A day late and a dollar short*, you know what time it is. (*I bought a candy bar from a vending machine today)
When we last left off, I'd half-arsed some makeshift tailpipes to get the exhaust off my legbones whilst syncing the ITBs.
That exhaust. It needed an...uh...adjustment.
I had multiple text convos going simultaneously brainstorming ideas and reasonability-checking my madness. Sparing you all the hideousness that never came to fruition, here's what was decided upon.
Fast n dirty mockup using jack stand inserts to hold 'mufflers' in situ and blue masking tape holding well-worn (but surprisingly even) cutoff and grinding discs.
Commitment issues? Not this guy. #fullsend
This looks alarmingly like insect pupa. :vomitemoji:
Not sure if this is a success or not just yet...
Looks familiar tho
A bit more cut and paste and some twisting about and things are looking much more symmetrical...mostly.
I traced the 'insertion point' (?) of the bumper around the tail pipes, pulled everything out, used a ruler and sharpie as a makeshift slide-rule to move the tracing down ~20mm, cut on the dotted line, evened with a flap-wheel, stabbed it all back in place, and this happened.
That was all done on Saturday and completed before the shadows grew long. I felt pretty accomplished and packed it in.
Sunday
Oh Sunday. Still reeling from Saturday's victory, I wasn't sure if I even wanted to work on the car on Sunday. (Fear of FUBAR. It feels good to get a win sometimes and I didn't want to lose that feeling.)
Alas, my burning desire to drive the car further than the end of my road pressed me into action. Unfortunately Sunday was divided unevenly and sporadically with yard work and FaceTime tech support for my dad, so I did a pretty poor job of taking pictures.
I un-forked the fuel pump wiring. Now the car pulls the power supply and the and the powered side of the relay switch from the stock fuel pump fuse. The MS signals the relay to fire by sending a ground signal. Works perfectly. Stupid mistake finally fixt! Hooray!
I 'fixed' the battery cabling. I moved a little slack around, used some zipties to secure the ends, wrapped the whole lot in corrugated split tube, and called it good. I plan to revisit the fuse block and the trunk wiring in the future. So it needs to be [mostly] safe and that's it for now.
I spent 3 hours forking around with the next item. You'd be forgiven for looking at the final result and thinking it was a 5-15 minute job. Well, I'd forgive you in public but burn your effigy and curse the ground you walked on in private. You know, standard car guy stuff.
The source of all this frustration? The insipid license plate and its lights.
While that was happening, FedEx stopped by with a new windscreen seal and a brake light switch. I unboxed the windscreen seal right before I went in. No pics because no fun until it's in the car with a big [heavy] windscreen in its grasp.
The brake light switch tho...what fun!
Here I found an M16 nut from my stash, used a file to make 6 tiny triangles in the hole in my brake housing thing, and then painstakingly ground down the nut until it was a reasonable interference fit in the brake housing thing. I then cut off its top 1/3 and welded one of the jam nuts to its face. Once cooled, I dabbed on some red Loctite and [quite literally] hammered it into place. From there, I used the multimeter to set the amount of pedal travel before the lights come on and confirmed that the switch works in parallel with the OE pressure-activated switch. Now I have a redundant system that will come on with light foot pressure and have the OE pressure switch as a back-up.
My next task is to rewire that brake light switches to a relay to minimize the current traveling though them and extend their life and reliability.
That's it. I feel like I didn't get anything done on Sunday, but typing it out it sure sounds like I spent all dang day out there on the car. I didn't to anything on it today. I had to drive to work and I was able to confirm that it's my commute that demotivates me the most. I was home before 1700 and was totally flat. No juice. I took a nap, rode my bike, caught up on Pelican threads, ate dinner, and that brings me to here. Tomorrow is a new day and I'll get back on it.