JamesSlusher.com

I’m having a horrible day.  Sucky suckiness with suck on top.

I have an August 1st deadline to have the truck moving under it’s own power.  That means I have today and tomorrow to hook it up.

I started the day with 5 things to do to get it going.  None of these things should take more than 30 to 45 minutes.  I got 2 things done.  In 8 hours.

I needed to go get the new driveshaft for the truck.  There is no way in hell it would fit into my Honda Civic.  I mention this to my neighbor (who is helping me with drywall repair in my house) and I tell him that I don’t want to get his Tahoe dirty.  He suggests hooking his small trailer to the back and using that.

Sounds like a good idea.

We hook it up and I drive down to Master Fabricators and pick it up.  As I’m backing out of the parking lot, this Chow puppy that they have running around the shop comes jetting out into my path.  I swerve to miss it and the trailer swings around sharply and punches a small hole in the side of the SUV.  Not major damage, but noticeable and probably expensive.  And definitely embarrassing.

So this guy is working on my house and doing me a favor and I repay him by scratching up his truck.  Nice.  I go home and give him the bad news and he takes it quite well.

That is gonna turn out to be a very expensive driveshaft.

So the driveshaft, thankfully, pops right up into place like it should.  Thank God for small favors.  The transmission cooler lines take me forever to line up and tighten down.  The transmission linkage is a being a huge pain in the butt and I can’t seem to get the darn thing to pop into place like it should.  The transmission filler tube is designed for a lower riding intake manifold so I’m gonna have to get that bent somewhere.  And I still have to tighten down some crossbars.

So I have 3 things that need to be done tomorrow.

Let’s hope it is a better day.

Listen to this:

Indeed, that is the old F100 firing up. I ended up cheating and turning it back into a carbureated engine rather than fuel-injected. But I had to do what I had to do. There is still a bunch of work that it needs, I am steadily progressing towards full utility.

I’m excited.

I madethe F100 make noise for the first time in well over a year today. It is getting gas and it has spark but it hasn’t actually started up yet. The noise it was making was actually the cranking noise, but that is still better than the paperweight noise it had been making.

So I need to figure out exactly what is going on. There are 2 possibilities that seem most likely: first, the timing could be off. When I put it to top dead center to install the distributor, i might have put it on the exhaust stroke rather than the compression stroke. Second, the gas could be old enough that it is no longer any good. It is a year and a half old. I’m gonna get some new gas and pour it into the intake to see if I get any reaction. If not, I will try changing the spark plug wires around to see if I had it on the wrong stroke.

Unfortunately, I’m going into work some OT tonight (and tomorrow and the next day) and then I work my normal shift this weekend, so it will be a week before I get to try to delve further into the mysteries of the F100. But it made noise.

I am, in my heart of hearts, a TWAC.

It’s not something I’m proud of. After a lifetime of being a TWAC, it is somewhat ingrained.

I’m trying to change.

For instance, the truck rebuild is going on way too long. I compare where I am with the amount of time this project has been going on and it is quite embarassing. I should have been done months ago.

If you compare where I am with the fact that if I had sent that motor out to be rebuilt and put it right back in, the whole process would have taken less than 4 days. That is horrifying.

So I have begun baby steps towards self-improvement. The first thing is To Do lists. I’m making a new one every day so that I get that day’s stuff out of the way. When I have it written down it is much easier to organize what order I’m going to do things in.

The second thing is that I pick one thing a day to finish on the truck. Just one thing. It doesn’t even have to be a hard thing. I just do that one thing and if there is more I can or want to do, great. That’s gravy. But if I do one thing every day, eventually I will run out of things. It’s like the old adage about how you eat an elephant. One bite at a time. I took a bite yesterday and I took a bite today and eventually there will be no bites left to take.

I mounted the new fuel pump today and it turned out to be about 1000 times easier than I expected it to be. If I hadn’t gotten sidetracked by projects for others, I might very well have cranked the thing up tomorrow.

I still think I can get it going in the next couple of weeks, even with my more hectic than normal schedule.

The whole thing is very exciting and I’m so thrilled I think I will change back into my work clothes and spend a bit more of the daylight on it.

I now have the engine and transmission fully installed in the truck. What I mean by fully is that originally the transmission crossmember (to which the transmission mount attaches) wouldn’t go back into place. It sat about 2 inches behind the holes in the frame for it. Using the engine hoist, a crowbar and copious amounts of vulgarities, I managed to move the whole thing forward. So now it is mounted in the truck the way God and Henry Ford intended it.

So tomorrow, after my trip to the dentist, I am going to run the fuel lines, mount the fuel pump and start attaching wires to the ignition switch.

It may seem like a long-time since I started this project, but I am amazed that I really am only a day or two’s worth of futzing around– no really more like a few hours– before I can attempt to crank this bad boy up.

The 7/30/05 episode of The Chair and Automan is out. Download the MP3 directly here. Or better yet, get a podcatching client and subscribe to this podcast here. My Odeo Channel is here.

In this episode:

I talk about Emily’s birthday, I call out all of the people with audio capabilities that have not yet done a promo for me, I talk about repaying good advice and working on the truck.

I play some songs :

• Before The Money Tree by Encrypted Veil w/ Joani Ransom.
• Money by Michael Grimes.
• Good Money by Move.meant.
• Money Matters by The Regulars

Audio feedback/promos are always welcome at jaslusher AT gmail DOT com.

Later.

I spent the entire day working on the F100 with my Father-in-law. We did tons of work and got almost nowhere because we spent much time doing and then undoing and then redoing.

I did, however, learn enormous amounts and made some very valuable contacts.

First, I learned that I’m not the first guy to try this sort of thing around here. Second, I learned that Charlie at Rex Auto Parts is an awesome man, smart and honest, everything you want in your parts guy. In fact, he is the one that let me know that I’m not the first. He has done it himself and he was happy to share some of his hard-earned experience with me. You don’t get that from $7 an hour Autozone morons. Not that you can’t get good parts from Autozone. You can. You just can’t get good advice there. Don’t even try. If you decide to ask an Autozone parts person for auto advice, you are rolling the dice. Trust me on that one. I haven’t asked for advice from one in a decade, but I hear them giving bad advice all the time. Third, I learned that Rick from American Speed Center is also an all around mensch and has done this sort of conversion repeatedly. All sorts of helpful hints from him.

Now, I’m only slightly closer to finishing the truck now than I was at the start of the day. Occasionally it is necessary to take a step back to figure out how to go forward. And Rick and Charlie were just what the doctor ordered.

We buttoned down the front of the truck, so that is done. We installed the newer fuel tank only to find that the filler neck is a different size than the original and that replacing it is ungodly expensive. Charlie also told us about a work around that involves using the old tank. So back in that went.

We decided to put the transmission crossmember and mount in only to find that the crossmember no longer lines up with the holes in the frame. Same engine and transmission basics, but somehow the whole thing is a tad longer. So we tried doing a swap in which we reversed the brackets that hold the motor mounts. They normally set a bit towards the back and we thought that if we swapped the sides it would swing everything towards the front a little. No such luck, they aren’t symmetrical. So back in they went.

So we did lots of work and only made a slight bit of headway. But I met 2 guys that will probably be invaluable assets to me for the rest of this project. That and I will now get all my supplies from Rex Auto Parts. I will pay a little more, but get a much greater value for the money.

F100 Reassembled

Originally uploaded by jaslusher.

Holy Cow! I found a truck in my driveway! She is finally getting reassembled. I’m still a fair bit of work away from cranking her up (the fuel tank is still not installed), but at least I’m getting to where it looks like it could run.

Fuel Injected Engine

Originally uploaded by jaslusher.

Here is part of the reason I am so tired. This is huge for me to have this engine in the truck. There is still quite a bit to do, maybe 20 to 30 hours left of work, but this makes such a huge difference in the way everything looks.