I plead temporary insanity. I'm not sure how else to explain that I started disassembling the BMW's engine in the carport except that after four days of trying to track down a (nearly) simple torx socket and blowing through my time off, that I became a bit manic. So it is good news that I was leaning towards replacing the engine rather than trying to re-ring cylinder #5 and put it back together, because the afternoon of the disassembly, we had a minor windstorm. In the backyard. With the head and oil pan off the engine. No wise man could know without counting how many are the grains of sand in my engine, all I know is that it must be well above the BMW specification of "zero."

So now I wait for a deal on an engine, and try to make a deal with myself regarding the three options from here: Another 325i engine, just like the one that came out of there? A 328i engine, with a small (possibly imperceptible) penalty in gas mileage and a significant boost in torque for another ~$450? Or hock a kidney and get the engine out of an M3, for a near-50% increase in power. Probably an additional $1500 or even $2000, easily tripling the econo-option.

Okay, the M3 engine's a pipe dream. Even if I could come up with that, it would just eat unduly into other projects.

At least for now all I have to do is come up with a new cooling fan, install the new steering rack out of a 2000 Z3 roadster (32.5% quicker steering!), and otherwise amuse myself 'til the right engine comes along. I should probably fire up this recording equipment and try to do something neat, but I'm afraid the shock of returning to work after five days off is causing me to just want to drink some cold water (I've already had a beer or two), lie down, and watch some Jeeves and Wooster.

Sorry for all the non-posting. I've been busy. Work's been hectic (had a dream the other night that a psycho client had called Rebecca and was trying to get my cell number, which she valiantly didn't disclose), and my cars is done blowed up (to put it succinctly, if badly).

But down to the specific item from category B above which has me posting. About six months ago(?), my old BMW 2002 broke an oil control ring (resulting in a James Bond-caliber smokescreen which is on all the time), about eight years after I rebuilt the engine, and about two weeks after I got the do-it-yourself fuel injection suddenly near-perfect after two years of poor mileage and lousy driveability. So... I figured, after the usual hemming and hawing, that I would find something else to drive while the 2002 got a much needed semi-restoration as well as some suspension re-engineering and the transplant of a mid-'80s BMW 6-cylinder engine. Trent had recently acquired a late-'80s BMW 325i, a car we both had mixed feelings about; it's a brilliant car, good-looking in a boxy way, reasonably powerful, and excellent handling. Working against it is its role as the villain's transport of choice in half of John Hughes' movies. Okay, Blaine turned out to be all right, but still, you see the cause for concern. In any case, Trent predictably didn't turn into an asshole, and the car turned out to be pretty brilliant, so I started looking for one.

I found one, too. A 1987 325is (the picture's not mine, but it's the same color, and even has the same aftermarket spoiler/bumpers on it). Parked nose-down on a hill for a year, it had taken on a bit of water. In fact, I had to bail out the footwell to test drive it. The interior, originally black, had become almost universally green from mold. But it had a straight body, some suspension upgrades, and the engine out of a car ten years newer, an upgrade both in lifespan and power output. As a clincher, it was within ten bucks of my combined state and federal refunds.

This was to be the car that I was going to "just drive" while I worked on the 2002. And of course it took quite a bit of time/effort/money just to gut the interior, kill the mold, replace the Fast and the Furious muffler with something a bit quieter and having a catalytic converter installed, remove the window tinting, weld in threaded inserts for the driveshaft center bearing carrier, and get the drainage issues sorted so as not to repeat the mold episode. Imagine my horror, then, when the little vibration didn't go away with the driveshaft fix.

The next step was a compression test, wherein you hook a gauge into the hole normally filled by a spark plug, and crank the engine over a few times. This indicates to some degree how well the cylinders are sealing at the rings, valves, and head gasket. Five out of the six were within a couple of psi of 210. Cylinder #5, however, showed at 80; essentially dead. A spritz of WD-40 brought that up to 150, suggesting that it was an issue with the rings that seal the piston to the cylinder wall (the WD-40 sprayed through the spark plug hole wouldn't get on the valves or around the head gasket to assist their sealing). Thus did I resign myself to the notion that this engine had to come out of the car and be either repaired or replaced.

The piston rings, as noted above, were the leading culprit. While removing the engine from the car, it became clear that the car had been overheated at some point. The fan was utterly loose on its bearing, and its center was a mass of previously-melted plastic. How long had it been driven with no fan?

The next major frustration came in trying to get the engine disassembled. There were several specialized BMW tools listed as needed in the manual. I looked at what they did (mostly locking crank and cams into particular relationships) and figured I could substitute caution for most of them. Then I discovered that the bolts holding the head down weren't just the unusual external torx type —which I had just bought a set of for this project— but required a thin-wall, extended-length socket to get into the recesses of the head's casting. I spent four of the five days of my fourth-of-July weekend just obtaining this specialty tool, and alternately twiddling my thumbs and trying not to die of frustration.

Which brings us to this afternoon. This morning, I obtained that socket, and 45 minutes after heading out to the shop, had the head off the block and started looking for the cause of the low compression on cylinder #5. What I found was... Nothing obvious. The combustion chamber looks fine. The valves look fine. The cylinder wall doesn't look perfect, but it's still a bit better than cylinder #3. The piston looks fine, as do all three rings. The head gasket shows no signs of having had leakage past it. In short, I now have it all disassembled, and still have absolutely no idea what's wrong. If I can't figure out —with a high degree of confidence— what's wrong with it, I can't see replacing the rings and going to the trouble of reinstalling it. Especially looking at $300 in tools/rings/gaskets to do so, against as little as $700 for another engine. I think if I can't diagnose it absolutely, then the only thing that makes sense is to find a whole new (used) engine.

Argh.

I don't really have a ton to add to that. It's either something that will immediately make sense to you, or will eventually make sense to you, or, if you're unfortunate, may never make sense to you.

Whichever of the scenarios above applies to you, I recommend that you go listen to some Motörhead and read and/or watch whatever comes to hand that carries nuggets of wisdom from Lemmy. I wouldn't want to exactly do what Lemmy does at every occasion, just as I don't always want to listen to Motörhead, but I feel strongly that if he's got an opinion on any given subject, that it's damn well worth taking into account.

Take it as read that he gets a spot on that list of things that improved the universe.

For KFR, who likes lists, and/or reminds us that we all do. Really. Lack of content in this post hopefully offset by providing links for list items. Quantity over quality.

Things that make or made this universe a good place for me.

• The Ramones
• Douglas Adams
• DEVO
• cheese
• punk rock girls
• Cars (conflictedly)
• The Princess Bride (If you haven't already seen it, in the name of all that is silly, go rent it now. Key scene spoilers in this link.)
• Monty Python's Flying Circus
• Louisiana style hot links
• Ducatis

More later. I'm tired.

Is it telling that the windows of the clerks that you have to see at the courthouse for any questions pertaining to a traffic ticket have signs overhead which read "Traffic Cashier?"

For me, it makes it a little harder to swallow the notion that the four motorcycle officers who were sitting on fourth ave when I got my ticket were non-quota'd agents of public safety.

You should not usually take advice from me about money, but I think this is an exception. My news is about a year old, but it's that time of year.

Last year, I started to do my taxes using Turbo Tax online. I was horrified to see what I owed (a previous employer had failed to do some withholding, and I had spent a short period of time self-employed, the self-employment for which pretty much wiped out what I made during that period). As a result, I thought I'd check the math for giggles and just filled out a 1040 by hand. No dodgy guesses, no overreaching exemptions or deductions, just filled it out following the directions.

I still owed money, as expected, but about $300 less than before. In addition to this, the other person doing her taxes in the room kept finding that when she went back to check things, that Turbo Tax was losing significant chunks of information (about deductible donations, if I recall correctly).

So, boring as it is, that's my advice: Don't use Turbo Tax. There's the possibility that they fixed last year's issues, but I won't be going back. I used another service this year, and it seemed to go just fine, though mercifully I only had one employer and all my withholding was fine.

Next post, how I found a car for within about $5 of my combined state and federal refunds!

I'm not much of a writer (like I have to tell you), so perhaps it makes sense that I've apparently accidentally gotten published in a format which results in the least possible number of my words being inflicted on some innocent reader: I submitted a Six Word Memoir to no particular end some months (or so) ago. I don't even remember what it was, but it's been selected to go into the collection. Weird. Weirder? There may be a reading at Powell's after it comes out.

Diving even further into having non-work shown to lots of people to no effect or result, an online tourism company just asked to use one of my pictures of the Gap of Dunloe, near Killarney in Ireland on their site.

It's nothing useful, or an accomplishment, or... Anything. It's just strange to have a couple of tiny snippets that I called into existence do more than immediately disappear into the ether.

Unrelatedly, the baseball player of many decades ago who has my name also has my birthday. Weird.

This is the sort of drivel you will put up with when someone's out of town and I rely mostly on cat and computer for my frames of reference. Which is dodgy, 'cause the cat would probably like to see me go round the bend just for fun.

According to the signature of a co-denizen of a vintage motorcycle roadracing list I subscribe to, Stephen King once said "Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."

I can't help but think that he's completely wrong, and that this stance is central to his being such a pop culture success. Sometimes the right word doesn't spring to mind, but you remember that it exists. You just know there's a word for aimlessness which quietly but firmly connotes damp weather, but you keep rifling fruitlessly through the bin in your brain containing "ennui," "malaise," and perhaps "bummed."

Or maybe he doesn't have that issue, but is always capable of bringing to mind the word he wants to use. If I wrote all the time, I suppose my mental language bins would be better stocked. I still take exception to the "no exceptions" part of the quote, though. It seems to suggest that we should just be happy with whatever vocabulary we've got, and it seems quite clear to me that there are a lot of people who need even more badly than myself to be freed of this restriction on their linguistic palette, ain't there?

When ballots were last mailed out around here, I was quite startled and disappointed to realize that I hadn't gotten one. I was all the more surprised because I hadn't gotten one the previous time, and had subsequently gone down to the Multnomah County elections office to inquire as to why, which they couldn't tell me. I don't know what happened the first time, but when I went in today, they informed me that the most recent ballot had been returned by the post office as "undeliverable," though the address and all details were correct. They were happy to take a fresh registration form to reset my deliverability.

My only guess is that since this was before we got a working doorknob on the screen door, that my ballot had come on the Nth day wherein we'd neglected to undo the hook latch on the screen door before closing the main door, rendering the mail slot inaccessible. We may have done this on a number of occasions. Our mail carrier may have gotten tired of it.

Yoinking my ballot seems a little heavy-handed. I wonder what else wound up "undeliverable?"

Ah well. let's jump topics completely: My car's dead. I know I mentioned it before, but I think I'm ready to discuss it in more detail now. A couple of months ago, I made some long-awaited improvements to the do-it-yourself MegaSquirt electronic fuel injection on my old BMW 2002. The results were wonderful. Driveability and power were up, and so was —I think— fuel mileage, though it's hard to say. It is hard to say, because before I'd run enough gas through it to do the math, I started being pursued by a giant blue cloud. It obscured everything behind me (a bit like The Nothing from The Neverending Story), to the extent that I couldn't tell whether I should be shouting "Sorry, sir!" or "Sorry, madam!" (or perhaps "Hoover fumes and die, Cheney!") to the poor person behind me as I left each stoplight.

And that was, I guess, the end of the engine that I was so proud of, that I had assembled... er... about ten years ago? Or so? So the 2002 sits there, tires leaking slowly, weatherstripping leaking rapidly. A bit forlorn. And while I'm behind on projects and recovering from the holidays, I'm still a bit enthusiastic about the plan from here. I believe I'm going to stick the engine out of one of these (a BMW 325i) into my 2002. The 2002 is about 500 pounds lighter than the 325i, and the 325i has about 70% more power than the 2002, so this should be fun.

I was working on a website, and had a scratch test page made up to try a few different ways of doing things behind the scenes. There were two or three tests on the same page, made up over several days. For some reason, I was quite pleased with the resulting output when I noticed it today:

Foo is seagull
No bar!
My, what a lovely dog you have there, fred.

The ramen really was glorious. In our first day of wandering around Tokyo, we went first to the district called Akihabara. Lots of electronics shops, described to us as something of a geek central before we went. And there were lots of electronics shops. We had a remarkably difficult time finding an appropriate adapter to get Luke's laptop plugged in at the apartment, considering that the actual voltage, current, and frequency provided are fine. We really just needed a 3-prong to 2-prong adapter. Which we eventually found.

We were also looking for either a 7-11 or a Post Office, in hopes of finding an ATM which would work with our American ATM cards. Most don't, you see. We did eventually find a Post Office with an ATM, and succeeded in procuring some of the local currency. The building which housed the Post office was a rather large, modern thing, housing a bit of this and that, and outside on the second floor, we noticed a rather inviting sign (visible in this picture). A small bit of wandering later, we found a place that didn't look too scary-nice for one of our first meals in Japan, and which appeared to serve ramen (which I was very much excited about). After parting the curtains to enter, it was laid out as an L-shaped bar with a square kitchen inside the L. Small lamps sat on pillars above each place at the bar, and there were small metal clips near them. It also had a machine at the entrance which had buttons with characters on them, which apparently corresponded to pictures of food items on the upper part of the machine. We stared and scratched our heads for a little bit, and then we were delighted to get some help from a girl in the kitchen who spoke some English and could see how perplexed we were. With her help, we managed to get the machine to cough up some tickets, and managed to find a few seats at the bar. The tickets, it turns out, go in the clips. After our tickets were collected, Rebecca and I, who had chosen ramen, were presented with slips to fill out (mercifully with an English guide as well), on which we were to specify within several levels how well done we wanted the noodles, how spicy, how much oil we wanted, possibly one or two other parameters, and which four of the six available toppings we wanted on our ramen. I only wanted three (and in retrospect, two, not having been fond of the Japanese style bacon), which seemed to perplex the cook. I mean, he figured out as quickly as he could across the language barrier that I didn't want all four, he just didn't seem to understand why anyone wouldn't.

I may not have like the bacon, but the green onions went very well with the ramen, and I expect the particular spicy, pickled vegetables are something I'll probably never figure out how to find again. It was the best bowl of ramen I've ever had, and sadly, the only one I ever got in Japan, though I mistakenly ordered thin buckwheat noodles in a weak broth a few times afterwards. The broth was rich and flavorful, and a bit spicy. The noodles were just chewy enough. I wouldn't say that it bore no resemblance to what we usually get for ramen here in the U.S.. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Top Ramen was to this stuff what grade-school cafeteria pizza is to your favorite pizzeria.

Hopefully I'll be a bit quicker with the next snippet. Perhaps they'll get better, if not more accurate, with time to ferment.

Japan is an interesting place; physically much smaller than the U.S., densely populated, especially in the urban areas...

No, wait, not a book report. First off, you don't understand what I mean when I say densely populated. I failed to take pictures of crowds, and I'm afraid Nerdygirl's pictures of crowds don't convey the density, so I'll have to attempt to explain it. There's more, too, so if crowds don't fascinate you, don't give up. My favorite thing about the crowds in Japan is that they preclude talking on a cell phone and holding a latte whilst driving. You will pay attention, whether walking or driving or cycling, or you will have immediate problems. 99.9% of Japanese seem to elect for the former. This results in the most amazing flows of people. Shinjuku station in Tokyo is quite possibly the busiest place on earth, with people moving sometimes in currents, and other times in weaving patterns crisscrossing plazas, but because everyone is paying attention and making small adjustments to their surroundings, you don't usually break stride.

Another wonderful crowd example is in Shibuya, where the intersections go not only corner to corner in the normal fashion, but there is also a phase where traffic stops in both directions and people cross diagonally as well. At these times, it's just people from building to building as far as you can see. I suppose if you're not as tall as me, you just see people for a few feet, but I digress...

In any case, this is the first installment. I was going to try to wrench a bunch of it out at once, but something's come up, as they say. In any case, my pictures are here. I expect Nerdygirl will have more and better ones up soon. Perhaps when I log in again, I'll tell you about the glorious ramen...

Sorry this is so terribly dull for a drought-breaking post, but I figured I'd put this up to give myself a little motivation by public humiliation. I've been trying to ride my bike to work because it just makes sense, though I do have to leave about a half hour earlier. Anyone who knows me knows that making my morning earlier is not a good start for any endeavor...

Monday: First day back from vacation. Operating on Tokyo time. Didn't even try.

Tuesday: Needed to return a box of car parts to a coworker. Drove to work to carry them.

Wednesday: Overslept. Drove.

Let's see what happens Friday...

I swear, more posts soon with stuff about Japan, woodworking, cars, and motorcycle racing. I'm interesting! Maybe even exciting! Really! No, wait! Looook aaaat meeee!

Okay, the Rabbit wasn't exactly Epic. Or if it was, it was less epic like a legendary saga from the history of storytelling, and more like a drum solo that's gone on three minutes too long... And while it's a car I may miss a bit, I'm pleased that it's gone on to an owner with a fresh batch of enthusiasm, and that I can return my attention to the 2002.

The new story will be much shorter (and therefore also not epic, I suppose), but it's just beginning. We're going to Japan! That is, Nerdygirl, her brother, and myself. For a week and a half. I'd go on, but you see, we haven't gone yet. And for this reason I have no pictures, no stories, and no samples of strange and interesting foods to post. Yet. This will change, I think. So, onwards to ramen and sushi, and a million culture shock moments, large and small, neat and awkward.

Talk to you soon. Take care and have fun.