- December 2nd 2002:The Cat's CD player spontaniously broke on the way down to Darkover. It can no longer recognize if it has a CD in it or not and therefore won't play any CDs. Of course the thing is 11 months old and just on the edge of the warrenty running out, except that my mom (whom gave it to me as a gift) no longer has the reciept so returning it is not an option. So right now I don't know what to do. I need to try and call Jensen and see what my options are, except that they are only open when I am at work.
- November 25th 2002: Saturday I rewired The Cat's radio to try and get the speakers to stop crackling and going out. It turned into a huge project but at least it seems to have mostly worked, One speaker is still off, however I think i know which connector needs replacing.. I also replaced her PCV valve, which I had not been aware she had and therefore had never replaced in the 5+ years I've had her. It's supposed to be replaced at every tune-up.
- October 6th 2002: After the Roslindale parade I wandered off into the Boston Suburbs. My wanderings brought me to The Transportation Museum in Brookline. I had seen the signs for it on the way in and had decided to swing by. It turned out that there was the Brookline festival that weekend and admission to the museum was free. I parked The Cat across from the entrance and went in. The place is full of beautiful antique automobiles. After wandering around in rapt facination for a while I headed back out to The Cat to get my camera, on the way back in a man stopped me and introduced himself as the director of the museum and said he would like to try and get some sort of artcar event together for next year. We traded contact info and chatted for a while. If this happens it would be really cool and have potential for a great event.
- October 5-7th 2002: Drove down to Newark Delaware for the Newark 'Downtown With Arts' Festival on Saturday, then on Sunday went up to Boston for the Roslindale parade.
- October 1st 2002: So The Cat's rear brakes have ben vibrating badly for a while now, and I decided I didn't want to deal with it for the long drives this weekend, so I priced the parts needed and discovered it was only $40. That seemed more than reasonable so I bought them. After work I did oil changes on mom and I's cars, then started in on the brakes. I managed to snap one of the bleeder screws off a caliper, and ended up having to buy a replacement caliper for another $40[1]. Eventually managed to get it all back together about 1.5 hours later than I had planned. But at least now the brakes are all working properly.
On a more positive note I managed to draw out the cat on the passenger door during lunch at work, so with everything today The Cat is sufficiently ready for the artcar events this weekend in both mechanical and artistic aspects. I would have liked to get a few more things done art-wise but they are not necessary for her to look good.
- September 29th 2002: Well in prep for the events I'll be attending next weekend I decided to finally try out one idea I've had for a while, and I did a little bit of custom painting to the tailpipe of my new exahust system. So without further ado on to the pictures and explanations.
Apologies for the poor quality it was taken facing into the sun and the glare messed with my digital camera. I've wanted to put something in this space on the car for a while but couldn't think of anything. I finally decided on the minimalist -cat design, It isn't perfect but it's about the best I could do. I might futz with it more later. I decided shortly after this was taken that I hated the text there and ripped it of and redid it with a more angular font.
I love how this looks! I had painted the entire exhaust system with grey high-heat paint, but it made the tailpipe looks dumb, so I painted it silver, and that made it look worse. So I decided if it was going to be painted it might as well be painted in an interesting way. So I masked it off and cut out the flames freehand. Sprayed on the red, then sprayed the end yellow to give it a two-tone effect. I personally think it came out great, especially considering the size (2" wide pipe), the bend in it and the fact this was the first time I'd ever done flames. I put a few coats of clear on it and wil bolt it in place once that's dry. After how well that came out I'm tempted to add some more flames to the car, possibly using the green/silver color change paint I bought...
- September 28th 2002: Well after ~3.5 hours of work The Cat has a new exhaust system. It wasn't too bad to get in especially since I'd done it once before a few years ago and knew the tricks needed. I painted it with high-heat paint in hopes that it wouldn't rust out as fast as the least one did.
- September 27th 2002: I backed into a parked car on my way to lunch, smashed his tail light and dented the panel below it. No idea what that'll do to my insurance rates.
The only cosmetic damage to The Cat was a scratched bumper. But the tailpipe hit his bumper hard enough to cause part of the exhaust system to split open. The system is too old to be fixable, so I bought a new one to the tune of $190 after my employee discount. - September 23rd 2002: On Sat I cleaned The Cat quite throughly. She was scrubbed, cleaned out, vaccummed, the interior was cleaned and much of the stuff in her was repacked more neatly.
I attempted to cover over the peeling Pelucid clearcoat on the roof with cheap spray clearcoat from work. I wiped the roof with alcohol only to discover that Pelucid (a 'Rock-Hard clearcoat finish') is alcohol soluable and began to turn milky white and gummy. This was most annoying. IT took a bunch more work and trying of different things before I was able to get it so that once I sprayed on the new clearcoat it looked respectable again[1]. - September 16th 2002: I have a working car again. It turned out that the ijits at the shop down the street installed the distributor backwards(!) when they did the head gaskets two years ago. This didn't affect her running until I went and installed the new plug wires in their correct spots (instead of 180deg off). Once I installed them wrong she ran fine.
- September 14th 2002: I tried to do a simple tune-up on The Cat last night, and I managed to snap off one of the screws for the distributor cap, and break a spark-plug wire.
Today I bought the stuff to fix what I broke yesterday (which cost me an additional $30),
And after a bunch more work on The Cat she won't start. I can't figure it out, she has spark, and gas, and everything checks out according to my service manual, but she won't crank over.
- August 19th 2002:
That's a picture of The Cat's odometer taken Friday night. She rolled over a quarter million miles on the Cross Bronx while I was leaving NYC.
I bought her in April of '97 with 101,000 miles on her. Now 5 1/2 years later I've put a total of 149,000 miles on her. Though she sat for 11 months so it's more like 4 1/2 years of actual driving. That works out to an average of over 33,000 miles a year, more thant twice the average miles driven in a year.
The Cat has in her 12 years had the head gaskets redone once, and had two transmission put in her (though the second one lasted over 142,000 miles so I can't really complain). And she is currently running great and I expect to be able to get many more miles out of her.
I love my car. - August 8th 2002: The news story from the Boston Extravaganza is now up here.
- August 3rd 2002: Went up to Grey Maine for their 'Grey Days' celebration. Pictures are here. One of the best parts of this is that we got to meet hte 'Toy Machine' folx. They are a father & son traveling around the US in their artcar, they have a band 'boogereater' that plays by plugging the instrements into a power inverter in the artcar. They play on street corners for tips to support their road trip. Great ppl.
- July 26-28th 2002:Went to Artscape '02 in Baltimore MD again. Images are posted here.
- July 20th 2002: Went to a small artcar event in Boston. On the way I met up with a group of artcars from truemajority.com and invited them along. It was a fun party, and i was highly amused to relize that between the truemajority ppl, and two other ppl from S.A.N.E. I was directly responsible for six artcars being there out of hte seven total that showed up. We also turned the person organizing it's car into a temporary artcar with spray tempra paints. I met Harrod Blank again, as well as having another three ppl interested in joining S.A.N.E.
I was also photographed and interviewed by ppl from the Boston Globe for a story that should be appearing next Saturday. So that should be very cool. But the coolest thing by far is meeting Rick McKinney, owner of The Duke. He's the one who wrote the quote on the driver's door of The Cat> I mentioned it to him in email a few years ago, and it was cool to have him finally see it. He was honored to have his words on my car, and I was honored to have him see it. I got him to sign the door, and got a few pictures of him next to it. - July 16th 2002: I did a bunch of overdue repairs on The Cat today. Amusingly enough, all of them were on things mounted on or in front of the radiator support, so I never actually worked on anything more than about one foot in from the front of the car. I managed to:
- Get the horn working (for the first time in a few years)
- reattach the cooling fan (which had come loose and was hanging by the wiring)
- replace the bulb in one fog lamp
- reattach one loose LED from the undercarriage lighting, and rewire another
Which doesn't seem like a lot, but it was rather complicated, and took me about two hours all told. - July 15th 2002: Brought The Cat to an alignment shop that was reccommended to me as the place that can align *any* car. They managed to get her front end into alignment, and even got the back end aligned properly, which no place has managed in years. Hopefully this means she'll stop eating rear tires so fast.
- July 14th 2002: I ripped the front end of The Cat apart and replaced her front struts, the strut boots and one strut bearing. It took me around six hours all told. ALso had to replace a bolt on the sway bar link that had somehow come off.
- July 10th 2002: Finished the shattered-mirror roof. I feel throughly accomplished, as I started this project back in '00 and It's finally done.
- July 9th 2002: I finally got the text finished on the passenger door of The Cat . The door now looks 'right' for the first time since I ripped the trim off surveying the rust last fall. I found the door was rusted beyond saving then, bought a door for it that winter, didn't install it until May, and only now got all the text done.
- July 7th 2002: Repainted the peeling passenger side door.
- June 20th 2002: Finished the rear 3/4 of the shattered-mirror roof, also stripped the mylar out of the four inside curtains, and have sewn in the white cloth to replace it into one curtain. Doing the other three curtains next week.
- June 18th 2002: Installed the air cleaner assembly, and added to & repaired the shattered-mirror roof.
- May 30th 2002: Coated the shattered-mirror roof and the whiskers on the front grille with Pelucid, a super-tough clear coat. Hopefully this will kepp them from fading and peeling off again.
- May 28th 2002: Painted and installed the new rims/tires on The Cat. This is the first time she has had the correct tire size on the rear (rather than slightly larger) since early '99. I can't help but think she looks a bit odd. I've gotten so used to the larger rear tires that the correct tire size actually looks small and undersized. I haven't gotten a chance to drive her on the highway so I don't know if the vibration problem is relieved by this or not. But at least I have four tires with decent tread and not two bald ones on the back.
Brought The Cat in bright and early this morning to the Ford dealership to see if a recall on the subframe bolts had been done or not, they told me she wouldn't be done til noon, but fortunately they have shuttle service so I was able to come home and veg for a couple hours. Got a call and lift back a little after 11:30, and turns out the recall had apparently already been done on The Cat, so they didn't actually do any work on her. Damn. This means the clunk in the front end is something else. I'm rapidly running out of parts that haven't been replaced in the front end though, and I'm throughly baffled as to what it could be. - May 25th 2002: Junkin' run. Got a replacement air cleaner assembly, and two new front tires/rims, for only $15 each.
- May 17th 2002: I can't get The Cat's sunroof to stop leaking, so I've caulked it shut as a temporary expedient.
- May 10th-13th 2002: Went to Those Cars '02 in Columbus Ohio (link is to pictures from that event). Unfortunately I spent the two days drive home in constant pouring rain, the sunroof has started leaking badly, and the shattered-mirror roof peeled badly. Also while attempting to transcribe quotes onto the replacement door the paint began peeling badly, so I will have to strip it and try again to repaint it.
- May 9th 2002: Well I got the door installed on The Cat . It was a royal pain, but about as bad as expected. It seems to be fine, I have to adjust it though at some point to get it to align better. Also copied down all the quotes off the old door so I can transcribe them onto the new one this weekend. I'll be leaving tomorrow morning for Those Cars '02 in Columbus Ohio.
- May 8th 2002: Well I think I figured out why I've been having a problem with the damn paint on this door. It keeps crackling and such. I just figured it out. I've been wiping the door in turps to get any residue off it that might cause fish-eyes. Apparently I have not been waiting long enough for the turps to evaporate fully off, so in places where the turps gets trapped (like say, along the bottom edge) I get the crackled paint. Of course I figured this out while putting on a coat of primer just now. So I have to wait an hour for that to dry, then sand it out again and shoot it with another coat. With luck though now that I've figured it out I won't be having the crackling paint problem again.
I did though today manage to get The Cat 's new front grille design done. It's prety cool if I do say so meself. It features three 1" wide chrome whiskers on either side of the 'FNORD' emblem.
I also got a good sized chunk of the shattered-mirror roof done. I need to have it at least at a symetrical state by this weekend, and that's looking like no big problem now. I might even get a significant part of the rear of it done before this weekend. I got the lettering painted on the rear bumper. It looks sorta ok, but definitely not great. It will do for the weekend, and is a distinct improvement over the scratched & battered look it's been sporting since last October.
This means that if things go right with he second coat of black paint today, I'll be able to hang the door tomorrow, and The Cat will be all set for this weekend and looking good! - May 7th 2002: I put a coat of gloss black on the door today, and of course problems occured, the paint is bubbling in one corner for some reason, so tomorrow I'll have to resand that, prime it, sand the primer and then repaint. Hopefully I can work that repair into the second coat of black without having to start all over again. If the second coat works I could be installing the door thursday (if not I'll be stuck with teh old crappy door).
The yellow I applied to the bumper yesterday sucked, and even after 6-8 coats was still not thick enough to cover the old paint there. I'm going to just paint ont the CAUTION WEIRD LOAD, and hope it looks accepatable, then deal with sanding down and repainting the whole thing some other time. Today I painted all the black edging and the angled black lines next to the letters. Tomorrow I'll paint on the lettering, and hopefully will be able to clearcoat by Thursday.
I haven't worked on the grille today, nor the roof. No enthusiasm for those projects with the hassles the door and bumper are being. I did put a coat of POR-15 on the recently discovered rust on the rear hatch, so at least that'll be black, I'll worry about topcoating it after this weekend. - May 5th 2002: Decided not to use the junkyard rear bumper and just to repair the original as it would take about as much work for that as to prep/paint/etc the new one. Painted the wheels Gloss black again, they look much better without five years of scratches and such all over them.
- May 4th 2002: A lot of front end work was done in preperation for heading to Ohio for Those Cars '02 later this month. The lower control arms were a complete and total pain in the ...well everything (I was so sore the next day). The main bolt holding them on was stuck and in a placde that's almost impossible to get a tool on, and the rod that bolt threads onto rotates so you have to brace that in place with one wrench while you pry at a stuck bolt with another. I had to jump up and down on the wrench on one side, and use a 5' breaker bar on the other side. But I did get those changed out, and the sway bar links too. I'm annoyed though, the old sway bar links were metal, the replacements (a ford "upgraded" design) are plastic. Plastic! Just what I want, part of the front suspension on my 2.5 ton car made out of plastic. bleh. Anyway I got it all put together, and The Cat's front end feels much tighter and stiffer, which is what I was hopeing for. I also installed chrome lug nuts, which improved the look of the rims and make it look more like I intentionally don't have hubcaps and not like they just fell off.
- May 1st 2002: Some new pics of The Cat in the New Pictures section.
- April 30th 2002: Had The Cat's front end realigned (it was off due to installing the new rack. They couldn't get it exactly right because the lower ball joints are worn out. However if I get those fixed and bring her back in a month they will realign the front end for free.
- April 28th 2002: Pulled the PS rack (again!) and this time convinced Pep Boys to exchange it. I got a reciept this time so I shouldn't have all this hassle again next time. Installed the new rack, and also repainted all four rims gloss black again. They look much improved, though now the rusty lug uts look horrible. I'm going to repace them with bright shiny chrome ones when I have the money.
- April 14th 2002: Well I got The Cat functional again, though not even to the same degree she was before I started working on her. Yesterday's activities just add another chapter to the reasons why I hate and dispise Pep Boys parts stores. I did fix a few other niggling problems on The Cat, such as a broken headlight mount (that caused the headlight to shake).
- April 13th 2002: Helpful hints for would-be vandals:
- using black magic-marker on a black car is pretty ineffective.
- it's spelled 'F-A-G-G-O-T', not 'F-A-G-I-T'.
- as a guess at my gender-orientation it's incorrect, as an attempted insult it just made me laugh.
I also attempted to remove and replace The Cat's defective power steering rack. It took me two hours to remove it, and bring it to Pep Boys, there I was told that dispite the fact that it was a Pep Boys part, and it had a lifetime warrentee the idiot assitant manager wouldn't let me return it. So I had to fix the problems with it as best I could and put the defective rack back in The Cat. After a long frustrating time I got it in, then managed to cross-thread and damage on of the hose fittings. Left it to work on the next day when it was light out and i was rested. - April 2nd 2002: I installed several of the parts for The Cat that I had aquired at the junkyard (steering U-joint, vaccuum hose, light covers), and also finished as much of the shattered-mirror roof as I could with the stuff I had. Did a couple other odds 'n ends little stuff I've been meaning to get around to.
- April 1st 2002: Posted an april fools joke in my Livejournal about The Cat burning up, as you can see it freaked the heck out of my friends.
- March 30th 2002: Our first junkyard trip of the season. Today's junkin aquisitions were: back bumper, steering U-joint, vacuum hose for engine, lots of trim screws, and some front interior light covers.
- March 28th 2002: Finished fixing the thermostat housing bolt, this required another two trips tothe hardware store. But it's fixed. THere is now a bolt holding it in place on one side (original) and a stud on the other side with a nut that holds the thermostat housing (the repair). This should be a permanent fix to something I've been paching and just dealing with for years.
- March 27th 2002: I replaced the thermostat gasket in The Cat yet again, and had to borrow a friend's car's battery to get The Cat started as I had managed to kill her battery. Not 2 hours of driving later the gasket had started to leak badly again. I limped The Cat home and proceeded to rip everything apart again. This time I bought the tools to get the old broken off bolt out and did everything I could before it got too dark to see.
- March 26th 2002: Blew out the thermostat gasket again. There is only one bolt holding the thermostat housing oin place, but usually a gasket lasts several months before leaking. This one lasted three days before it started spraying coolant everywhere. Not good.
- March 23rd 2002: The Cat's front motor mount was replaced, and I had to fix the coolant leak caused by the motor moving too much (due to bad mount) this required replacing the thermostat gasket. I also went and replaced the upper radiator hose as I realized it is prolly still the original one from 1991!
- March 22nd 2002: The Cat is picked up from the transmission shop. SHe has a fully rebuilt and functional transmission. However they found a coolant leak, a bad motor mount (I cross-threaded the nut when installing it), and my power-steering rack is all messed up.
- March 13th 2002: Enough money is raised and The Cat is brought to a transmission shop to get her tranny rebuilt.
- February 1st 2002: Limped The Cat up to my mom's place where she will be sitting until I can afford to replace the transmission. I home this doesn't take as long as when she needed new head gaskets. She sat for 11months then.
- January 24th 2002: The Cat's transmission has started to self destruct. It's slipping badly in third gear and smells like burnt transmission fluid.
- January 18th 2002: Replaced the thermostat gasket which had started to leak again.
