New projects in the new shop!

Good Morning
Kevin and I pushed Nell’s VW Rabbit into the shop yesterday, along with the refrigerator that Jose brought us, last week. The VW blew the head gasket and we wanted to see what other damage the engine had. The refrigerator needs some work as well, but we just got it inside and haven’t done anything to it yet. I’m guessing the dolly attached to the fridge belongs to and needs to go back to Jose, I’ll call and find out when I thank him for the donation. The refrigerator we are using now was given to us by Lisa and Jonathan and it works great except the plastic on the door is disintegrating, and that is affectively losing us room on the inside. Maybe with a little servicing this new one will work out as well as the last one did. Thank you all very much.

While I am thanking people, I should have mentioned yesterday that Danny, bless his heart, came out with his Datsun pick up truck on Sunday, my birthday, enabling us to go for a load of firewood. This really helped us out, as we were down to burning wet Ponderosa pine wood, which doesn’t put out very much heat. So now we have some dry Pinion pine to get us through, until the other wood dries out a bit. Jackson also loaded up his trailer that afternoon, thank you both. I keep thinking this is the perfect time to build a waste motor oil burning heater, but I just don’t seem to have the time, now the Rabbit is in the shop. So many projects to fill the time.

Yesterday, was a slow starting day for me. My excuse is I woke too damn early and fell asleep on the couch after I finished the newsletter. When I woke for the second time it was nearly noon, and I wasn’t feeling terribly rested even with the nap. I’m not big on naps, always felt a little groggy after a nap, but it wasn’t my intention to take one yesterday, I was relaxing on the couch watching a streaming video from Netflix, and the next thing I know the credits are rolling. I forced myself up and out to the shop, where I looked around for something to do. After building a fire in the wood heater, I began removing the masking tape from the stator Kevin and I worked on before the Trooper episode.

Recasting really brought this thing back from the dead. Only a few imperfections can be seen now, and we don’t think they need more attention, except perhaps a thin coat of resin brushed on to seal the whole stator.

Here you can see the before shot of the stator.
To give you an idea of how I thought about this stator after Synergy Fest in the Spring. I left it in the yard in the weather while we built the shop. I thought it would not come out of the mold without demolishing it. Happily it turned out that the mold was the only thing to get demolished. I don’t remember if I mentioned the other day when I first posted the image directly above whether I described what you are seeing. Kevin is pouring polyester resin into the gaps where the resin which didn’t harden came pouring out when I picked the mold and stator up thinking it had hardened overnight. We were on our way to Synergy Fest, and if I was thinking properly I would have put the clamps back on the mold and placed it back on a level surface to finish setting up.

As you can see in the upper image it is almost as if the screwup prior to Synergy Fest never happened. The fresh polyester resin bonded with the old seamlessly, and it was fun to do besides. We had a little bit of resin left over so we scrambled to find something to use it for, before it setup.

The slight discoloration at the top of the snow board is where we added polyester resin. The board was de-laminating at the front edge. We don’t know if polyester resin will stick to the plastic the board is built from, but supposedly polyester resin sticks really well to everything, which explains how and why it wouldn’t come out of the plywood mold even though we used a thick layer of mold release and made sure the stator mold had no undercut edges.

This was probably a waste of time, with snow shovels being inexpensive, but again we need to know what materials polyester resin sticks to and which materials it doesn’t stick. The snow shovel was wrecked anyway. I used a side-grinder to quickly clean up the rough edges. I did not want to spend too much time fooling around with this, although it does look like polyester adheres to ABS plastic. My guess is this will come apart under heavy use I give a snow shovel.

After I got done fiddling around in the shop in the morning, Kevin and I finished pushing the VW Rabbit that Danny moved up to the new shop from the old with his trusty 4×4 Datsun the day before. Proving again that the new workshop is awesomely conducive to getting work done, we had the rabbit disassembled and diagnosed in record time.

Except for the fact that the diagnosis wasn’t good, the job went quickly and with few cuts and bruises. In the above photo, two large cracks can be seen in cylinder head in the right side of the picture, just above the two dark round valves. Not good, like I said, but likely nothing to do with the overheating that caused the head gasket to blow out, on the left side of the head. Luckily we have two of these VW Rabbit diesels. More than likely in short order we will be posting images of a blue VW Rabbit in the shop as the donor vehicle for a hopefully better condition cylinder head. My experience says, those are brand new valves, too bad the guy who did the engine rebuild didn’t look more closely at the head for defects. I don’t think those cracks happened recently.

So there it is, another work day at home, with plenty to show, thank you Jesus, thank you Lord.
Catch ya tomorrow, same time, same channel,
Brian Rodgers