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VOILA!

Fini! Terminado! Finito! DONE! (Drums, please!) The motor is finished! Didn’t think I’d be saying this a whole year into the project.  I mean, how long can engine reassembly take? Ah well, I’ll just have to pick up the pace. My goal is to finish the whole project by the time school starts next year […]

Our 302: all dressed up and nowhere to go

Alright! Reporting from Snowbird, Utah right now, tired from a long day skiing. My English teacher once told me that writing is like a miniskirt: it should be long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep it interesting. I plan to make this entry short and concise. Now that the valve train […]

Winter break… time at last

Oops. Sorry I haven’t posted much lately… between the play, finals, and what little is left over for my social life, there hasn’t been much time to work at the garage. Thank heavens it’s winter break now. Last weekend, we inserted the front oil seal into the timing chain cover. After warping the first two […]

Curse you, W. N. Woodruff!

Late in the nineteenth century, a Connecticut inventor named W.N. Woodruff invented the Woodruff Key, a way to mate parts to rotating shafts.  Mr. Woodruff came up with the ingenious idea of inserting a semi-circular key into a keyway cut longitudinally into a shaft so that a portion of the key protrudes as a tab […]

The Mustang MacGyver

Yesterday, I squeezed in some time at the garage to prepare for piston installation. Well, our plan was to get to pistons, but we ran into a couple problems (don’t we always?). Ollie tagged along to work on his Oscar the Grouch costumein the last few days before Halloween. The new bolts for the thrust […]

Loss of Yardage

Knowing Dad was going to be gone this weekend, I made sure to get my homework done early on Tuesday and Wednesday so Dad and I could get as much work done at the garage as possible. We left the block, now with its newly balanced crankshaft in place, under a garbage bag to protect […]

Engine is in good hands…

Jack and I visited Wade and Jim at Hubbard Machine in Hayward to drop off Jack’s small block 302 engine for machining and balancing.  Hubbard’s was recommended to us by my friend and fellow car club member, Ed Archer, a vintage auto collector and racer who has been a Hubbard’s customer since it was run […]

Relapse

After a grueling 34 days of withdrawal, my dad and I relapsed from our sobriety and fell back into our dirty habit: working at the garage. Having been on the wagon so long, we’re putting the pedal to the metal to try and make up for lost time. On Friday, we stopped by to clean […]