Friday, July 30, 2010

Anybody need dental work done?

Yesterday afternoon I got home, changed over, and went right to the garage. The clouds were gathering, so I wasn't going to chance working on the e30 outside. I had to do SOMETHING. So I got underneath the mini and started poking around at the catalytic converter. Luckily, the car is a '76, so I don't have to play that anymore; also, the cat is it's own section with a flange on each side, which makes it easy to buy the cat delete pipe that bolts right in from the UK. Anyways, I couldn't quite get enough leverage on these rusted, heat-cycled bolts, so I broke out the air impact gun. The gun is a little bulky and it wasn't a straight shot at the 4 bolts, so I got a wobbly extension. While effective, the wobbly tends to throw the socket AND the nut it just loosened in two opposite and deadly trajectories. I was under the mini, so there wasn't too much room, they usually bounced back up and hit the bottom of the mini and came to a rest just. out. of. reach. After this happened the first time, I thought about either looking away or maybe trying SOMETHING different. Honestly, the first thing I thought was, hey, if one of these bounces up and hits me in the mouth, I'm going to need some dental work. So I made sure to close my mouth so my teeth weren't hanging out in the breeze. The socket only hit me once, and not that hard on my left pointer finger. No biggie, now I've bled for the day. All four came off with a minimum of fuss, and as I was pulling it loose, all kinds of stuff was falling out. THAT can't be good. Putting in that "test pipe" should really open up the exhaust.
I then ate dinner and went to Orlando's to do the alternator. Everything went together pretty well. I took my sweet time, got the belts adjusted nice and tight, was just about to put the ground strap on the alternator and realized that we were a bolt short. It's been about three weeks since we worked on it, so we did a quick search, then a more detailed search, no dice. Luckily, it's a pretty common bolt, so we'll just pull it off one of our spare engines/cars. Really wanted to finish and button it up last night, but it was getting late. It'll probably take 20 minutes to finish it up now... Good sign that we were getting close to the M6 running: We had a very healthy rain last night.

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