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So, summer’s here again, and with it comes the crazy temperatures on the blacktop. It’s bad enough sitting in traffic in winter in the van – the temps slowly creep up then, with the engine-mounted fan barely pulling enough air through the radiator to keep it from boiling over. This year it’s even hotter even earlier than last year, so driving to work along the highway with massive amounts of air pushing through the front of the van is enough to make the temp gauge climb.

Coming off the highway, or even slowing down for a slow car in the daytime brings a noticeable increase in temperatures now – enough to be dangerous to the long-term wellbeing of the engine. This is bad! I work in the city! Stopping for morons and traffic signals is a way of life!

I had two choices, get a radiator shroud and a better engine-mounted fan, or install an electric fan on the radiator itself. Being the lover of electronics that I am, I decided that an electric fan would be better, along with the fact that when I’m sitting at the lights it’ll still be burning along at hair-dryer speeds, pushing those coolant temps down to a useful temp.

$60 got me a 12″ fan, along with all the mounting gubbins from Super-Cheap Auto, that always-lovable cheap car part supplier. I installed it tonight, hanging a switch under the dash so I can turn it on and off at will. It came with a fat relay, and a fuse block so that’ll protect it from any dodgy shorts or if the wiring rubs through on a sharp piece of bodywork if it happens. It’s nice and fast, and blows shitloads more air than the stock fan, so that should be good. It only has to last as long as it takes me to get the gemini on the road, then the fan will probably get installed on it for good measure.

It’ll get a really good workout on the weekend when we drive up to Positronic, and it’ll be good to be able to stop and have the engine get some decent airflow, rather than stop and have it heat up – we’ll see how it goes

Ok, so I dropped the gearbox on my head a couple of weeks back – I probably shouldn’t have tried to lift it in with brute force, and after actually getting it in yesterday I realised there was no way I would have got it in my myself. We lifted it in the first time, and after only about twenty minutes we had it up on a jack and the input shaft was in the clutch.

The next part was the problem – we had to get the input shaft on the gearbox into the bearing in the crank – easy to say, not so easy to do. After playing with it for a while and jiggling around, we came to wondering if there was the wrong bearing in it (I was using the one that came with the cheapo engine we’re using for this stage of the project)

So the gearbox came out again, and while jamming my finger through the clutch into the bearing housing to try to work out how big the bearing was, we realised that one of the springs in the clutch is either slightly loose or the plates are busted – it moves about 2mm if you jam your finger in and wiggle. This’ll mean that putting any sort of power through this 2nd hand heavy-duty clutch will be a joke, but I think it’ll be fine to drive to start with. If not, I’ll just throw in the original clutch that was in the car when the engine blew.

Once we’d worked out that there was a bit of play in the clutch, we realised that having the input shaft in the driven plate didn’t mean we had it all aligned. Gearbox back on the jacks (two this time, a bit easier in the end) and back into the clutch. A bit easier this time, since we knew where we were going and so forth. After about five minutes wriggling and thrusting, there was this tiny bit of movement forwards, and we knew we had the gearbox in.

We pushed it a bit forward, just enough to get another bolt in, and from there we put a few bolts in different places in the gearbox and just pulled the box onto the engine.

Another part done, another day used. It’s getting close!

Ok, so I finally gave in and bought a DVD burner. I don’t really need one, since the only reason I’ll really burn DVD’s is to give stuff to other people, or the once-in-a-year-maybe burn a video to DVD to watch on the television. I was bored, and needed a new toy, so I thought for $79 it wouldn’t be a bad upgrade to the linux machine. It’s a black-faced Pioneer DVR-110D, and it seems to only burn at 2x in K3b but I think that’s a settings issue.

Hopefully I’ll be able to fix it – on the rare occasion I actually burn something, I don’t want to have to wait the twenty-something minutes I had to wait tonight when I burnt some car vids to test it.

I also got a good deal on a pack of 50 Ritek blanks, $30 bucks – they are A-Grade white-top discs, and they are a pretty good brand from what I’ve heard.