tintedpane.com

Saturday:

1:30pm - Jevon helps me move tools to my place.

2:00pm - Drain coolant and remove radiator, coolant hoses, fan clutch

2:30pm - Remove P/S, A/C, alternator belts

3:00pm - Eliot’s hardware run to get 3mm hex bit and masking tape to label items

3:45pm - Remove sparkplug wires, distributor cap, rotor

4:30pm - Remove vibration dampener pulley and camshaft belt

5:30pm - Label and remove various electrical harnesses and coolant hoses

6:00pm - Remove exhaust downpipe nuts. Struggle with fuel lines

6:30pm - Remove remaining heater core hoses from firewall

6:50pm - Remove valve cover and break (loosen) head bolts

7:00pm - Attempt to pull cylinder head off. Run into 3 attached hoses/wiring

• One remaining heater core hose attached to rear of cylinder head
• Diagnostic plug and various wiring ground points attached to intake
• Fuel return hose from front of engine

7:15pm - After standing in engine bay to lift off cylinder head, success. Cylinder head removal DONE.

Thanks to Jevon for helping out. Much obliged.

Pics to come later here:

edit: had a scare — forgot to put the cylinder block on a stand to prevent the open valve from bending. fortunately a quick check saw there was a cooling hose the block was sitting on to prevent the valve from hitting the ground.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060817-7533.html

John Gilmore will have his day in the Supreme Court. The court will argue about the secret directive that requires having ID when travelling on a plane. I’ve been following this for a few years now and it’s good to see that it’s finally moving somewhere, whatever the outcome.

Since prostitution is legal in Germany, if you are unemployed and don’t accept work as a prostitute, you could lose unemployment benefits, according to this.

Fortunately it was a mistake.

It’s that time again. Since the old thing is now nearing 2 decades, it looks like it has a blown head gasket. Gonna do some testing this weekend to be sure. Got a leak-down tester to pinpoint the problem. The manual did speculate that having a massive pressure drop between the 1st and 6th cylinders using the compression test usually indicates a blown gasket.

The local shop wanted $200 for a leak-down test and $1000 if the gasket needed to be replaced. So far, the leak-down kit and parts come to about $275. If I get a compressor, that might be another $200. Hopefully we won’t break any studs taking the top end off. I’m pretty excited. Found one of my old suppliers which beats all the other online suppliers by 10-35%.

Does anyone know the proper procedure for installing a stud? For certain, one of the valve cover studs is stripped and possibly one of the exhaust manifold studs are missing. Last time this happened, we just used a stud installer/extracter to put it in the Type-R block.

Got my first whiff of them today. Put up a new page under Politics.

The line-item veto was ruled unconstitutional in 1998. Nothing was said about Signing Statements which are basically amendments that the president adds before signing a bill into a law. What I found out was that Bush (and many of his predecessors) have been adding such statements to the text from congress before signing. So this is why he’s never vetoed anything. He just reinterprets them on the fly.

There are some links under the politics page.

Congratulations! You solved the Sudoku in 4 minutes, 54 seconds!

Rank: Top 31%

I’m sure 31% of you out there are faster, but I’m pretty happy. My average time still sucks.