Interests

Improvement

domoxazCars, Volvo, ,

So, things have improved on the car. Thanks to Alex, I have a replacement rack in the car. What a cast iron bitch. Not because the rack was difficult to take out but because it was so messy!

I had let the leak fester for way too long and it showed – there was hydraulic fluid everywhere and it mixed with dirt. More on the dirt: there was a rainy night back when the county was redoing the intersection o La Cholla and Ruthrauff and I was driving with one of my kids and it was really dark. So dark that I missed the traffic re-direction away from the dirt side of the road and I went right over this pile of dirt on the border. I thought I’d bent the cross member but fortunately it had only scraped a layer of dirt off the pile and embedded it into the cracks and crevices between the rack and the cross member. Fast forward to present day – I spent at least an hour breaking out pieces of caked greasy mud and nearly vitrified mud chunks. What a pain in the ass.

Mud removed, I moved on to disconnecting everything from the rack. This included hoses, the steering column joint, sway bar, and the tie rod ends. Yeah, about those tie rod ends – nothing was easy on this little project. Normally, you hit the locking nuts with the impact and then tap on them and that loosens them up. Not this time. No amount of beating on the ends was working – time to think outside the box – then I had a Eureka! moment. :). HEAT! I pulled out the torch and hit them with a little heat and all I did was tap the ends and the ends just popped off. Go figure! Problem solved.

Re-assembly was anti-climactic. The only hiccup was that the tie rod ends didn’t have their nylock nuts – not a problem when you have an Ace Hardware nut and bolt selection :). The hardest part was re-assembling the joint on the rack to the steering column. There’s a section on the coupling that has a couple of missing serrations that need to line up so that the steering wheel is in some semblance of ‘straight’. Doing it upside down, even when you have lighting – it was a bear. Everything got put back together, down to the cleaned up metal gravel shield. Best of all – no leaks!

Swapping out the radiator was anti-climactic – just a simple swap. It took me longer to get the radiator repaired at Performance Radiator on Ft Lowell. Only $40 and a couple of days and it was done.

And just like that, over a weekend, the car was almost leak free. There’s still a minor oil leak, need to find where it’s coming from. I know that the rear main seal needs to be replaced and it looks like the oil lines going to the remote oil filter. In addition, it looks like the cam seal is leaking and the water pump is failing. Looks like there’s another weekend of work in my future.

Woo-hoo! New content!

domoxazNews, Personal, , ,

Ok, getting back to work on this site.

I’ve been going through a lot in my personal life – closed the company, out of work for almost 2 years, renewing interest in some, reducing interest in other hobbies, family growing older and losing a member then gaining one. Been a rough few years.

I’m moving away from dedicated work on the Volvo as a hobby and more to making it a dedicated mode of transport because I’m pretty sure the van is dying. It’s got 180K miles on it and needs WAY too much work and funds to make it viable. I’d love to make it work but it needs a power steering pump, hoses, axle shafts, transmission or power train control module, a replacement passenger window lift motor assembly, instrument lights don’t work, radio cuts out, and who knows what else. The Volvo needs some minor work: a catalytic converter, O2 sensor, oil hoses, power steering rack, and pass emissions – all much cheaper than the van – and much easier to work on. The van has awesome AC but beyond that, I can’t see that we need it after the Volvo is back on-line. Either donate it or sell it for scrap. Either way, we have registration on it until next April at which point it may be time to cut our losses.

Mission Data no longer exists as a company. It died in 2009. I now work for another IT company in Tucson where I run the managed services – not glamorous but it pays the bills. For now.  This speaks to my next topic…

I’ve renewed my interest in firearms with a vengeance – to the point that I’ve decided that that will be my next field of endeavor. I’m working on building up my tool and skill set. To that end, I’ve decided that since I can’t afford to buy a lathe and mill, I’ll make them. While this might sound completely insane, I believe it’s completely do-able. My father taught me a lot about mechanics and where needed, there are extensive references on-line. I believe that I’ll have a working prototype by the end of DEC-2012. (unless the Aztecs were right and then this whole topic is mute). Anyway, long story short, I’m doing it. I’ve just finished building two AMD-65 AKM variants, one for me and one for the wife. (There’s more behind that story, to be updated later). I’ll be documenting my progress as time and my laziness allow.

My girls are now in the 5th and 3rd grades, time flies! We’re busier than ever with homework, I don’t know how people have time for any other activities. It’s insane! Having to re-learn math I’d forgotten 20 years ago is a riot, especially when they don’t even TEACH it the same way.

We had to say good bye to Bear, our beloved German Shepherd. He lived a long life, out-living his siblings Gunther and Engel, and adopted sibling, Mouse. We’d resigned ourselves to not having a pet friend for a while when Vicki got this email from some arcane Tucson bulletin board that had an ad for a German Shepherd puppy. Next thing you know, Jack-Jack entered our lives. He’s named after the baby in the cartoon film ‘The Incredibles’ because of the way he gets into trouble. Constantly.