Merry Christmas Pika!

After reading my boss' (Ben) blog, I discovered that we now have our very own bridgeport milling machine at Pika! Merry Christmas to us! I am super pumped about that, you can read all about it on Ben's Blog. Quite the project, moving that thing into place.

I'm in VW mode at the moment, collecting and cleaning parts for the next phase of motor assembly. I've shared the latest progress on facebook and my Build Thread. Amazing how unorganized things get when you leave them sitting for a few months. Probably my initial unorganized method of take it apart, throw it in a bag and keep going didn't really help. I think I've got most of the parts I need though. I will be buying new pushrod tubes and carb rebuild kits (if the carbs are worth saving). I've got a surprising amount of engine tins ready for action, all the sandblasting and painting from two summers ago will pay off eventually.

The more I look at bay window bus stuff the cooler I think they look when they're lowered. I've found myself drooling over the stuff at Wagens West, which is the premier place for all your bay window bus lowering needs. I never understood why it is so expensive to lower a bus though, I've seen people take stock I beams and cut them up to convert them for air ride suspension and it doesn't look THAT impossible. I mean it can't be all the bad to narrow a beam and maybe adjust it for one height. The Wagen West beams are adjustable though, which is cool. I think fabricating your own "horseshoe plates" wouldn't be too bad though. Here is the kit for lowering a bus, and you see what I mean by expen$ive. I'll probably start with stock height and everything and maybe one day make some suspension modifications, but that is miles down the road. Probably nothing extreme, just useable... kind of like this...

To the untrained eye this may not even look lowered

While this guy is going to the extreme.

I like that single cab a lot but it would pain me to take it on a Maine road.

Picked up my alternators for the bus engine (one from each engine I scavenged) they both checked out alright. I'll go with the newer looking one that doesn't make a funny sound when I spin it. The guy who tested them was pretty cool. He was a fellow motor connoisseur and I ended up talking to him for a while about electrical engineering stuff. He went to the University of Rhode Island and has been fixing alternators and car problems his whole life. He didn't charge me for the alternator testing which I thought was awesome! There seems to be a lot of comradery in engineering disciplines and I felt like old pals with the guy before I left.

Dropped some more parts off at the machine shop including the fuel pump, carbs, oil pump, oil cleaner, etc. Apparently I need a thermostat unit, mine was broken. That will be hard to find. I've got some more brackets and parts I need to sandblast and paint now too. Also, apparently my motor is in high demand at the machine shop and several customers have asked if I am interested in selling it. One guy asked me while we were assembling it the other day and he was dead serious. I told him "no way" because he knows how long it takes to get the point I am and how difficult it is to find all the parts to get there. Handing over some cash is much, much easier.

Planning on heading North tomorrow at some point and leaving Litchfield behind. Time to start making some more PCBs and get set for the new semester.