I found a cheap 1968 C series pickup on Marketplace, so I took a chance and drove three hours in beautiful fall sunshine to look at it this morning. Having talked to the owner, he didn’t know much about it other than the pictures provided. They showed a 2WD in original Bahama blue, with a floor-shifted manual behind a V8 of some unspecified size. It had a full-length bed, something I like. There was visible rust on the cowl seam and along the side of the bed; this seems to be common with this model. The glass looked to be intact, and the interior of the cab was in decent shape from what I could tell. The camper shell on the back may or may not have saved it from pooling water and rust. The big questions I had were:
- What engine is in it, and does it turn?
- How are the cowl vent assemblies (the achilles heel of this series)?
- Does it have power steering or power brakes?
- What shape are the front brakes in? (are they the dreaded Lockheed brakes whose parts are impossible to find?)
- Which carb does it have?
The drive up was uneventful, but got off to a bad start; I’d told Google to avoid tolls but it immediately pointed me at the Harbor Tunnel; I reconfigured and made it up there by 11AM.
In person, the truck was in worse shape than the photos (big surprise). The rust was worse than the pictures let on all the way around.
I figured what I’d do is check the cowl vents first and if they were toasty I’d write off the truck—in order to repair this, you have to pull the windshield, drill out the welds on the cowl, and then do a bunch of surgery to replace metal.
I put the borescope down the driver’s side and found the cavity full with a mouse nest; the passenger side was rusted through in several places. So that was bad. What was worse were all the places the PO had sprayed foam insulation, which is essentially a death sentence for metal. It was behind the front fender, inside the cowl seam, under the dashboard, inside the rear fenders, and a bunch of other places I couldn’t see.
The doors were almost perfect, and the bed floor was in excellent shape due to the cap, but someone had rear-ended the truck and damaged both rear endcaps.
The engine was probably a 304 or larger, due to this truck being spec’d as a Camper Special, but the fan didn’t turn—not a good sign after sitting for 25 years; the last inspection sticker read 1997. It also had factory power steering, which was somewhat rare for a pickup of this vintage.
With all of the faults, I decided to walk away. I’m itching to find a new project, but I really want to be smart about it and move on the right one. This was just too much to tackle too far away; if it was local I’d have offered $1K and brought it home to either tinker with or part out.
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I picked up a neat little toy through the Amazon Prime Day specials, something that will get some immediate use and hopefully pay for itself down the line: a lighted borescope, for looking deep down into dark places like cylinders and inside frame rails and down into AC ducts. It’s pretty slick; the control pad has a nice wide screen a little smaller than that of my iPhone SE and a keypad with a set of sturdy buttons. The wire is permanently connected to the unit and is a good bendable but stiff material that makes things easy to direct the way you want it to. It’s got a video and camera feature with a 32GB card that allows for all the photos and videos to fit and be offloaded to a computer. Here are some pictures from the spare SV 345 in my garage:
Cylinder 1
Cylinder 3
(Cylinder 5 and 7 are missing because the engine is sitting next to a shelf, making access to those two plugs impossible right now).
Cylinder 2
Cylinder 4
Cylinder 6
Cylinder 8
There are clearly some carbon deposits directly on top of the pistons; I know the moisture is Marvel Mystery Oil so I’m not too worried about that. The carb on this engine wasn’t burning the fuel completely so it was probably knocking; hopefully it wasn’t run to the point where it overheated. If I get this thing on a proper stand I’ll maybe pull the heads off to see if I can clean the pistons and cylinder walls—but that’s in the future.
This weekend I’m going to use it to peek into the cylinders in Bob’s Chrysler and see what’s going on with the 440.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I finished reading Heat 2 last week, and I have to say, after a bit of a slow start, I did enjoy it. There’s an obligatory catch-you-up at the beginning that could have been left out; it reads like a fanboy reading bits of the script to another fanboy, and it’s all cringe. Once past that stumble, the story picks up right where the movie ended, following the only surviving member of the criminals and the detective chasing him. The novel is split into sections, a what-came-before story and a what-came-after, and of the two I think I enjoyed the former more than the latter. Michael Mann’s screenplays often feature a driven male who falls in love with a powerful female—OK, fine—but the second half of the story here reminds me a bit too much of his remake of Miami Vice. The story is meticulously researched and tightly plotted, and I enjoyed how he wrapped up the action on both threads, as well as how we get to see some familiar characters return. Overall I’d love to see this adapted into a movie or series, though I have no idea who they’d get to play these roles.
It’s getting colder and I’m getting no younger. The cold is affecting me more than it ever has; I’ve taken to wearing fleece through most of the winter when I’m indoors. I’ve got some traveling coming up where I’m going to need the Scout, and I don’t relish the thought of a two-hour morning drive under the soft top at 45˚. Putting the hardtop back on is always bittersweet, because I live for driving the truck under a warm summer sun. After 25 years, I’ve got the method down to an art; it took me about two hours to get the soft top off and packed, and the hardtop lowered and bolted down. At some point I’d love to have one of those motorized hoists they sell for Jeeps but I think I need a garage upgrade before I do that.
Meanwhile I’ve been working on the second of two A/C boxes. When I took out the plastic vent housings, two of them broke at the pins that hold them into place, so I cleaned them up but can’t use them. The box is painted and just about ready for reassembly, and once that’s done I’ll have two clean boxes on the shelf.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
“Giant Peach” by Wolf Alice has been stuck in my head for the last couple of days. They were recommended to me on the YouTubes with a different song, so I fell into their catalog and found a bunch of tracks I really like. This one has a great beat, excellent guitars, and some fantastic double-tracked vocals.
The other one that’s been on repeat in my head is “Moaning Lisa Smile”:
There are some elements to both of these tracks that remind me of shoegaze from the late 80’s, which is, I suppose, why I like them so much.
We did a very unusual thing on Wednesday, and enjoyed ourselves immensely: we traveled to Virginia to meet up with Jen’s childhood friend Raquel and her family to tour Mount Vernon, George Washington’s family home. The weather was gray and gloomy for most of the morning, but as the day unfolded and as we walked the grounds the sky cleared up and we got to really soak in the beauty of the location. I’d never been there before, so it was a new experience for me, and I enjoyed being with Finn to see it with her. From there we headed into D.C. for dinner with their family; they are lovely people and we would definitely like to see them again when they’re in town.
Saturday we traveled down to Bob’s house to keep things moving forward for him; while Jen cleaned the kitchen cabinets I rebuilt the surround to his bedroom door, sorted out a pile of random keys, finished his Ring doorbell install, and made a bunch of other improvements around the house. Having the Ring hooked up is another way for us to keep track of what’s going on, and it’ll be good to be able to check in when we need to.
This morning the ladies got themselves cleaned up for church and I got dressed to take Hazel out for a long walk. Our first stop was at the farmer’s market, where I stocked up on empanadas and found Jen some fresh yellow peaches; while I was there I ran into an old friend from my gaming days and walked the neighborhood for an hour or so in the sunshine, catching up. From there I headed back home to catch up on some housework. I’ve spent all spring and summer hauling tools to Bob’s house to complete long-delayed work at his place, and each project is involved enough that I’m pretty worn out by Sunday morning. That means our house is suffering from neglect and there are projects around here that I haven’t tackled at all.
At some point in the last six months, one of our wood cradles had a little too much to drink and leaned over onto its neighbor for support. I looked out there last weekend and realized the whole thing had tipped over into the neighbor’s yard, so I knew I was going to have to do something before the snow started falling.
After putting the hardtop on the Scout, I wheeled a bunch of tools over and started throwing wood into a pile on the lawn. When the cradles were empty, I rebuilt one and attached them both to a long set of feet, then screwed braces into each of the endcaps so that they have lateral and vertical support. Finn arrived home just in time to help me reload each cradle with wood, and when that was complete we put the tarp back on top to keep things dry. It looks janky but I’m not interested in aesthetics; I just want dry wood for the winter.
I read this article with great interest, as it touches on a lot of the reasons I’m not teaching anymore: a highly respected professor of organic chemistry, the man who literally wrote the book on the subject, was fired by NYU because students felt he was grading too hard. (archive link) His students got together and petitioned the university and their response, instead of upholding the academic standards of the institution, was to end his contract.
“I think this petition was written more out of unhappiness with exam scores than an actual feeling of being treated unfairly,” wrote Mr. Benslimane, now a Ph.D. student at Harvard. “I have noticed that many of the students who consistently complained about the class did not use the resources we afforded to them.”
My experience felt very similar in the last two semesters I taught design: there was no desire to learn, just to get a passing grade to continue on to the next class. I’m terrified what kind of doctors this program will produce.
OK, Pitchfork released a “250 Best Songs of the 1990’s” list; as with many of these lists I have concerns. The top five songs are:
5. Missy Elliott: “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”
4. Liz Phair: “Fuck and Run”
3. Aaliyah: “Are You That Somebody?”
2. Björk: “Hyperballad”
1. Mariah Carey: “Fantasy (Remix)” [ft. Ol’ Dirty Bastard]
Missy Elliot: sure. The Liz Phair track is absolutely a top five, for what it says and what it meant for women in the early 1990’s. I don’t know much about Aaliyah; the song is OK, I guess. There are better Björk tracks to choose from—”Human Behaviour” and “Army of Me”, for starters. And then there’s Mariah Carey.
In a note describing how the list was put together, Pitchfork’s editor explains their reasons:
…because our understanding of it changes the more we learn; because there is still a thrill in discovering something we didn’t know about (or quite get) before; because taste evolves and grows, enriched by the passing of time.
Their previous list, from 2010, ranked the top five as
5. Wu-Tang Clan “Protect Ya Neck”
4. Radiohead “Paranoid Android”
3. Dr. Dre [ft. Snoop Doggy Dogg] “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang”
2. Pulp “Common People”
1. Pavement “Gold Soundz”
Five bands featuring posturing males either bragging or complaining; not a woman in sight. So yeah, I support re-examining these lists, and putting them through new lenses; I just don’t think I would have put Mariah Carey/ODB at the top here. Especially as the original version of Fantasy is better anyway.
Earlier this year, we took Jen’s Dad to his local Verizon store to buy an iPhone and an Apple Watch. The phone is nice to have, but the watch was the important part; we wanted to be able to track his heart, blood pressure, and have some kind of fall monitor for when he’s home by himself. We sat in the store for what felt like way too much time, double-checked all of the information, and walked out with the hardware. It worked fine for a couple of weeks, but I started getting worried when I didn’t see any bills coming to the house. When I reviewed his bills at the beginning of September, we found out that the statements were going to the wrong address and Verizon had shut the phone off for nonpayment. Thus began a truly Kafkaesque descent into customer service hell.
Because they’d never given us a customer PIN number, we couldn’t handle anything over the phone, so Jen had to take him in to a local store. They spent four hours watching the CSR there bounce from department to department on the phone, disappear repeatedly into the back room to talk to a manager, but were only able to walk out with an updated address, zero balance, and a customer PIN. The phone was still deactivated and couldn’t be reset.
I brought all of the paperwork down to his house yesterday, drank a cup of coffee, plugged in my Airpods, and got on the phone to try and sort things out. For the first two hours I went through four CSRs until I was handed off to a nice man named Del, who kindly and patiently walked me through resetting the phone and then the watch for another hour and a half. Thankfully, he’s now got a phone, a watch that works, and I can see account statements online. If his Ring battery had charged properly, I could have gotten that set up as well, but it’s going to have to wait until next week.
The CR-V had a bit of an adventure on Thursday, where it slipped out of gear in a parking lot, rolled down a hill, and backed itself into another car. Nobody was hurt, and the car is still driveable, but the rear hatch is severely dented where it hit the other vehicle. I opened it in our driveway, after removing the spare tire, and tried to close it, but either the hinge or the door is bent and it needs to be lifted slightly to latch properly. I found another silver CR-V in a pick-your-own yard about twenty minutes away and tried to run out there this morning to grab the hatch, but Hurricane Whatever has been dumping water on us for the second straight day. Walking through a muddy junkyard in a rainstorm is unpleasant; walking through a muddy junkyard carrying 80 lbs. of hatch is just stupid. My upcoming week is pretty nuts but I’m going to try to get out there next week to grab it before they crush the car.