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Apr. 5th, 2018 05:39 pmDear diary:
I came home at noonish to take Monty to the vet to have her sutures removed. She's somewhat infamous at the vet's, so pretty much as soon as I walked in, one of the techs grabbed her and whisked her off into the back, ahead of everyone else, because she had "I am going to eat that terrier and then I'll get that rottweiler puppy immediately afterwards" written all over her face.
They were done in record time, like ten minutes, and said "go around to the employee entrance" so I did and got her back without having to negotiate through the waiting room again. Vet says she looks great, if we can keep her from licking the one suture she's flexible enough to reach.
Back home. I was in theory working from home for the second half of the day. That means being able to log into the work network, which somehow never actually happens. Today I brought home my work laptop. Remote Desktop: didn't work, laptop can't find the server. VPN: didn't work, authentication failed. I thought this might happen, so I'd stored the files I wanted to work on locally. I tried to open one and it crashed horribly because of a ton of dependencies it hadn't told me about when I was trying to store everything locally.
Luckily for me, I downloaded a third-party extension that packages projects, complete with all the dependencies, into a zip file, so my backup-backup-backup worked and I got a huge amount done with nobody coming in to ask me questions.
It's now quitting time, so I turned off the work laptop, ran downstairs, and fired up the Spitfire.
When last I talked about it, the water pump had failed. I installed a new water pump, and then took the time to do something I've meant to do since we got it: removed the bodged existing radiator fan and replaced it with a good custom radiator fan.
Lower: the original fan, complete with a section of a shopping cart hacksawed out as a mounting bracket. Upper: my original replacement bracket, prototype version, with two fans that have some protection for errant fingers.
The bracket fit, but contacted the radiator inlet/outlet and didn't fit where I wanted it to, so I cut out a couple of bits and welded in some flat strip to detour around the radiator hardware while still keeping room for the fans, and added mounting brackets to attach to the radiator mounting hardware.
Then I bolted the fans in, bolted the bracket in, and wired everything up.
I fired up the Spitfire and drove around the block, which is the first time it's been out in three months. The dashboard still isn't completely in the right place, but it looks pretty good, and everything else seems to work just fine. No leaks, no brake problems. There's a weird clunk involving the left front wheel, but that might be a bearing adjustment. (Spitfires are nearly unique in that the spindle arm is hollow and supposed to be filled using a grease gun filled with oil rather than grease. I haven't yet done this.)
Noted in passing: the new fans make about half the noise the old one did, but when they come on, the engine rpm drops for a second as the alternator deals with the significantly higher electrical load. This is why I need a proportional fan controller, so they can run at half load, half current. As it is, they're too much cooling and load. In the summer, they'll only be too much load.
Seen in a local parking lot: "Don't judge my pitbull and I won't judge your kids."
I came home at noonish to take Monty to the vet to have her sutures removed. She's somewhat infamous at the vet's, so pretty much as soon as I walked in, one of the techs grabbed her and whisked her off into the back, ahead of everyone else, because she had "I am going to eat that terrier and then I'll get that rottweiler puppy immediately afterwards" written all over her face.
They were done in record time, like ten minutes, and said "go around to the employee entrance" so I did and got her back without having to negotiate through the waiting room again. Vet says she looks great, if we can keep her from licking the one suture she's flexible enough to reach.
Back home. I was in theory working from home for the second half of the day. That means being able to log into the work network, which somehow never actually happens. Today I brought home my work laptop. Remote Desktop: didn't work, laptop can't find the server. VPN: didn't work, authentication failed. I thought this might happen, so I'd stored the files I wanted to work on locally. I tried to open one and it crashed horribly because of a ton of dependencies it hadn't told me about when I was trying to store everything locally.
Luckily for me, I downloaded a third-party extension that packages projects, complete with all the dependencies, into a zip file, so my backup-backup-backup worked and I got a huge amount done with nobody coming in to ask me questions.
It's now quitting time, so I turned off the work laptop, ran downstairs, and fired up the Spitfire.
When last I talked about it, the water pump had failed. I installed a new water pump, and then took the time to do something I've meant to do since we got it: removed the bodged existing radiator fan and replaced it with a good custom radiator fan.
Lower: the original fan, complete with a section of a shopping cart hacksawed out as a mounting bracket. Upper: my original replacement bracket, prototype version, with two fans that have some protection for errant fingers.
The bracket fit, but contacted the radiator inlet/outlet and didn't fit where I wanted it to, so I cut out a couple of bits and welded in some flat strip to detour around the radiator hardware while still keeping room for the fans, and added mounting brackets to attach to the radiator mounting hardware.
Then I bolted the fans in, bolted the bracket in, and wired everything up.
I fired up the Spitfire and drove around the block, which is the first time it's been out in three months. The dashboard still isn't completely in the right place, but it looks pretty good, and everything else seems to work just fine. No leaks, no brake problems. There's a weird clunk involving the left front wheel, but that might be a bearing adjustment. (Spitfires are nearly unique in that the spindle arm is hollow and supposed to be filled using a grease gun filled with oil rather than grease. I haven't yet done this.)
Noted in passing: the new fans make about half the noise the old one did, but when they come on, the engine rpm drops for a second as the alternator deals with the significantly higher electrical load. This is why I need a proportional fan controller, so they can run at half load, half current. As it is, they're too much cooling and load. In the summer, they'll only be too much load.
Seen in a local parking lot: "Don't judge my pitbull and I won't judge your kids."
