J Crew

Heather can be kind of hard for me to shop for. Well a couple of weeks ago she slid the laptop over my way and asked if I liked a watch she was looking at from J Crew. I told her I thought it was ugly but, in reality, I took a mental note of it and put it on the back burner. I was on to something. I would finally be able to get her something that she really wanted and she probably wouldn't know about it. 2 days later I ordered it AND it was on sale. Last week, she tells me that she saw a story on the internet about that actual watch and how a bunch of people were complaining about their orders being cancelled. I pretended to not have a clue about the watch but then I called them because it had been over a week since I ordered the thing. The gal wants my order number and name and then she says, "Oh.....Neumann." "Yes...I say....Neumann." She says, "Yeah...I just spoke with your wife about this order." "What?" I ask if my wife was informed that I had ordered the watch for her and she says, "Well yes." Now I get angry. Not only was the order cancelled due to it being out of stock but I wasn't notified of the cancellation AND now my wife knows what I was going to get her for a gift. I ask to speak to a supervisor and, of course, one's not there. I'm informed that I can get the watch in a few days because they'll have more in but I tell her I'm not sure I wanna give them any money now that they've ruined my surprise. She apologizes and I'm sure it wasn't HER fault so I try to be nice.

Today while we're out running errands, I broach the subject of said watch with her. She swears she didn't inquire about my order but it really doesn't matter now anyway. I decide to go ahead and order it again but now I'm gonna wait until Monday so I can call and make sure I get it for the sale price that I originally bought it for. We get home and a while ago Heather shows me an online chat she's been having with an employee. The watch is on sale again but it's out of stock again. This employee tells Heather that the watch has been pulled because somone forgot to not include the watch in the sale. It will be available again on Monday. Now I'm sure that this is what happened the first time too. Now I'm mad. The employee actually admits that this is what happened in the correspondance.

Thanks a lot J Screw.

Alaska Gold Rush

Last night while drinking a magnificent barley wine from Deschutes Brewery, I watched this new show on Discovery. It got me fired up enough that I'm thinking about contacting Discovery to ask them what the hell they were thinking. It's about this group of family and friends that heads to Alaska with 5th wheelers, and loads of heavy duty construction equipment. They rent a piece of land for the purpose of digging for gold. I know the land owner can do what he wants but my inner tree hugger gets pissed off that these knuckleheads are constructing makeshift buildings, and digging random holes in the ground all day long in order to try and strike it rich. The most agitating part for me though was the fact they were concerned about the large number of brown and black bears that were just coming out of hibernation and wandering into camp looking for food after a tough winter. They shot one of the black bears. None of the bears were "menacing" as they said they were. I've had bears closer to my front door and they meant no harm. The young kids were walking around with juice boxes and food and leaving them lay around. Then the "adults" were shooting at/killing bears that simply followed their nose. Real nice job Discovery.

In all my years of working with troubled adolescents...I've learned that, generally, even people that are very good at that job have a particular kid that it's harder for them to work with. For many it's the sex offenders/predators. For me it's always been the kids that are into animal cruelty. Lighting dogs on fire and that sort of thing makes it much more difficult for me to maintain an open frame mind while working with that type of kid. Seeing suffering is very hard for me. Don't know where it came from but it's there. It's even harder when it's at the hands of a jackass.

Saabaru

This one's pretty darn nice too but I still llike the gray one better. This one's had a full STI swap (trans, brakes, suspension, rear diff, etc.). The 92x already came with the DOHC 2.5 turbo motor so it's still the Saab one. Errrrrr.....the Subaru one.

In other news...we don't have any snow yet. While it's nice to be able to go riding outside...I really wanna try out the new snow tires. I also have some rally mudflaps on the way. There not gonna do anything except look cool but...still.

One of my favoite cars

There's a gal that lives in town that's got one of these and I see it every now and then. I really like these. They're unusual and you don't see them too much. The 92x was made for Saab by the same company that did the Subaru WRX. This car ran for 3 years and I think there were 10,000 of them made. They had slight changes to the body and the suspension but it's essentially the same car and you see a lot of the WRX/STI guys swapping parts. These were only sold in the United States. This is the most tasteful one I think I've ever run across.



Very yummy.

more car stuff

When I was working on the green car the other night, I had to remove all this air intake stuff. I started thinking about it maybe a day later and went back to it again yesterday. This picture shows pretty much the whole shebang. This is an interesting setup. Fresh air comes in right by that yellow cap. As it enters the main pipe, it passes over a 2.5" opening that leads down into that larger tank that sits right on the frame rail. The main pipe turns towards the motor then and passes over a slightly smaller hole that, again, drops down into a smaller tank. Finally, the main pipe hangs a left and, once again, the air passes over another hole that leads to another tank.

Here's the underside of the initial collector. Only the triangular shaped hole at the top right allows air in.

Here you can see the main pipe and the second and third tanks.

This is the big daddy first tank.

Just because I can't ever leave well enough alone, and the fact that I was bored, I decided to mess with it. Some drivers will rip all of this restrictive piping out and do a straighter shot cold air intake. The problem with them is that they end up sucking in a lot of warm air from the engine bay. They sure sound good though. I can only guess that these tanks act like baffles to keep things quieter but....what a waste of material. I know...it's already been wasted but what if I recycled the tanks?? I decided to try it and see what the effect would be. I'm holding on to the tanks to make sure nothing catastrophic ensues. I didn't get a shot of the final product but I was able to plug all of them in a really similar fashion. The end result was a much tidier engine bay and a much more pleasing sound when you get in it a bit. Exhausts can sound really cool but I've always been a fan of a cool intake sound. I'm also gonna watch the fuel consumption and see if it drops but that's gonna be biased since I sometimes like to hear the neat noise it now makes. It's the simple things really.

Spark plugs

The Subaru developed a little dead spot right off idle last week. The plugs in the motor had been in there since the it was installed and that was probably 22,000 miles back so I figured I'd start there and see what happened. I won't say ALL but A LOT of Subie guys really complain about how much this job sucks. You do need to remove a few things like the washer reservoir, the battery, and a lot of the air intake stuff but, after that, it money maker rump shaker. Things are a bit tight on drivers side but passengers side was quite roomy. I pulled the passenger plug wires and got a few extensions and a 5/8" socket to pull the plug (they sit about 6" down into the head). I felt the socket seat correctly and then went to unscrew the plug. Snap. Something felt weird so I pulled out (that sounds bad) and stared in horror at the plug on the right here:

The nut portion of the plug sheared right off. That's about 1/8" thick all the way around. So I had all of the porcelain part of the plug from tip to tip but the threads were stuck way down in the head. I've seen plenty of plugs crack in the porcelain area but I've never seen this. I even talked to my buddy Adam and our friend Sean (who is now building Subie engines on his own since our friend Booger from Axis Racing seems to have left the country on the run from the law) who had never seen it either. Sean said he had heard of it happening to someone once but never actually seen it.

Adam and I figured I could take an E Z Out and get what was essentially a hollow bolt out of the head. The issue was that it's so far down in the head. I pulled another plug and used a Dremel to cut the nut off so I could see what I was dealing with up close. I had a 19/64" E Z Out that I thought would do the job. Then I figured I could weld an extension on to that but I was worried about the metal the E Z Out was made of being hard to weld to. I have access to a MIG welder so I called my buddy Gary up to see if I could come over to his shop Saturday to put something together and he was cool with that. In the mean time I figured I'd finish what I could. Luckily the rest of the plugs came out easily. When I got as far as I could, I started looking around at all my tools and trying to come up with something. Eventually these are the tools I gathered:

I came up with this and it was the perfect length. The next issue was that I couldn't get the E Z Out to bite into the metal. It bit in real nicely on my practice setup on the bench but all it did was spin on the motor and I was terrified of any shavings getting in the cylinder. Luckily, an E Z Out isn't sharp. Eventually I wondered what would happen if I hammered the E Z Out in a bit. At that point, it didn't matter if I was trying to MacGyver it or if I had some welded up tool so I went for it. I gave it a few taps with a hammer and went to unscrew it. It bit. I got it out. The last plug went in and everything else went back together. The car fired right up and the dead spot's gone. A HUGE load off.

Tonight we went down to the mall so that Sears could install my new snow tires. It was supposed to take about an hour but it ended up being 3. We walked around the mall. I think we went into every store. When we were walking back through Sears, we happened to notice some of the ugliest turtlenecks in the world. Turtlenecks are pretty bad anyways but these holiday print ones were on a whole different level. They were on sale for 6 bucks. I told Heather I would try one on and get a picture of it. It's pretty ridiculous. I intentionally got a slightly tight one to enhance the stupidity. I'm thinking about buying one and wearing it to school to see what kinda reaction I get from the rest of the staff.