An Exhausting Undertaking

Here's a project I've been working on for quite a while!!!

Back in the beginning of May is when I started in on it. The idea has been in my head for longer than that, but here's the culmination.

I've been displeased with the terrible job that was done attempting to duplicate the original 512 Labs tailpipe for Scruffy. As I've been working on this, I've discovered that the system had been doing quite a bit of making contact with the tunnel. Additionally, I wanted to attempt to pick up a bit more ground clearance and improve the look of the outlet.

I started off by getting some 1 3/8" tubing and steel flat stock. I used some chipboard to fabricate a template, then used a sawzall to split the tube and cut out the flat stock.

I also got some of the old system parts and tubing, and came up with a much better output pipe, which tucks up into the tunnel much more cleanly. After getting the tip into shape, I ground the welds down quite a bit.

You can see, the end result is quite a bit cleaner on the pipe shape. What doesn't show as well in the pictures is the end section, where it does a dip down, then back up, which nicely clears the end of the tunnel area and goes under the emergency brake cable. I'm not sure if that dip makes the clearance situation no better than it was.

Laying the one pipe over the other shows it to be much cleaner.

A shot of the tip in place, prior to the addition of some black high-temp paint, the same as the original.

Here's a marked improvement over the one it's replacing, a pair of rubberized mounts on either end of the tip, for a solid but not too solid mount!!!

Took quite a while for several reasons. I was using my dad's MIG welder, and first it ran out of shield gas. Had a spool of flux core wire, and I switched to it. Took me a while to dial in the settings, but it came out pretty good. Then, at the tail end of the project, the wire kept getting jammed, and it turns out the wire feed cable was screwed up. I had a friend finish off the final welds.

And, if you hadn't noticed in the earlier shots, I've seen to it that this one has a legitimate 512 Labs inscription!!!

The Legacy Continued

My wife dug this up a couple of weeks ago. It had been rolled up for some time, and upon finding it, she mounted it to a wall. Like my father before me, my older son after me is something of an artist himself. This was from around five years ago, his senior year, when he'd taken an art class and actually got some formal training!!! I know he came up with several quite good pieces (and a few... questionable ones... I remember he'd made a piñata of a minion somewhere in there) but this is the only one I can remember. His talents really came alive with the training he received in the class!!!

Anyway, the inspiration for this drawing is "The Treachery of Images", which shows a painting of a pipe, with the subscription "This is not a Pipe" in French beneath it. Ironically, it happens to be displayed at the LACMA, which we had visited for extra credit for the very same art class!!!

Finishing Touches

Here's a few follow-ups to previous posts, some things that have been finished off...

First up is one of my dad's paintings. The flying saucer is completed with shading and the windows. In addition, the shack is now sporting one of the passengers, the fabled Purple People Eater!!!

It's a bit on the small side, but appears to be canonical, with the one eye, and a horn in his head suited to blowing out rock and roll music!!!

Next up is my latest work board artwork, now featuring the lyrics I'd said I would likely add eventually. The only notable part is how I fancied up the ampersand, complete with a light reflection that corresponds to the ones on the chess piece.

And finally, I got the transition on Scruffy's roof striped to blend better!!!

The Return of the Monkey Boy

It's been a long while...

Don't believe I've made mention, but now my younger son also has a lady friend.

She's got a sister, who apparently is fiend for loquats!!! Know who's got loquats??? We do!!!

The sister has come up with a nickname for my son, starting with the "loq" from the loquat tree...

Later on, we were visiting my parents', their tree is great for climbing, also.

A Happy Homestuck Day

I took this picture a couple weeks back, with the intention of posting it here.

It's the first time in a while we've made up a shirt. My younger son wanted to make this shirt up, another Homestuck addition. The character is Jake English.

Found out just a couple days ago that today is Homestuck day, the day the first debut of Homestuck. Ten years, it's been, and I've been aware of it for seven of them!!!

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!!!

Shirt-Art Imitates Photo-Art

One of those things I do most every day is check what they've got for sale on Woot. Got my last two phones, a few TV's, and dozens of shirts from there. This week they had another that I had to get.

One of my favorite shots from when we were in Texas was the bat bridge in Austin.

This shirt had a black and white (well, gray. Well, you know, gray is my favorite color) rendering of almost exactly that image, draped with plaid octopus. Another nice tie-in, the contest the shirt was coming from is about the South by Southwest festival, in affiliation with Do512. OK, I'll take one!!! Once again, I've got too many shirts.

Something I'd made mention of on that post, but never expanded on, was the fact that there IS a basement in the Alamo!!! Within the grounds of the Alamo, there's a gift shop. I'm pretty sure it was one of the original buildings. As I was perusing the shirts, a lady next to me asks one of the workers there if they have a shirt in a medium. The worker replies that she'll go look in the stock room, and proceeds to this elevator, that, as you can see, only has a down button!!! I say to the lady, "There IS a basement in the Alamo!!!"

White Cap

It started out simply enough, and then it snowballed.

It's been almost two years since Scruffy took a stick. Back when I made the post, I'd stated that there was no damage to the roof, but I was mistaken. It put a dent around two inches in the roof, which you can see in the first shot. I had a little time, I thought I'd get around to removing it.

A little liquid dent remover and a lot of sanding and primer and it's fairly well gone, and you almost can't see it without knowing where it was.

Since I was sanding on the roof, I continued sanding the un-ridged front portion, getting rid of most of the badly flaking clear coat. I got that area fairly well taken care of. More primer in the areas I'd sanded through to metal.

While I had my sander out, I did a bit of the sanding along the sides and within the area between the first couple of ridges, and did some hand sanding of the ridges.

I'd primered the front and either side, and it ended up looking pretty bad with the center area still raw and flaking, so I took some time and sanded that area, too, as well as the top portion of the rear hatch. I didn't really do a thorough job of sanding along the center ridges, so it's a bit rough along those areas, but if I was going to get any actual paint on it, I had to draw the line somewhere. As it was, I spent a lot longer than I'd planned on it. All I'd set out to do was to fill the dent!!!

Way back in the Tribute post, I'd made mention of 3-toning her, with white on the roof, black on the window over-trims and the metallic green on the lower body. I'd gone so far as to have picked up a half dozen cans of white enamel paint. I had no other plans for it, and decided if I don't like the look, I can always satin black over it. Not to mention, with a white top, it has better properties of heat rejection!!!

In most of the above pictures, you can see I've got the side window trim pulled off. In the top picture, you can see they also had pretty bad clear coat separation, too. Back to the Scruffy gets Stuck post, you can see the broken trim on the driver's side. I'd bought a replacement piece way back, just after that incident, but hadn't installed it yet, because it would have been the odd one out if I didn't go through and paint all four, which leads to another thing I'll get back to later on in this post...

Anyway, while I had those pieces removed to paint the roof, I of course painted them, too. Below that were several pieces of black plastic trim, which were all fairly weathered looking. Before I re-installed them, I took some rubbing compound to them and livened them up some. Took a before and after shot to show myself it actually did some good!!!

That one piece of window trim I'd broken back when I was painting the nose actually came out pretty good!!! I'd been planning on just getting a replacement from the junkyard, but this is good enough. Turned out the front driver's side window trim was from the 2nd generation, and in typical fashion, it has to be just a little changed... has to do with the tabs between the front and the back pieces. Ah well, it added a little more time in the re-assembly, but came out fine.

It has been a very wet beginning to the year. It's something of a challenge threading the needle and getting the paint on while it's dry out. It was drizzling when I was putting the trim back together, and of course I wanted to get some pictures right off!!! It's far from perfect, but from five feet away, it looks good enough, and way better than it did before!!! Then I get a picture with the side that's still metallic green, and I kind of think I'd like to go that route still!!!

As mentioned above, there was one other complication with the window trim. The style line continues onto the rear hatch sheetmetal, With everything the same shade, you don't even notice it, but multi toning it like this, it would look bad if I didn't continue it. This is how it came out. The passenger side is better, but still a little notchy. Fortunately, I have a guy who pinstripes to smooth it out!!!

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!!!

A Legacy of Art

As I've mentioned a few posts back, my dad was a painter back in the 60's and 70's.

I suppose that, like his son after him, he's come up with various art at different points all throughout his life. He had mostly gone on a hiatus from oils on canvas. Now, as he's gotten on in life and it isn't as easy for him to do some of the things he would do some years back, he's broken back into it!!!

These are a few of what he's done. I've tried to get them in chronological order, but I'm not 100% sure that I've got it right.

The first one is simplicity. Sea and Sky, with no real distinction between (although, it appears there is, due to a shadow falling across it). Following that is the Danube, like many of the paintings he now does, he'll take a photo and then translate it to paint. Both of these are on the small side, around 5x7".

Amboy crater, followed by the coastline, looking North from the Huntington Beach pier (another unfortunate victim of shadows). The sizes on these are larger, around 10x14" and around 14x20" respectively, I'd guess.

Don't know where the imagery for the golden sea and sky came from, but it's an excellent painting!!! There's a junk floating on the sea, if you didn't pick up on that.

The last one is still a work in progress. Once again, from a picture he'd taken. Took him several tries to get the perspective right on the shack. It's supposed to have a water tower in the background, but he says he can't get the lines for it to come out straight. He gave up on that, and is adding in a flying saucer. I approve!!!

Chimneys

My last post brought to remembrance that I still have quite a bit I could blog on about several of our last vacations.

This one is more about our trip to Tennessee a couple years back.

We had found out from some locals about one of the trails out in the Great Smokey Mountains, a hike out to a natural rock formation called The Chimneys. My younger son and I left mom at the trail head with the rental car and started out.

I went back through my pictures and selected several of the good ones from the hike.

Another of those situations where almost all the pictures came out really good!!!

It was only a little over three miles of a hike, but it's upsy most of the way. It gains almost 1,500 feet.

The first part follows along a stream bed, so there were many water shots.

It started out as a bright sunny day with a few clouds, but as the day (and our hike) went on, it became more and more cloudy.

Which was actually pretty nice, otherwise it would have been even more sweaty!!!

It appears that the only actual shot I got of the wood beam steps that were prevalent for the later part of the hike was one of my bad shots, where it blurred.

The main color that we saw was the forest green, which made the red flowers and red leaves we saw stand out all the more.

When we got to the actual Chimneys, the trail ends and you have to scramble up the exposed black rock.

There's not a picture that shows it very well, but it goes up. Almost straight up!!!

There were some other hikers up there to take a shot of both of us.

And the last couple of shots were from my newly acquired smart phone, a selfie of both of us.

And another, attempting to get a shot of the sheer steepness.