Last night I finished the last few details on the trucks tow-bar and also riveted a reflective plate to the rear panel of the truck...then I returned to the fitting of the bodywork on the tank canopy.....I made a few fresh bungs and it seems to sit pretty well....now to fit the tub and see if it all lines up OK, having done that I knocked out a few dings and gave it a light sand....the nose of the car is a difficult shape..
it's always got a little bit of cellulite....
I couldn't spend all night doing that as I had an important cultural event to attend to.
The Annual Cleaning of the Spray Guns !
I dunno whether it's that I'm just lazy or whether it's the effect that thinners has on my hands now but I'd sooner perform my own dental extractions than disassemble and clean a spray gun.However , I have a bit of paint to lay down and it's pretty obvious that I'm going to be in a hurry whatever happens and so uncharacteristically I had the foresight to perform a little preventative maintenance.A wheezy , sputtery, lid-stuck-on one air-hole blocked gun is no-one's friend . Last weekends effort of pouring paint into the spray-gun case was a winning effort so in the interest of sanity and good workmanship I sat down to huff some thinners.
Acrylic thinners are not an insect repellent. It has been a season of plenty here. The drought broke , and then it broke again, and again, and again...as a result all of gods creatures have gone forth and multiplied. We had close to a million red-back spiders here in the back yard, then there was the age of the daddy-long legs..(they eat other spiders).....now there are parts of the garden that look like a tropical swamp with spider webs tying everything together ...anyway, needless to day there have NEVER been so many mosquitoes....and there is a warning out about amongst other things Murray Valley encephalitus, and that'll kill you.
At one point I swatted three mozzies in one hit .....all this to the background chorus of crickets,a billion of them on a steady march across the country.
OK. speaking of preventative maintenance here's a post I put on the DLRA site about travelling to and from the salt in 2006.....
The next year I drove my EH panel van that had lived a life of parts taken from other cars. On the freeway just out of Adelaide , yeah on the way down it threw the harmonic balancer , it was just getting dark. I pulled out the radiator( it was hot in there let me tell you), got out the little home made puller and got the spare balancer (yeah, I know) fitted in about 30mins......It went OK all the way to Iron Knob except for one moment on the road just before the Gutter where it just died , bleugh..... while we were doing 100k's..
started straight up again, I didn't want to look until later........So we stock up in the Gutter , as soon as we hit the dirt it starts running hotter....it was 46 degrees that day, the van has an area above your head that I swear is a perfectly shaped lens to focus radiant heat on your head.......it boiled about six times from there on and it was dangerous to get out of the car unless there was shade, needless to say it took ages to cool down each time. Had no trouble there except a brand new tyre got a cut from a rock that looked like it had been slashed by a machete...it was new because we'd had three flats on the way, by the way....oh yeah and I got a $295 speeding fine and lost my wallet with $550 in it when I got pulled up....I'd been bleating like a sheep and we were laughing so hard we missed the 60kmh sign........
Anyway...on the trip we home we ditched the trailer to the Chev...the car still boiled a couple of times on the way out and it felt weird too... and I didn't feel the best either...We got to Port Wakefield and I noticed that the replaced harmonic balancer had walked half off( I would like to point out that at this point I remember standing at a roadhouse in Pt Wakefield covered in red dust and Jon Amo standing there and looking at me and the beleaguered rig and shaking his head and laughing)......the local auto-wrecker wanted $30 for one, it was so tight on the crank it broke my puller and he didn't have one,I left empty handed....We made it to Gawler and got to Repco 5 mins before it shut I bought a 2 cheap crap pullers and a new balancer for $20....we pulled up in a shady park next to the pool, the others went for a swim.....I realised then that I had diarhorea, and with the handy store bought pullers I had a big job on my hands getting the balancer off... it took about two and a half hours, it was 40 degrees.
It was a pretty uneventful trip home we didn't talk much because the gearbox was howling so loudly in top that it was hard to hear much..
Topic: Australian Belly Tank (Read 3514192 times)