Some People Shouldn't Teach

I am a strong proponent of women learning to shoot and reject, strenuously, the "old boys club" model of shooting ranges.

That said, there's a long list of boyfriends who have no business trying to teach anyone how to shoot, let alone someone they love.

Today we witnessed yet another gym rat doing a really bad job of "teaching" his girlfriend to shoot.

And by "teaching" I mean that he handed her a gun, pointed her vaguely down range and started recording with his phone.

After the third round hit the ceiling, the range officer came over and had harsh words with them.

Harvey reported that it was the second such intervention she witnessed since we'd arrived.

I'm honestly shocked that they weren't asked to leave. 

It Is Halloween Eve After All

Took my hoary old M&P 9 to the range and did some Mozambique drills.

I traditionally don't shoot this pistol well.  I've gotten better, somehow...

Harvey is hitting her groove with the Equalizer.

Ayup

 

This is so very true.

Ignoring The Service Manual

If you follow the service manual for the 2012 Chevrolet Caprice PPV 6.0, to connect the parking brake equalizer to the cables running to the rear wheels; you need to drop the exhaust and drive shaft.

OR

You can crawl underneath the car and just reach up past the pipes and shaft and reconnect them. 

Working The Problem

A Correction

I posted about Minnesota's changes to their classic car registration and mentioned some steep prices...  In this post.

I said:

Betcha that there's a lot of shitboxes that are 2006 and older that have a "Collector's Vehicle, collector plate" who are doing it to avoid the 10% of original MSRP plus 1.575% of current value.

For reference a '69 Chevelle's MSRP is in the $2,600 ballpark.  Current value is VERY subjective, so let's say $50k because that's what Autotempest says.  So $1,047.50 a year to register your '69 Chevelle in Minnesota.  That's steep.

A 2006 Toyota Corolla ran $14,725 sticker price and is worth $6,500 today.  $1,574.88 a year.

See the incentive to call your shitbox a collector car?

 But I made an important error.

The percentage value of your car is only on a car that's 10 years or newer.  It was also $10 plus a percentage not 10% of MSRP plus a percentage of current value.

The classic car we're talking about gets a $30 flat fee, plus $8 renewal fee, plus $2.25 technology fee, plus $15.50 or $13.50 for plates depending on if you want one or two and some counties add up to $20 for "wheelage".

$53.75 to $75.75 a year depending on how many plates and what county you live in.

The lifetime classic plate fee of $178.50 is a bargain!

My underlying conclusion that there's people with 20 year old cars who've gotten the classic plate to avoid the annual headache and costs is still valid, just not so strikingly so.

Still, nothing about putting restrictions on where or when you can drive a car so registered makes the sky fall. 

Oh, the cost to register a new car is fucking extortionate!

Replace the $30 with $10 + 1.25% of the base value of the car.  That's $12.50 per thousand dollars your cars original MSRP.  $413.18 for a 2027 Equinox in Hennepin County.  Every year.  For ten years!

Captured!

 As The Lovely Harvey was doing her morning routine, she spotted our "guest" sniffing around the garage bathroom.

She says it walked rather than ran away and she managed to get it under an unused cat-food storage container.

 The poison in the bait we used is bromethalin from Victor.

Our guest is showing clear signs of nuero problems and the picture above is the best it's looked since capture.

It's not responding at all to light and has started chewing on itself.

Other evidence of it eating the poison is the bright green turd half out its butt.

I hate this.

I don't shirk from killing vermin, it's necessary, but I'm an animal lover and I hate that I have to do it.  If it'd stayed outside, I wouldn't have had to.

Circle of life and all. 

To Be Fair

While I do rant about how hard it is to work on modern cars, I will, grudgingly, admit that they're far more reliable and dependable than their ancient counterparts.

100k miles was a real accomplishment for a '70's car; now it's routine.

That's not even accounting for the plethora of features that are standard today that were expensive and rare options back when.

When was the last time you cranked a window?

I can recall when a mirror on the passenger door was uncommon and forget about adjusting it from the driver's seat.

Air conditioning was once uncommon, now it's standard.

Power... everything!  It's now standard.  Even my seats with a manual front and back slider have powered lumbar, tilt and angle.

Remember when a manual transmission was called standard?  It's not even offered for most cars now. 

While I, sometimes, yearn for the clarity and simplicity of the older cars...  If I were to own one it'd get a lot of electronic gadgetry added.  Multiport sequential fuel injection makes an engine so much more livable.

Overdrive transmissions let driving the car be more affordable. 

Be Seated

Replaced the rear seat back with one from a wrecked 2008 Pontiac G8.  Harvey was instrumental in her assistance!

What you get with a G8 seat instead of a Caprice PPV is an armrest...

...and a pass-through to the trunk with a little table and cup holders.

The little blue beast sits in there just great!

I also confirmed that the wire I ran makes the overhead console's buttons illuminate.

The little light in the middle is supposed to light up the cup holders in a Holden VE Commodore.

Confirmation

Took the old HVAC box apart:

This was my original plan back in April last year.  Remove the box, replace the evaporator and heater core, seal it back up, put back in the car.

Well, I bought the parts to do it; but got scared of the idea that the windshield had to come out and dragged my feet until the complete assembly became available as new-old-stock.

With the parts in hand and stalling putting the car in the air to get the parking brake fixed...

Now Marv and I have a spare HVAC assembly!

Getting apart let me get a look at the old evaporator with a black light.

Yup, that's evidence of a leak.

Putting My Finger On My Irritation

The main issue of how too many modern cars are put together in terms of working on them is this removal of several assemblies to access the broken part means that you're taking the chance of breaking them on the way in and the way out.

Some parts rarely break and you can nest them deeply.

But when it's a component that MUST be replaced every time a seal is broken, you don't make that part hard to get to if you're an engineer worth their salt.

Case in point is having to get the condenser out to replace the desiccant pack.

You have to break three seals to remove it and this introduces the risk of these seals leaking after reassembly.  Now you have three places to look for the leak instead of one.

Then there's the massive proliferation of single use fasteners.

What a racket.

Make it so you have to remove, at least, two unrelated assemblies to access pieces that you KNOW are going to wear out then require the customer to purchase all new fasteners.

Never mind that a lot of those "single use" fasteners were specifically designed to be reused.

Prevailing torque nuts were designed to address two issues of the old Nyloc nuts.  First was nylon melting in high temperatures.  Second was a used Nyloc is no better than a normal nut for locking once it's been removed.

Prevailing torque was designed to be reused.

As the male fastener reaches the deformed section it stretches the threads of the nut elastically back into a circle. This action increases the friction between the nut and the fastener greatly and creates the locking action. Due to the elastic nature of the deformation the nuts can be reused indefinitely.

But GM says to toss them every time.

Almost as if they developed a procedure for lock nuts based on the Nyloc and never amended it for prevailing torque...

In one aspect, it makes some sense, the mechanic doesn't know how many times the nut has been removed, so it's safest to replace it.

But if you're going to treat every locking nut as if it were a Nyloc...  Why not just use Nyloc?

Which brings me around to an elephant in the room.

The engineers the automakers are hiring.

A lot of modern cars are packaged more and more in an aviation style, with an aviation attitude towards fasteners.

Aviation is the coolest kind of engineering, after all. 

Aviation style decisions made by the least experienced engineers without moderation from more experienced engineers.

Where did the experienced engineers go?

Well, they keep getting fired laid-off when the assembly line apes threaten to strike and the automaker has to cut payroll to accommodate the union's plan.

I sometimes wonder how many of those senior automotive engineers went into robotics just to strike a blow at the UAW. 

It's Just Irritating

The filter-dryer is a tube welded to the passenger side of the condenser.

You just have to unscrew the cap on the tube to remove the old desiccant and install the new.

It would be simple if they'd put the cap facing up.

It's not.

It's facing down and there's no access down there.

So you unbolt the top radiator mounts.

Raise the car and remove the splash guard.

Disconnect the power steering cooler, that for some unfathomable reason runs through the bottom of the condenser.

Disconnect the suction tube, replace seals, cover openings.

Lower the car.

Tilt the radiator back and disconnect the other line, replace seals, cover openings.

Unbolt the condenser from the radiator.

Lift it out.

NOW you can unscrew the cap on the dryer tube and replace the desiccant!

This would piss me off a lot less if I hadn't watched a couple dozen videos where the cap faces up and it's a three minute job. 

All of this leads me to believe that I will definitely have to drop the entire cat-back exhaust and the drive shaft to get at the fucking parking brake cable.  Never mind that it shouldn't have been possible to unplug that cable from the equalizer from the inside of the car.

Almost Close Enough To Taste It

It's back together!

No warning lights!

It's still holding 30 inches of vacuum!

The new box did it's own self check and all the doors appear to be doing what they're supposed to do.

The test drive, however, was not without incident.

I manged to disconnect the parking brake cable somewhere under the car when I removed the parking brake cable.  I need to put it in the air and see if I can get to it without dropping the entire underside.

The AC still needs a new desiccant bag, some fresh PAG and a charge of r143a.

Tomorrow might be a busy, but fruitful, day.  Or it could be massively frustrating.

We'll see!

At Least It Was Done Legally

Today is the 107th anniversary of the Volstead Act, which kicked off Prohibition.

It is notable that the government of 1919 recognized that you needed a constitutional amendment before you started banning things.

Sadly, this recognition was lost some place in the Franklyn Roosevelt administration. 

One More Reason To Fear

Last night we tried to light a happy little fire in our fire pit and it just would not catch.

Harvey was looking at the put at one, forlorn, little red ember and being all sad because she wanted a happy little fire.

So I says, "use your Firestarter powers!"

She holds her fingers to her temples and does the concentrate face and...

The forlorn little red ember bursts into open flame and we, suddenly, have a happy little fire! 

I hope she doesn't use her powers for evil. 

National Black Cat Day!

Here's Bear in his natural habitat!

It Really Ties The Room Together

The Beast is in an advanced state of reassembly!

The eagle eyed might notice that the steering wheel is different from when I started.

This wheel is from a 2009 Pontiac G8.  Since the G8 and Caprice PPV are from the same generation of Holden, it's a plug and play.

The big difference is the G8 wheel is leather wrapped instead of injection molded plastic over a foam core.  That foam degrades and the plastic starts to get loose...  Ask Marv how we know.

I did it more for the preference of a leather wheel than degradation on my old wheel.

As Required

Comparing the service manual for The Beast with my manual for the Biscayne SS;

A recurring phrase, paraphrased,  in the 2012 'M' manual is to disconnect, remove and relocate the wiring as required.

This led to several instances of the part I was removing being at the extreme limit of a wire while I figured out which of 45 connector latches GM used this time.

The 1991 'B' manual has a picture and a list and locations of which connectors have to be disconnected to get the part loose.

This is despite the 1991 manual being a single volume and the 2012 being three. 

Feeling Alright

Something I hear over and over about getting old is to get off your but and get moving around.

Well, working on the car is definitely getting me moving around.

Because I am taking my time and staying organized, even bagging and labeling the fasteners between steps, I am doing a lot of schlepping back and forth from the car to the bench.

Getting my steps in!

Something that's surprised me is that I am not near so ravenously hungry as when I just sit about.

One full meal and a snack is enough.

I kinda hope that this shows on the scale. 

 

The Camera You Have On You

I dearly love my Canon M50, but...

I find that I'm using my phone to take pictures more often than not because I have it with me.

That makes me so very sad.

I like cameras that are JUST cameras.

They're becoming specialist gear and that kind of thing gets expensive FAST. 

That Will Learn Me

Harvey, via my ebay account, ordered a Pontiac G8 back seat for The Beast because it's got a fold-down arm-rest and a pass-through to the trunk.

She ordered it on the 20th with 4-day shipping.

You might notice today is the 26th.

No seat.

If I'd checked, and read, my emails from ebay I'd have caught the message from the seller asking me to call.

Something this size needs to be shipped to a freight center and they needed my OK to do so.

I gave the OK.

Gotta drive down to Tampa to get it, but mox nix.

 

Going Back Together

Parking brake pedal.

Brake pedal.

Steering column.

All have been returned to their start locations.

Gave Myself A Song Virus

With the brake pedals removed, Saga's song "On the Loose" got stuck in my head.

So I am sharing!

 

Steak

My father in law bought a big package of steaks for a good deal at Sam's Club.

He offered us 4 of the 6 in the package if I'd grill them for him and my mother in law.

Because they keep an odd schedule, "dinner" for them is lunch for us.

So I grilled steaks for lunch.

Good call!

I am sated. 

RIP Officer Bester

Walter Koenig has passed the veil at the rip old age of 90.

While I liked Chekov, his performance as Alfred Bester in Babylon 5 was his defining role to me. 

Or Perhaps It Did

Marv's gauges are long in the tooth.  He bought them used and he's had them for over ten years.

Even so, using them incorrectly is a poor mechanic blaming his tools!

I had the valves in the wrong position and my massive leak was the line going to the vacuum pump!

Before Marv told me about my operator error, I'd ordered a new set of gauges.

Those arrived from Amazon this morning and I put them on the car and gave it 30 minutes of suction.

Closed the valves, correctly this time, and waited an hour.

That's what we wanted to see!

Happy dance! 

Well That Didn't Work

Tried to draw a vacuum on the HVAC system because the evaporator is connected at this point of the reassembly.

No joy.

It went from -32 psi to -20 while I attempted to distract myself with a trip to the brewery, or about 30 minutes.

That means I didn't diagnose the leak correctly and have wasted a week of my time replacing a part that was, likely, just fine.

And I still have a week of work ahead of me to get it put back together to a drivable state.

And I don't want to.

I am just entirely discouraged by this adventure and I just want someone to come take the hulk away and never wrench again.

I will get over this, but right now...

I am pinning a LOT of hope on Marv's gauges being the source of the leak, not my repair.  We're pretty sure I didn't operate them correctly for the second draw down.

On the plus side, I got two of the three wiring projects I wanted to do done. 

The real trick will be to shut off my mind sufficiently to stop brooding on it until tomorrow when I can work on it. 

Zoo Boo

 

Last night we did the Zoo Tampa at Lowery Park's Creatures of the Night Halloween thing.

We bought memberships for the zoo and that has paid for itself already in free parking, admission and discounts!

Harvey and I get free admission until Dec 31, 2027 and we each get a plus one too.

It supports the zoo and helps the animals.

They are also super good with kids like The Boy.

Actual Florida animals!

 

 

Wiring Day

Today is remembering where the under-dash harness went.

Today is fixing the wire from the driver's window switch to the port rear window.

Today is adding an illumination lead to the overhead console. 

The Vote Was Actually The Small Problem

68 year old immigrant voted in 2024 and is being prosecuted for it.

First off, I didn't give their headline for this. 

Secondly, he's been here for 30+ years and is only now getting around to applying for citizenship?

An application that is being derailed by his criminal act of illegally voting.

This is something that's been bothering me for a long time.

We shouldn't be giving visas for people to stay longer than a vacation.

If you want to live here, you have to become one of us.

Assimilate to our culture and get that citizenship or go the fuck back home.

Because it's clear when they dither for decades about it, they don't really consider America to be their home.

"Oh, but McThag, he HAS assimilated!"

Then what the fuck was he waiting on?

And, while we're fixing our visa system...  I think that any place hiring any kind of H1 visa should have to show there were zero applications from citizens before they can spend the $150k application fee per H1 visa then the $250k fee for bringing over a foreign worker.  I might even assign a "stop the exploitation of foreign labor" fee of $250k a year to keep that worker.

I mean if there REALLY aren't any Americans qualified for the work and it HAS to be done, this is a pittance, no? 

I would further say that the H1 visa should only be good for the job they were imported for, not just ANY job.  This loophole is really the biggest part of the problem. 

Past The Tipping Point

Parts are going back into The Beast!

Huzzah!

Too Big An Ask

The woman suing Torchy's for $250k...

First off, finding that tooth is kinda proof that it's really beef.

Secondly you were not actually harmed.

You found something icky, true, but you weren't hurt.

Now, some stout fines are in order for both Torchy's and their meat supplier.

This sort of thing shouldn't make it into the customer's meal. 

Ruger Day

 

All Ruger, all .22LR brace on 10/22!

RIP Viper

Tom Skerritt, a steady and reliable dancing monkey, has shuffled off the mortal coil.

I can't think of a truly bad performance. 

Success!

Got the dash tie-bar out!

The way is now clear to remove the heater box!

The worrisome bolt that the service manual says you need the windshield out of the way to remove the tie-bar...

Turned out to be a non-issue.  It pulls up far enough to clear the tab it screws into.

I had been informed that it either wasn't going to be an issue, or I'd have to be cutting them down.

It turned out to be no issue!  Thank the Gods!

The service manual also forgot the three screws down by the brake booster that needed to come out.  I was very vexed about that because I'd removed everything it'd said to remove, and then some, already!

Addendums Provisos And Quid Pro Quos

The service manual has been an unalloyed boon in the process of taking the car apart.

But it's got blind spots you can ram the Death Star through!

"Remove and move wiring harness as necessary..."  Means YOU figured it out because we can't be arsed to tell you what harnesses run where.

What they should have done is put a big plug on each end and have the harness come out with the tie-bar.

I know they can because there's such a big plug under the passenger side kick panel that you have to unplug and feed through a hole in the tie-bar and flop it all the way to the driver's side.

Where the driver's side of the harness disappears into the kick panel you don't need to separate it from the tie-bar because they ran it behind it not through it. 

I've also been clipping a lot of the abandoned in place upfitter wiring. 

I'm Having A Week

Went to pick up a patty melt for Harvey.

Tripped on the damn curb of the restaurant and skinned my damn knee like a five year old!

Second time in three days I feel like a fool. 

Nothing Can Stop Me Now!

Because I don't have ANY brakes!

Or at least I don't have any brake pedals.

Savage And Wesson?

Looks like S&W just bought Savage Arms.

I happen to like my Savage rifles, I sure hope this doesn't fuck up their secret sauce.

 There's a very vocal cadre out there wanting the Model 99 back.  I wonder if this is their moment!

Progressing

Got the dash part of the dash out!

The garage is getting full, though.

I hope to attack the cross-body brace tomorrow.