The Ridge Run

Here we go again with the Catalina vacation!!!

This is the post for the ridge tour. It was the last full day we were there. It departs from the plaza. They put surrogate in the passenger seat, or as they called it, the co pilot seat, and the younger and I were directly behind him.

We depart from the plaza, and of course we have to go around the back of town, since Crescent is pedestrian traffic only, something I didn't really even consider, since we normally are the pedestrians!!! Came out Clarissa Ave. right past Green Palace Jr., and I got a picture as we drove by. Onto Crescent to Pebbly Beach Road, past the landing.

You know what else is out a ways on Pebbly Beach Road??? Buffalo Nickel!!! We had just been there the night before.

There's a lot of the infrastructure that you don't see staying in Avalon. They've got the cargo docks, the only gas station, and the garage where they house and maintain the Catalina Island Company vehicles. Had one of those sweet Flxable buses there!!!

A little further on, there's the power plant.

Not much further on from there, we left the paved road for the dirt road up the side of the hills. Spotted a red tailed hawk perched on a tree!!!

From above, our driver and guide, Bear, pointed out the quarry near the end of the island.

While we were ascending, you could see Avalon from above!!! We were high up!!!

And there's some of the dirt road!!! Not really, with the exception of the first part of the dirt road, it was fairly flat with only gradual climb. Bear said, “one of these day, I'm going to try climbing that!!!” We encouraged him to make it that day, but as expected it didn't happen.

And there's the first we saw of the other side of the island!!! As well as the ridge road off in the distance.

And there's a couple of ravens!!!

Great view!!!

As we reached the other side, you could see clouds streaming in off the ocean and up the mountains, very cool!!!

Towards the end of the canyon that Avalon is situated in is the Wrigley Botanical Gardens, that I had been thinking I'd like to visit at some point. They moved the original pavilion that had been where the Casino now is up there, and converted it into an aviary. I didn't know, but they had also made a mausoleum that William Wrigley Jr. is buried in, that is visible at the end of the canyon in this shot.

The dark spots on the ocean are the shadows of the clouds!!!

After we passed some radio towers and the reservoir, we began our descent down the other side of the canyon towards Avalon, down Stage Coach Road.

Another shot, from above, of the Descanso Beach area... which, incidentally, we never made it out to this year!!!

Good times!!!

Frontier Weekend

Last weekend I did a coolant system flush on my wife's car. Interestingly, when we first went to look at the Matrix, I'd taken my scanner along, and the only code that showed up was for low coolant! Didn't give a check engine light or anything, and I'd never seen a code for that before, but there it was!!! Once, during summer, the coolant was low again, and when the temperature would climb, the A/C would stop working. That was the impetuses for doing a flush, it had gotten very warm out on Saturday, and my son and I were out in it, and the A/C wasn't working, and the temperature was up.

Anyway, apparently it has a very small coolant leak somewhere in the system, to the tune of around every 9 months or so, it needs more coolant. I had the thought to do the pepper trick, and might as well do a flush first. After we got home, I popped the hood to let it cool down, and went out in Scruffy to get a bottle of cooling system flush. Got home, and it was cool enough to drain and add the flush. I grabbed a 5 gallon bucket to add the clear water to the system, and try and rinse the system out some.

The bucket had been stored upside down by the barbecue, and for whatever reason, it was just behind where I've got this cactus, the 'Old Man of the Moutains'. After I wrapped everything up and was putting things away, I put the bucket back where it had come from. I just lobbed it back where I'd gotten it, but it landed kind of caddywompus. I grabbed the handle to the lid of the barbecue, and leaned over to right the bucket, but while I was leaned over, the wood handle broke, and I fell on a cactus!!!

All this took place on Saturday. On Sunday night, I was laying on the couch in the front room, and I heard a coyote yipping, very close. I looked out the window, and it was right on the very corner of the yard. It's on!!! I slip on my shoes, and grab a walking stick. I can open the front door quietly, but the security screen always makes some noise. I throw open the screen, and come out raging and yelling again!!! The coyote is quite spooked, and jumps down around 7 feet to the street and off into the canyon!!! It was a rerun of another time!!!

In retrospect, I realized I had a very western frontier weekend, I fell on a cactus, and chased off a coyote!!!

Electric Avenue

Something I like about when I go to independent auto shops is that often someone working there will have some kind of interesting project in the works. This was just such an occasion!!!

The double-edged sword is that I usually do most of my own work. A bit ago, though, I took Scruffy to get her air conditioning repaired. I pulled up while the proprietor was busy with another customer, so I was looking around, and saw this beauty on the lift. I'm not a particular fan of VW microbusses, but anything this clean is admirable in it's own right!!! I took a closer look...

Underneath, and off to the side was the engine.

But directly under the rear, was this... I looked closer...

I looked at the other side...

Hmmm, looks like a transaxle, but there's no bellhousing....

About that time the proprietor walked by, and he says, "You're wondering, huh???" I reply, "Is that what I think it is???" "Yeah!!!" "All electric???" "Yeah!!!"

"Sir, I salute you!!!" Magnificent!!! A perfect candidate, actually, there's plenty of room for batteries, and it probably ends up way quicker than the original!!!

When he finally got to Scruffy, he determined it'd need a new compressor and some hoses. He'll get the stuff ordered, can I come back in a day or two??? Actually, it was two Fridays ago, and I told him I'd be back in a week, since that's my day off. Got to come back and see the progress. He'd made a spot for the strut mounts, and mounted the cradle. As it sits, the wheels were cambered way in, but that may change after it has batteries, and gets rolled some. Also, after I'd been there a bit I noticed the Chevy Bolt donor carcass out in the yard. The second to last shot here you can see the mess of wiring harness laid out behind it. Also, I hope he's going to be able to adapt the VW wheels to it, or at least get some steelies that look close and can mount the wide whitewalls.

So I got to see a cool project coming together, and I got the air conditioning fixed!!!

Crazy Bikes Revisited

Way back when I made the Tribute post, I made mention of a couple of my creations. The other day I was at my parents house, and took a couple of pictures of the pictures mentioned therein.

First up was the chopper bike I'd made by welding in six foot fence posts. The original thought was to use the forks on my 20" BMX bike, possibly with a smaller wheel on the front end. It was highly unstable, and impossible to drive. Since I had come upon this 16" kids bike, complete with training wheels, and the head tube was the correct size, on the forks went to it. The training wheels made it so it could be stood up, at least, although it was tilted way back!!!

The second shot is the April Fool's trick where my sidehack ended up on the diving board of the pool.

Dang, I was a dorky looking kid!!!

The Wayback Machine

I've kinda been on a roll of late with me blogging. I'm going to try and keep it going!!! I've got a lot of things I could go on about, but for now I'm taking this fork. Something I've wanted to do for a while. All the cars I've owned!!!

I did one post, back in 2009, about the first car I ever purchased, and just today I went back and added web-sourced pictures and another paragraph. Way previous to that, I'd done a tiny little post of my first actual car. Much more could be said there.

Anyway, fast forward a few years from the Dinosaur, and here's the first car I ever owned that would have had two names on the title!!! Would have, mind you, as we were never actually able to get it titled in our name. We bought it for $750 without first having the owner smog check it. I have been wary of doing so ever since, but still haven't let that stop me!!! I'm usually too antsy to jump on a "deal". Took it to a smog check center, and it had three places in the exhaust system that had leaks. Can't smog it if you can't detect anything at the end of the pipe!!! 1975, if I remember the year correctly. Seems to me it had the rear edge of one of the fenders crinkled, as though the door had met it at some point.

Anyway, this was back when we were poor. Probably 1989 or 1990 is when this all went down, and we'd saved up to buy something. I don't remember ever having to use one car between us, so I'm thinking this was while we were using the Gremlin. If you're poor, my advice to you is to stop being poor, it sucks. My wife had ridden in someone's Celica once, and liked it, so the hunt was on to see if we could find one in the price range we could afford. One of my friends growing up had a later fastback, and spun it on the freeway into the guard rail, totaling it. He'd sold the engine from it to someone he knew that had a coupe of the same color as his, swap included, and I helped him swap it. Actually, we both swung the engines (and transmissions) from the one to the other, and he flaked, so I ended up finishing everything off. I believe the girl we were doing it for ended up paying me some amount more than I was expecting, likely stiffing him for the rest of the cost. His was manual and the recipient was automatic. If you've driven an econobox of this vintage with an automatic, you'll likely agree that manual transmissions are the best option. ANyway, I was impressed with some of the innovation of those clever Japanese.

Ours was similar to these web sourced pictures I found, in that it was a red coupe. I preferred the fastback style, in most generations of the Celica, but apparently there were none to be had in our price range. Also, ours had a strange vinyl top, not the decent looking full top black pictured in the first shot, but tan, and only covering the rear half, landau style, and it looked like the color had been refreshed by spray painting. I seem to recall it wasn't fastened to the roof especially well, and would billow up at highway speed. My plan, if I'd ever gotten to it, was to strip off the vinyl, sand down the rust that was likely hiding under it (primary reason I don't like vinyl tops) and getting some black wrinkle finish paint to spray on the area.

Inside, the fun continued with a headliner hanging down. Not long after we got it, I made up an aluminum plate about 2 inches larger than the dome light all the way around, and used that to hold it up a little better. Seems to me it had some strangeness with the electrical system, and I'm pretty sure the air conditioning didn't work.

Mechanically, it had the manual transmission, and if I recall, a leaky clutch master cylinder. I seem to recall at some point filling the reservoir and opening the slave cylinder to do a "gravity bleed". Another time I was heading to my parent's house, and it stalled on the off ramp. I don't think I even opened up the cool forward-flip hood, just took off the mile or so to my parent's house. No one was home there, so I went to Sean's and we took his '68 Mustang with similar red paint and vinyl top, as well as his toolbox, to see if we can figure out what was up. Upon opening the hood, I quickly discovered the hot wire to the coil had broken off, so it was a fairly easy fix. Sean, meanwhile, found the sprinklers along the off ramp had a little plastic sign that said, "WARNING: These premises irrigated with reclaimed waste water", so he removed one and hung it by the sink in his bathroom!!! I remember some wonkiness with the windows, them not quite rolling up all the way. Pretty sure at one point one of the regulators gave out and I opened up the door panel and fashioned a 1x2" piece of wood to hold it in the closed position. I remember in the short time we had it, it rained quite a bit. It had 5-slot mag wheels, the same as my first car had, so we had two cars with the same style rims at the time. I think it had some kind of aftermarket stereo, but don't remember for sure.

It was a fun car, front engine rear drive with a fairly tight suspension, and of course that stick shift!!! Go-kart handling, and while it probably wasn't especially quick, it sure felt like it was.

I can't remember how long we had it, long enough that I remember it pretty well and fondly, but in my head I can't imagine it was more than six months. Certainly a car I kinda wished I still had. If you are able to find any of them anymore, they are either complete junk or are ridiculously priced, or both. So, here's how it ended...

We were living in North Long Beach at the time. As is the case, you end up finding short cuts to get home. Ours was to cut through the residential area before where we lived, avoiding a left turn light, then an uncontrolled left across a busy street. There were a couple of cross streets with a stop sign going crosswise to the one we'd be on, but they had deep rain gutters on either side going our way. Hence, a lot of people going our way would come to practically a stop, but we had no such respect for our suspensions, just slow enough to not bottom out. Since most people going our way would be going very slow, a lot of people rolled the stop signs. You can probably see where this is going. One afternoon I come home to my wife talking on the phone to the insurance company. Hmmm, that doesn't sound good... I look out the window into the parking lot, and see the front end basically flat. She gets off the phone and breaks down crying, and for a while I can't understand what she's saying. Come to find out, pretty much exactly what you'd guess from the intro to this paragraph!!! Some guy in a full size van rolled through the stop sign, never suspecting my wife, and she cleanly T-bones him!!! His insurance ends up paying us off to the tune of $1400 or so, if I recall, and we get to retain the hulk of the poor Celica. The cool looking front end was closed up in the middle of the grille, with the hood bent down and the bumper bent up. Since we were having trouble getting it smogged, we were more than happy with the payoff!!! I remember getting a replacement fender from half price day at the pick your part, but don't remember if that was before or after the wreck. Know I never put it on. I also remember pulling the bumper mounts and straightening 'em, but not ever getting it back together. Couldn't find a replacement hood. I'm pretty sure the radiator was leaking afterwards, but somehow I got it to my parent's house and had it in their side yard for a while. Don't remember for how long, but after the wreck I was finally able to get a salvage slip in our name, after clearing up some strangeness with the previous owner's actual name. Ended up selling it off, maybe for $100, maybe for $200, but not before I took the rims off for our next car (bought, of course, with the insurance payoff money!!!) That is, possibly, a story for another day. I've already got the images for it from the 'web!!!

Saturn S Series Technical Bulletin v. #512.0

Just to share a little of the information I've recently acquired...

The smaller oil filter on the right is the specified unit for all S Series 1.9 engines. The one on the left is slightly larger, hence it has more filter surface. It has the same base size, thread size and bypass pressure as the specified one, and sells for exactly the same price as the other, so no reason not to use it. I believe it is the one specified for 2000-2006 Mustang V-6 engines, but the STP one has an easy enough part number to remember.

The next two pictures I took because attempting to do an image search for "Saturn 1.9 Twin Cam Air Injection Ports" came up with only one picture of what I was looking for!!! If I ever get an engine to rebuild, I'll get some better shots. The ports are lined up directly under the studs. In the second picture, I've added in a helpful couple of purple arrows. For a while I've been getting the p0410 check engine code for secondary air injection. At first I thought it was from the connector to the valve, which was damaged in the hood incident, and the code started coming up shortly after that. I replaced it, and it didn't take care of the issue. Next, I took off the metal pipe from the valve to the exhaust manifold and cleaned out the carbon build up inside of it. Still no good.

Smog check time is coming up, and the code keeps coming back. The only thing left to do is pull off the exhaust manifold and clean out the rest of the way. The air conditioning compressor bracketry needs to come off to get to all the bolts. I left the down pipe connected and just made some room between the head and the manifold and was able to get to the ports. I had a couple wire brushes I had intended to use, but the carbon was also rather gummy in this area, and I ended up using a stiff piece of wire to get out quite a bit of gunk. Hopefully it's enough.

In addition, since I had the transmission done, I've been getting a code for the torque converter lock up not working. Took her back to the transmission place (they'd wanted to see her back in a few weeks, make sure all is well) and they told me at that time they'd need a couple hours to see to it. I couldn't do it at that time, so my wife and I came back a couple weeks later. Called them back in a couple hours, and they said they were going to need more time to take things apart. Ended up being there a couple days, and they replaced the external switch, which wasn't making good contact, they said. Made it most of the way home before the light came back on. I took it back to another garage of the same chain, not because they failed me at the first one, but because it's closer to home. They've got it now, and they've replaced the torque converter, even though it looked like it was fine, and are replacing the valve body. Seems to me that's every possible thing it could be, so this should do it.

Just last week 3 turned 100!!! Two and a half years, and I've rolled around 33,000 miles on her!!!

Also a week ago, I finally got a set of the 16" Ion alloys I've been wanting to get for Scruffy!!! Got them from two different Ions at the junkyard, and turns out there's a little difference, do you see it??? Apparently, on some they have a dark gray inside the spokes and machined look faces, and on others they've just painted the whole thing with a metallic silver paint!!! I'm looking into getting them matched, but if not, I'll just put a pair of either style on opposite sides!!!

Down With the Other Half!!!

Last Friday I finished off the lowering job on the back end of Scruffy. It was considerably easier and more straightforward than the front!!!

Of course, it was just springs and struts on this portion, no suspension components other than those. I'm quite pleased with the way it sits!!! Even with the bald tires, it still seems to corner quite well, too!!! Scraped the exhaust on two speed bumps and a driveway so far.

I think I'd better start carrying around some blocks, it's almost impossible to get a jack under it now!!! In addition to the passenger rear tire, the driver's side front tire has been losing air, so I stuck the one remaining steelie on the front for now.

The end of the tailpipe had been tweaked where it was pointing right at the rear tire in the center of the tread. I managed to get it bent to where it's way forward of it.

One other thing, it had this flexy plastic air dam under the front. I have a feeling it wouldn't last long at this altitude. It's gone!!!

On the way home, it was running strange. Idling high, around 2,000 to 3,000 RPM. Way back when we were still shopping for Jade, I'd replaced the idle control valve because it had been stalling. Now it's gone the other way. I'm not sure it might be because it hasn't gotten much driving since I put it in, and the computer hasn't quite adjusted to it yet. I popped the hood that evening, and pushed on the connector a little, and it came down to where it should be. Maybe just dirty contacts??? Hopefully this coming Friday I'll get the alignment done and start driving it a bit more!!!

Tribute

As usual, I've got a bunch I could go on about. This takes precedence.

At the end of last month, I came home from my Saturday shift to a message from a friend I'd grown up with to give him a call. I hadn't heard from him in a while, and returned the call. He tells me that our friend Sean had recently died, and there's a celebration of life the next day. It's a couple hours drive north of me, in the high desert. It was a pleasant drive, but I was stuck with my thoughts. It had been years since I'd seen him.

I arrived a few minutes in, and there was a large crowd. A good portion are in wheelchairs. His second wife has a daughter with spina bifida, and he had taken his fabrication skills in the direction of making custom wheelchairs.

Back when we were kids, we were always making things with Lego bricks, then we transitioned to modifying our bikes, then our cars. He'd bought a sidehack for his bike, which someone welded on. I liked the way it looked, as well as the change in the handling dynamics of the bike. I got a little torch set for my birthday that year, which was supposed to be able to do light duty welding. It sucked it's little oxygen cylinder dry before I was able to complete half the braze of the head tube on my own sidehack. My father was able to borrow an arc welder. If the first was undersize, the second was way oversize!!! I burned many a hole through thin tubing, but got good at filling them back in and making giant booger welds that almost always held. My parents have a couple of pictures in photo collages in their house of these creations. One year Sean and Steve (the guy who'd told me of his passing) found an IRS letterhead envelope and paper and dropped it in our mailbox on April 1st, addressed to the fictitious company Crazy Bikes Inc. that I had mailed out to companies with. They put the message "April Fools!!! Look for your sidehack!!!", with the intention of playing the funny trick on me off taking the wheels and leaving it up on blocks. Joke was on them, though, it didn't have any wheels on it at that time!!! Well, with that plan foiled, they improvised and set it up on the diving board on a chair with a life preserver around the handlebars and a foam ring around the seat, and that's one of the pictures. Another shot is a 16" kids bike I'd modified into a chopper... by cutting the front forks and welding in six foot long fence posts!!! It was terribly unstable, and required training wheels to ride at all. That's another picture on the wall, me attempting to ride it while Sean looks on from beside.

When we started in with cars, his dad bought him a '61 Ranchero. I had the old family car '76 Maverick. We lowered 'em. We shaved the door handles. We converted them from column shift to floor shift. He chopped about 6" out of the top of his, and added in an offset snorkel hood scoop, to line up with the intake of the 144 cubic inch six. I cut a targa top in mine. He never did find someone to cut down the windshield glass, so it never really got roadworthy again. Of course, sound system upgrades were made. That's where Sean really got his start, doing stereo and alarm installations for people. It helped both of us that my mom was working for Pioneer Electronics. Of course, this was around the time when mini trucks were getting big, and he started a groundbreaking and ground scraping suspension shop. I had stopped by one of these and he was showing me a truck he was putting an air suspension on, one of the first to do that. Come to find out, he was inducted into the Mini Truck Hall of Fame. I would link to it, but it appears they've let their domain lapse. Anyway, he was quite the fabricator, and it was pretty amazing how his stuff would come out. I would also fabricate things, but our approaches were different. I would meticulously plan things out in detail ahead of time, then start in, and usually the results would be not be to my satisfaction, and I'd end up coming back weeks or months later and dialing it in better. He took more of a banzai approach, diving right in, and more often than not coming up with a nice finished product in short order.

He was a daredevil. I remember the time he broke his collarbone doing a bunny hop on his bike over a planter at the college where we were always riding our bikes, and jamming over to the nearby fire station to get him help. At another visit to one of his shops, he shows me a picture of a flying Subaru, which he told me he'd recently bought and taken it out to see what it could do. The guy who'd taken the picture was at the celebration, and related the story.

Just a couple weeks prior to finding out, my younger son was saying he's probably the most sensitive person to spicy food. I told him no, I knew someone more so. Sean used to order pizzas with no tomato sauce because he couldn't handle it. Another guy spoke at the celebration with the same story.

Here's a shot of his daughter in her custom chair. There were so many cool chairs there, I kinda wanted to take shots of them all, but didn't feel comfortable asking all these people to get pictures. Fortunately, there's a lot of images at the website of his company. Come to find out, he'd done the one 2 Chainz used when he broke his leg. I was able to see and talk to his parents, and meet his widow. I overheard her telling someone she wants to keep the company going, I hope she's able to find a fabricator that's up to the task.

Funny how there's a few parallels in our lives. We both have versions of our first cars, we both sport mustache and goatees (although his went quite a bit more wild than mine has) and we both have red haired wives.

His death keeps hitting me in different ways. To exacerbate the situation, I've had a couple more deaths since then, and that Vegas business went down on the night of the celebration.

So, a couple weeks before, I was looking at the hardtop versions of the Saturn SCs, and was thinking that without the sunroof, it would be an interesting candidate to make into a true gullwing door car, none of this lame attaching the hinge to the top of the door frame, but cutting to the center of the roof and hinging it in the middle. Hmmm.... might work out good, with some reinforcement along the spine and those lightweight plastic door skins. Meanwhile... I've been keeping an eye out for a replacement for Scruffy. She keeps on ticking, but is now pushing 190K miles, and if you let it go, that ticking will be the engine running low on oil!!! I've got the replacement body panels for her, but kind of want to sand down the roof where the clear coat is in terrible condition, and shoot it with white spray paint. I've got the idea to 3-tone her, with a white roof, gloss black on the window rails and A pillar, and similar to the factory green from the greenhouse down. I think it'd look nice. Ran the idea past my dad, who has more car painting experience than most, and he comes up with, "Nahhh... primer black!!!" Now, I know my wife wouldn't care much for it, BUT!!! My younger boy is closing in on 16 and showing more interest in getting his license than the older had at his age. Find a suitable replacement for my wife (all the power doodads, and maybe find her something with a sunroof this time, too!!! Oh, and looks pretty) and yank the engine out of Scruffy and do the build I've been dreaming of in it (.040" overbore to 2.0, early crank with later rods, some work on the exhaust ports, and a stud kit is probably all, but that should be enough for improvements and longevity). That primer black sounds like the scheme it could use, but I'm picturing a few other tweaks... Steelies painted red (or orange) with moon hub caps, probably get some lowering springs, maybe some matching red or orange pin stripes, and of course, the realization of making her into a sedan delivery as I envisioned when we first got her!!! Probably seal in the back doors, so some coupe seats that flip forward would be in order. Now, while I'm going crazy with the mods, why not gullwing doors on a phantom sedan delivery??? Don't think I haven't been thinking about it, even to the point of having preliminary ideas on how to reinforce the body and roof and engineer the roof hinges. Of course, by the time I do any or all of these tweaks, I think it'll be mine and the boy would have to settle for 3.

Told one of the car guys at work about it, how I'd thought of it before I'd heard, and now I kinda have to.

You know, as a tribute.

13 Shots from Petersen

I've lived my whole life in the Los Angeles area, and I'm a car guy, but here's something I've never done. A visit to the Petersen Automotive Museum!!!

My dad's car club managed to get a group trip there, including a tour of the vault. It was pretty awesome, but they don't allow photography in the vault. The three things that I remember from that part are one of the three gold DeLorians ever produced, a Pantera owned by Elvis that he put three bullets into when it wouldn't start for him, and a 62-63 Comet that was under construction. The Comet got my attention because one of the cars I'm always looking around for the similar but much cooler 60-61 model.

All the pictures are from the levels above the vault. I considered attempting a sneak vault photo on my phone, but never did.

Right out in the lobby they had this auto show superbike with a Dodge V-10 engine.

This Mercer was pretty cool. Whoever heard of a monocle windshield??? I was a bit mystified by the gear drive to the front wheel. The most likely thing I could think of was a speedometer cable take off.

Motorized bikes were well represented.

I liked the green car with the white hard top. Don't remember what it was named, but it is a trike, has a removable top, and seats four across the bench seat!!!

There was a design school that had done wood mock ups for the next generation Minis. I like that they used a 5 gallon bucket for the center gauge cluster.

A lot of auto show cars that never saw production.

The huge black Rolls Royce in the lobby has a perfectly round door, although it's not so easy to see in the picture.

Finally, on the way out, in the parking lot was a cool dune buggy!!!