What did you do in your shop today?

[94touring]

It was time to address the wood on the small trailer I haul behind the bus. There's a local metal shop that sells alloy tread plate, this stuff is only 16 gauge but seems even stiffer than the plywood I took off. Added a couple braces under where the rear vespa wheel sits for added stiffening.  I think it's even lighter now too.

[MiniDave]

Can't believe how destroyed that wood surface was.....new plate looks great and since it's aluminium it will never rot.

[94touring]

The wood went bad quicker and worse than anticipated. I had coated it with epoxy.  It looked really good for about a year.  The local metal shop isn't far from where I live and it was only $235 after taxes on a 4x6' sheet of this alloy tread plate.  Maybe one of these days I'll replace my big trailer with something like Darrin had in the Ozarks last weekend.  Reducing weight when hauling would be nice.

[MiniDave]

If you don't need to haul the bus on it, I hear small aluminum trailers built for quads or SxS work well for Minis. I think Justin has one he shares with Cole.

[94touring]

Needs to be able to haul the bus.

[94touring]

Since my long term tenant moved out of the one rental and I've been replacing various pieces of furniture, needed my hand dolly.  Except when I went to grab it at the shop yesterday and needed to air up the tires, the valve stems had dry rotted. Ordered new tubes and tires to do that today.  I'm hopeful it won't be hard.

I also have an industrial coffee table cart I'm trying to get rid of, but the more I think about it, maybe I put it into service at the shop and use it to push engines and various things around the shop floor.

[Jims5543]

The R53 got another mod this past weekend. I had to change the oil filter housing gasket. I dedided to do a while I am in there mod. I dropped the stock header and cats and installed a Milltek header and high flow cat.



VERY VERY VERY happy with this mod, it really woke up the car, gives it a much better exhaust note and my ass says it make it a bit more peppy.

The old header was not horrible. I was impressed, it looked almost efficient. Losing that pre-cat helped a lot though.


Pulling all the heat shields out went much easier than I thought it would. Once they were out, it was easy to work back there.

[Jims5543]

I am really fighting with this forum, it keeps telling me I am attempting to inject SQL into the forum.

[Jims5543]

This is the oil filter housing pulled away from the block, you can make it out in the bottom left corner of this pic. This is why I was there.  I was about to insert the new oiled up gasket into the grooves when it slipped out of my fingers, after close to 30 minutes of looking for it, I gave up went inside, cooled off, got more water then walked back out to look for it again. What a monumental waste of time!



After I calmed down I decided to look in stupid places that make no sense. Alas!! I found it on a lower control arm on the passenger side of the car!! I had to take a picture of this stupidity.



As I was bolting on the high flow cat, I laughed at the inscription plate. I took a pic, sent to the wife and told her she has to drive like she is racing all the time now.



Cat in place, O2 sensors were a breeze, they were very easy to take out and reinstall via a 7/8" open end wrench.



Oil leak fixed, exhaust upgraded, mission accomplished. I have a 17% pulley to put on next along with colder plugs then it is time for an ECU flash.

[Jims5543]

I have lots of projects planned for the R53 Mini. When we first purchased it 4 years ago, the factory radio wasn't working properly. I tossed a cheap $100 Kenwood unit in there, added a Sirius adapter to it and called it a day.

The wife hated it, and TBH, I did too, it was always a temporary fix, I just never got around to finding a good replacement. I knew the wife wanted a touch screen double din. I found a really nice Alpine unit to install. The Kenwood install went very smooth, Crutchfield is the only way to go for car stereo's. After my experience with the Alpine unit, I can only say Crutchfield is the best.

As I started to install I started to think the wiring harness they sent me was wrong. Then I looked closer at the instructions. Dammit, I have to make my own harness.




So I did, you see the Blue wire with the white stripe? Yeah, I needed that to be wired in too, I missed that little detail. That would come back to bite me in the ass a little later.



I get it all installed, I rip out the old Sirius antennae and put in the one that came with the Alpine unit.

I do not fully install it, I test fire it to make sure everything is OK, everything is not OK. It will not get past the initial splash screen, that comes up and then it turns off after a few seconds.

This is the point where I should point out I am horrible at reading instructions, I prefer to just muddle through it, this day and age, you cannot do that. Things have become way more complicated.

After some scouring of the internets, I think my problem is a bad ground, so I run a wire through the firewall and ground it to the frame of the car. Still no joy.

Frustrated I start a customer service chat with Crutchfield, in 5 seconds the tech asks me if I installed the "power plate".  WTF is a power plate? I frantically thumb through the owners manual, and find it.



I held that part in my hand along with the decorative covers for the back of the screen and thought it was just another decoration, it is just a pierce of plastic, there is no power coming from it, it appears to press on something inside the radio that lets it know the screen is attached to it.

Boom!! That was it, it fired right on up to the main screen, then I realized there was no sound. That blue/white wire.. Yeah, I needed to hook that up in order for the cars amps to get a signal to turn on.

Now I have sound!! I get ready to activate the Sirius, when I hit the icon on the screen it tells me there is an error or no module.  WTF? I tought I bought a unit with Sirius installed already. Back to the owners manual, seems I need a Sirius adapter, I find one on Amazon except, it looks familiar. I grab the one I pulled off the Kenwood deck and look at the part #, its the same part #!! I already have the adapter.

I install it, then I get a Antenna error, seems the one that came with the unit does not work with my adapter. Back out with the radio, remove new Alpine one, plug in old one that was hooked up to the original Sirius adapter. Yes! That worked and the best part was that unit was already registered with Sirius. So I didn't have to move my subscription.

Here it is finally installed and functioning, it is our first unit that has Android Auto, which is pretty nice, especially the navigation part.



Next post in a couple of days will be the steering wheel fiasco... I sear nothing has been going smooth lately.

[94touring]

That's a significant amount of odds and ends. Nice additions 

[Mudhen]

NICE!  And great write up...would like to give it a go at some point.   

[Willie_B]

Not quite awake this morning.

Pulled the engine out of the moke last week. Headlights removed for more room. Put them back in this morning. As I was tucking in the wiring I was wondering why it is not laying down as neat as last time. Just as I finish and look at it all I figured it out. I had labeled the lights when I took them out. Standing in front putting them back in put the right on the right side then left in the left side. Well standing in front is the wrong way to look at it, DUH. Take them both out, swap places, all is nice and neat now.

[94touring]

Does the engine have to come out to change lights or was that a separate issue?

[Willie_B]

Separate issue.

I had changed from the broken plastic fan to a tropical fan. After it was all back in the moke the fan blades were hitting the fan shroud. I used a steel rod and hammer to reform the shroud to clear. Being as I am selling the moke I decided I should fix that. I had another tropical fan that I trimmed 3/16" off the blade ends for extra room. But to change that I had to pull the engine.

[94touring]

Ahhh

[MiniDave]

Wow, you have to remove the engine to change the fan blades or shroud? Just pulling the radiator doesn't give you enough room?

[MPlayle]

Mokes have the shroud on the inner fender that eliminates any maneuvering room.

[MiniDave]

I know, I've had Clancy's radiator out a couple of times.....it's not easy or fun, but it will come out if you take the bolts out of the fan shroud on the radiator. The 2 piece ones are a particular PITA tho!

[Jims5543]

We ripped out the drywall on an interior wall a couple of weeks ago. There used to be a full wall mirror there when from when we purchased this house. We had the mirror professionally removed, the glue on the back damaged the wall greatley.

After having that decoration for many years, we chose to place these fiberglass braille wall squares over the damage. They looked like this.



We decided to rip them out and fix the wall, between the mirror and the wall braille, the sheetrock was too damaged and would take a ton of work to fix.

We decided to just rip the wall out and put up new sheetrock.



We wanted to run the new drywall horizontal like the sheetrock we pulled off, except it would have been impossible to fit it, so we decided to cut it along a 2x4 and place it vertically. It was much easier to slide it back behind the existing drywall in both corners.

It looks rough after the initial mud application it got much nicer after some sanding and a few more applications.



The final product, that vase with the yellow things was moved from there shortly after the pic, wife was trying all sorts of things out.

I cut a bunch of 1x2 strips to create this pattern, then caulked it all after stapling it to the wall. The wife painted it up. Then we cut out portions to install these custom floating shelves we ordered.

Very happy with the remodel / upgrade.  Glad I was not recruited to paint, I hate painting.



Usually, on Monday I am happy to be back at work where I can relax. 

[94touring]

Vase with the yellow things

[Jims5543]

Last weekend by BIL's older bother drove across the state to install 2 Mini Splits in my house. If course I was elbow deep in the install helping where I could.

The first unit took 2 hours to install, with me learning a lot, the second unit took about 1 hour, if that. I love these two brothers, they are wired different. They are both brilliant when it comes to construction, working along side either of them is just fun, the work flows, it is hard to explain.
 
Best way to describe it is, we all think exactly alike we get into this groove where we barely have to speak and just know what needs to be done. That is the best way I can describe it. We are all on the same page and just work really well together.

We did the garage last but here is the first picture, he is getting the head unit up on the ladder so we can attach the lines to it it, the low and high pressure lines and the drain line along with the power.



On the master bedroom unit, I initially mounted the compressor on the outside wall opposite our bed. That turned out to be a horrible idea, because my house is frame, it was reverberating through the wall. You can stand outside next to it while it is running and it is silent, there was some sort of dynamic at play here that was causing it to sound 100X louder when mounted on the wall.



After 2 nights of hell, I pulled it off the wall and put it on the ground that night it was silent, the head unit on the wall is silent.



The head unit in the master bedroom.



What a game changer!! Our master bedroom is across the house from the air handler, as a result, our room was always 3-5° warmer than the rest of the house. We had the AC set to drop to 73 at 10PM so our room would at least be in the 77-78° range which is warm.

Now we have it set to 68° at night.

At 5 PM we turn it on and set it to 73, the room is typically 78 at this point, this cools the room down and takes stress of the house AC.  Then at 8PM we drop it to 68 for the evening. We close the door at night.

In the morning I leave early the wife wakes and shuts it off at 7 am. By noon the room is still colder than the rest of the house.  By 6PM it is warmer again.

Nonetheless, this has been a game changer. I have not really run the garage unit but may this Sunday as I have some work to do on the R53.

These units were $300 each, I paid my friend the same per unit to install them. I owe this guy big time, he has always been there for me over the years. I was happy to be able to use him for this project.

[Jims5543]

Vase with the yellow things

I have no idea what the fuck to call it, I am not an interior decorator. LOL

[MiniDave]

You are going to LOVE having the unit in the garage!

[94touring]

No kidding!  Can't even imagine working in a garage in Florida summer heat.