Friday, November 13, 2009

Engines and pop tops and seat frames, oh my!


Craig has been working like crazy on our bay window. Last weekend he suspended the pop top from the ceiling of our garage in order to give him room to work on installation.

It was a pretty slick operation if you ask me. The biggest challenge (and we knew it was coming) is our dear old friend Bondo. As mentioned before, BB used to be a camper and then someone started the process of converting her to a transporter, which means that all 75 (I hardly think that’s an exaggeration) of the holes for screws that hold the pop-top and its canvas in place have been bondoed over, which means that as Craig drilled into the roof, bondo pieces chipped away, in turn chipping the paint on BB’s roof. Oh well, we weren’t going for a show vehicle.

As Craig has been cruising through the pop-top project (I’m highly impressed by the excellent work he’s done on this by the way), I’ve been working more slowly on recovering the front seats. So far, no re-covering has happened, but I have successfully removed one of the covers, taking care not to break any of the little metal tabs that hold the upholstery on the frame.

The covers were hashed, but I think that the frames are in pretty nice shape and I’m excited for their future.

After learning that this case was cracked…

We heard about this 1776 longblock which has sat in a box for a few years and was built by Serrano (hopefully before he got tired) and we are really excited. The dorks that we are, we immediately got stuck on our—building of the top end the engine—project when we realized that we didn’t know what size of spark plugs we need. I think we got an answer on this question today and now we’re gonna cruise through this project—I know it. (ha! Yeah right!)

It’s a beauty, eh? We paid extra for the pink Bubble Yumm. (What the heck is that gunk anyway?)

PS I almost forgot to mention that the dude finally showed up to install the windshield and he totally redeemed himself by doing an awesome job and he was really cool to boot.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Eleven Things We've Done.

1) Sanded down Jasmine’s roof in places that were (I thought) rusty metal. Turns out it was just brown primer—yea!
2) Went on vacation
3) Came home. Lame.
4) Sorted through the miscellaneous parts in our garage (thanks for your help Chad)
5) Took the relevant pieces of the bottom end to the mechanic to build engine for our bay window
6) Did emission testing on Jasmine. She failed (big surprise).
7) Changed Jasmine’s oil
8) Changed Jasmine’s belt
9) Called someone to install our bay window windshield…he hasn’t shown up yet…hopefully tomorrow.
10) Painted the bad spots on Jasmine’s roof (one coat…then it rained).
11) Found out that the case we took to the mechanic is cracked. We’re planning on opening a cracked case museum in our garage.

I do want to point out that Craig did about…90% of all of this stuff. I just hung out at work and interrupted with several phone calls. (Thanks honey!)