Wednesday, January 13, 2010

It could be worse

I'm certainly not ready to change places with any of the poor folks in Haiti today. Just the same it was a frustrating day. Sadie was sick and missed school. I stayed home with her in the afternoon.
In the morning I went to see what more needed to be done with the Ford 460 v-8. It is now a $3,000 pickup instead of a $1,000 pickup. What more is there to say?
Then we looked up the torque settings for the manifold bolts and the flywheel bolts. There was a little mix up on those values and we broke off a bolt holding down the clutch to the flywheel. Then there was a mix up on eating lunch. Then I decided to solder a wire onto the terminal on my GPS receiver that provides a radar out sort of signal to run the calc-an-acre. I was doing this at the house as I was instructed to actually stay with Sadie instead of wandering off and working. Well, I managed to drop a dollop of solder onto the circuit board. I think I got it off and perhaps it will continue working. I looked up a replacement GPS on ebay. The only thing that came close to what I have was at $800. Will probably not do that this year.  Sadie and I played legos for a bit. Then i worked on pulling the molding off in the laundry room. Then we played driving games on the Wii. Then i went to sleep while she demonstrated the My Little Pet Shop game. Then Wife appeared. She fixed me supper and I went off to work on the international truck. I drilled out the broken bolt in the flywheel wrong. I got the drill bit just a little off center and I went up to a little bit larger drill bit on than I should of. I got advice from a friend and then just drilled the bolt hole out to 5/16 and tapped it with a 3/8 NC tap. It kind of cleaned out the threads. I found some sleeve and bearing retainer type green loc-tite and smeared that on the threads and then carefully installed a new bolt. Who knows....
Perhaps tomorrow I can get the engine installed...

2 comments:

  1. That's why I don't do mechanic work. Any skill beyond splitting firewood is too technical for me.

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  2. It is not so hard when you have a book. Tractors are much easier with the I&T shop manual. This was mostly dirt and grease and brute force, plus a lot of wires and airlines and stuff that didn't get labeled when it came apart.

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