P1800

Garage and Seats

No new pics today, just an update. Tried to work on the car this weekend but realized the garage needed to be cleaned. There were cardboard boxes that needed to be broken down, a broken dresser from T's room, and clutter from the car made life impossible.

So while I was doing that, T used some leather conditioner to clean the front seats and the bottom of the back seats (the back of the back seats is still in the car). We've now stashed those inside the house to keep them away from the elements a bit more. I found a couple of small tears along the seam of the back/bottom of the passenger seat. Other than that the seats are in amazingly good condition (better than my 2003 daily driver, IMO).

Also vac'd and stored all the carpet we took out of the car. Honestly, the only part that 's probably usuable is the back carpet. the front was really just a hodge podge of different carpets. But figure I'll store it all for now.

And Shmoo bought me an anvil vice. He got a bit nervous when I was using a pneumatic angle grinder in one hand and holding the bolt I was cutting in the other. ;) So, now I just need to find a place to put it.

Non-Car Failure

I have a 12" Mac Powerbook. It's god's gift to computing. I've got one book on Mac's and have another one coming. I've been using iPhoto for all my high res pics of the 1800. It's also my primary work laptop even tho my employer gave me an IBM laptop. The biggest problem with my PB is that I upgraded from 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4... so it wasn't as optimized as it could be.

Yesterday, it stopped working. More precisely, the hard drive was making some terrible noises. I had a week old backup of my home dir (so most of my mail, photos, etc) were safe, but some proposals I had been making at work were potentially lost. I was, to say the least, very not happy.

I booted my Powerbook to be a firewire target (basically turning the computer in a disk drive) and managed to get a full disk image off of it and stored on an external drive. yeah! no data lost.

So I went to CompUSA and bought a 100GB 5,400 RPM disk and a 512MB stick to upgrade my memory (figured, as long as I was inside the machine, I should upgrade from the 256MB stick I had.). So, this is where the real adventure began.

First off, despite much effort, the memory appears broken. Sometimes the box boots only to freeze later. Other times the box doesn't boot at all. Oof.

So, that was only really a diversion. The key was getting the new drive in. Unlike most PC's, getting a new drive into a mac laptop is a non-trivial process. There are a lot of screws, wafer thin cables, and odd manuvering to get to the drive. I helped shmoo do it once to his powerbook, so I was prepapred.

Or so I thought. When I was trying to remove the "power connector", I really did remove it... completely. I pulled the plug clean off the mainboard. I was... uh.. very not happy. It turns out the "power connector" is the connector to the power button. So unless I could fix this, I would never be able to turn on my powerbook again.

I should have taken pictures. It was a very small part and had to go in a very small place. Somehow I managed to pull enough soldering foo out of my hiney to actually get it soldered back on. It wasn't easy tho... it took about 45 mins and a dozen or so tries to solder it.

But the long and short of it is I'm typing this on my powerbook with 100GB drive in it, a fresh install of 10.4, and all my old data restored. w00t!

Frankly, after this, I'm ready to start dealing with welding the 1800 together :)

Driver's Side Disaster

Tonight after dinner I went outside with Terran to do some work on the car. Figured he had an hour before bedtime and we hadn't worked on the car in a few days so it was a good time to get some things accomplished.

First, the pro's of the evening. H bought some Simple Green (you can brush your teeth with it) to clean parts with. I feel much better about Terran wiping off grease with Simple Green than with other chemicals, so he went to town on the seat belt covers and buckles that I took out the other day. They look much better... he really did a good job.

That's where the good news ended I'm afraid. I tried to take out the drivers side seat rails again. The passenger's side came out easy, but the driver's side has been proving difficult. So first, I decided to finish tearing out the carpet on the driver's side (the only carpet left). Here's the hole I found (no, I didn't make this one.. it pre-existed)

Heh. So then I went to try and pull the seat rails out. They're attached by 4 allen bolts. The first one (front right) came out easy. The back right one broke off the braze on or whatever it was connected to on the other side so it just spun freely. Same thing happened to the left rear. The left front? well, that one wouldn't move at all. Put some PB Blaster on it and let it sit. Still nothing. So I put a breaker bar on the allen wrench (heh!) and tried.. ended up stripping out the inside of the allen bolt.

So, I drilled a little hole in the center of the bolt and tried to use an easy out attached to my DeWalt hammer drill.

NOTE: this hammer drill is AWESOME. It has a f-ton of power. So much, in fact, that beetle was able to drill a hole in the unibody of his racecar with the drill set to reverse direction. It smoked a bit, even with Mobil-1 on the bit, but he did it (he didn't mean to.. once he realized it was in reverse, it got a lot easier).

Anyhoo, I popped in the easy out, and tried to extract the bolt. It took about 1/20th of a second for the DeWalt to break the easy out in half. Nice. So, given the fact that there's no saving the floorpan, I went old school and drilled holes all around the bolts in question and used tin snips to cut the bolts out. Here's the right side seat rail:

It got to be T's bed time, so I called it a night after the right rail. Next up: the Left rail. Once that's done we're going to pull the rest of the interior out and get it stored in the house. Then... well, then we start our parts list.