A Peek At My Week! #26

Good morning, friends and fans!

Welcome to another “Peek Into My Week”, a behind the scenes look into the (I hope) noteworthy events in my past week – October 25, 2021!

This past week was much better for me than the previous one! While it was still filled with some taxing physical work of various descriptions, as well as some on-the-spot strategizing and planning, it was at least relatively stress free, and to be honest I actually enjoyed most of it!

The Beetle Project:

WRT the Beetle project, if you’ve been keeping up with my updates you’d know I’d been refurbishing the motor. In the previous “Peek” I described how I’d cleaned and painted the motor crankcase and started modifying the fan shroud for the sake of ergonomics! This past Monday afternoon, I picked up the finished barrels & pistons and the pair of cylinder heads from the workshop I had sort them out for me. The pistons and barrels were thoroughly cleaned, the barrels honed, and the pistons fitted with the proper original size rings. In the process of doing so, the technician determined that the previous rings that had been fitted had been improvised from a different car! There were also large bits of the compression rings missing – which appeared to have resulted at the time they were fitted to the pistons originally, which explains why the motor had lowered compression to begin with! Scary! The heads too were cleaned and all four sparkplug ports were fitted with hard metal inserts – the purpose of which is to prevent the threads stripping out in future when changing sparkplugs! On Wednesday afternoon I had a little free time, which I used to fit all 4 sets of barrels and pistons to the motor, but sadly, I didn’t have time to fit the heads until Friday afternoon!

A Quick Shopping Trip!

On Thursday afternoon, a friend took me out shopping for stuff I needed to carry on working on Dolly, including 3x pairs of rubber work gloves, 1x 5 liter oil to refill the motor later, 2x black engine aerosol spray-paint, 4x ivory body color aerosol spray-paint, 2x bottles of mineral turpentine to clean more engine parts, nuts, bolts and assorted tin-ware, 1x tube of engine silicone sealer paste in case I run out, and 2x sets of rocker cover gasket seals. That should just about do it!

Work, Work, Work!

On Thursday morning my work colleagues and I undertook a challenging project: to begin a long-awaited improvement of the facilities available to us: by building car-ports to protect our own vehicles in the employee parking area! We divided into two teams, one would be charged with cutting down eleven old tar-poles in a disused area of the lot, while the other team would make postholes in the concrete at the appointed places with a jackhammer! I was with the team that cut down the poles – and in fact since a chainsaw couldn’t be loaned or otherwise procured for the day, I brought my modest reciprocating electric saw along to meet the challenge! Despite all skepticism, my little saw performed amazingly well – cutting down all eleven thick posts within 2 hours of starting! We had an amazing team-thing going, making suggestions to solve challenges, taking turns with the saw, helping each other to get things done! The only things that spoiled it a little for me was the sun-burn on my neck, and then nearly passing out from the heat and not hydrating! Still, we soldiered on, and good progress was made!

Publish & Be Damned!

On the writing & publishing side of things, I’ve again received a number of audiobook first 15 minute test samples from some of my amazing narrators this week, which thrilled me to no end! One of these happens to be “Dead Beckoning“, book 3 in the Galaxii Series, being narrated by Edmund Bloxam, complete with sound effects and music! I have to tell you that listening to it was quite an experience, and I was only sorry it was just a 15 minute preview!

I’m looking forward to unleashing so many new audiobooks on you in the near future, so stay tuned! It’s all thanks to my amazing publisher, Brandon Mullins at Moon Books Publishing – who bears my undying gratitude.

Brandon also created a stunning new cover for “Dead Man’s Hammer“, which is also at ACX for approval, and which should be released very shortly! Here it is below:

Back To The Bug Again:

The weekend again, was occupied by Dolly’s motor. Beginning on Friday afternoon, I set out to create a tunnel through the fan shroud through which to pass plug leads and other cables. I intended to fit the coil on the back of the fan housing, out of sight. You can see Friday’s progress below:

On Saturday I picked up where I left off. I started by torqueing the cylinder heads so that was out of the way! I’d have to fit the rocker arms and pushrods later, after the pushrod tubes arrive from my supplier. Meanwhile, I carried on with other things that needed to be done.

Dolly had a missing piece of cooling tin, and since finding parts for these cars is such a chore (and since I was rather stuck for transport) I decided to make a one myself. I used the existing one, which came off the right-hand side as a guide, and traced it onto paper. Since the missing one was a mirror-image of that one, it was a simple matter to fold and fit and modify the paper version to the point where I could cut the final one from a piece of steel, which I then shaped using the paper version as a guide. After that, I finished the fan shroud, which took the bulk of the day to achieve – and I’m rather proud of the result! Anyway, once I’d finished test-fitting and ensuring that everything fit together nicely, I stripped off the cooling tins, painted them, and refitted them to the engine since I still have to test-fit a few other things next weekend, in order to sure that everything will fit together properly when I finally reassemble the whole thing in situ.

As you can see, I added a few detail touches, such as highlighting the cylinder numbers pressed into the tin-ware, with red paint to make them stand out a bit better. It also looks rather nice, don’t you think?

On Sunday I decided to take it a bit easier for the sake of my aching muscles and joints, so I only devoted an hour to tidying up the plug leads with some plastic sleeves and marked the ends with the appropriate number of red cable ties to mark the plug number – in order to make finding the correct plug lead a lot easier! spent the rest of the day recuperating!

That’s all for now! I hope to have more good news to tell you soon! Have a great week!