The last of the four engine mounts is done along with more of the rear suspension framework. This brings the chassis to the point that the engine’s no longer needed for mockup. It’s probably a good time to pull it to get it both out of the way and off to being rebuilt.
Remember the engine builder that took forever to return correspondence? He finally answered and says he’s still interested. So, as something of an experiment, I’m corresponding with him about my goals, which really serves to see if he proves to be more on the ball than I thought. Last time he wrote he asked for my phone number, saying it’s a lot faster for him to communicate that way. Okay, fair enough, so I gave him my number… haven’t heard anything and it’s been a week. At this point it’s just become sort of sadly amusing, wondering how long the next exchange will take; the consistent slow replies do indicate a trend. It would be far from funny if he had all my parts and wasn’t answering…
Somewhat related, Honda offsets the rods on the pistons in order to quiet them down (by eliminating the piston side-loading that causes them to knock into the cylinder walls.) The strange thing is that almost all aftermarket piston makers don’t offset this unless requested. The catch is that they have to be told how much offset them yet one seems to know the OEM amount. Regardless who builds the engine I plan to disassemble it myself to become acquainted with it, so the pistons will be measured then.
I appreciate the input regarding MS Word; I know real writers all use something else, like Adobe InDesign. The embarrassing thing is… I own CS3 but got so annoyed with its quirks that I went back to Word just so I could get on with things. InDesign had a bad habit of eating pages – they’d just vanish. I think it has something to do with how I was adding new pages. It’s one of those Catch-22’s where I pushing to be productive yet the tools I’m using have problems. Other tools are better but they have their own learning curve which eats time – I’m impatient. So I guess I can’t blame Bill too much. If you’re an InDesign expert and want to help out, drop me a note. If I can get the manuscript into InDesign intact I can probably figure out the rest of it myself.