~ > Scott dare I ask which car lost the engine? Is it time to get serious
~ > about the B engine sitting in front of where the B parks?
~
~ I'm curious too but too timid to ask. Thanks TeriAnn.
Oh, sorry. Between hands still tired from pulling the head, and
from the fact that Solaris 2.3 is unusually brain-damaged with
regard to how it deals with dial-in windows, I probably bagged
out of my login session earlier than I should have last night.
On the other hand, I only have one British car...
Solipsism, I know. It's depressing. Yes, the B lost a piston.
Too much compression for cheap 92-octane gas, I guess, combined
with California heat. I pulled the head last night, hoping it
would be a gasket or a valve, as I've got a fairly fresh head
and gaskets are cheap, but no such luck.
On the other hand, now Bob Jones' car can run. :-)
And in answer to TeriAnn, yes -- I'm trying to decide whether to
pull that engine apart myself, get new things as necessary, and
reassemble it, or whether to box it up, take it to O'Connor, and
have them do just the bottom end rebuild (the head has only a few
thousand miles on it). Mike is out, and is going to call me back
with a ballpark price estimate later. (You *know* you're a car
geek when you 've memorized your mechanic's phone number but have to
look up your mother's...)
The ethical dilemma is whether paying someone else to do the work
will violate the obvious unity that this car has for me, as I've
never paid anyone else to work on that car -- I've paid machine
shops to work on things I removed from it, but all the labor in
that car has been mine, and Chris', and Tim's, and Daren's, and
a couple of other people's. But I can't stand the thought of
waiting another seven months to fire it up. Last time I waited
I bought a 280ZX after it had been down for three months; this
time, who knows what egregious horror I'd commit?
Oh, for those who are planning for Sunday: the drive is still ON,
but unless someone offers me a ride in a British car that you happen
to have lying about the garage, it'll be in the aforementioned 280ZX.
(Hey, Kim's meeting us later in the 122S.) I think I still have the
Union Jack that Tim Pettenati gave me for the DBTBD tour last year.
--Scott "Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor chunks of aluminum" Fisher
|