yaleman.org

Finally, after 10 months, I’ve got an engine that runs! Over the last few days we’ve done a lot of work, getting the fuel system in, cooling system completed and all sorts of wiring done up. It took a lot of playing around, but it got together in the end.

It felt so great just to put the key in the ignition, turn it, and have something happen! We got oil pressure rather quickly – after we filled up the oil filter. Next was confirming fuel flow and so on, and it mostly worked pretty well first go, just a bit of air in the lines and so forth. We had the inlet/outlet backwards on the carby first go, since we didn’t know which one was which – the wonders of using old hardware that doesn’t have a manual

Rather than fighting with the dodgy old radiator that had been sitting there for ten months with no water in it and was full of rust, I went out and bought myself a brand new one from Slacks Creek Radiators. Originally I’d planned to get one to suit an RA40 Celica, but it seems that the one they had wasn’t anything like the pictures and information I found on the ‘net. $230 got me a brand new copper radiator which bolted straight in.

We hooked up all the coil/dizzy/leads and the rest, and in went the battery and so forth. We seemed to have the timing way off, but after working that out it all got a lot better, and now it runs!

It seems to run rather smoothly – we didn’t run it for long since the cooling system is probably really full of air – today’s work is to bleed it and keep going with the tuning process.

All I can say is, it’s SUCH a feeling of elation to have the gem running after all this time!

Wow, I was going through my web stats because I was bored today, and what did I find? More people trying to access something I uploaded (as far as I can tell) about this time in 2003. I posted the Playboy Photoshoot of the Brazilian Womens’ Soccer Team (re-uploaded for posterity) as you see there, and took it down about three or four months’ later, because I redesigned the site or something. I keep seeing people try to access it in my stats, so I thought I’d try and find it (which I did, in an age-old backup of my site) and upload it to see how many more people will access it in the future. The only thing I’ll change is an addition of a link back to the main page, so hopefully someone will come to my site for more than the boobies.

Oh, and you can still find links from forums to the content. O_o

Mental note – when you’re supposed to start at 11pm, don’t get out of bed at 10:35 – especially when you live what is normally a twenty-five minute drive to work – it sucks. I got there with a minute to spare, and I’d showered, brushed my teeth, shifted the pimpmobile out of the way to get to the camry, picked up my lunch and gotten dressed except for my shoes (one of which I put on while on the highway, the other while sitting at the last red light before work. Go me!

Woo, I’d completely forgotten about this project they started a while back. Basically it’s just another stats tracker, but Google-Stylin’ which means they’ll actually have something pretty to show me.

I’ll see how it goes, with my zero-pageviews-a-day site