Automotive – Page 5 – Zing Blog 2

Camping, Storms, Guitars, Cars and Rest

We finally had a weekend with no travel and no commitments, and hung around the house and relaxed and got a bunch of things done. So now’s a good time to bring all y’all up to speed.

Last weekend we went camping. It was our second camping trip of the summer and it was a big group of people. Us, Erik and Jen and Ellla, Max and Miguel, Shannon and Shawn and their three kids, Bob and Lisa and Jimmy and Lisa and Emily and Lauren. Wow. We left Friday afternoon, although some of the other families waited until Saturday morning because of the threat of rain. And sho’nuff it started raining just as we were packing the car, and by the time were on the road it began raining really hard. We actually pulled over and discussed whether to turn back, but we were able to get a weather report on Jeannie’s blackberry that said it was clear up in the Catskills. So we went head and passed thru a wave or two of heavy storms. Later we found out that there was some serious flooding and even tornado warnings in Westchester, and they closed the Hutch, Saw Mill and Bronx River Parkway shortly after we got out of town. But after an hour the sun came out, and we got to the camp site and set up our tents and got the fire going, before a scattered shower that went away after half an hour or so. The rain came again after dark and the kids were asleep in the tent and Jeannie and I were watching the fire. Another scattered t-storm rolled thru and after that we still had to put water on the fire before we went to bed. Saturday and Sunday were clear and all in all it was a beautiful trip, although they always feel too short. Got some nice canoeing in, and the girls got to play on the beach and catch salamanders. We got home there was a good amount of leaves and branches on the ground, but no real damage.

I spent some time jamming on guitar on the trip. Guitar is maybe my fourth best instrument, which is to say I know the basics and never practice. Most of what I know I picked up from watching guitar players in my various bands over the years. I can play a good number of Neil Yong songs (Powder Finger, Heart of Gold, Mr. Soul, etc.) and some other tunes, just accompany myself singing, no prog or jazz chops. I’m not very good at bar chords so there are a lot of songs I can’t play. So I decided to start practicing guitar for a little while and see if I get any better. And its so far so good. I know the chords so came up with a few little exercises to cover them in all keys. And then I picked a handful of songs to work up, with some of the new chords. I have a good number of music books. I’m practicing Burned, Down to the Wire, Broken Arrow by Neil Yong, and I Will and Mother Nature’s Son by the Beatles. When I get those down I’ll pick some others. Right now I can only practice about a half hour every other day because it’s hard on the fingertips.

I actually own two guitars. One is acoustic that I traded for a boom box many years ago. It has almost no wood in it (plastic body and metal neck, an ovation knock off), and is kinda hard to play cuz the action is high and the intonation isn’t great, but it has a good resounding tone and is a great guitar for camping. The other is an eclectic, a Guild solid body with two humbuckers, which has great action and good tone, and is a nice versatile electric guitar. However the tuning seems to drift and I have to tune up after every song. Ah well maybe it’s just that the strings are old and I haven’t played it in a while. Anyhow, I’m thinking I want to get a new guitar, a better quality acoustic, and with a pick up so I can use it for recording. I’ll give myself a month or so to see if I’m gonna want to keep on practicing (this also means I’m going to have to cut back on piano), and if the answer is yes, I’ll start looking for one sometime this fall. Luckily the big music store district is only a couple blocks from my office, but I have a feeling they’ll be pretty expensive there.

I also fixed my car over the weekend. There had been a leak in the exhaust manifold, where a clip to attach a heat shield, which had been welded onto the pipe with a different metal, had rusted thru. My local mechanic gave me an estimate of $1600 or something outrageous like that to replace the manifold. So I just kinda let it be for a while, but the noise has been getting worse. So I got one of those muffler fixit kits. Basically it’s a bit of aluminum foil and special wrap that bonds to the pipe from the heat of the engine. I put it on and seems to have done the trick. Only problem was that the directions say to use a piece to tape to temporarily attach the wrap to the pipe, and then run the engine for a while to heat it up. Well Sunday all the kids in my neighborhood were hanging out in my driveway which made finishing the job difficult. So I left a bit of tape on, and this morning drove to the train station. The tape has some plastic in which started to melt and burn. I checked it out when I got home this evening and it looks ok, there’s just a little black stripe left on the pipe.

Auto Didact

Well I have no new creative output this week, but I do have some updates on this and that. After the last 3 weeks being so busy entertaining and all, we decided to take it easy of the Memorial Day holiday. At one point we were considering going for a day hike somewhere, but the weather got really hot (in the 90’s), so that was not in the cards. Ah well, the summer is just beginning, there’ll be another opportunity. Instead, we mostly hung around the house, made some barbeque, played outside, played videogames, went out to dinner, ran some errands, and did a bunch of shopping. We got Lizzy a new, larger bicycle and gave her old one to Michelle.

I did manage to get my ’67 Mustang fixed. After my regular mechanic was reluctant to look at it, and told me I’d need find parts on my own, I looked around for another garage and found a place in Bronxville, Ultimate Auto Center, that specializes in servicing, maintaining and restoring classic cars. After the carburetor blew out and started leaking fuel I was a bit hesitant to start it up, so I asked Jeannie to stand by with a fire extinguisher. Well the engine turned and nothing burned, so off I went to the garage, hoping I’d make it as the car sputtered up the big hill. When I got there, the guy who greeted me was smoking a cigarette (dude, indoors in an auto garage, not too smart!), so I asked him to step back a bit and then explained my problem.

The guys at Ultimate took good care, I’m happy to say. First they gave the car a complete looking-over for mechanical and other problems, and made recommendations (my car is solid, as it turns out). Then they took apart and rebuilt the carb, replacing the worn out accelerator pump and all the gaskets. They even steam-cleaned my engine and it looks like detailed the car too! And it wasn’t even too expensive, at least compared to what the mechanic at my regular garage said it’d be to acquire a rebuilt carb. Now it runs great, with more power and a smooth, satisfying rumble when it idles. Jeannie says it “purrs”. Ah.

While I was there, I asked them to give me an estimate on repainting the car. His figure was almost twice what I paid for the car in the first place! Yikes. It also was more than triple the estimate I got in 1999 in Palo Alto (I was all set to get it done then, but then Lizzy came along and we move back East and I ran out of time) and a good deal more than I really want to spend. So while I think I’ll shop around for a better deal on that, I’ll at least ask him to break it down so I know what that cost would include. I think he wants to take the whole car down to the metal, and I don’t think that’s necessary. In any event I’ll keep you up to date on how this project unfolds.

Auto Motive

Well this week I’m in the middle of a lot of things. Kids parties last weekend and next (pictures coming soon!), and work has been really busy. I worked on Sunday, and on top of that allergy season is in full effect now, so it’s making me a little cobweb-headed. So I feel like it’s the wrong day of the week. Logical Thursday, but really Wednesday. Must keep it straight. Ah well, soon a big ol’ web site redesign to share with all y’all.

Sunday was a beautiful perfect day, and I decided to take my old car for a ride. You see I have a classic ’60’s muscle car, a red Ford Mustang. It’s 40 years old, older than me. I bought when I lived in Palo Alto, a little over 10 years ago. I’d been living there for about 6 months and commuting to work on rollerblades, and then I bought a bike because the trip was rather hilly and I thought, as I cruised down the big slope behind Hewitt-Packard approaching the speed of cars, that I really ought to get a mode of transport with a brake (I’d taken the brakes off my skates for hockey) before I spill and hurt myself. So I bought a bike, which was a big improvement, and rode that all summer. I noticed a little neon sign in the window above Palo Alto Bicycle Shop at the time that said “Google”. Hmmm, I said to myself, an internet startup. I wonder what they do?

At the end of summer (October out there) I knew the rainy season was coming, and that I’d need a car. The way it played out was that I only had one weekend to find a car, and didn’t have a lot of money to spend. So I bought a paper and started looking thru the want ads. My budget was only a few thousand dollars, basically as cheap as possible but still reliable, and there were a lot of 10- or 15-year-old Nissan Sentras and that sort of thing. But there were a handful of classic older cars in my price range, including some Cameroes and GTOs, and 4 ’60’s Mustangs. If you’re from the Northeast like I am it’s a bit surprising, but it’s just a California thing, all these classic cars still on the road. I decided to concentrate on the Mustangs and check them out. The first one I looked at was in good shape, no rust, sound mechanicals. It was red and with a V-8, the perfect image of what I thought that kind of car should be. It has some minor dents and the paint was pretty dead on the roof and trunk. The next one was blue, a ’66, in perfect shape. I mean absolutely beautiful. But the thing is, it was a 6 cylinder, so not that interested. Plus it was the most expensive of the group. The last 2 were in bad shape; one had a Lincoln Versailles engine and other franken-parts, the other was half bond-o.

So I went back I bought the first one, which was actually under my budget limit by a few hudred. It turned out to be a great car. I drove it every day for years, all around Silicon Valley and up to San Francisco for band practice and gigs. Replaced the alternator once, and some other minor repairs, but that was it. The engine, powertrain, etc., never had any trouble. I did replace the weatherstripping and, believe it or not, the driver’s seat. The main thing it needed and still needs is a new coat of paint, and I was all set to do that in ’99. But then we moved back to New York rather abruptly, baby in tow, so that got postponed.

I couldn’t bear to part with the car; it represented one of my favorite aspects of life in California. Moving it back east probably tripled its value, since cars like that are basically nonexistent in this part of the country. I ended up keeping the car in my brother’s barn in upstate New York for a couple of years. There was no point in moving it to Brooklyn; it’d just get stolen. And car insurance in Brooklyn is so expensive that our insurance premiums actually went down when we put the Mustang on as a second car parked somewhere else.

When we bought our house I drove it down here, where it sits in the garage, an anachronistic absurdity, still cool but mostly harmless. In this day and age of trendy hybrid cars it seems a bit, uh, decadent. Although to be fair, it’s fuel economy is not too bad, because the car is light and even though it has a big engine, it revs really slow. In any event, I still like it and drive it on nice days in the summer, and still dream of fully restoring it and driving down the road listening to ZZ Top on the radio. Of course real life being what it is, it’s pretty far down on my todo list. So I took it out Sunday, the second time this season. The first time was the weekend before, and it ran great. Except that it needed a jump cuz the battery had died over the winter. I was hoping a week later it’d still have some charge.

When I got it out on the highway, traffic was all backed up, so I couldn’t even get up to a cool 55. On top of that, I noticed the pickup wasn’t all that great, and it seemed to hesitate when I stepped on the gas. I got it home to look under the hood, and there was gas dripping out from the around the throttle lever in the carburetor onto the intake manifold and engine block. Oh no, potential fire hazard! After a few minutes it stopped and I cleaned it up, but from the look of it I really ought to get it fixed. I once tool apart and rebuilt a carburetor, but it’s not really something I’d do for fun nowadays. There is a great garage down the street from here, so I guess I’ll call ’em and see if they can do that kind of work on a car that old. I don’t think new cars have had carburetors in about 20 years.

But of course the episode brings up the whole existential question of the value of material possessions. Should I get it fixed or just sell it? If I sell it, it’d be worth more if I fix it up first, but then if I do that, there won’t be any point in getting rid of it. Round and round …

Meanwhile, the pollen from the trees has been so thick these days that my current practical-for-all-seasons-on-the-East-coast everyday car is coated with a sticky golden dusting. Trying to clean my windshield I discovered that my squirts were broken. I could here the little squirter motor going, but the windshield remained dry. But I open the hood and there was washer fluid dribbling under the car … the hose must’ve come loose. But it looks like a nontrivial operation to take off enough plastic to get at it. Still, it’ll probably be simpler than fixing a carburetor.

So dribbly automotive fluids abound. Ah well, I have Friday off cuz I worked on Sunday. Maybe I’ll have time to get it then.