5 min to read
Are We Monthly Yet?
I turned a running car into a non-running car
Draggor Split Personality Icon by finbeard
The Bumblebee sure got interesting!
If you don’t know, the Bumblebee is my yellow 1995 corvette. I bought it a couple years ago as quite the fixer upper, and wowee have I underestimated the work! I’m new to wrenching, so at this point I am not surprised, and now expect it. While the car exists in a much better state today than when I acquired it, fixes for the remaining items prove to be… Interesting™ .
The car ran loud, and all of this with Axel’s help, we discovered some awful rusting to death cherry bombs in the middle of the exhaust system. We sawed those out, and hacked together via generic pipe from Oreilly’s a patch replacement. This drastically reduced the noise levels, however I still had an exhaust leak, and it increasingly became annoying to me on road trips. One day I happened to check Face Space Marketplace, and found a 1996 complete stock exhaust for cheap, and bought and acquired it. Finally, the weekend before AnthrOhio, we decided to “swap the exhausts quickly”. Oh how wrong we were.
I do a lot of prep work on my own: get the car on jack stands, get any and all of the bolts out I could do myself, and prepare the garage for Axel and I to remove what was there. At one point Axel suggests we cut out what’s there, it’s not that useful. I counter with I should learn how to remove the exhaust the The Right Way™. This turned out to be a mistake, as once I had gotten the rear mounts out, it was time to attack the bolts that held the main exhaust to the catalytic converters. One bolt comes out, and two of the other bolt heads snap off. Oops. Well that means the cats need to come out so we can deal with the stuck bolts. In the process of getting THOSE out, we snapped off more bolt heads. This meant the exhaust headers needed to come off.
Oh hey, to get the exhaust headers off? Spark plugs need to come out. It also means the AC Compressor needs to be moved to get at a bolt, which means the serpentine belt needed to be de-tensioned. This required removing even more parts. Ultimately, I did most of the work to get the exhaust headers out, and I’m proud of that. With the help of a newly acquired acetylene torch, we got the majority of the bolts out, with the two casualties of burning a hole in one of the catalytic converters, and utterly annihilating the threads on that bolt hole. Axel is able to tig weld the hole in the cat, and we’re able to rethread/tap the ruined bolt hole. We do more than that, but eventually we’re able to reinstall the exhaust headers on the car. In doing so we learn I broke a coolant temperature sensor on the engine block, oops!
With new gaskets and the headers on, I went to install fresh spark plugs, and wow on this car? What a major pain in the ass! I currently have 7 of the 8 in, which I’m proud of: previously I’ve required help to get the back plugs in. Curiously, one of the easier front plugs starts to go in fine, then gets very, very difficult. We’re going to get a thread chaser in there and see what’s going on, because I do NOT want to crossthread a spark plug, that’s a Bad Day™. There’s also a weird hissing noise occasionally, so we’ll see if I managed to get a pinhole leak to the AC system. Hopefully though, the car will be back on the road in time to take me to Anthrocon.
FWA IS SOON AAAAAA
I have a panel at FWA: Intro to Alternative Role Playing Game Systems Friday May 9 at 1:30pm, Room 3-B (301-305), presumably in the Hilton. I hope to have Alkali and some friends accompany me for it, and if I get my prep work done, will be demoing a little round of Inspectres with the hosts, and maybe some of the audience. It’s an experiment!
Otherwise I intend to fursuit and generally be a goofball. I haven’t decided what all I’m bringing, but I certainly need to be a dog, especially after forgetting to bring the hood to AnthrOhio. Of course some Spideys will appear too!
AnthrOhio 2025 mini recap
Thank you to Boozy, Iggy, Ash, Citrine, and Sigma for all the fun stage time! I finally did Iggy’s long form improv show and despite being utterly terrified, it went surprisingly well. I look forward to doing it again! Mass Debation continues to be one of my all time favorite panels, and once more I’m actually proud of how I did for that show: for the first time I am actually learning how to be comfortable on stage, which of course lets the performances get better. The fursuiting was a blast, and the new venue in downtown Columbus was a grand time (if expensive).
Current and Future Projects
I still need to study for my ham radio license, and there are some software projecs I would like to complete, one of which being a mini editor for doing blog updates like this. Here’s hoping I update this before June!
