Work, work, work

4/24/09

Work, work, work - after blissfully allowing bus work, bus research, bus dreaming, etc to occupy all my free time for several weeks (much to my girlfriends displeasure) I have become overwhelmed by long hours of work at my "real" job followed by long hours of work at my side job. The result: ZERO time and attention for the bus (and still zero for the girlfriend - I'm lucky she puts up with me.)

My hope is that my time spent at the side job - managing the internet presence for Real Estate Investment speaker Pete Youngs (www.PeteYoungs.com) - is an investment in myself. Developing a new subscription website for his students (www.RehabInsider.com), has been a major undertaking, but very pleasurable. I would love nothing more than to be untethered from a desk job, working wherever I could get an internet connection. I don't think this has to be exclusive to web building/managing, but it is certainly more conducive to it. The only problem is that my knowledge & experience are way insufficient to support myself doing that. I have some ideas on how to make it work, but we'll have to see if it's worth the time and energy it would take to get it going.

Not firing on #1?

3/11/09

Poor performance (not that an aging bus ever has great performance) started me wondering ... messing with my spark plugs led me to be concerned.

I'm can't even remember why I did it. I decided to remove the wire from one of my spark plugs. Not being experienced with engines, this sounds like a bad idea, so, like I said, I'm not sure what prompted me to do it. The funny thing was that when I did it, nothing happened. The engine didn't sputter or shake, it just kept on running. Surprised, I decided to try it on other cylinder's plugs. Each of the other 3 had slightly different reactions, but they all changed the way the engine ran.

You'll see in the video below that when I pull the plug wire off the #1 plug, there is no change in the way the motor sounds or runs. If I pull the wire off of any other plug the motor hiccups, bucks, and backfires. Does this mean that #1's not firing?

I'm pretty sure I'm getting juice to the plug - I think I can see the spark jump from the boot to the plug (and hear the click.) I pulled the plug out and it looks clean and normal (light brown.) Not sure what this mean, but it's definitely time for a compression test

[YouTube Link]

This bathtub is getting too small

3/10/09

There's nobody to read this yet, so I'll keep it brief. "Magellan Soul In A Bathtub" was a piece of a chorus to a song I started writing some time ago ... I never finished the song, but the sentiment is and has always been with me. I'm a wanderer and a dreamer enduring the mundaneity of daily life so that I can make it to my next adventure.

We'll see how this blog develops, but I suspect it will be occupied primarily with my newest obsession, restoring a '78 Volkswagen Camper (bus, hippie van, kombi, campmobile, westy ... so many names.) This is my current dream of escape. Once I can rely on it's mechanical soundness and my mechanical aptitude the plan is to take some grand tour ... Anchorage to Tierra Del Fuego, maybe?