A Weekend Lost

There comes a time in every Project of Magnitude where everything lines up, everything goes your way, and all you try is easy and successful.  Where you have all of the right parts, the right tools, and no bolts are seized, and all is well and right in the Universe.  A time of joy, and unmitigated success.

This was not one of those weekends.

My daughter Ember, saying goodbye
to the YarMini...

Everything was lined up to be another productive weekend working on The Imperial Car Destroyer.  I had sold my Mini Cooper on eBay, and the buyer was showing up in the morning to purchase the vehicle.  I had received my case of DynaMat and was itching to work on the interior of the cabin.  I had the sun shining in my hair, and the world was my oyster (WTF does that expression mean anyways?).  The Universe, however, had other ideas.  First disaster is the arrival of the Grumpy Russian (tm).  He was to buy my Mini, and I was excited/sad to see it go.  I have been a classic British car guy for close to a decade now, and that little beast and I had been through a lot.  Truth be told, it was the end of an era.  From the moment Grumpy Russian (tm) pulled up in his $45k SUV, I knew things were about to go pear shaped.

Ends up, he had never owned a British car before, and was buying this one for his daughter for her 16th birthday.  I blinked several times when I heard that.  Might as well get your son a used Main Battle Tank as well while you are at it.  The two ideas are almost on par with each other.  Anyways, he proceeds to find anything and everything wrong with the car he can, and generally insults me with his thick heavy Russian accent in the process.  I guess somehow he was expecting a car that was showroom quality, everything gleaming and factory new, and powered by Unicorn magic.  News flash people - forty year old British cars take work - and even the nice, clean, working ones like mine have their blemishes.  The deal fell through, and I was back to the drawing board with needing to get my old car sold, so I could pay off the truck (...which I have intelligently purchased on a credit card so far.  Me iz smartz).  The shitty thing is, I went on Craigslist and eBay and looked at other classic Minis being sold, and I am right in the right spot, even a little below what other people are asking.  Oh well, at least my truck still loves me.

So, off to work on the truck at last.  Now, the night before I had shown off my cool shore power setup to my gamer friends that were over, except that when I threw the knife switch to turn on shore power, I got squat.  No lights, no power.  I smartly didn't do anything about it late at night, but decided to look into it during the day, post Mini fiasco.  I was just opening shop and getting my tools out when my buddy Joe showed up with his other friend Joe.  The Fates had thrown me a bone, the Master Electrician showed up just when I needed him.  We then proceeded to look into the issue and spent the rest of the day trying to track down what had happened.  Here is basically what was going on.

Sorry GFI Circuit...

Somehow I was now getting something on the order of ~617 miliamps of current through the system which had not been present before.  It is basically nothing, static in the wind as far as current goes, but it was enough to trip the GFI circuit we had installed each and every time we tried to switch to shore power.  24V truck power still worked fine.  We merrily went about isolating every single thing we could, going so far as to unplug and uncouple everything we could get our hands on, but all to no avail.  Somehow the ~617 milivolts kept on showing up.  So, in the end, we decided on the short term fix of simply replacing the GFI outlet with a normal outlet, and buttoning everything back up.  It was getting close to dark at this point, and at the end of that miserable day I was at slightly behind where I had started, and my spirits were a bit low.  I decided to call it an early day and go inside to drown my sorrows in beer and gaming.  At least they still love me!


Okay, next day, waking up refreshed and willing to get back on the metaphorical horse (this one just happened to weigh 15,500 lbs) I got back to it.  I decided to attack the cabin once more.  I have already mentioned what a bitch it is to remove that old foam in my previous post, and today proved no exception.  Undeterred however, I plowed onwards.  I removed the fire extinguisher mount on the curved passenger side of the cabin, near the door, and then proceeded to attack the caked on foam underneath.  It took some time, but with some acetone, a heavy duty scraper, and a hammer, I got the job done.  I was sweaty and covered in ancient foam flakes by the end of it, but I had met with success, of a sort.  I sanded the sucker to metal in most places, then cleaned it up and put a coat of rust resistant primer on it for good measure.


I had received my package full of DynaMat in the mail that week, so I was obviously itching to use it.  I ripped into it, and was surprised to discover it was not what I had envisioned.  I bought it simply because everyone I spoke to told me "That's the stuff to get", and I believed em.  Turns out, they were right, I just had a different idea in my head what that stuff was going to look like.  My imagination conjured up some Wunder Foam with Uber Insulation, but in reality I got large sheets of dense tarry rubber stuff with a giant peel off sticker on the back.  For all the world, it looked as if I had just bought several giant sheets of black eraser goo mixed with modelling clay.  You see, how it works is that it deadens the actual body panels it is attached to, making them more resistant to vibrations, and more dead to sound.  Crazy cool stuff, and actually very easy to work with.  One Super Pack got me nine sheets, which I had no idea if that was too much or too little at this point.  A lot would depend on whether or not I could put my new insulation right over the old foam and call it a day.  With my mythical, dreamed up Wunder Foam, I thought it could work.  Looking at the dense, tarry DynaMat in my hands, I realized that just wasn't going to happen.  The DynaMat only really worked if it was put right on the body panel to be deadened.  Placing it on top of the older foam would be like pouring jet fuel into an old truck.... oh wait, I can do that.  Well, pick a different metaphore then.  ;)  I did push forward and get the two foot well sections cut out and installed.  I had already done the work of prepping those areas, and I was going to be damned if I didn't get some of this stuff installed, even if it was going to take me a millennium to get the rest of the foam off.  The driver side was particularly difficult, as I had to have cut outs for the various pedals and what not that live there.  First attempt I did all of my measurements totally bang on, made the cuts, only to discover to my horror that I had cut it sticky side up, and the damn thing was upside down.  *groan*  The second time I nailed it though, and it looked pretty good.

At this point I also noticed that the edges of my windows were covered in rust, and in some cases whole chunks were missing due to the corrosion.  Obviously something had to be done.  I attacked it with a sander, then cleaned it up with some sand paper by hand, and then blew it off with my air compressor.  It wasn't pretty, but at least I had gotten rid of the larger chunks and flakes of rust, and had a surface I could work with now.  I then hit it with my favorite nasty die-if-you-ingest-it chemical, Loctite Extend.  It worked its transformative magics upon the rust and turned it into not-rust.  I then hit it with some more rust resistant primer as well.  Now, a note about these windows.  They are cool.  I mean seriously cool.  You can not only fold them down entirely and bolt them to the hood of the engine, allowing you to drive like some crazy Mad Max bad ass getting bugs in your teeth and wearing goggles which you can't see out of, but you can also hinge them forward so they are propped open from the top, allowing air to get in along the bottom.  I'd like to see you try that in your Toyota Camry, ha!

At this point darkness threatened once more, and I called it a day.  At least I had made some progress, even if it fell far below what I was hoping to accomplish.  Actually, reading back on this post, I have to say it wasn't nearly as bad as I felt at the time.  I went to bed that night in pretty low spirits, but upon more mature reflection, I did indeed get some shit done.  I had installed my first two pieces of DynaMat, cleaned out yet another section of foam, and dealt with some rust issues in the cabin.  I had also got my damn shore power working once more, but that didn't seem like as much of a win.  Getting something working that had previously been working was not my idea of progress, although I should know better, working as a software engineer for the last decade plus.

Next post I will make up for lost time in a BIG way, and get the project rolling again.  So, stay tuned, and remember, report any Rebel Scum you come across to your local Storm Trooper Authorities at once!