Shop Truck Winterize
Ah my trusty old shop truck. I spent the summer hauling engines and gear and rear-ends and whatnot. It was time to give it some love before winter snuck up, especially since there was an ominous sounding "clunk" coming from the front suspension when steering at low speeds. I also knew that the front shocks looked terrible. I probably should have spent more time diagnosing, but to me "clunk" means "replace all the damn ball joints and tie rod ends" (and maybe even the steering pittman arm). Shotgun loaded, online parts catalog deployed- a week later I was under my old GMC with a pile of parts and an impact wrench. Unfortunately I learned that GMC beancounters engineered the lower ball joints instead of GM engineers and the result was a mess that required time-intensive and destructive pnumatic and fire-breathing techniques to disassemble. Lucky for me the replacements only required an impact tool. All in all a job that took 4 hours in my head took 2 weekends. C'est la vie. Truck drives like new now, and the front suspension should last until the rapture!Air Compressor
My dad left me a heavier-duty 5HP air compressor with a 50 gallon tank which for all I could tell might have been usable. The electrical box cover was removed, and looked like someone took a messy stab at fixing some sort of problem. Electrical not being sorted, I couldn't really test the motor. There was also some orange RTV gasket goop sticking out from underneath the head, so I knew someone had performed mechanical work on it for reasons unknown. Since I grow increasingly impatient with my small, underpowered pancake compressor in the garage, I really wanted that big tanker to work. So I loaded it up out of my storage unit, delivered it to Mike at Cox Electric in north Urbana, and asked him to go through it.
Mike did his thing, finishing with an apologetic call to report that the motor was bad, the crank was bad, the bearings were bad- in all, not worth fixing. After thanking him and paying for his service, on a lark I asked whether or not they had anything suitable for a small garage like mine. Normally, Cox is a repair shop, not a sales joint. But that day Mike just happened to have something that another customer had turned in to exchange for a larger unit. He explained that it was a fine, low-hours unit they had just inspected and tuned up. I slipped behind the counter, went back in the shop and took a look.
I turned the corner and saw it. My eyes scanned from its foot, mounted on a heavy pallet, upward, past a vertical 80-gallon tank and stopped at the 7.5 horsepower motor and drive belt turning a crank connected to two soupcan-sized pistons configured in an air-cooled V. Overkill, it was complete and utter overkill. This unit could drive four of my shops if I ran them full time. "That'll do", I said. Won't bore you with the logistics of moving that thing, but I will pause to thank fellow car enthusiast friends Jeremy and Josh for swinging by to help move and unload. Not a dainty endeavor.
Furnace
It's getting cold, and in anticipation of winter, I purchased a furnace. The back of my house and garage needed their own unit to stay comfortable. I spent part of November building a mechanical room in the back of the house, arranging for my HVAC contractor to fabricate a plenum and run new ducting, then install the furnace.Electrical
I would like the ending of the compressor story to be me plugging it in and using it to finally blasting those darn stubborn leaf spring bolts loose with my impact wrench. I would like the ending of the furnace story with me under the car not freezing my ass off. As luck would have it, I opened the main panel in my garage and realized there was no place to properly add the needed breakers or circuits. To solve, I decided to install a garage subpanel. I needed it also for the welder and workbench outlets as well anyway. Then I realized the next problem in the stack: there was neither the room nor any open lugs to clamp down the fat 2-gauge wiring needed to add my subpanel. Stupid fused main. The proper way to do this would be to replace the main fuse panel with a breaker panel. That lead to realizing the need to pull the meter on the outside of the building, and probably moving the entire main (old feed is in place that may require updates due to new code requirements). This tightly-coupled mess all of the sudden turned into something I need to bring the power company and licensed electricians (personal rule - as good as I am with electrical, I will not mess with any main feed). It's a lot of work, but it is a huge project I had been avoiding. I just really dislike that I need to do it right now.So there it is. Nothing really going on with the Mustang in the past 6 weeks - I have been jigging up and practicing stitch and plug welds on 18 gauge. Helped out my buddy Jeremy with welding up a 4" exhaust flange for his new turbo setup (pretty cool), and he in turn helped me out with moving that monster air compressor. I plan on getting back down to business soon, after all, my workspace is no better or worse than it was last winter. I'll just bundle up in my Carharts until I get my shit sorted.
