(no subject)

The water temperature gauge on the Spitfire has slowly been dying. It was reading 120F when the car had been off for two days, and got up to 160F when the car was running. It was a really cheap unit. I bought another really cheap unit off ebay and replaced it last night, which was way more of a pain than it should have been, because the previous owner ran a LOT of extra wires through the grommet in the firewall and there was no longer room for the sensor to fit through. I also forgot that the first step is putting the gauge in the dash, because you can't remove the sensor from the gauge, so after routing the sensor through the grommet and along the engine and installing it in the water pump, I had to undo it, feed it through the dash, and redo it. But now it works, at least.

Yesterday I spent about five hours painting the house, getting a layer or two of exterior paint on all the sun-facing wood on the first floor, and getting a good start on the non-sun-facing wood. Today I'll get the small amount of wood on the second floor. Man this is sore work, all above my head, a lot of it from a ladder, but it should last several years and more importantly prevent the wood being damaged by being exposed, as it was. Looks a lot better, too, than all the flaking and peeling paint that had been there since we moved in.

(no subject)

Water temp meter part II:
I left the project half-finished last night, intending to fill the radiator with the water that had been lost in pulling out the water temperature sensor. This morning I got up, intending to drive the Spitfire over to the Annual Little British Car Show, poured a bunch of water in, and watched it cascade out of the sensor recess. Tightening the nutbolt (a bolt with a hole through the center that the sensor lives in) down didn't help. I drove my normal car over, checked out some pretty cars, and drove back, and then removed the sensor and started poking at it. Halfway up the bulb that lives in the water, there's a tapered ring of metal. I thought it was a precision tapered ring, that sealed against the matching taper inside the water pump. But this is automotive: there is nothing precision outside of the innards of the engine and transmission. Instead there was secretly a rubber gasket that, when I removed the old sensor, had stayed inside the water pump housing. It was totally shot, and no amount of trying to carefully put it back in was going to save it. I ended up getting an o-ring from my collection of high temperature water-resistant o-rings and using that instead, but because it was smaller, the nutbolt no longer managed to press the sensor down well enough to seal. I had to cut a little collet on the lathe, like a thick washer but sawed in half so it could be put in two pieces around the sensor line. With that, everything sealed correctly, as far as I can tell, and the car is ready to go again. A quick jaunt around the block shows the water temperature gauge indicating roughly the right numbers. I'll check tonight to see if the radiator is full of water.