Tunachuckers Can-O'-Blog

It's been a pretty busy time in Tuna Land.  Jamie had to take his family's van in for some repairs, which left him and his family with only a Mazda RX-8 for transportation.  As I have boku automobiles to spare, I offered him the use of one for a week or so.  So the Amazon Estate from the previous post took up residence in their garage for a spell.  The Amazon was pretty good as a commuter, but as the back seats were re-purposed with an over-large box of speakers and an amp, it still wasn't much good for the family.  Luckily, another friend of Jamie's had a spare Cadillac to lend, so Friday I caught a ride home with him to retrieve my wagon.

I dunno...I'd probably take the wagon.  But that Caddy does look comfy.  You could probably drive that sucker from Maine to Florida and arrive refreshed and ready for a round of golf with the rest of the AARP set. 

In other news, Rob, Clint, Jamie and myself gathered at the T-spot today for a little wrenching in between raindrops.  We were able to get the radiator installed, the oil pressure sender wired up, the fuel lines connected and in general get the engine ready to fire.  The fan/ radiator presented a special challenge.  Apparently the front of this 122 is somewhat slightly shorter than it should be (or, at least, shorter than the green 122 this engine came out of) and the end of the water pump shaft was just about touching the radiator.  Not good.  Now, we could have installed a different water pump, with a shorter shaft, but the water pumps on these engines have two sealing surfaces, 90 degrees to each other, that require some amount of RTV and luck to get to seal properly.  Its really a pretty awful design as water pumps go, and I've seen a few water pump designs. 

So what to do?  Simple- use angle grinder equipped with a 1/8" cut off blade and not equipped with a safety shield to lop off the offending 1/2" of water pump shaft.  Problem solved!  Time elapsed: 38 seconds to slice off shaft end.  Alas, no pictures of this have I (nor any of the work today) as the on and off again sprinkles made me wary of having my camera out.  So you'll just have to take my word for it.

The fuel cell is out, in preparation for some metal work in the trunk, but we rigged up a coolant overflow jug in the engine compartment to feed the carbs, and after some consternation with the distributor orientation, the mightly 2 litres of volvo-scented fury lit up with a fairly moderate roar.  High fiving ensued, and as the rain had begun to fall more in ernest, we decided to adjorn to the newly-opened pizza joint down the street for lunch. 

Now, some fellow who calls himself Waterwolf has chided me/us for not having a to-do list.  So, here is one.  Not really much to do before the race, which is encouraging, but time does have a way of slipping by, so we'll need to stay on top of this, especially since some on our team have work and other obligations in the next few weeks.

Tunachucker To-Do List:

• Change oil
• Adjust valve lash
• Adjust dwell
• Test drive, set timing
• Reinforce fuel cell area
• Remove differential cover, check gears, adjust if necessary
• Top off hydraulic fluids
• Theme up the car (sand, paint, super-secret theme stuff)

Did I forget anything?

After last week, many (of our half-score or so regular readers) of you are probably thinking, "Wow, he took the engine out of his daily driver for the LeMons car.  What kind of a nutcase dedicated racer is he?"  And, after a bit of time "Uh...what's he going to drive to work?" 

This:

This is a 1967 Volvo Amazon _wagon_.  I bought this sweet little number about 5 years ago back when I was living in Baltimore.  The previous owner was some sort of rabid communist pinko liberal hippie, as evidenced by the "Maryland Green Party" and "Vote Green... OverGROW the government!" bumper stickers.  Despite this, he was happy to take my cash in exchange for this Volvo.  Although he did mumble something about "from each according to their needs" or something like that as he signed over the title. 

Despite the overall ratty appearance of the car, underhood beat a freshly rehabilitated B18.  After fitting it with a GM-style alternator...the car sat in my backyard.  For some reason, I could never quite get her roadworthy.  Some other project...some other need...some other priority.  But with the Green Turtle destined to become an immobile bit of yard art at Mike's Not-So-Hot Car Lot, the incentive to get this fine piece of Swedish iron back on the asphalt was finally there.  After a weekend's worth of work, I've made a driver out of her.

Important work...like fashioning a hood ornament out of an old weedeater piston.

Installing an mp3 player-compatible sound system.

And making some seatcovers out of Tunachuckers(tm) T-shirts.

Unbeknownst to many of our loyal viewer, but knownst to...me...the wagon's white hood was actually a gift from Charlie!  When I first dragged the Tunachucker 122 home from the Atlanta minister from whom I purchased her, there were actually a few body parts that were just too nice to be subjected to LeMons duty.  One was the nose piece, which I sold to a fellow Amazon fanatic.  The other was the hood, which was surprisingly straight and solid...and which was far nicer than the rusty, bent, and dented hood my wagon originally wore. 

Plus, its a nice contrast to all the "flat black" hoods the hot rodders like to sport.

The wagon also came with some pretty hella-flush (author's confession: I have no idea what the hella that means, but I hear all the cool kids saying it these days) fiberglass fenders, which eventually found their way onto GT.  But the pinko commie previous owner also included the original fenders with the car, which, though possessed by some freaky, leprotic iron oxide, somehow work with the rest of the car.

This past Thursday was a roundly successful mid-week post-real-work-work-party, replete wth pizzas and beers.  Charlie's really coming along, and the new engine is _this close_ to being ready to fire.  Unfortunately, I don't have any new pictures to post, hence this fluff post about my 122 wagon.  But, soon we will  finish putting the Effluent Volvo back to whole!  For now, here's a going away shot for you, in all its wagonny goodness.

More, and larger, pictures here, if you're interested.

We rejoin our story...live from Tigerville...when we last left off, we had discovered that the Savior of the Tunachuckers, the B20 of Unknown Quality, had, in fact, very little quality at all.  More specifically, it had the quality...of being seized.  Now, for the average automobile restorer, this would mean taking the block down to bare bones, dropping it off at the local machine shop, and shucking out (depending upon the shop) several hundred dollars for an overbore.  0.030" probably would do it. 

But this is LeMons. 

So what is, in inactuality, happening, is this:  The seized engine is being pulled apart, flex honed, and put back together with some pistons and rings from a few different 2 litre engines I have laying around.  This engine will constitute a "spare".  But what's going to motivate the race car come next September?

The car on the right is Charlie.  You know Charlie. 

The car on the left is the Green Turtle.  The Green Turtle was the very first 122 I ever bought.  It was the Amazon that got me into Amazons.  El Volvo Primero.  A few years back, when I started getting into Volvos on a multiple-car basis, I swapped the original B18 (1.8 litre) engine out of her for a hot B20 plant.  (Actually, this is her second B20, the first one threw a rod after about 30 miles; this engine has several thousand miles under the hood of the Turtle)

The original b18, tired and worn-out, was the spare motor that became immortalized in the "90 minute engine swap" on Jalopnik.com.  It propelled the Tunachuckers to a modest but respectable 54th-place finish for that race, subsequently throwing a rod at a local car show. 

The Green Turtle, much like The Giving Tree, will make another contribution for Charlie.  The B20 that has served faithfully under the bonnet of the Turtle will be transplanted into the race car.  So, this past Saturday we gathered under the overcast sky and revelled in the cooler-than-average August Mercury.  We methodically disassembled the engine externals...

Whoops, what's that?  A crack in the intake manifold?  No, that's a CHUNK broken OFF the intake manifold!  How long had it been like that?  The car ran, pretty well actually.  So, perhaps the SUs were being characteristically rich, and the cracked manifold just sort of averaged everything out.  Yeah, I'm pretty sure the Volvo engineers purposely designed in a few vacuum leaks to compensate for those crappy british carbs.  In fact, I've long wondered why, when the rest of the 122 is such a finely tuned automobile, using such high quality components, they decided to use leaky, untunable, poorly design and haphazzardly assembled British carburetors.  (My running theory is that some engineer, likely named Bendjt, lost a bet)

Moving on...In short order the engine was loosed, and out on the concrete.  The transmission, feeling lonely, followed it out.  Poor little M40 tr*nny.  At least its not blown.  But it was very, very dirty.  Years of rallying (did I mention GT was a pretty hot little car?) left it caked with multiple layers of Southern Red Clay.  It's now in my shed, cleaned, and soon to find a home in my 122 wagon (whose gearbox sounds like a cement mixer full of marbles)

With surprisingly little effort, or thought (its almost like we've...DONE THIS BEFORE...) the B20 was firmly attached to the tr*nny in Charlie.  Horray!  As raindrops had begun falling on our heads at this point (the great Tunachucker garage has yet to leap off the concrete and shroud our heads) we called it a day and put everything away.  Sunday I went out and installed a new, uncracked intake manifold and exhaust manny (like a tr*nny, get it, except 'manny' isnt short for "mansmission', though that would be a pretty cool name for an automotive component- as would a 'trannifold', come to think of it).  And Thursday we're having a mid-week post-work-work party, in which we hope to make a dent in the various and sundry other things that have to go onto the engine to make it run...things like the carburetors, fan, belt, radiator, distributor...

 *: "tr*nny" is apparrently a flagged word.  I don't know how to fix that.  So I'm writing it with an asterisk.  I really, really hate censorship.  Blow my tr*nny.

If you go to any major city, but especially The Big Apple, sooner or later and inevitably you will come across a shady looking character (pronounced: "care-actor") who will invite you to lay $20, just twenty dollars now, down on a table next to a card of your chosing, and if the card you lay your money down next to matches the card he first showed you, BAM, just like that, you've got $40!  How can you go wrong? 

Except, no one ever wins Three Card Monty- nobody except perhaps some cunning chaps the dealer has planted to show that yes, it is possible to win (though apparrently, only if you're friends with the swindler dealer).  And so it was last weekend as the Tunachucker Troupe decended upon the almost-freshly poured concrete at the Tunachucker Tigerville Tent.  While I believed I had a usable B20 in my stash of Volvo 122 parts in my barn, what I instead had was a B10, with two very rusty cylinders comprising the remaining liter of displacement. 

Such a shame too, as McCall was so proud of being able to move that rusted out mill all by himself...

Well, perhaps he did have a little help:

Being the smart (ass) engineers that we are, we decided to make use of the pneumatic tools in my old barn to disassemble the B20 of Unknown Quality prior to moving it over to the concrete pad to be installed in yon Charlie.  But, the more we dug into the engine, the worse it looked.  There was a stuck valve.  The crank wouldn't turn, and then, we pulled the head and saw the mess above.  It wasn't looking good. Just then, Clint showed up.  Not that this made things any better (or worse, for that matter) but it did give us a fresh set of eyes and two more hands to get dirty. 

And then, we decided to re-enact the BP Gulf oil spill in my backyard flip the engine over on the stand. 

Luckily, we'd all seen the instructional videos the nightly news has been putting out on "Containing an Oil Spill for Dummies" so we decided to try out our own version of Top Kill:

Ah, much better.  While we were bemoaning the instuckitude of what was supposed to be the savior for the Tunachuckers in September, Jamie, ever the eternal optimist, pointed out that at least this engine did have one thing going for it.  It had an oil plug.

Rob, meanwhile, harnessed all the wisdom of his years and came upon a course of action in an attempt to loosen the jammed up engine.  And so he grabbed a rubber mallet.

After seconds and seconds of hammering to no avail, McCall and myself asserted our youthful can-do-ism and grabbed the two largest sledgehammers I had laying around.  Now, there are many ways "the book" will tell you to un-seize and engine, and while I don't cotton much to reading (nor do I condone it), I'm fairly such the phrase "...next, obtain two large mauls and a friend, some spare chunks of lumber, and proceed to whale on the offending pistons until they are dislodged" would never appear in such tomes.  And yet, there we found ourselves that swelteringly summery morning, the South Carolina sun bearing down on us incessantly, and us shouting obscenities at an inanimate metal block as we beat on it with our implements. 

After more interminable seconds, previously immobile parts began to move.  I grabbed a wire wheel to ream out the cylinders (again, everything by the book here, nothing back-woods engineered at all) ...

...and, eventually, the pistons were liberated.  Rob and myself, always fans of liberty (especially for pistons, being such a repressed minority as they are), pose with the newly freed pair, as Gary captures this moment for the annals of history.

After all this, we decided there was no hope for the engine.  At least, not this weekend.  And as many folks had to be going, we decided to at least make some progress with the car and yank the stuck engine out of it.  Actually, we were tired of working in the hot, hot sun and decided the carport on my slab would be far more hospitable an environ on which to spend the remainder of the morning.  And it was.  Here, Gary and McCall contemplate the myriad dents on the car and our massive amounts of camber.

Check back soon for more exciting adventures.  Will the Tunachuckers be accepted into the Fall 2010 LeMons South race? (plot spoiler: yes, we received our acceptance letter earlier this week!)  Will the car ever move under its own power? (plot spoiler: I have two other running engines!)  Will Mike decide to pave the remainder of his yard and turn it into a demolition derby arena? (plot spoiler: no, demolition derbies are held in the dirt, silly!)  Will Mike's writing style ever become less annoying and more chronological? 

(PS: for all the pictures, click on this link.) 

Lots of new, likely interesting, possibly exciting, and definitely intriguing developments in the Land of Tuna...

As you can see from the above three-twenty by two-forty, the garage I have wanted to build since moving to Carolina South has finally lept out of my head and is taking root in the soil around my house.  A foundation!  Concrete!  Rebar!  Everyone knows only good things can come from the use of rebar.  While my original plans involved digging the footings, pouring the concrete, and laying the block for the foundation of the garage myself, good sense prevailed and I hired a contractor to perform these steps.  As my good friend Matt likes to say, for every household project there is an appropriate tool to use, and sometimes, that tool is a checkbook.  34 yards of concrete and 210 cinder blocks will comprise the basis for the soon-to-be erected 48 by 28 Testament to Manliness. 

Hopefully all this brick and mortar work will be completed this week, so the actual framing can commence.  Armed with a Bostich and a Porter Cable, I'll be doing this bit of the project myself, though I'll probably have to convince some of the 'Chuckers, and perhaps some other folks to assist with the raising of the walls and roof. 

Ah, so _that's_ what this post has to do with the Tunachuckers!  Am I planning on bribing able-bodied friends and neighbors to help build my barn?  Yes.  Do I plan on compensating them in the common Confederate currency of beer and red meat?  Absolutely.  Are there other reasons, apart from gastronomical, that any of them might also want to help with the erection?  You betcha!  For you see, the long-awaited garage will also become the new headquarters of Tunachucker Racing!  No more squatting in the dirt in my old barn, or stealing space in Rob's place from his wife's BMW.  We'll have a shop, replete with all the necessary elements of a proper racing shop:  Compressed air, welder, beer fridge, bench grinder, big honkin' stereo, auto lift, and a Chestnut tree out back to relieve one's self underneath.  It will be a Nirvana of Testosterone.  Christy and Clint have even volunteered to donate their old window air conditioners to the cause. 

Now as it turns out, this weekend is not only July 10th, the 33rd anniversary of my birth, but it is also the week before the deadline for the September LeMons race at CMP.  By the 17th we have to be registered up- which means nothing more than gathering at least four of us together, uploading some hilarious and/or incriminating pictures of ourselves, and coming up with some inspired prose to convince the fine LeMons judges to allows us to enter the venerable Volvo in said race. 

I would like to propose Sunday, July 11th to throw a LeMons Registration Pre-Barn Concrete Slab Party.  We will gather at my place, consume malty, hoppy beverages, create our LeMons entry, and then stand around and admire the freshly poured Portland.  All Tunachuckers and Tunachucker groupies are invited to attend.  RSVP in the comment section below, or email me, so we can figure out how much food to make and alcohol to procure.  If you forget the address, email me for it.  I'm thinking an early-dinner sort of shin-dig, being that it'll be a school night, so figure around 2 o'clock, and we'll eat around 5 or so.  Be there or be a Rhombus!

*UPDATE* The slab is poured!  And its the most beautiful piece of concrete I've ever seen.  These guys do excellent work.