yaleman.org

Well, that’s day one’s travel done. By the time I’d packed the car and ran some errands it was about 11am before I left – being unable to stop hugging my cat Charlie probably didn’t help either :’(

I’m following the M1 down the east coast because it’s the easiest route and seems to be the most direct anyway There’s also plenty of towns and places to stop if I need to, which is a comfort considering the condition of the car that I’m driving.

Speaking of cars, I probably should have updated more about the gemini project, but bleh. It’s officially shelved until further notice, and will probably be scrapped entirely. In a few months the mazda’s likely to give up the ghost or get to a point where it’s going to need a large amount of money poured into it to keep it on the road. The clutch is failing, the CV joints need doing, the stem seals are leaking and it’s generally a piece of junk. The TD isn’t much better, with obvious rust repairs that have been done, loads of surface rust and other issues that need to be sorted out, and it’s not even registered yet.

At this point I’m going to DIY (not dodgy) repair the mazda until it gets unmaintainable, and by then I should have myself back in a position to find another (good) car to buy and drive. Something cheap, plain and easy to maintain while being reliable.

Currently I have to leave the fan setting on “heat” while driving the Mazda for more than a short distance at highway speeds otherwise it gets hotter and hotter and boils the water out of the system – something I avoid now I know how to fix it. I don’t know why it does it, there has been mention of the coolant system having air in the top of it, a possible thermostat issue or otherwise, but I haven’t been in a position to test either of these things lately, so that’s something to sort out later. At the moment it’s fine to drive all day like that as long as I don’t put the windows up and turn the car into a mobile sweat box.

Right now I’m sitting in the Park Drive Motel, a three star hotel on the river in a town called Kempsey, which is about 100km south of Coffs Harbour in New South Wales. I’d originally planned to stop at Grafton, but by then it was only about 3:30ish, then I planned to stop at Coffs, but then it was only about 4:30ish… then I planned to stop at Nambucca Heads, but it was a hole and I thought I could get a nicer place for cheaper. The only place there with a vacancy wanted $55/night for an on-site caravan with no facilities or $80/night for a cabin with ensuite. Uh, no.

So, I kept driving, and ended up in Kempsey at about 7pm. Being a little worried about the possibility of getting food on a public holiday in a small town, and also about finding somewhere cheap with a vacancy I stopped at the first place I saw, and this is it. It’s not bad. Not exactly resort quality, but for $60 a night it’s got a queen sized bed, aircon that I’m not likely to need, views of the highway (and sounds) my own shower, a tv and a room well and truly big enough for me to swing several cats in a bag around. Considering it’s a place to sleep in and then keep travelling I’m happy

The local Steak and Seafood place called The Flaming Steer has a seafood basket and a serve of wedges on its way to my room, so that should keep me fueled until I find a truck stop in the morning for a delicious greasy breakfast of pig and chicken bits.

According to the trip odometer on my GPS, I’ve done 490km so far – not a bad effort for a tiny little car full of stuff. I’ve probably gone through 3/4 of a tank of fuel which is pretty good – easy when it’s mostly highway k’s. I’m going to keep a track of the odometer readings and how much I’m using to work out how much it’s cost me to do this trip. The main killer for fuel usage is all the hills, other drivers (yay for it being a public holiday and lots of families on the road) and speed limit changes. Small towns are great, and there’s plenty of them on the trip, but can’t they just make a giant highway through all of them and just let us do 100km/h the whole way? 100-80-60-40-80-100-70-etc is annoying, I’d hate to be a long distance truck driver and have to do that all the time!

There isn’t many adventures to tell of really, I stopped in Ballina for lunch, and had a burger with bacon and some chips – two dollars buys you about two child-sized handfuls of low-quality chips, won’t be going back there again. Uh, I stopped somewhere for a smoke and a pee. That’s about it.

Ok, so I work for a call center outsourcing company on a contract doing customer care for a mobile company. The company’s been around for a while, and now it’s shutting down because their parent company Hutchison decided that 3g is a better bet (it is) and CDMA isn’t the way to go anymore.

I’d have to agree with them – most of the customers on the network were there because they got the cheapest service they could find, and it worked for them – most of the time. The phones sucked, the network sucked more, and while it was more profitable than 3g before they decided that the end was near, maintaining an old network isn’t a good business plan. The ability to focus your capital and human resources on a newer product tends to be the smart idea in business.

So, as of the 1st of February 2006, they decided that they would no longer provision new services, and that existing customers would be aggresively marketed to so as to push them to the 3g product. This worked well – over 200,000 customers moved in under three months – over 60% of the active number pool. They paid out contracts, they gave away cheap plans and phones, it probably cost them a lot of money, but in doing so, they locked most of those customers into contracts so they were less likely to change providers, thus retaining the revenue stream.

As for the affect on me – this is the sad part of my story. I started with Stellar on the 5th of August 2004, and the network’s due to shut down on the 9th of August 2006. Nice anniversary present! My contract’s customer care, and it’s due to end on the 31st of August 2006 as far as us, the minions, have been told. It could go longer, but not much further – by that time all the postpaid customers will have their final bill and will be paying it, and they don’t care what the prepaid customers do.

I don’t mind too much that my job’s likely to be over as I’ll get a redundancy payout of about two months’ pay, and I’ve already had two semi-reliable job offers. The plan now is to reduce non-vital spending, focus on paying off my debts, and efficiently work on getting the Gemini on the road so that if I do take up a job delivering pizzas, or any job where I need to drive to work, I won’t be paying $80+ a week on petrol like I am now with the PimpMobile.

The best option would be that we get another contract to work on, and I keep working for this company so that I don’t have to go through the garbage of starting afresh, but if not, I’ll just have to deal with it.

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!

So I finally had enough of a day off to work on the gemini again, and I got the intake manifold to fit. I cut off the heater-hose pipe that I don’t need any more, and this stupid little threaded nodule thingy that I also don’t need, so now it doesn’t foul on the brake lines. I also spent about an hour with a file taking small amounts off the thermostat housing so it doesn’t foul on the rocker cover anymore. End result, the intake manifold fits…

Now, if only I could find some o-rings that’d suit this rail. Maybe I’ll just have to import the bits and make my own… yay for more money and time.

Well, another knowledgeable person has posted on my “help me” thread on the Gemini forums. Seems that I might be able to completely avoid using one of the coolant chambers on the manifold – the one designed to provide heating for the runners, and feeds to heat the throttle body – which I don’t need anyway. Means I can just run a pipe from the bottom of the thermostat housing through to the heater, and that’s that. The coolant temp sender isn’t changed, and if I do need a coolant feed for a turbo or something down the track, then I can open up that chamber again and spend the money to modify it to allow for the heater pipes *shrugs*