Good Morning!!!! 51F @ 6:15AM. Plentiful sunshine. High 58F. Winds NNW at 10 to 15 mph.
We'll be pulling for you and your wife next week, Rip.
Thin clouds led to weak sunshine and not much heating in the house, so yesterday about noon I lit the wood stove for the first time in about a week. Today we're under a Red Flag Warning for strong winds and low humidity. I just hope folks needing to burn hold off a day or two and let things calm down. Certainly not good for the Ventura fires; Thomas is now well over a quarter million acres with no signs of slowing down.
I think the various carriers hire a lot of temporary help this time of year. No telling when or where packages will arrive, but so far they all seem to have figured out the lock on the parcel box, more than I can say for the regular mail carrier.:confused2:
Speaking of which, a box from BlazeCut showed up here yesterday with twelve feet of fire extinguisher tubing to mount in the van's engine compartment. Vanagons have a bad reputation for catching fire, in part due to old fuel lines, but also a plastic bulkhead fitting that gets brittle and breaks. All new fuel lines in this van, and the fitting has been eliminated. But I also think substituting plastic for the previously metal hatch over the engine bay was a bad move, and will be using the older metal one from the '82.
And speaking of the van, it looks like we'll be sourcing new gears from a company called Weddel, who has been making them for twenty or so years, mostly for the racing crowd. I've been able to find mostly good things about them, but there are some complaints that they make more noise than the factory parts. The only other option comes from Europe, from a company whose main business is catering to Porsche racers. Their products are supposed to be quieter, but they've only been making Vanagon gears for a little less than a year, and I'm not sure I want to be a pioneer.
Got back to cleaning aluminum castings on the old motorcycle yesterday, trying out a new acid cleaner from NAPA. I wasn't impressed, and went back to the Eagle 1 Mag Wheel Etch I had been using. It wasn't working too well, either, until I noticed that once the foam turned gray with dirt, the cleaning action stopped. So I started blotting it up with paper towels, and voila, nice, clean aluminum was hiding underneath there. Since the Eagle 1 has three kinds of acid in it, I also rinsed it with a baking soda solution, then water, and once dry, wiped it down with the NevrDull wadding, which doesn't change the color but leaves a bit of a protective finish. Today I'll start in on the engine castings. Not sure I'll finish, but that'll be the last of the cleaning chores.
Hope everyone enjoys their weekend!
