Good Morning! 54F @ 5:30AM. Mostly cloudy skies this morning will become partly cloudy this afternoon. Slight chance of a rain shower. High 64F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.
No rain since midnight; only 0.2" fell all of yesterday, so it looks like this round of storms is done. Looking down into the canyon below the waterline, plants are turning the dull brown dirt bright green quite quickly, so weed season is once again here.
Irv, may all of your adventures be pleasant ones, but some of mine, especially those involving plumbing, often come out to be misadventures before they are done. And involve lots of trips to the hardware store before all the right parts are in place! :laughing:
Looks as though that trailer got tipped over, perhaps on a side hill, while still hitched to something, Eric. The drawbar I welded onto my Craig's List cement mixer was bent that way, too, but it was thin enough that I managed to straighten it using just a big adjustable wrench, er, spanner. Penetrating fluid can work wonders, and so can heat, and when combined do even more. Even more critical is patience; it could take days before any effect can be seen.
Sounds like you're planning a ghoulish welcome for the Trick-or-Treaters this year, Don?:thumbsup:
The neighbor was down before breakfast to look at the bell housing cover yesterday, and managed to get it much closer to final shape than I ever could. He used a 25 pound bag of lead shot as an anvil, and a fist sized steel dolly as a hammer, but eventually ran up against the same problem I had. When the curve at the oil tank side was sized correctly, the curve at the bell housing side was too much, and pulling that back to something that would work also pulled the oil tank side to something that would not. So we went back to his place in hopes of finding a sheet steel cover off of something else in one of his many junk piles, but the piles were stacked too high and too deep to yield anything without scattering them over the wet and muddy ground first. And even then, all seemed to be full of priceless pieces of cars that had seen better days long ago, and even if a suitable piece was turned up, likely the owner couldn't be made to part with it. :laughing: But it was a good change of pace, and when I got back home was enough to provide a fresh perspective that allowed me to take a slightly different approach. The fit I needed was achieved, and I soon had locations for the two mounting screws picked out, and matching holes in the cover and bell housing drilled. I even found, after sticking the 7x magnifiers on my head so I could see the markings, an M6x1.0 tap to cut the proper threads. Alas, the tap was of the bottoming configuration, and the aluminum in the bell housing a bit too tough to let the tap engage. So I'll pick up a a taper version when I'm in town this week and finish up then. To finish the day I smeared a coat of body filler over the outside of the cover to hide all the hammer and vise marks, and will likely get that smoothed up today. So I'll have at least one more thing to paint toward the end of the week when it warms up again. Of course I also managed to put away the spray equipment yesterday. :duh:
I'd hoped to share a picture of the progress with you all, but the computer it's on is feeling cranky this morning. It's restarted itself twice so far just trying to get to the image, so maybe the best course from here is to wait another day or so until I can get that disc drive replaced and the data on the old one moved over before it seizes up all together. Fingers crossed it holds out that long, eh?
Hope everyone's week gets off to a great start!
