Over the last several days I've been working on various little things around the homestead. Mostly cleanup tasks with some organization thrown in, I managed to build up my outgoing scrap pile even more so in preparation for the grand haul. Part of this scrap build up was the "processing" of more wire that I cleared up from a pile of wires that was composed of the LUV's old wire harness, among other wires. I spent the day cutting the wires up and rolling up the individual wires into nice rolls to add to the box of already rolled up wire. Afterward I had a nice pile of scrap wire ready for burning. I fired up the can once again to burn off the insulation so I can add this wire to the buckets of already burnt wires I already have. At this moment I have only a little bit of wire left that I scrounged up from the garage in the process of cleaning up. Once I get this remaining wire done I'll be good on the wire and should be able to have more control over scraps, I'll be able to put any newly generated scraps into a bucket in order to burn it up when enough is produced, rather than having random piles of wire all over the place. The next thing that I ended up having to do was replace the water pump on the Dodge. After making a gasket for the old water pump and putting the thing together, putting coolant into the radiator ended in disappointment when I saw coolant dribbling out from the weep hole at the bottom of the pump. Luckily I was able to get a new water pump from Auto Zone for $30 with no core charge. After a day I was able to pick the unit up and install it that night. At this point everything is now together on the engine. Another thing I did was replace one of the old tires on the car. One of the tires was so old and dry rotted that the tread started peeling and bulging to the point that the tire was no longer usable in any capacity. We went to one of the local used tire shops to get a tire for $30. The other tires aren't bulging and distorted so I might be able to get some miles on the other tires before I need to replace them. At least I can be able to test drive the car some before I decide to replace the tires, which at that point I'll just put brand new tires on all around. I also have some shocks on order for the car too, so once those get here and I get those installed, the only thing left will be a driveshaft, to which I'll be able to attempt to start the car and hopefully be able to get it tuned and verify everything is good hopefully and I'll be able to move the Dodge out of the garage, under its own power for the first time in 14 years. The last thing I did that was worth mentioning was doing another piece of the walkway that I've been working on for some time. I've been slowly but surely doing the walkway one slab at a time over the course of the last 6 months. I took the 2x4's that I used for a mold and resituated them in front of the walkway over the depression that I dug in the recent past. This way all I had to do was pour the gravel down and spread it out for the base layer, then, because it had rained earlier that morning, just pour the concrete right into the mold area. Normally I would've premixed the concrete in the mixer but because there was already an inch of water in the depression, pouring the loose concrete into the depression within the mold soaked up the water enough that I just had to smooth the top off with a piece of wood. This little process went pretty easy and fast because of the water in the hole and because it was due to rain some more, I had to put a tarp over the slab so none of the concrete got washed out or oversaturated that it wouldn't cure properly. I'm planning on trying to get this walkway done way more sooner than later, really so I can guiltlessly move on to another large project without leaving this incomplete.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
May 2023
|