For the intercooler end tanks, the plan was to use 4″ OD tubing, cutting it lengthwise to fit the tank ends, but there was nothing available locally. The plan then changed to bending sheet aluminum into a cylindrical shape but due to the thick material, bending it went poorly. I’ll see if I can borrow the use of a slip-roller to create the proper curves, instead of making something looking like someone beat them with a hammer.
With that set aside, attention turned to fabricating the exhaust (part of the ongoing plan to get as much done as possible while the cylinder head is still on hand positioning the turbo). Got the main tubing tacked together about the time one argon tank became empty, which is why it’s good to have two – unless of course that one was empty as well. Oops.
Okay fine, on to Plan C. The dry sump tank was very dirty and suspected of containing FOD from the engine drama (the term seems to have two definitions, “Foreign Object Damage” and “Foreign Object Debris”). There was a fair amount of aluminum flakes in the tank; who knows what else was in there as well.
About then, home stuff intruded, playing IT tech on my wife’s PC, along with replacing a leaking natural gas valve behind the kitchen stove!
In other news, about the time ads were added to the website, an odd issue started happening, where a connection couldn’t be made to midlana.com, kimini.com, or the forum. Any other PC worked fine, and it could be accessed via phone, but only when WIFI was disabled. Spent an hour on the phone with the ISP, tracing the problem to the router. The ISP also mentioned in passing that I had an old router that it was throttling data and should be updated, though that wasn’t the direct cause of my issue. Anyhow, I went ahead and replaced the router and presto, everything started working again, probably because Goggle ads contain something that the old router couldn’t handle. Strange, especially since the forums don’t have any ads…
Lastly, a new Midlana site is in the works. It’ll contain all the same information as now with a much cleaner interface. It’ll have additional information about the car by topic, delving into some of the particulars for people wondering whether Midlana is for them (of course it is!). I realize that navigating huge build blogs trying to find something in particular isn’t easy. It’ll take months to set up and get running, and I dread what it’ll take to transfer over all the diary text and pictures, but so it goes. In the meantime, the current present site will stay up to date right up to the switch-over.