I am, in many ways, a donkey on the edge. I have a hand-printed sign I carry in my car that reads, “The world is not your ashtray, you pig!” I have knocked a clergyman down with my suitcase at the airport baggage claim for standing right next to the goddamn belt and making it next to impossible to see or retrieve a bag. Two weeks ago, I got into a (verbal) altercation with an old woman at Costco Gas when she got mad at me for driving around her and making it slightly more difficult for her to pull out, after waiting for more than two minutes for her to get into her car, adjust the seat, put her seatbelt on, count the change in her purse, call her grandchildren, and recite the Apostle’s Creed before finally turning the key. That encounter ended with her admonishing me that “patience is a virtue!” and my response that I assumed she’d be in a bigger hurry since she had so little time left on this earth. Nothing gets the attention of your fellow gas station patrons like reminding an old woman of her impending mortality, let me tell ya…

In any case, I was gratified to discover youparklikeanasshole.com, which, as the name implies, is devoted to singling out those who park like assholes for ridicule and retribution. The best part is the downloadable “parking ticket” pdf file that allows you to specify a category, like Two Spots, One Car or Diagonal Parking: Not So Cool Car.

I should point out that the site specifically says they don’t support printing the warnings on blank sticker stock and gluing them to the offender’s car…

With Michael’s help (well, actually he did most of the work), I got the heads off, the bottom end apart, and the pistons out.

First of all, the exhaust manifolds had to come off.

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This week’s update proves that the right tools make all the difference.

9 out of 10 dentists surveyed agreed that the power steering pulley needs to come off in order to remove the pump, which in turn makes it possible to remove the power steering/alternator bracket from the block. Here we see the wonderful puller kit I borrowed from Kragen. I highly recommend that the next time you need a weird tool you make a stop at the local CSK auto parts store and take advantage of their tool loan program. I slapped down a $42 refundable deposit and off I went.

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So back in the heyday of TechWeasel.com and its sister site, SDDragRacing.com, I got involved with a film project devoted to the subject of street racing. I got a call from the guys working on it about a year or so ago, saying they were finally almost finished (and looking for a release!) Forgot all about it until this week, when they got a trailer for the movie up on YouTube…

(I’m at about the 1:35 mark)

I haven’t actually seen the finished product yet - hell, I can’t even remember exactly what I talked about on-camera - so I can’t vouch for the overall movie. But since I am inherently fascinating, I’m sure that it will be worth seeing for my bits alone.

Update - 6/7/08
The website for the movie is now up.

Now that the engine is out, the fun really begins. Certain parts (like the intake manifold upper and lower) need to be removed and sent to McCoy to be worked over, while everything else needs to come off so that it will be ready to swap over to the new engine when it arrives. I also need to get the transmission ready to travel, so when my stuff arrives from Brian Hartman it can all go to the shop to be rebuilt.

Remember how hard it was to get at those transmission cooler lines? With the engine out and the transmission on the jack, it’s a piece of cake.

Getting the transmission out from under the truck was another story. I found that I couldn’t jack the front of the truck up high enough to clear the top of the bellhousing with the transmission still sitting on it’s zippy little jack, so I had to carefully (clunk!) slide the transmission off the jack and onto the floor, then drag it out from underneath. Of course, the 45 gallons of ATF the tranny spontaneously generated all came out through the dipstick hole and once again soaked the shop floor.

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I updated the Suctapus page with pricing information and a contact email. Hopefully I’ll have some more videos up in the near future too.

OK, the transmission jack is in my possession, everyone has gathered, and it’s time to try (once again) to finally get the engine out…

The transmission has been firmly strapped to the jack, which now supports its weight. The engine is still hooked up to the hoist, waiting to be freed.

We live in a golden age of amateur surveillance - any act of hoonage is likely to be recorded for all posterity. To wit, the blog HitAndCrash.com, devoted to videos of, well, crashes. It’s still in the early stages, but there’s some fun stuff to watch already.

April 25, 2001

Since Michael is:

1. Impatient, especially when faced with my extremely deliberate methodology for this process, and
2. Very sure of himself when it comes to yanking things out of cars,

We decided to take a shot at pulling the transmission even though I don’t have my special high-zoot transmission jack yet. The reasoning was that getting it out would be easy - putting it back in would be where we needed the adjustability and stability of a transmission jack. Things didn’t quite work out the way I hoped…

Before removing the transmission, the manual (and common sense) dictates that these hard lines running from the passenger side of the transmission just behind the torque converter cover need to be removed. They run up forward to the transmission cooler built into the radiator, and are already loose at the other end. Unfortunately, there’s no way to get any sort of a wrench on those nuts with the transmission still in the truck…

Happy Birthday to Syclone #1853! April 18, 2001 is the 10th anniversary of the date it rolled off the line at PAS. Unfortunately, the swap isn’t done in time to celebrate, but there’s always next month’s 10th anniversary of the day it was sold…

April 14 - There’s a bracket on the transfer case that holds the fuel lines in place, and because the hard lines are attached to the transmission, the shop manual tells you to take ‘em loose at this point. Of course, the connection is lower than the level of gas in the almost-full tank, so I got doused with 6-month-old Premium before I could get a pan in place to catch it.

Just to prove that I have no body image issues, here’s a picture of me playing dodgeball…

Click on it if you want to be transported to the magical land of Clown Punchers Dodgeball. 

In addition to the many other fascinating aspects of my life you’ve already experienced through this blog - the SyTy fiasco, my unhealthy love of airplanes, my raging xenophobia - you may not be aware of the fact that I am also a licensed professional pyrotechnician. Throughout the year, me and my crew do a half-dozen or so shows throughout the San Diego area, with our main show on Independence Day at Rancho Bernardo High School. The company that I contract with, Pyro Spectaculars, holds an annual operator training seminar and show every spring to get everybody tuned up for the coming holiday, and this time around I remembered to bring my camera. Click on the mortar rack below to enjoy the pictures…

Here’s something I wrote back in 2006, on the heels of the first "day without an immigrant" on May 1st here in SoCal. I think it holds up well enough to be repeated…

May 5th, or "Cinco de Mayo" commemorates the victory of Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragoza over the French expeditionary forces in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. In recent years, Cinco de Mayo has risen in popularity in the United States, equaling St. Patrick’s Day, Halloween, and Superbowl Sunday as an occasion to gather with friends, enjoy an adult beverage or two, and eat a special meal. However, many Americans are made uncomfortable this year by the prospect of celebrating a Mexican national holiday just four days after hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens, living and working in the United States in violation of immigration laws, attempted to harm the U.S. economy and manipulate the nation’s lawmakers through boycotts, work stoppages, and protest marches.