've been slowly getting things taken care of.

The first "lawn guy" we hired took TWENTY SEVEN bags of dead leaves, sticks, twigs, weeds, dead plants, branches, and assorted "other" detritus out of the backyard, and another 10~12 bags out of the front.

The backyard looked like the soil level dropped six inches, it was so clean! The previous owners, anxious as they were to get out from under this place, hadn't properly cleaned up either the front or back yards, but rather took some really shoddy shortcuts. Example: When they tore out the juniper bushes in front, they replaced them with some garish, orange colored bark. To fill the holes? Whatever they could find, including rocks, stones, and the cheapest "dirt" they could buy. And guess what they used for an underlayment for the bark? Why, the bags it came in, what else!

It was a mess, but looked kinda-sorta "OK". This is one of the listing pix.

One of the first things we did was have the rest of the junipers in the front removed, and the holes filled in with Real Dirt. My Dad had a couple of very similar evergreens back in Illinois. They didn't get berries like these do, and he called them Japanese Yews, but except for the berries, they looked identical. Even had the same penchant for having big spider webs in them during warm weather.

We still have the "red" bark to remove, along with most of that vegetation.  We thought the stuff coming up that looks like tall grass were some kind of bulb, but when we dug one up, it had several small "bulbs", more like baby onions than any flowering bulb, which are usually much bigger.

And were still not sure what we'll do on the North side of the house. Mulch or something for now.

It's always shaded there, except for a very few hours in the morning as the sun comes up. The first "lawn guy" suggested ferns, but my wife hates them. And that solid fence panel? Yup...gonna get a good, sturdy gate installed there so you don't have to cut through the house, or go around the front of the house and garage to the other gate. This will give us much more convenient access to the back yard. Yes, the gate will be padlocked when not required to be opened.

And we're going to install some pavers down to the sidewalk from our front porch to make it easier to lug a very curious 15-month old little boy, and all his support equipment, up to the house from the street. We're shopping around now for some nice "wrought iron" railings for around the porch and down the first four concrete steps. Us old folks might need something handy to hang on to as we go down possibly icy steps in the winter.

And we're having some metal edging installed to delineate the bare earth from established grass. The "bare earth" section will get mulch (we're using shredded cedar) and hardy, pretty plants to fill in the empty spaces.

And you betcha the rest of that red bark is going bye-bye!

So, we've made some nice progress with the front since we bought the house, and these pix are a couple of weeks stale. I'll take some fresh ones tomorrow and show you where we're currently at....

Fresh Paint!

Masked off parts of the tail yesterday and shot some paint on it.

It came out better than I expected....

Kind of hard to tell in the above picture, but the paint covered fine, flowed out nicely, and -GASP!- it even came out SHINY!

Here's a "Before and After" shot of the spoiler center mount point.

And here's the antenna mounting hole after the sand/prime/sand routine.

The rear edge of the spoiler was all chipped and dinged up, because when the spoiler is off the car, it very handily stores by standing it up against a wall or something. The bad news it that the bottom edge gets plunked down on whatever is on the floor, and if you don't protect that edge, the paint gets the living snot beat out of it.

I tried lightly wet sanding it, but some of the dings were completely through the paint and primer, and into the fiberglass. OUCH! So I went at it with some 600 wet-or-dry and a spray bottle of water to keep it wet.

Hard to see, but this is after the third round of sand/prime/sand.

I'll flip it over tonight and get the bottom of the rear edge.

Oh, My Aching Fingers......

WELL......I finally did something about all the glop (aka Tape Residue) on the rear hatch.

When I first pulled the spoiler off I wanted to do something about the holes in the hatch as I was afraid they'd allow rainwater to get into the car, so I slapped some blue "painter's tape" over the holes. After a few weeks in the Kalifornia sun, the tape degraded, so I put another layer on.

And another.....

And another.....finally ending up with some aluminum foil tape over the holes.

After a few years, I figured I should pull the tape off, only to find it left an impervious layer of adhesive residue on the paint.

And I mean impervious to every solvent I had, including spit. I tried citrus-based cleaners like "Goo Gone" and "Goof Off", solvents like acetone, mineral spirits, "Brake Kleen" and even Birchwood-Casey "Gun Scrubber" which I've found to be a very good solvent for many things.

The adhesive residue was at least as bad as the remnants of the Supra decal on the rear.

So, Friday night I made the decision to SAND it off, and just accept whatever paint damage was going to occur.


Left lower spoiler mount:

Center lower spoiler mount:

I masked off the surrounding area with two layers of blue tape (it's only staying on the car a couple of hours this time), and started sanding away.


Now you see it....

Now you don't...

The darker areas are caused by the paint being very thin there, and the grey primer is just starting to show. Total time to sand out this approx 3" x 2" area was 90 minutes. The "rings" around the bolt holes are bare steel, soon to be primed, and the thin line beneath the holes is a rust line, caused by the triangular gasket on the spoiler chewing down  through the paint after it degraded and became very hard.

Even though the spoiler covers the hatch, it 'floats' over the hatch at the bottom, being attached at the outer corners and center. With the spoiler on the car, you'd still be able to see the glop because the gasket doesn't cover it all.

If I knew back then what I know now, I never would have used tape. I would have have punched out some small discs of the aluminum foil tape, and stuck them over just the holes. Due to my own ineptitude, I now have some paint work to do, not something I enjoy.

Oh, and as I was finishing up, I noticed this:

That's the mounting point in the right rear quarter for the power antenna, and the site of my original Paint and Bodywork Experiments. The rubber parts for the antenna got hard and brittle (notice a pattern here?) and chewed through the paint, leaving bare metal, which rusted. So, several years ago I pulled the old antenna, and "fixed" the paint in that spot. This was when I first saw how thin the paint was, and wound up spotting in an area about TEN times as big as the damage. Every time I'd try to feather in the new repair, I'd blow through the original paint, and have to make the repair area bigger.

And yes, I masked off that area and sanded it out before I closed up for the night.

And I still have to address this mess at the top edge of the hatch, and rear edge of the jamb area.

The rust on the edge of the hatch was caused by the spoiler/gasket issues, but the back of the roof where it goes into the jamb area? Real live, genuine "Factory Installed Rust"! It never got painted at the factory in Japan. You can see where the paint on the roof flowed over the edge and dripped down, but the vertical section of the jamb either never had any paint on it, or was painted so thinly that water went through the paint and primer, and got at the steel.

Rust proofing on 1980's Japanese cars was NOT very good, and one of the British car magazines had an article on how fast these cars "dissolved" over in the UK.

Happy 40th Birthday to the 8086 uProcessor!

YOW.....I remember when these things were cutting edge. My first real, hands-on exposure to "Programmable Stuff" was when I was working as an Industrial Controls Engineer for McGraw-Edison Company. We had built several systems using a Texas Instruments 5TI Programmable Logic Controller to take inputs and produce outputs using "Ladder Diagram" logic.

After that, we started using the newest, latest, greatest thing; a fully programmable, uProcessor-controlled, industrial-rated, controller made by Sylvania, and programmed using "SYBIL", or the SYlvania Basic Industrial Language, customized version of BASIC running on an 8086. The required development system consisted of a NorthStar Horizon S-100 bus computer, dumb terminal, and a serial PROM programmer. I later built a Heathkit dot matrix printer so we could have hard-copy to play with.


Really good article over at Extreme Tech.

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.