IT RUNS! IT RUNS!

Greetings!
I hope you enjoyed Christmas and the New Year celebrations. I know I certainly did. Family gathered and we had some great meals together. I spent less time in the shop however, and more time goofing off. We took my young son Joey to Seattle a couple of days ago so he could report for more Marine Corps training at Fort Benning, Georgia. It was nice to have him home for awhile, even though he spent most of his time with friends from school. We got to see him on Sundays as he recuperated from a week of intense merry making. He's a good boy, I don't worry about his activities. I just wonder why they can't do the activities during daylight hours and sleep when it's dark outside. 

In case some of you were wondering, my hens are still laying, even in the middle of winter. We're getting 4-6 eggs daily from the 6 chickens. Check out this picture of a recent gathering: one of the eggs looked like somebody was in a hurry to get outside and play. It's as hard as the other eggs, but looks like it's still forming. We've had one or two like this before and they're just fine on the inside. I guess sometimes appearances can be deceiving.

In the time I spent in the shop I finished sanding all the decaying clear from the paint on the '68 Camaro; Grace. It's ready for the patch panels to be added as soon as the puppies are old enough to move out of the shop. Yes, the dumbest dog in the Pacific Northwest had 5 puppies - all identical black. If you're at all interested, we'll be giving them away to good homes in a few weeks. Contact me if you're interested, OR, if your kids saw this post and they're interested and you made the mistake of letting them see the puppy in the picture.

You may not have heard, but Gary's '51 Chevy coupe is now running! Then again, you MAY have heard, because there are no mufflers yet! It started up and went right to an idle! That's the beauty of using EFI. With a carbureted engine, I would have been tuning and testing until it seemed to run okay. Did you know that this 1987 vintage fuel injection computer (that's mounted under the glove box) can make up to 600 adjustments per second while the engine is running to keep the fuel/air mix correct? That beats carburetion so bad. SO bad.

I've ordered some Hushpower II mufflers, made by Flowmaster. They're more expensive than the more common 40 series Flowmasters, but they're narrow and long, like a 50s glasspack muffler so they can be distanced farther from the fuel system mounted along the frame rail (See the December 11th post, "NOW I HAVE GAS!"). So, until the mufflers arrive I'm spending some time trying to utilize gas-charged struts for the hood props, instead of using the creaky, archaic springs that came with the car in 1951. It seems I may need a mechanical engineer to design the system. I've tried a few different positions but it won't close all the way with some struts in some positions, and won't hold the hood up in other positions. 

Each time I change experimental positions, I have to weld mounts to the cowl & hood hinges. I'm going to have some cosmetic repair work to do when I finally discover the correct combination of positioning and strut power. You see, some struts can support 30lbs, some over 100lbs. The stiffer ones make lifting the hood very easy, but impossible to close. Forcing it will damage the hood. I had my old friend Bill come out to the secret lab Saturday to help me figure it out and we got closer, but I'm going to have to spend another day on it tomorrow to get the right combo. 

But it runs!!

Doug