I mean I still have a shit ton of work to do to this thing and I can’t keep anything clean to save my life in the first place.
I always marvel at other peoples machines that are just spotless and wonder how they manage that.
Mine get dirty by me just walking by them.
Quality control?
What quality control?
Holy fucking shit.
Hoo boy.
So I was trying to get the carriage lock that I made for the old bed to fit in the new bed.
As you can plainly see, there were some issues there.
I couldn’t even get it started in the hole at first.
Since it’s not really a critical fit, I got tired of messing with it and just took it over to the belt sander and started grinding the edges down until it would fit into the opening.
After I finally got it started, it slid in until I got to the first cross brace casting and butted up against another glob of flashing so then I had to take it out, flip the bed over and attack it with the rotary tool with a small grinding wheel on it to knock that down flush.
Little by little I messed with it until I could pretty much get it to slide all the way through.
Then the real fun started..
I fought that little bastard for well over an hour, back and forth, back and forth.
But I finally won that little battle.
Then I cleaned the mess up and started in on the saddle for the Cross Slide.
Holy Mother of God.
This is going to be ugly.
Just because I don’t have enough to do, The Old Guy across the street was trying to haul some bedding material in his 90’s vintage Dodge 4 Wheel Drive truck that I wanted to buy instead of the Chebby yesterday and it was missing and barely running by the time he got back from wherever he went to get the stuff.
This has been an intermittent on going issue because the thing just sits all the time.
He wanted me to fix it and I tried like hell to get out of it but The Wifely Unit basically ordered me to work on it because Good Neighbor type shit.
So here in a few minutes I am going to get the distinct pleasure of climbing up on top of that fucker and trying to figure out what it needs,. He said it would run right up with it in neutral and no load but as soon as he put it in gear it would start missing and that he barely made it home.
I’m going to start with the plug wires and go from there. Naturally it’s got a fuel injected 318 in it with the distributor UNDERNEATH the cowling at the top of the damn firewall.
I always hated them fuckers at Dodge for pulling that shit.
I suppose I should be kind of impressed that the moron even got that far with it.
Still, on a scale of 1 to 10 for Stupid Things To Do Even Though You Should Know Better, that’s a 12 right there..
It was damn near 80 degrees around here yesterday and going to be warm for the next few days.
Yay, right?
CUE UP THE WIFELY UNIT.
Damn.
It’s hot, I have to go to my Mothers.
You need to recharge my Air Conditioning. By the way, I have a headlight out too.
Fuck me.
You would think that this would be a fairly straightforward little task.
But no.
She has….. a Ford.
The dirty little sonofabitch that I absolutely hate even opening the hood on.
And THIS, is why I have an eternal hard on for the assholes who design modern (cough 17 year old, cough) cars.
Two years ago it took me a solid half an hour just to find the charging port on her little Ford Focus.
I’m not joking.
I finally found it by Braille, reaching my hand down into the front of the engine compartment, following the A/C lines by feel.
When I did find it, I couldn’t believe it.
Now, I know WHY they put it where they did, so the design engineer isn’t really the asshole here.
It’s the fucking Bean Counters.
In their quest to save a buck, someone made the decision that at a certain point on the assembly line as they were building these little fuckers, the cheapest and easiest place to have this A/C port would be riiiiiiiiight here,
so they could slam a charge in the system as it moved down the line.
Yes, that is the front right tire and the inner fender well peeled back so I can get to it.
Even then, it’s a fucking game of Twister trying to get my left hand up in there to be able to grab and unspin the cap.
Getting the Quick Connect at the end of the hose on the re-charging cannister up in there and clipped on is a whole nuther ball of wax.
But I finally won in the end.
Since there was still a bunch of Freon left in the can because I was just topping hers off, I decided to open the hood on my Chebby and top that off while I was at it.
Notice any difference?
Right up on top, out in the open with the Sun shining right down on the fucker.
The way it was for fifty fucking years and the way it should be until the last motor vehicle rolls off the line.
Dirty sonsabitches.
So they are close.
In reality there is only so much good measuring past the third decimal point is going to do me as a hobbyist with limited ways to do anything with that information.
I did want to do a comparison and I did verify there is quite the taper in the bed, at least on this one side.
At least .005 from one end to the other.
That doesn’t sound like much until you consider that needs to be lapped out.
By hand.
I haven’t even gotten to the prism side yet
It also talks about money I think.
