L.A. Fleet Week 2018 Video

From my friends on the Iowa. Lots of neat stuff to do and see. If you're in L.A. next Labor Day, try and include it, but get there early. They had around 300,000 visitors this year, and it's expected to grow.

Murphy Strikes!

But it's not serious, more like #672 of Mr. Murphy's famous laws, along with their various corollaries and sub-sections.

I started putting the foglamps back together so I could "bag 'em and tag 'em" until I get the rest of the front-end finished, and need to install them.

Cleaned up the wiring harness assemblies the other night.

And then fed them through the buckets to where they will mate with the reflector/lens assembly.

Took all the masking tape off the reflector/lens units, and cleaned the glass. They both had some kind of overspray that came right off, but the fronts of the lenses are "micro-pitted" with many, many tiny stone hits. I may or may not try and polish the lenses. They're in the grille, at knee-height, and unless you get right down there and look, you'd probably never notice it.

And that's when Mr. Murphy made an appearance. Something I hadn't considered when I shopped the LED replacements for the OEM H-3 Halogen bulbs, was what their overall length was.

This picture below shows it all. The clear glass bulb is the H-3 unit, and the depth stem of the caliper is set to the distance from the bulb flange to the internal baffle/light shield.

Yup.....the LED replacement is about 8mm TOO LONG to fit into the housing.

D'OH!

So, after spending about 30 minutes searching around, I found replacement "H-3" LED units that are only about 1mm longer than the Halogen bulbs. So, until they get here and I can wrap this small sub-sub-sub-project up, they're back to "Awaiting Parts" status.

So rather than let a nice Friday night in the garage go to waste, I put in all sixteen screws that hold the sunshade to the spoiler, and put the spoiler back on the car.

What is it with Japanese Engineers? Do they all have a "Small Fastener Fetish", or is it a cultural thing? Sheesh....sixteen screws to hold the sunshade on. Maybe some of the "downforce" these things are supposed to generate is caused by the weight of all that hardware......

So I then maneuvered it around a bunch, and plopped it on the car, where after a small amount of wiggling, all 8 mounting studs dropped through the holes in the hatch, and I started the nuts on them.

Yep...this is what the rear end of a 1985 Toyota Celica Supra "P-Type" is supposed to look like.

A bit of fettling to get the spoiler and gasket all tidy, and I torqued the nuts to 15 ftlbs, and stood back.

This assembly had been off the car for about three years now, and it's good to see it back on, as it's the only major thing that differentiates the 1985 from the earlier years of this model. The 1986 (six months only) had a third brake light added, but was otherwise identical to the 1985. With only 28,000 made, they're the lowest production run, so if you see one with a rear spoiler, either the hatch has been replaced with one from a 1985, or you're looking at one rare MKII Supra.

With the exception of mounting the antenna, the rear section is pretty much finished for now. Pulling the hatch to repair the surface rust on the leading edge and the upper jamb area can wait until Spring. This will allow me to concentrate on getting the front finished, which still needs a lot of work. The last big push will be to sand out, repair/fill the crazed areas, sand some more, and then prime and paint the front bumper cover. Then I have to clean/refurb the turn signal/side marker lamps, and put it all back together!

I can take it out while the weather is still pleasant, and then gunk the engine bay again,  drain the coolant, possibly flush it, and then put her in the garage while I start taking the front of the engine and the intake manifolding apart to catch up on all that deferred, unknown status maintenance, like the hoses, timing belt, and fuel injectors.

New Background Image

Got tired of the bland background image that "came with" this Blogger theme, so I started tinkering around a bit last night. I mostly just stayed with the default image because it didn't matter to me much, and then last night I was going through a file folder, and found a bunch from the Iowa, so I picked the one on display now, which was taken down in the museum area of the shop near the Gift Shop.

Since I'm now a Retired Land Baron living in Free America after 35 years in captivity doing Real Neat Stuff behind Socialist lines, I'll probably start rotating the images on a semi regular basis, and include some of the more pleasant ones from our new AO.

And I almost can't believe that 10 days from now will mark the one year anniversary of our CALEXIT, and my arrival here in Northern Colorado.

Time to finish up that 1 year AAR, I guess!

Well, At Least *I* Didn't Kill The Yard

Finally had a landscape guy come by to look at the yard. Hopefully this company is more reliable than that other Bozo we had for a while. I've been a little upset with myself as I thought I noticed the grass dying off not too long after I did the "Broadleaf Weed Killer" treatment to the yard. Nope, he says it's "drought stress", and we simply weren't watering enough.

If we'd watered the yard this much in Long Beach, the Water Cops would have hauled us away, and we still weren't watering enough. I was watering about 30 minutes per section a couple of times a week, and we really need more like an hour each time, at least three times a week. We still have the "Kailfornia Save The Fish and Kill The Crops" mentality as far as water use on the yard goes, and if we want a nice yard, we're going to have to change that mindset that's been hammered into us for the last 30 years.

He sad to put out some grass seed in the early Spring, and it should come back fine.

A Little Something for the Grandson....

Yep, it's from Harbor Freight, and was meant as a yard wagon, but when he saw it the other day, he took to it like it was his.

I can envision trips around the backyard, and through the neighborhood in the future.....

The bagged items are the rear seat backs from the Supra, and the decals came from an Amateur Radio supply house, and the "MOD" sticker is from a decent little "Pizza-On-Demand" place.

September 11th

Others have written far more eloquently than I ever could, so please go check them out.

Aesop, in particular, expresses my sentiments on this day.

Yup...I'm just another Old Man who bitterly clings.

Mundane Automotive Tasks

Mundane, but necessary, like a lot of grunt work.

Doing some clean-up work on a few items so I can paint them tomorrow. I took my Cooling Plate and buzzed it off with my orbital sander and some 140 grit. It put a nice, smooth, flat finish on it, and also gave the surface some "tooth" so the paint will stick better. This will get painted wrinkle-finish black.

Then I prepped two pieces of headlight trim that screw down to the hood. They fill the gap between the leading edge of the hood, and the back edge of the headlight pods. These are stamped steel, and the paint was weathered but solid, so I cleaned them, and then scuffed them up with some 220 grit. These will get painted satin black.

I'm going over the grille right now. I scrubbed the living daylights out of it in the sink with hot, soapy water (Dawn works very well), and several different brushes to get in all the nooks and crannies, and then went over it again with some of that semi-lame "No Scratch" blue Scotch-Brite I have. Even though it feels "squeaky clean", it still has splotches of road film on it that don't want to easily come off. I went through this with the two big pieces of black plastic headlight trim that go on the front and sides of the headlight pod and hide all the mechanical bits. I finally gave up on trying to get them clean, and went over them with the green Scotch-Brite I have, and a ton of my "Sanding Juice". It gave them a very clean, "brushed" look, and after treating them with Mother's "Back-To-Black", they look ready for their close-up, Mr. DeMille!

BUT....the grille has TWO-HUNDRED AND SIXTY-EIGHT of these little hex-shaped holes in it, and I don't want to spend the next six months cleaning each and every one of them by hand! So since it's really clean right now, it's getting painted satin black tomorrow when I do the headlight trim.

I took my little "spare" laptop, and set it up in the garage. I patched the audio into the receiver, and now I can stream YouTube audio, or play CDs and DVDs in the garage.

Tonight's music to work on your car is by the Allman Brothers Band and is their "At Fillmore East" live album, one of their best.

The wife hit the rack really early, as she's bit depleted from a week of relatives, and watching the little guy from the afternoon they left until early this evening.

And just in case you think I spend all my "spare time" in the garage, I don't. We're going out tomorrow afternoon after I finish the painting, and just going to stroll around Old Town for a while, and then go out to dinner.

Supra Headlights, Cooling Plate, and "Whisker" Install

Besides hanging out with my wife's sister-in-law, and her sister-in-law, and my sweet little wife, I've also been beavering away out in "Gandpa's Garage". The fog lamps are all cleaned up, bagged, and awaiting final cleaning and painting. It's been a little too cool and humid to have bare-naked metal out in the shop for my taste, so I've done a few other things, like the headlights, and starting the prep work to refinish the bumper cover.

I wet sanded all the mostly horizontal surfaces on it were the worst, and then blended those areas in to where the paint was still fairly intact. This took about 45 minutes with some 220 grit in a rubber sanding block, and lots of my "Sanding Juice" out of a spray bottle. This will be a project of it's own, but getting started like this lets me examine the underlying urethane for damage. It's got some scuffs on the outer corners, and the black band running horizontally across the front has a lot of gravel dings, so there's a lot more sanding and reapiar work to do.

And the new headlights are in after about two hours of fettling. The OEM sealed beam lamps used protrusions molded into the glass to provide a mounting surface where the glass rested against the bucket. The bezel then held the lamp tight in the bucket, and once you aligned the headlights, they stayed put. The new ones are a stamped reflector housing adhesive bonded to the glass lens. To position the lamp in the bucket, it relies on small metal tabs on the back of the reflector. Small metal tabs that can be bent to adjust, but weren't. I couldn't even get the bezel to fit close enough to get a screw started. I compared the backside of the old sealed beam to the new one, and then used my caliper to measure the distance from the front of the lens to the mounting surface. Sure enough, the new ones were 1/8" out-of-tolerance. I bent them with some needle nose pliers to get the correct dimension, and they fit right in. I also cleaned and polished out the stainless steel bezel that holds the headlamp in the bucket, and replaced the screws with new hex drive stainless steel button-head screws. Then I popped out what was left of the plastic headlight trim (aka "Whiskers") with a trim tool, cleaned the paint under the area, and snapped the new whiskers in place. The round black plastic plugs turned out to be the same size as the one I used to plug the hole for the rear window wiper, and they snapped right in, replacing the headlamp washer nozzles quite nicely.

Then I moved on to repairing the surface rust on the four spots on the hood that contact the rubber hood bumpers when the hood is closed. Since this car was never cleaned under the hood, dirt and oil vapors built up on the contact surfaces of the rubber bumpers, and ground through the paint. So I used the flap wheel in the Dremel to take all the rust down to clean, shiny metal, and then treated it with Evapo-Rust Gel, and primed it. It will get smoothed out and painted later.

This one just had a "ring" of rust ground into it from the round rubber bumper. It cleaned up in just a few minutes.

Oh, boy....this one. For some reason, water pooled here, and even got under the seam sealer and lifted it. Those two little black spots? Yep, rust holes. They started out as pinholes, and since that's as far as they easily opened up, they fortunately never got much bigger. That's solid metal all around them, and I was able to get at the backside of the metal through the convenient drain hole Toyota provided. I poked around in there and couldn't get any loose scale or rust to come out, so I'm crossing my fingers that I caught it in time. I shot some Eastwood Rust Encapsulator in there, and that should seal it off. But rust never sleeps, and like some of the old "B" movies, it might get released later to ravage the hood. The correct, "purist" way to fix this would to weld or braze up the holes, or perhaps even lead them. Lacking a welder, and not wanting to repaint a larger part of the hood than absolutely necessary, I'll be using a different method. Yes, I'm going to "Bubba" it, and use a couple of dabs of JB Weld, then sand smooth, use some spot putty, prime and paint. Before you laugh too hard, I know people who have put their cast-iron axle center sections back together with the stuff, and drove out of the middle-of-nowhere. It;s strong, and if the metal is clean, it holds.

This one took maybe 15~20 minutes to clean up. Just a ring of rust, and some rust coloration on the seam sealer, and what looked like a hole in the sealer. Turned out to be a bit of rust that quickly cleaned up.

This one was another piece of cake. 5, maybe 10 minutes.

So while the primer and rust encapsulators are curing, I measured, located, and drilled the other two mounting holes in my "Cooling Plate".

The cooling plate is to ensure that most of the air coming in the front of the car goes through the radiator, and not over it. There's a rubber seal on the bottom of the leading edge of the hood, and one on the cowl that seals to the bottom of the trailing edge of the hood. If the front seal gets out of shape, or is missing, a lot of the air coming in will scoot over the top of the radiator, rather than going through it.

And it makes a nifty place to hold things!

Holes drilled, reamed, and chamfered.

New holes in core support for plate. After I finished the holes in the plate, I clamped it in place as a template, and used transfer punches the locate the centers of the new mounting holes.

The reason I was stalled on installing this thing was what to use for fasteners? I need it removable, as there's stuff down there can fail, so that means something like a nut and a bolt, right?

Nope. I stumbled across these "Bumper Cover Retainers" while looking for something else. Most of these push-pin type fasteners are meant to be single-use, like a plastic rivet. These have threaded pins that can be backed out with a good old #2 Phillips screwdriver, and then you pull the fastener out. Elegant, light, simple, and reusable! The nylon washers will go between the plate and the sheet metal to isolate it a bit.

Washers over the holes.

Plate and fasteners installed!

It doesn't rattle when I tap it, so it should be quiet on the road. It's coming back off to get cleaned, and then I'm painting it with wrinkle-finish black paint, something I've loved on machinery and vintage radio gear since I first saw it probably fifty years ago. On my never-ending list of projects is to refinish a pair of cam covers I have. They'll get the same wrinkle-finish black like from the factory, with the fins and lettering polished. Then I'll go over the "TOYOTA" block lettering with a bright red, and the "DOHC" block lettering with either a bright blue like it was, or a matching yellow to the "DOHC" on the cam drive belt cover (see below). Then a couple of coats of clear, and hopefully they'll be good for a few years.

Labor Day - End Of Summer -

So put away the white patent leather loafers, the white patent leather belt, and your lemon yellow leisure suit.

You can keep the diamond pinkie ring out until Thanksgiving.

Just kidding. The only people I knew who dressed like that were car dealership owners. Some of them thought they were really STYLIN' back in the day. One had a yellow Cadillac Coupe DeVille with a white leather interior that matched his outfit perfectly. I was very good friends with his oldest son, and we'd both crack up when Dad went out on the prowl. Al's Steak House was the most popular spot for Gentlemen Of A Certain Age to hang out and conduct business, and those of us in the Automotive Tribe could tell who was there by the cars in the lot. They conducted their business over Martinis and polished wood, and we conducted ours over blacktop County roads, 1320 feet at a time, or on the Center Street on-ramp to Westbound I-80. First one to Rte 7, Larkin Ave, wins!

So anyway........I'm headed out to the end-of-summer BBQ bash at The Kid's Place, aka The Country House. Hopefully the DIL's brother is there so I can find out if the CB radio in his truck works any better than it did.

Menu today is burgers, dogs, chips, potato and macaroni salad, sodas, and a pony keg for those so inclined. It's 80*, partly sunny, 20% chance of rain, and looks like a fine day for an end-of-summer BBQ!

L.A. Fleet Week Starts Friday, August 31st

And I won't be there this year...sob..sob.

Looks like it's going to be pretty big this year, and I wouldn't mind being there, but we have relatives coming (again) this weekend.

Read all about it here at the L.A. Fleet Week website.

On a side note, it's just amazing how far the Battleship Iowa Museum has come since she came to San Pedro in 2012. New exhibits are opening, and more of the ship is becoming accessible to the public. You can *finally* get a tour of some of the Engineering Spaces down on Broadway, like Engine Room #2, and Fire Room #4. If you'd like to see the Transmitter Room on Broadway, just contact the nice folks at BIARA, and a tour of that area and the Radio Room ("FACCON1") can be arranged. ALL of the 24" fluorescent tubes on board have been replaced with LED lighting, giving the working spaces greatly improved lighting, reducing the electric bill, and have much better reliability than the old old tube/starter fixture they used to have. I donated 4 cases of 24" tubes to the ship over the years, along with a case of starters, so going LED will eliminate that.

If you're ever in the L.A. Harbor area, by all means take the time to see the Iowa. It'll give you a whole new understanding of the phrase "Built Like A BATTLESHIP".

Easy Radio "Field Service" Call

Since most of our new in-laws are in the construction/demolition/rehab/excavating/hauling business, they have good old CB Radios in their trucks. CB radios are still pretty big here, as they're cheap, easy to use, and work pretty well for what I'd consider "Short Range Ground Wave" communications of a mile or two.

Most of the gravel pits, constructions sites and paving plants these guys go to use CB radios to communicate with the truckers. Even though the truck may have a fancy 800~900MHz "Trunked Radio" 2-way  FM radio in it to talk to the office, it will still have a CB in it to talk to the Dispatchers/Yard Managers at the places they go to.

The first of the in-laws trucks was a full-size Peterbuilt tractor with a full-size dump box on it. Our daughter-in-laws younger brother bought the tractor and dump box separately and 'married' them in the shop section of the little place we stayed at when we first moved here. He does very good quality work, and it looks like it rolled out of Peterbuilt that way.

At one time the truck had a commercial 2-way radio of some kind in it, so it had a Larsen "NMO" (for "New Motorola) antenna mount on the roof, with coax running behind the driver's seat down to where the radio was mounted, on the lower, door side of the seat mount.

This was NOT a good place to mount a non weather-resistant "consumer grade" radio! It got wet when the door was open in the rain, got kicked by people climbing in and out of the cab, and had all kinds of stuff get dropped on it.

He went through THREE of the "$50 class" radios before he decided to relocate the radio up to the top of the cab in the center where it's out of harms way.

And he bought a brand-news, shiny "$150 class" radio to put up there.

The wiring was beautifully installed, the coax had been rerouted, and the radio mounted solidly.

The problem was, he couldn't hear anybody at the gravel pits, although they said they could hear him.

Hmmmm......Well, I did the Full Monty on it when I got there. The power output of the radio was about 4 Watts, increasing with modulation, and sweeping the antenna with my analyzer revealed nothing out of the ordinary. The SWR was about 1.5:1, rising to 1.7:1 on one end of the band, and 1.8:1 at the other end, perfectly acceptable considering I could NOT get the analyzer to connect to my laptop, and was forced to read the little 2" x 3" display on the analyzer.

Double Hmmmmm.....this looks like a good installation, and AFAIC, it "meets specs". What could the problem be? I open the squelch all the way with volume at max, and was greeted by a slight noise increase, which quickly faded away. Yup....sounds like the receiver's dead. On a brand-new radio........DUH!??!

Flipping through the manual, I remembered this radio had an RF Gain control, basically a receiver sensitivity control. No, it couldn't be.......yep, it is. ALL the way to zero, meaning the receiver is pretty much deaf.

I turned the RF Gain wide open, and "Channel 19" audio came blasting out of the speaker from the trucks on I-25. People immediately came running over asking what I did to "fix" the problem.

Uhhhhh.....RTFM?

So I sat down with them and gave a "Radio 101" course, explaining what all the knobs and buttons did, and my findings on the antenna. The radio has a built-in SWR meter, and after calibrating it, it agreed with my analyzer well enough that I decided there wasn't any antenna problem.

He sent me a text today saying it worked fine at the gravel pit, and could I look at his Dad's radio? And his friend Nick's? And maybe Justin's too?