Category: garage

Heavy Lifting

It’s been two years since I bought the moment frame. The beam has been in the garage, getting covered in dust waiting, but there was a lot to get done to prepare for it.

The column near the garage door is too tall to stand up in the garage, because the final height will have the bottom of the column buried in concrete. So I had to dig out the footing before I could even stand the column up:

Here’s the column standing in a freshly dug hole. The top of the column has to be down below its final position so that we can bolt it to the beam. Once it’s bolted to the beam, the whole lot will be lifted into place. The columns will be hanging in the air and we’ll pour the new foundation under it.

The column at other end of the moment frame will be up on top of a concrete wall – but the wall isn’t there yet: So I had to make a temporary platform to sit it on.

The major pain with this moment frame: Absolutely every utility in the house has to cross this beam: All the electric, gas, water, heating, and network wiring and piping had to be disconnected, and then routed through holes in the new beam or under it.

Holes in steel? I bought a “mag drill” to drill holes in the steel beam. It’s basically a small drill press attached to a powerful electro-magnet. I position the drill in the correct location, then turn on the magnet and it sticks to the beam.

Then I drill a hole. I had to drill large holes for the utility pipes to go through, and smaller holes for bolts to hold pieces of wood to the beam so that I can support building structure off the side.

Here are two of the pieces wood, all drilled and prepared to attach to the moment frame beam. The bucket is filled with wood chippings for the compost.

Just the beam weighs a lot (over 1000 lb) plus each column is extremely heavy. I used two furniture dollies (they are supposed to be able to support 2000 lb each) to move the beam. They were creaking and flexing ominously.

Once the beam was lined up in the correct location, I used a 20 ton bottle jack to slowly lift one end a few inches, then temporarily support it before lifting the other end. It took a full day to get it almost up to the floor above.

Once I got it close, I cut the old wood floor beam where this moment frame beam fits in. And I also had to disconnect all the wires and pipes that crossed over it.

It took me over a week to get all the wires and pipes reconnected. It’s interesting thinking about our priorities for what we need. First I reconnected the power for the kitchen, to keep the refrigerator running. Then the main water pipe. Then bit by bit I got the electrical reconnected. But we were taking cold showers most of the week until I could get the gas reconnected. Finally I got the network cables connected. I still don’t have the duct for the heating in the front room reconnected.

I made one mistake in measuring for the holes in the beam: I drilled the hole for the gas pipe right where the duct for the furnace was. The beam was already up in the air when I figured this out, so I had to lift the mag drill up, and drill a new hole. Because the floor joists were in the way, I couldn’t get the hole quite as high as the other ones, so the gas pipe will be a little below the ceiling.

Here is the new steel moment frame beam temporarily supported in place.

I have lots of temporary support posts holding everything up while I do the foundation.

The old steel beam that used to be here was too small for the load, so it had sagged about an inch in the middle. The floors in the house are all sloping because of it. I figured when I put this new frame in place, I’d level out the floors – which I expected would damage the plaster.

What I hadn’t expected was how badly it would crack the plaster. Now I again have to fix all this plaster that we had fixed perfectly over a decade ago.

I also didn’t anticipate quite how big the jacking loads would be to lift the beam into place. Once it the moment frame connected with the house and started lifting the house, the loads were huge: Enough that the jack crushed and cracked the concrete floor slab in the garage.

I used a laser level to figure out how much to jack up the structure. Once I got the beam to the correct height, I added temporary wood pieces that I’ll replace with a steel post cap.

This piece of wood is almost 2 inches thick: That’s how much the floor got raised at this point.

I talked about the floor joists being notched on the bottom in a previous post. But all this leveling of the floors suddenly made it obvious when a floor joist supporting one of the walls in the living room was sagging. So I added a joist to that one.

Again, I had to disconnect wires and reconnect them to put the new joist in. I also screwed this one up: At first I reinforced the wrong floor joist.

I spent a full day, removing the drywall, disconnecting the wiring, adding the reinforcing joist, reconnecting the wiring, and putting everything back. When I went up to the living room at the end of the day, I was surprised how little the sagging floor joist had changed – until I realized I’d reinforced the wrong one. So the next day I had to do everything again, but for the correct joist this time.

I temporarily jacked the center of the sagging floor joist, connected it to the new reinforcing joist, and then removed the jack.

Now on to the concrete work. I’ve got the reinforcing done for the wall and the pilaster below one of the steel frame columns. Now I have to build formwork to hold the wet concrete in place, but I have to get the rebar inspected first.

Bella bella… we miss you…

Tying rebar and pouring concrete

Well first I just had to add this photo of mole – we went to Hawaii and found some really great vegan ramen. This is how happy we were.

Back to business: I finished chipping out the concrete and digging for the first part of the foundation. This is where one end of the steel frame will be supported.

So that means more sacks of soil. I’m becoming a regular customer for these guys. This time I was careful to try not overloading the sacks. It probably helped that it wasn’t raining any more.

I’d been dithering on buying this tool for a year or so because it’s so expensive: It’s an electric rebar bender. You can get manual benders, and I’ve done that before: It’s a lot of work, and not very accurate. And you can rent (or buy) bigger bending machines that weigh about 800lb, but can bend bigger bars. But then I’m either hauling it back and forth to the rental place, or trying to find a place to store it. This one is limited to no bigger than #5 bars, but I’m only using #3 and #4 on this project.

Here I’m starting to lay out rebar. In the future, the foundation will continue from here, so I made a bar long enough to “lap” the rebar, and covered half of it tightly with electrical tape, and drove it into the soil. When I excavate for the new footing, hopefully the bars will be there and protected by the tape…

Here I’m starting to bend bars. It’s a really great tool – very glad I got it. It even has a cutter built-in.

One of the really tricky things about rebar is that there are layers, and lots of pieces that interconnect. You have to be really careful to put things together in the correct order, or it won’t be possible to get some of the pieces in. I had to take it apart a couple of times to get it right. Here I’m about halfway through.

These are the anchor bolts for the moment frame. I’ll have to extend them with couplers but this part is firmly held in place so it can get poured into the footing.

All the rebar ready for a concrete pour.

A concrete pour is a big event: You have to schedule inspectors, concrete delivery and pump truck all to be there at the right time. And hopefully there’s space on the street (the whole road was closed most of May while they replaced the sewer lines under the street).

So much work, and it’s all hidden:

Oh I just realized I’ve been really going on a bit of a splurge with tools. This machine is definitely more of a frivolous purchase. But it’s oh so nice.

My brother (in law) and sister, nieces and nephew came to visit and we all hiked up to the top of the nearest hill.

Three more sacks

This seismic project is really going to take a long time! OK, so I got started digging out the opposite side. I’ve been looking forward to removing this step for a while.

After I’d chipped out the steps, I realized: There’s going to be a gaping hole at the bottom of the door. I put the concrete breaking on hold while I worked on extending the door by 14 inches!

I just glued a piece of wood on the top and the bottom. Not the most ideal method, but it was quick, and this door isn’t a beauty. I then used 10″ long screws to screw through this wood into the door frame. Really difficult to keep the screw going straight: Actually it came out the face on a couple of places. Ooops.

This is how things looked before I got into messing it up (so tidy!):

First I took off all the concrete and put it directly into a big yellow sack. Then I got started on the soil. Manual labor is hard.

Here it is, dug out (well, as much as I can do right now). On the right side, the foundation is much higher up than the ground level, so I had to leave the soil sloped back to that. I’ll be taking out all that foundation eventually.

On the left side, because they had poured concrete against the wood, there’s gaping hole all along the bottom of their house where the wood has rotten about 2 inches into the wall. It was all filled with soil. Not good!

I saved the small pieces of broken concrete to use as gravel while I’m working on this. Hopefully it will keep the amount of mud down.

So that’s what two sacks full of soil and one full of concrete look like. The weather forecast says 1 inch of rain on Wednesday: That’s the day they are picking the sacks up. I’d better cover them with a tarp!

When a lot happens, little gets written

Is that how it is? Well, last year, very little happened on the house, but a lot of other things did happen: Multiple trips. Marathons. But I’ll have to write about them another time. Just wanted to try to catch up on the house a bit here.

I decided to remove some more concrete, and plant a tree:

This soil has been below concrete, and compacted for so long that it can’t be healthy. I dug out quite deep, then threw in some compost: that’s some of the buggy apples from the ground (I guess it wasn’t quite rotten yet.) I layered compost and soil all the way to the top, then planted the tree.

And here is our new little Japanese maple. I hope it thrives here.

So the pile of concrete and dirt from my earlier post sat in our driveway for about 3 months. I had it covered in plastic to prevent a mud slick when it rained. My initial plan was to stockpile it so that I’d get a dumpster and fill it in one go. Well, I just got tired of having a huge pile in the driveway (it was in the way when I took out the garbage, it was difficult to get out of the car, etc.) And life was filling in a lot more of the weekends than I’d expected.

So I used a service called yellowsack. It’s quite a bit more expensive than a dumpster per ton, but if I’m just hauling out 9,000 lb at a time, that fits into three sacks, and they come pick them up with a truck that has a crane on it. No need to reserve street space.

OK, so there’s another project that’s been keeping me busy. I spent a few months reinforcing floor joists. Remember this phot? This one notch, even though it’s about 2″ deep, has probably halved the strength of this 10″ floor joist, because the edge fibers are the most important:

So one by one, I sistered on new joists to the old ones to try to strengthen them back up. I need the joists to be strong for when I’m shoring up the side of the house to replace the foundation.

Had to move some electrical wiring, and removed some rotten wood also.

It’s quite a pain trying to get a full length joist into that space. Actually, I made them a bit short, turned them on their side and pushed one side up high, while the other side I pushed up. Once it was in the space, I could flip it up and push it against the joist. Quite a workout. Don’t ever let an electrician notch a joist.

Oh, I just liked this photo: It’s the bag on my dust collector that’s connected to my table saw and thickness planer. I like how the different wood I was working put different colored stripes.

More demolition

Oh, and in between the rain storms, we did continue working on the foundation project. More destruction first:

Oh, this was painful:

A view from below as things were coming apart. I was thinking I’d try to save the tile above because it was still in such good condition – but it would have been difficult to get the waterproofing right, and the slopes. Plus I’d have to support it while working under it.

Here you can see straight into the garage.

Mole is taking out the concrete anchors that were at the bottom of the steps. You can see the steps all piled up on the right.

As it started getting dark, we were still working to get a temporary wall and roof in place to close off the garage.

Here we have the temporary roof, supported off the wall on the left, and you can see the marks of the steps on our neighbors wall on the right. The paint was in really bad shape, and some of the wood quite rotten.

I spent a weekend stripping the old paint off their wall so I could repaint it. This will get permanently hidden behind a new wall, so at least it should have a decent coat of paint.

That bottom row of siding will need to be replaced. They poured concrete against the side of the house, so the wood just rotted away behind it. Even thousand-year-old redwood cannot withstand that.

I sanded and filled all the holes. Ready for paint:

You can see the finished paint on the wall. The photo below I took on a Saturday afternoon, right after I’d removed the concrete and hurt my back. I spent a week barely able to walk. After this, the project sat for a month while my back recovered.

… time goes by …

Mole helped me finish excavating down the soil. I think I’m going to need to hire some people to help me on this.

But there is something I _can_ do: Repair the damaged floor joists. Who would do this to a floor joist?

Feeling much better after getting some reinforcing in. It’s pretty slow going, because it’s hard to get the joist in there over all the conduit and wires.

Bella wanted to say “hi”:

Electric

I just realized that my thinking on electric cars changed dramatically over the last two years. Two years ago, we had to buy a new car, and at the time I was perfectly happy with buying another gas car. In fact, if it hadn’t been for mole’s veto, I’d have even bought a non-hybrid Honda Fit. At the time, my thinking was: Most electricity is generated by CO2 emitting technology (and I include Nuclear in that, because the mining, transportation, storage, safety backup systems, etc all rely on fossil fuel) – therefore it is more efficient to just use the energy source directly. Two years later and it feels almost absurd to think that someone now would go out and buy a vehicle that’s not electric. I was missing the point.

I think a few things have happened to push me that way:

  • One was the morning in September 2020 when we woke up to a burned, dark sky and no sun. This hit me at a much deeper emotional level than even Greta Thunberg’s speeches and Friday strikes, and left me feeling hopeless and depressed.
  • On top of this came the dramatic demonstration by Russia that reliance on fossil fuel is an ongoing security issue for the world. One despot in control of the oil-drug we rely on and we’re lost.
  • Talking to people who own electric cars it became clear that electric cars are so simple mechanically that they are inevitably more reliable and require much less maintenance.
  • And also the general noise and stink of internal combustion engines became very obvious after the brief hiatus we had from them during the pandemic.
  • And, and, and we got solar panels! I now see first hand the layers of self-serving inertia in our electricity monopoly. They cause delays to the installation, delays to allowing us to connect, and constantly (successfully) lobby the state regulator to reduce the amount they pay, even as they cause wildfires that burn down whole communities. But much of the inefficiency and weakness in the electric grid is that it relies on single point generation of electricity. Electricity is distributed over many miles to many different places, wasting energy for every mile it travels. Distributed solar could change that – in California the electricity could be mostly generated and stored near where it’s needed. The loss of one electric plant, or power line, could be negligible.

I think electric cars are most certainly not the answer to our environmental crisis. They do not address urban sprawl, or the massive waste of money and energy building huge roads. But they are so much better than gasoline cars, that I now compare them to the steam engine: Clever technology for the time, but now very dated.

It was a bit of a process to get solar installed: When the garage was dug out in the 1960’s, they put a post in front of the electric panel. This violates code, so the building inspector would not approve any work until it was moved. Besides, it was completely full with no available locations to connect the solar electric system. Contractors were so extremely busy that I could only get two bids – one of which I had to pay them for. And the prices were twice what the solar company had estimated for the cheaper bid. But now that it’s all installed, we’ve become obsessed with trying to time our electricity usage with the middle of the day when we make the most. Better to try to use it here than get pennies on the dollar from PG&E.

But I digress: I mentioned in the last post that I made a door and a new temporary wall. This door I made out of old wood that was wall paneling. The mistake I made on this door is that the two stiles (the thicker pieces on sides of the door) are too narrow to install a lock. Maybe I can find an old surface mounted lock.

But it looks nice, and now the bikes are completely hidden from view when the garage door is open.

I also got the new steel moment frame delivered. The main beam weighs over 800lb. I couldn’t figure out how to lift it off the truck: Even if we got four people, it would be over 200lb per person, and it’s very difficult to share that load among all those people. It would have been a disaster. Luckily Beronio – where I ordered the moment frame – agreed to have the frame delivered to them, then they drove it to my house on their truck that has a mobile forklift. Now it’s sitting in my garage, waiting for the next stage.

It rolled around quite nicely on a couple of moving dollies. I got it tucked in under my workbench, so it’s not too much in the way while I work.

Oh, but there’s still something else: The space where the new steel beam needs to go is a spaghetti jumble of wires. They all need to be moved.

So the last few weeks I have been identifying which circuit the wires belong to, and figuring out how to re-route them so that they don’t interfere with the new beam.

I’m going to have to repair a lot of floor joists that were notched by the previous owners.

I started removing the old siding in the space under the stairs. But I need to take these stairs out completely before I can get the rest of the siding off. I’ve been delaying on it though, because it’s been raining non-stop. I’ll need to build a temporary wall where the steps are right now, and maybe a temporary roof.

When mole and I were out walking, we saw this fun mural on someone’s garage door. Made me think of my brother!

And look at this security gate. Instead of an uglification of the house, as most of them are, it’s a piece of art. Even the vertical bars represent kelp. I love it so much.

How about this for public art sculpture? My nephew riding a sand dragon.

Oh, and when Misha was in town, we managed to get friends together to go for a run on one of my favorite trails.

Purrrrr.

One step back

I’m no zen master. For me, the end result is at least as satisfying as the process of getting there. With the house, I often find myself standing staring at some piece of work I’ve finished working on, just enjoying that it’s _done_ (and done right, hopefully).

It took quite a while for the plaque to be made. But I wanted to get a solid brass one, with raised lettering, not the cheap engraved plaques that are easy to make. I like that the cheeky grin remains (caused by rusting of the pin I originally put here).

So here’s some of the satisfaction of a completed project: Our neighbor enjoying the bench in memory of his son.

It’s been quite difficult for me to take a step back and undo a lot of the work I did over the past few years so that I can build the seismic strengthening at the front. This is something that I’d been procrastinating on, and with a comment from an electrician, realized that I needed to stop dancing around the edges and get into it. I put together structural drawings. I got them through the planning and building department. And I even got a bid on it: Wow! More than $0.25 million just for a small portion of it: I guess that means I need to do it.

I built a wall between the work area and the rest of the garage so that bikes would be hidden from view when the garage door is open. I also built a door – but that’s another post (maybe).

The problem I have is that to do this work, I need to tear out the workbench, the electrical work, the gyp board, the plywood – everything. All that satisfaction gone. And then I can get to digging a new foundation, and rebuild everything. Misha came to visit in October and sensed my hesitation so helped me get to tearing things apart.

The old window looking under the stairs. I plan to save this window and reuse it. It’s going to take a lot of repair to make it nice again. But I’ve done it before.

So a major hint that something has gone wrong is that the sill plate on this side of the building has crushed – this has dropped the height on this side of the house by about 2 inches. Maybe rot, maybe something else.

Here is a photo looking at the end of a piece of the wood taken out of the wall here. Any guesses who was living here?

Termites have almost completely eaten the sill plate, and left this behind. We found no termites, so this damage must have happened a long time ago.

It’s always fun to find things in hidden in the walls from a hundred years ago: Japalac (laquer), a picture for Sperry’s flour, someone’s painting of flowers.

And we tore out the gyp board on the ceiling, and the insulation too. Insulation is such nasty stuff – can’t we come up with something that’s not hazardous? We rolled it up tightly and stuffed it in plastic bags for re-use. Whoever did the electrical work really made a mess of these floor joists: It’s not okay to chop into the bottom of joists to fit conduit in there. Bad electrician.

Cleanup time! OK, turtle got a jump start.

Benchmaking

Yet again, I didn’t plan on this being a permanent change, but once I get into it, I can’t help myself: I built in a bench, shelves, cabinets, electrical…

But before all that, I ran a really tough half marathon in September – “Bear Creek Half”.

Bear Creek Half

At the beginning of the race, I noticed that nobody else seems to wear bright colors. So it’s pretty easy to spot me in photographs. After the first climb, the view at the top was incredible – and there were cows everywhere. I started wondering if it was really true that red makes cows angry? Or is that bulls? Either way, they didn’t seem to care. It was an incredibly strenuous race, and the 80+ degree weather didn’t help. But I finished in the top ten overall (6th) – and my fancy new Garmin watch suggested I rest for 66 hours. The girls were quite happy to rest with me.

So back to the point of the post. I’m still trying to reuse wood, so just to start making the cabinets I had to glue a lot of smaller pieces together. Then I used the special cabinet jigs Misha gave me years ago to drill all the holes for adjustable shelving.

OK first base cabinets going in – because the floor slopes in every direction, and the wall isn’t square, it took a while to get this all lined up.

These cabinets we’ve had in the garage for a long time. Finally they are in a good place – I’ll fill them up with things that don’t do well getting dusty.

Now I need some shelves…

I decided to make the work top stepped down so that I can use my miter saw here. The height of the step is exactly the same as the height of the miter saw base, so that wood can be supported on the bench top at the left side. But first the old bench top is too short, and has a piece cut out of it. Need to fix that.

A bit hard to see here, but this is how it works. I still need to use spacers to support the wood on the right side of the saw.

Oh, and there was a lot of wiring to do – it all got pulled out when I was putting the plywood up.

Shelves for all the paint cans I’ve accumulated.

On the right of the photo below is where I plan to put my dust collector. When I re-wired, I added a three-way switch so I can turn the dust collector on or off from different places in the garage…

… and dust collection means I have to put together all the ducting for it. This is turning into a major project.

So here’s the problem with doing all this:

The electrical panel is currently partially hidden behind that wood post. I had some electricians come over to look at moving it (because it’s not to code here). One of the electricians said “why don’t you just get the post moved?” Exactly.

These stupid wood posts are at best a temporary structural solution that I should fix, and I have been planning to (for years). They support beams that are undersized and sag, and they are not properly braced for earthquakes. But to fix them – which I absolutely should – I need to get the foundations replaced here… Which would involve tearing out all the work I just wrote about.

Seismic

Dad always joked that the cobbler’s children go without shoes. This house has been a bit like that: We’ve been here for almost fifteen years, and I’ve barely done any seismic strengthening on the house. So I finally decided to pick the most vulnerable wall, and make it a bit better.

But first: Mole almost finished the photo wall… and did I mention she made a rainbow cover for her keyboard?

Oh, and with all the masks, mole perfected her mask strap technique: This allows her to hang it around her neck, or loop behind ears. Super easy on-and-off without the mask-beard that seems to be the vogue right now.

When Arwen isn’t relaxing on the couch…

… she’s decided that oatmeal is one of her favorite treats.

Bella found the new power position in the bedroom…

OK, the garage door: It’s been begging for some attention for decades, and I’d just been ignoring it. Too many other pressing things, and besides: Who looks at the front of our house??? (not me, obviously).

It took about a day to get the door sanded and prepared for painting. I decided to paint it, instead of staining it. Stain and polyurethane may be nice, but they don’t last as long as paint. And it’s a garage door. I’d rather not be doing this again soon.

It took a couple of coats of primer (the door is made of redwood).

I tried to match the rest of the house somewhat. Still need to paint the walls on the sides of the door (I also want to put a couple of lights up)…

Now to the project at hand: I took off the old random pieces of wood, shelves, etc to get down to the studs on this front wall. And I found some rather nasty surprise: Looks like some termites have been living here.

I drilled and installed all the anchor bolts, but had to pause on putting up the plywood until I could get a pest inspector to look at it.

He said it was old damage. But I soaked it all in wood preservative all the same (made the garage stink).

Hmm, it didn’t happen this quickly, but here I am putting up the last of the drywall.

The amount of electrical wiring in the ceiling is quite mind boggling. And I added to it by putting in an additional four way light switch so we can turn off the garage lights as we leave with bikes.

Don’t hire me to be your electrician, OK?

OK, now almost ready to start putting shelves and cabinets back in. Got to make them first, though.

Arwen has been really enjoying the overgrown back yard. The area she’s sitting in gets watered by our shower and bathroom sink, so it stays lush and green.

Bella prefers her cat tree – like everything, originally it belonged to everyone, but now it’s exclusively Bella’s: She rules the house like a despot.

Oh, and instead of the wire shelves, we now have a beautiful fancy wood cabinet with a full height mirror. The first time we’ve had a full height mirror since we lived at Rousseau St!

July fourth weekend this year we took a trip to Tahoe to escape the war zone fireworks on our street. The girls still hate the ride, even with their thunder shirts on.

You didn’t think this was going to be a vacation, did you? What’s that?

After we finished putting in a new water heater and fixing a pipe broken by freezing last winter, we were up scaffolding installing sheet metal over holes that woodpeckers had drilled into the house. Lesson learned: Get enough scaffolding to cover the whole wall. Then you only have to assemble and disassemble it all once (instead of four times).

We didn’t realize what we were making…

The girls really like the rock cabin – particularly the spiral stairs. They even got to go outside for some walks in the rocks.

I also managed to get a run up to the ridge trail in. This is lake Tahoe on the morning of July 4th (click on the image for a larger picture)

On the way home, Bella got a bit better at traveling, but it was still traumatic. I can’t decide if the fireworks, or four hours in the car, are worse for them: Might be a wash.

How d’you like our matching jerseys?

Watching ice melt is fascinating… for Arwen.

She is a good car

Nothing lasts forever, but she almost has. For twenty years, I’ve been thinking Mole’s 1982 Honda Civic would not last another year. And there were things we had to fix, but then she’d just keep on going. At the end of last year, the car had been getting progressively harder to start, and would sputter and hesitate for the first few blocks when first started, but still she kept going. As the year turned the corner, suddenly she started overheating, and would issue clouds of white smoke when started: Blown head gasket. Time for a new car…

But I couldn’t let this wonderful little car just be towed to a junk yard and get torn to pieces; or be crushed for scrap metal. So I bought a head gasket kit and had to clear out some space in the garage to work on it. The bike rack I’d made a few years ago jutted too far out into the garage to fit a car next to it.

I put some hooks in the wall, and hung the bikes up on hooks. Mole’s city bike is just too heavy to lift up, though, so it will need to be wheeled around…

Plenty of room! Now, to rent an engine lift, and get out the ’82 Civic shop manual.

The most difficult part is keeping track of all the vacuum hoses: A car of this age does not have a computer – or fuel injection. It has a carburetor, and the emissions are controlled mechanically through miles of vacuum hoses. I think there are about fifty hoses to label and keep track of before the head of the engine can be lifted out.

This is the “head”: I left the carburetor and intake manifold attached, so there’s less to reattach later.

No mystery here about what the problem is! One cylinder is completely filled with coolant that has leaked through the broken head gasket. In the few weeks the car’s been sitting in the garage, some rust has formed, too. The oil was an emulsified gloopy mess: Mayonnaise!

This absolutely felt like open heart surgery. Poor little car was hoping I knew what I was doing (first time).

The photo below shows the old head gasket. To contain the forces inside the cylinders, they embed a metal circle in the gasket around each cylinder. The second from the front one had rusted through – should have been more careful changing the coolant!

Mole caught a picture of me slowly lowering the head back in. Then the time consuming part: reconnecting all those hoses. If I were planning to keep the car, I would have replaced all those rubber hoses at this time. A tiny leak in any of them makes the engine run poorly.

When reconnecting the timing belt, I discovered that the mechanic who had replaced the timing belt (not me!) had set the valve timing off slightly. At first I didn’t believe it, but true enough, it had been wrong for years! This engine is so magnificent it can even compensate for the valve timing being one notch off! With the correct valve timing the engine now started even easier, and had more power, than before I replaced the head gasket.

So she’s back alive, and I was using her to get plywood, gyp board, and as a general SF runaround car. While going to American Ace to buy electrical parts for the garage, I ran into someone who wanted to buy her. He was so excited about the car, he was willing to buy it right outside the store (how would I get home??) He came over later that afternoon, and gave us cash: Years ago, he says, he had one. He loves the car.

So long! It’s been 32 years since mole learned to drive in this car. We’ve traveled to Canada multiple times, to Colorado, Tahoe, Arizona, and countless times up and down the coast of California in this car. Take care of her, Charles, and she’ll last forever!