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A research thread that started with a fellow on Facebook posting the pictures of an old Doyusha car model he'd just bought last week has led me in a bunch of directions that appealed to my weirdness.

One such place was the particulars of my sister's first car, a Datsun 1200 (a.k.a. Nissan Sunny).  At the time it was built it was the cheapest new car available in the States...and I sort of wonder what manufacturer and model has that title now.

After that, it led me to the story of Isuzu cars in America--which ended (among other places) with the Impulse and the Geo Storm.  For years I saw Storms parked in the backs of people's yards and was weirdly attracted.  Now I know why--they're four-fifths of the way to being LOTUSES.  I wonder now how much work it would entail to fit a Storm with the same kind of Lotus suspension that was optional on Impulses--and what modern Lotus powerplant would work in the engine bay.

Car Stupf

Jun. 27th, 2016 12:54 pm
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To condense a lot of happenstances into something more undestandable:

* My car's brakes were inspected a couple weeks ago.  There's still some horrible noise coming from the rear, but the problem I'd had was for the most part fixed.

* Dad traded in the Cadillac for a Camry--and two weeks later got in an accident with it.  On Wednesday I'll take it to the repair shop for him.

* We were planning on a trip up north to coincide with Dad's high school class reunion, but that may not happen if our money situation has a big crimp in it.

FP

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Moonshine is on Injured Reserve; the brakes again.  They haven't gotten completely unreliable but there were times in my drive today that I had to push the pedal all the way to the firewall.  I also had a couple very close calls/narrowly avoided collisions with other vehicles.  So the car is going to stay in the carport till I can get it to our mechanic.

Meanwhile, if I have to go anywhere I'll borrow Dad's Nissan pickup truck.

Randomnity

Jun. 10th, 2014 02:21 pm
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* The Public Radio station is playing the Lord of the Rings Symphony as I'm writing this.

* Dad just installed the window air conditioner unit, and it works.

* I frosted the cupcakes for Dad's Bible study group tomorrow.

* When I looked up my own name on a search through my data base for a graphic I've already shared here, I found a reference in a Battletech e-book.  I'm a Steiner.  I don't know how I feel about that.

* We await word from our mechanic on the status of Dad's pickup truck.  A stud in one of the wheel mounts failed, and the other studs for that wheel mount were in bad shape, so he's replacing the lot.

* I'm dabbling with Bitstrips on Facebook...but it doesn't seem to be habit-forming, yet.

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The Suzuki car that General Motors sold in the United States as the Geo Metro (a stablemate of the Prizm I drive!) is still in production in its 1990s vintage form--in Pakistan.
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I took Moonshine in for an oil change at the Dandridge Pennzoil today. I'm only a month or so away from putting 100,000 miles on her since I bought her. And, like the song goes, so much has happened and nothing has changed.
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* Because my brother got me a smartphone to replace my flip-phone this week, I felt I had to return the favor and find a toy for him. I'll tell you all about it after I give it to him.

* Because my brother got me a smartphone to replace my flip-phone this week, I'm trying to figure out how to use it. So far, I'm way behind it and the whole touchscreen nonsense is somewhat counterintuitive to me.

* Because my brother got me a smartphone to replace my flip-phone this week, I went through Precious's soundfiles (and made some new ones by using a decompiler to loot soundtracks from .SWF files I downloaded over the years) in an ongoing attempt to generate ringtones. I still only partly know what I'm doing.

* In my travels to procure the toy for my brother, I saw a late-model Audi sedan outside Strange--the interior comprehensively burnt out. I started brainstorming hot rod ideas almost immediately.

* Still dabbling with reverse-engineering old Eastern-bloc paper models of aircraft carrier ships into much larger mixed-media models. I have seven downloaded patterns of a planned eight...but my internal math estimates that each "plate" in the scale I'm working with means $10 in materials. So I'll need funding of one form or another.
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Well, after that incident in Morristown in which I heard some really nasty noises come from Moonshine's underside last week, Dad and I scrambled to find a repair shop to get her back to rights.

Dad calls mechanic he knows #1--"Sorry, I've got a bunch of projects lined up. Be at least a couple weeks.'

Mechanic he knows #2--"I'm busy this weekend. Be out of town too."

I mentioned the place where we got Moonshine's new tires and Dad decides against that. So today he took Moonshine over towards Panther Creek...

New AAMCO shop!

MOONSHINE: Hey! Pull in here!

DAD: Okay, just a moment.

And so Dad tells them about the problems I'd had with the car, and the mechies look her over and get to working...

MECHIE: Two new front rotors! Reconditioned CV axle! And a new brake pad!

MOONSHINE: Eeee...

(Dad's in the lounge getting a cup of tea...)

MECHIE: Clean out and inspect the rear brakes!

MOONSHINE: Ohhhh...

(Dad's getting his shoes shined...)

MECHIE: New spark plugs and plug wiring!

MOONSHINE: Ahhh...

(Dad gets a back massage...)

Of course this takes all afternoon. Finally he gets back to Rather Manor and shows me the invoice.

DAD: 12 month guarantee on all the work.

ME: And you got $50 in discounts!?

He always manages to find good customer service. I'll have to take Moonshine for a test drive overmorrow.

Recycling

Aug. 18th, 2012 12:22 am
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My sister visited overday, and we gave her more of Mum's stuff and I helped replace the windshield wipers on her car.

I'm playing around with the paper model files again. I wonder about the hobby possibilities of poster printer hardware. Who can I ask about that?
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Dad's replacement for DodgePodge, which he sold to my Brother-In-Law last fall. It needs a lot of little fixes but is otherwise in splendid shape for its age.

It also needs a towel.
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So I needed a steno refill pad for in my work portfolio, and I took Moonshine ("Adventure! Yay! Vrum!") to Morristown to the shopping center that includes Hobby Lobby and Ross. They also have a Dollar Tree, where I got the steno pad.

Well, on the way there, I saw a Bradley GT in somebody's back yard and thought Well, so somebody bought it. Load off my mind. But just the same, I decided to return the long way through the neighborhood were the one was for sale--and it hadn't moved AT ALL.

TWO Bradley GT IIs within ten miles of each other? What are the odds?

Still, my Mad Scientist labcoat wants to be put on and set me to making monsters. I noticed from Westfield's website that the XTR works would fit in the body shell (thanks [profile] _eljefe_!) but they don't offer the kit anymore. Hmm. SOMEBODY must be doing something likeable, closer to the Manor and cheaper to boot.

Meanwhile, the recovery isn't recovering worth a darn. I counted four major properties on the west side of Morris Boulevard in Morristown that were sitting empty and forlorn. I won't consider this place out of recession till one of those gets a business tenant again.
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Nay, I am not dressing up for Halloween this time around. I'm just not in a party mood. We're ready for the little kid crowd if they come by, but they usually don't around here, because the schools and churches bend over backwards to throw parties for them.

Truth is, the level of discourse on the Web today scares me more than any haunted-house story. People just can't get along. The bad times have been bad so long that it's bringing out the bad in everybody. I just wonder how much worse it can get, or if it will ever get any better.

Aye, I received a JC Whitney Catalog for the first time in probably a decade today. It's not as much fun as it used to be, but it's all color (as opposed to NO color except the cover back in 1974 when I first saw them!) and the coolest stuff is included. The whole idea now is to point customers at their website or their phone sales line and have them place orders that way...you can't exactly buy much mail older from the catalog like you used to.

Moonshine could probably use some of the tweaks offered by Whitney, but the main brainstorm is still the as yet unacquired Bradley. I noticed that the site Electricar is a blog about a likeable project car, and I'll probably go over as much of that as I can.

MORE TO COME.
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ExpandMORE PAST HERE )

This is a 1970s vintage Bradley kit car, for sale at a junkyard for the princely sum of $300. Wish I had that and a truck and a garage I could borrow so I could take delivery myself. I'd build a "real-life superhero" proof-of-concept car out of it.

FP
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I wonder if that will fit in her engine bay. Chevy's new 2.5 Liter EcoTec engine for the 2014 Malibu. More HERE!
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She got a new tire this morning and I took her for a test drive after lunch. Just over to the bank to draw some money and back. Like nothing was ever wrong with her.

* * *

USELESS FACT: CREATE TV's programming updates at 6 AM Eastern Time. What is on at 6 AM repeats at Noon, 6 PM and Midnight. And so on for the following 11 timeslots (they repeat exactly six/twelve/eighteen hours from their first airing of the morning).

Grounded!

Jul. 2nd, 2011 07:10 pm
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Attempted to take Mum to the store this afternoon and we didn't get far in Moonshine--it was quickly evident that the rear passenger side tire was going flat. So back at Rather Manor we try to reinflate the tire and Dad notices a nailhead in the tread.

So Mum and I take Dad's Buick to the store, and when we get back Dad's in his pickup going past us into town--and Moonshine is up on a jack.

After a while he returns. "I missed the fellows at the tire garage by five minutes. This will have to wait for Tuesday."

Now, I'm willing to think this is just lousy luck. But at the same time...

Last week our neighbor across the street was away from his place and Dad sees a couple men there. So he went over there and asked them what they were doing. They were looking for a car the man there owned. Dad knew that the neighbor had lent it to a friend, so Dad sent them in that direction.

Turned out they were repo men from the bank; the neighbor had quit payments on the car, and so his passing it to a friend was legally theft and the friend's having it was possessing stolen property. So the repo men taking the car were saving both the neighbor and his friend from going to jail.

The neighbor didn't see it that way, of course. He was very angry about it and cussed both Dad and Mum when he found out. We aren't on speaking terms, and I wonder if my car is out of action due to sabotage rather than a mere piece of bad luck.

Makes no difference to me, of course. If it was bad luck, I'll just move on and forget it. If it was the neighbor trying to get back at us, I'm going to ignore it and not sink to his level.

But if it happens again, I know who to call. I believe in justice, not vengeance.
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Coming back to the idea spawned by my nostalgia for my Dad's Capri and this object:



Which is available from These People, whose website isn't helpful enough yet.

Leaving aside the internal workings of a car for a moment to concentrate on the styling...if I got the AR Bodies Mustang shell to play with and lay on a chassis, how could I make the result more Capri-esque for my taste? Poking around Wikipedia overnight gave me the answers:

1) Ford Flex headlamp and front turn signal units
2) Mercury Milan grille, or possibly Mercury Mariner grille if that works better
3) Mercury Milan tail lamps, and possibly an adaptation of trunklid geometry to incorporate
4) rear BUBBLE glass ala post-1978 Corvette, Seventies/Eighties/Nineties Camaro/Firebird, Mercury LN7...and of course the Eighties American Capri...to replace the rear windshield/quarter windows arrangement on the Mustang.

For street legality sake, the result would likely need off-the-shelf bumpers. Probably Milan or Marquis units...or even Mercury SUV ones. Depends on what fits.

Wish I had the tools to explore this thought to its fill extent.
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Mom and I are plotting out the fourth book in the series that started with Cricket's Moon. A lot of the plot has to do with auto racing, and one of the details I had to figure out was what factories there are in the United States and where.

I learned a big lesson in a space of an hour or so.

In the last fifteen years, the auto industry in America has imploded. Two-thirds of the factories that existed when Reagan began his Presidency have shut down. A good number of these have been demolished; some have been repurposed as facilities for energy production or new industries or even schools.

Meanwhile, laws that were put on the books to limit the importation of vehicles have meant a great deal of foreign investment in new factories in America. Of the eighteen states that still have auto factories, fifteen have factories for "FOREIGN" cars. Toyota now has more active assembly plants in the USA than Chrysler does. Yes, the Big Three have offshored a lot of their work...but the Rest Of The World is picking up some of the pieces.

There is more to this, but I think it'll have to wait for further rumination.
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Extremely heavy rain today. Worst in years, IMO. The street in front of Rather Manor had flooded for a while before the water could flow to Dumplin Creek. This place needs a better drainage system.

Moonshine didn't need to have a new belt put on the engine after all. The previous change was only about 30,000 miles ago, so in theory it should be good for nearly again that much. But my thinking is if I have to take the car in for another service on a different issue, I just might have a new belt put on at that juncture anyway.

Mum's waiting on a contract for the re-release of one of her older books.

Poor Trevor Bayne. Today is his Daytona victory celebration in Knoxville, and the weather shut down the town. Welcome to fame.

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Stephen R Bierce

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