In no particular order:

The cars. Red has been out since November. The clutch failed and I had to figure some things out. Now, on reassembly I am meeting some resistance. The matter of engine over heating has likely been remedied by the installation of the new water pump. Oddly though I see six ports on the little thing. Two for engine flow, two for the heater, and two for reasons unknown. There were five on the older one, seen below.

These cars at one time ported water to the base of the carburetor but that is not the case with my vehicle even though it has the Solex unit. Someone has plumbed a line to the engine.

 

I thought the water flow went the opposite way so I numbered the ports from the right. To see how the water flows into and out of the water jacket of the block see below:

So the pump has two chambers. The one on your left is where cooled water enters the motor to circulate around the cylinders, then it exits in the large chamber into the pump which has an impeller to move it along out the right side (your right). The water hits the thermostat at that point. It’s embedded inside the big exit hose. That has been replaced with a new one and as usual, consistent with fate, it does not look like the one in the shop manual diagrams. The point of the thermostat is to help the motor heat up when it’s cold. It has a spring and a closing plate. The spring pushes against the closing plate and that restricts water flow. A 1/16″ hole in the housing of the thermostat and a notch in the water pump outlet allows some water through. As the spring heats, it pulls back the closing plate, allowing more water through as the temperature rises.

I expect to cap off the ones designated as 3 and X and will close off the pipe that feeds the motor. That one actually works against cooling since it seems to dump heated water in with the cooled water. I’ll put air bleeders in 3 and X  and  close off the one I just described. If my gasket holds and the pump doesn’t leak, then I’ll be done with that part of it. Then I’ll figure out if the radiator fan works. I’ll add a manual switch to it also.

Now I’ve moved on to the exhaust system. A PO used aircraft grade  clamps but left the exhaust to rust. This makes no sense.

I was a little slow to figure out what exotic tool would allow me to loosen the clamps until I realized that all they are are twelve sided nuts and heads. A six sided socket works fine. As it turns out I just happened to have the correct sized sockets: 11/32″ for the bolt head and 13/32″ for the nuts. Now there are some common sizes! I’d seen 12 sided sockets, but never the 12 sided nuts and bolts. Now I have to figure out how to pull enough exhaust pieces apart to get them to fit in the oven.

Heat proof paint wants three baking cycles before it goes on the car. half an hour at 250, 400, and 600 degrees with half hour cool between each. Home ovens are limited to 550 degrees so that will have to do. An alternative is to wrap the pipes and parts. Another alternative is to have them ceramic coated. That’s not going to happen.

Hmm,  maybe I ought to wrap the pipes after all. I don’t prefer the look but it might be a good alternative. It traps heat. Then I can bring home ice cream in the trunk.

The fellow who gave me shocks and springs for the Type 65 died. He was a young guy and healthy. Two years ago he was diagnosed with some sort of neurological problem that took him out of commission pretty fast. Now he’s done and gone.

John Lexau. I was able to meet him and personally thank him last September when the Lotus club brought him to the All British Field Meet where the locals bring their  Brit cars for racing, part swapping, and display.

Work:

I made progress on that program that is taking far too long to write. I built data structures for the work it will do in the form of dictionaries.

I’ve never been a fast programmer.

Interesting to note that I nostalgically revisited the Pick R83 manual and actually comprehended their explanation of how F Correlatives work using reverse polish notation. It’s still cryptic, but fascinating that people could build such a system as the Pick Operating system and it’s multidimensional data base system. R83 was the first IBM Personal Computer (PC) compatable version. Made for the 286 but it ran on the XT and 386 also. Those were the days when if you wanted a math coprocessor you paid separately for that. I was amused to read it. That may have been a long time ago and by today’s standards it may be primitive but it was very complex, very capable, and wonderful. It was a robust operating system that had been used on main frame and mini computers.

 

Mainframe computers were huge things. A mini computer would fit in a room. You could haul it in a truck. The company where I work had one when I was there. It sat unused and sadly, we dismantled it and threw it in the dumpster. In those days the prongs of chips were coated with gold to make them more conductive. It came with a three platter 120 mb hard drive and an 8 inch floppy. Dang! I had one of the floppy disks for a long time. I think they held 360Kb. of data.

I opened up the hard drive and it was the first one I’d ever seen the insides of. When R83 came out, the standard hard drive was 10 megs. My first computer, from 1991 was a 286 with 512 kb of ram and an amber monitor driven by a Hercules card. It was pretty peppy until I bought a VGA monitor. I beefed up the RAM to 640K for $100. VGA was worth it, but I couldn’t tell any difference when I added ram.

The main board, manual, DOS disks and memory chips are all that’s left of that thing. I should do a post on it. Right now some of it is hard to get at  and more of it is in an unlikely spot in a garage.  Changing memory in the old days was quite a different matter than upgrading it now. And the amount of hard drive space on those old boxes wouldn’t cut it today when I can create a work file twice that large in photoshop in short order.

But back to the Pick manual. I cut my teeth programming with that manual. That and the Pick Pocket guide that I managed to finally own. I wanted that and when I found that it was destined to go into the trash I requested and got ownership of it. This was no small coupe. It has little money value, but it was carried by none other than the venerable Larry Bair who started Columbia Ultimate Business systems. He was a capable programmer and built a company that provided industry standard software for the collections industry. He carried that in his pocket for years and referred to it throughout the time he trained me in Pick.

So it’s an esteemed personal treasure. The kind you don’t have to worry will get stolen and if it does, well then it’s gone. As Larry might put it, they must need it more than I.

The R83 manual is a solid primer on basic Pick knowledge. I don’t know how applicable it is now that Jbase and some of the others are so very good. But they all are built on Pick. What an invention!

The manual warns you not to let the hard drive get full. Yep. Current versions don’t totally freeze like the old ones did. There was no way back if you used every byte of the hard disk.

The Logo:

A fellow in a faraway place needs a logo. He’s got himself another business. So I sent him a rough proposal. It looks like he’s warmed up to the concepts.

 

The snow:

Today there was a little bit left. It had come and covered all the yard and I went out in the early morning and cleared my driveway using a piece of plywood as my plow.  Now it’s all gone without a trace.

I’ve run out of time tonight. But this week I awakened at 4:30 AM one day with the memory of a certain thug on my mind. Must have dreamed of that individual. It’s been long enough since the event that I can have a sense of humor about it. I imagined a way victims could attend the funeral of such a toxic and morally depraved child of hell. Then I sketched it. One part of life that brings comfort to some and relief to others is the reality that these credentialed predators eventually die and go home to that God who gave them life. At that point all their crafty tricks and resorts and excuses cease working, replaced by the realization that they spent their lives doing harm. They will face the Spirit father and creator of those, their brothers and sisters whom they abused.