Originally I’d wanted to do paintwork but the pollen situation has been appalling. All my nice dry paintwork is covered in a thick layer of yellow pollen. My white car has big drifts of pollen on the windscreen wipers.
In the end though I felt motivated enough to do a lot of work I decided to start with brake lines. That meant I had to move a pickup truck out of the way. Well, I pulled that forward three feet and turned the engine off then found I hadn’t pulled forward enough. Rather than restarting the engine, I simply pushed it and it was very light and easy to push on level ground.
So, up went the hood and I took a look at what needed to be done then had a change of heart and decided to work on the battery compartment. Thus I pulled out the battery tray insert and I’d made it oversized so I had to trim it slightly with the angle grinder. While I was at it, I drilled holes in the battery retaining strap that I welded together some while ago and fitted the new retaining hardware to it. That’ll all be ready for use once I’ve made the new flame shield. Because of the way the battery holder has been made, the flame shield is much more complex than the one over the other battery. There’s a lot of cutting and welding that needs to be done.
Having done that, I rearranged the brake lines a little so I now don’t need an extension on the line for the front brakes. The line for the back brakes I made but I’m not happy with as it does not go through all the securing points that it should. It will work but I will have to return to both of the lines from the chassis to the blended lines.
Once the brake lines were in, the brakes could be made to work although I still want to replace the whole run from the front to the back wheels. Those lines are as old as the bus and in dire need of replacement. I want to see if what I’ve done holds up to testing though or whether there’s something vital I’ve overlooked.
Into the master cylinder went a quart of DOT3 but that’s where work stopped. The sky began to look terrible so I never got the change to try my Harbor Freight brake fluid sucking tool.
No pictures today, I’m afraid. Not because I didn’t take any - I took quite a few. The problem is that my laptop running Linux Mint Cinnamon went bananas after a genuine Linux Mint update. It now works in command line only. I tried to download a new version of Linux for it and put that onto a USB memory stick but my Raspberry Pi refused steadfastly to perform. That too needs a new installation of Linux. Thus I’m currently reduced to typing blog entries on my iPad. Blogger, being a Google thing does not play well with my iPad. Accessing via Chrome on the iPad, I get no scroll bar and have no idea what I’m typing once everything goes off the bottom of the window. Putting pictures in with Chrome is possible but once I get to the bottom of the screen, everything flicks up and down constantly, making the whole experience rather vomit-inducing. Via Safari, I can see what I’m typing and the text does not flick up and down but I cannot include photos.
Currently my only other option is to use my phone as a blogging medium. That’s Android and the screen is painfully small. Interestingly, iOS, Android, OSX and Linux are all exactly the same operating system but with different tweaks. I have tried to download to a memory stick with my phone but of course the Android software to write to USB just does not work. It’s all really rather frustrating with everything conspiring to block me from blogging etc. Perhaps it’s the world telling me to complete the bus and to blog about it later?
And, of course as soon as I finished the last paragraph, the text started jumping up and down like an excited toddler. On that point, I’ll let you read what’s been written and I’ll put photos in the next entry - even if I have to buy another damn laptop in order to fix the stuff that’s gone wrong with the previous one!
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