What I've been up to / why you shouldn't own a cursed car...!

[Kelly_H]

Well boo, I just realized that I put this in non-Mustang related general discussion instead of Mustang-related general discussion... oops. Someone move it if necessary, or don't, it's all good

Ok, I admit it, I'm about to copy text over from one forum onto the other, but it really is a long story... call it the story of the week and read a little bit when you're bored every day or something, I don't care. To preface it, I am currently in Austin, TX, where I am apparently going to live for a couple of years (someone was dumb enough to decide I looked like a good graduate student). Now the problem is that Jane is in North Carolina, and her engine is on an engine stand with its guts hanging out and a different engine that works just as well as the old one (that is, it doesn't) is in her engine bay. Obviously, things are not as they should be! And here's why:

I drove Jane home to NC from CO a couple months back, arriving on July 13th. I went up to Chas's (my bodywork and paint guy / secondary father / ultimate hot rodder friend) to formulate a plan - Jane was in dire need of a clutch (it was older than I am), was seriously down on power (has been since the beginning of this year), and was having some weird cooling issues (running warmer on the freeway and at idle). We figured we would tackle the clutch first, then mess with the engine and cooling. I ordered parts and then went to Mustang Week because, well, I didn't want to miss out on the fun

I needed to drive to Austin, Texas on August 13th but I had plenty of time to do the clutch and figure out what little issue was plaguing Jane... or so I thought. From here on out I'll list everything by date.

Tuesday, 7/21:
Put Jane up on the lift (yes, I am fortunate enough to have access to Chas's lift) and pulled the transmission. This puppy has been leaking for quite some time so I thought that it would be a good opportunity to reseal everything. We took the transmission's top cover off and found that it was PERFECT inside - absolutely pristine. Must have been rebuilt. So we just resealed everything to ensure it wouldn't leak and left it alone.

The clutch was old and pretty worn but the flywheel looked perfect with no wear on it whatsoever. Awesome.

Wednesday, 7/22:
Installed the new clutch - a new 10" RAM diaphragm clutch. Reinstalled the transmission with no issues.

Thursday, 7/23:
On to the loss of power problem! Chas agreed that Jane sounded very flat, almost like she wasn't running on all 8 cylinders. We checked spark and it was good. Changed the plugs just in case and then went for a test drive. No improvement.

Double-checked the timing (10 initial, 36 all in) and the adjustment of the valves (dead on). Went for a test drive again, still no improvement.

Oh yeah, and that brand new clutch? Bad right out of the box. Heaviest pedal you could ever imagine and it was either all-on or all-off with no ability to feather it at all. Yes, it was installed right. And no, it wasn't supposed to be like that. So now we know that we need a new clutch - thus invoking the vicious "Jane's Law of Threes", which states that any part that is changed on the car must be changed three times. The original clutch makes one, the replacement (bad) clutch makes two, and the new clutch... well, hopefully it'd be three.

This is where it starts to get hairy. If you've got good spark, good fuel, good timing, and everything is properly adjusted... well, the dang thing should run well. So we rigged a dial indicator up to roughly measure the lift of the cam from the pushrods, just to check if anything had obviously gone flat. Well, the good news is that the cam wasn't wiped. But the readings were kind of all over the place so we concluded that it was pretty worn. This is interesting because this engine is a fairly fresh rebuild (~40,000 miles on it since the rebuild by the PO in the 80's). We started getting curious. Too curious.

So I took everything off of the front end of the engine (no small feat when you've got A/C, power steering, a mechanical fan with fan clutch, and a shroud all wrangled in there) and pulled the timing cover. We found that the timing chain was stupid stretched. There was so much slack in it that I could almost pull it off of the sprocket. Hello, problem one.

Well, a bad case of the "while I'm at it"s struck. I figured that if I had the front end of the engine off already and knew that the cam was worn, I might as well replace the cam. Thus...

Friday, 7/24:
I removed all of the extraneous stuff in preparation for removing the engine from the bay. While it's possible to change the cam out in the engine bay, I figured I would properly repaint the bay while I was at it... so the engine had to come out.

The whole time I was looking at that engine hoist I was thinking about the old saying - that an engine hoist is a tool used to test the tensile strength of all objects you've forgotten to disconnect from the engine

I made sure that wouldn't happen to me.

Saturday, 7/25:
Pulled the engine! It came out easily and I didn't have to test the tensile strength of anything. Suspiciously successful. We took it out with the transmission attached so that we could swap out the offending clutch at the same time.

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We pulled the cam out and surprise, surprise, no part numbers or any identifier on it. It was worn but not flat and not damaged, so that was good at least. The wear indicated that the cam had been in the car a whole lot longer than the other newer parts and we suspected that it had been pulled out of a different car.

I didn't have a degree wheel so we stuck it back in the engine and used the dial indicator to measure lift and duration as precisely as possible so that I could use the specs to buy a new cam with similar specs. I would have gotten a degree wheel but there were none available in my area and I didn't want to wait 2 days for one to ship, then another 2 days for a new cam based on my old cam, so I did the best I could.

I turned the engine over on the stand just to see what the bottom end looked like. All of the pistons were tight with no play in them and the bores still had really prominent crosshatching - a good sign! But as I looked closer at the bottoms of the pistons, I noticed something... several somethings. Yes, the previous owner had assembled the engine with not one, not two, but THREE different brands of pistons. How in the hell they all worked together happily is beyond me. The engine was officially upgraded to "built by a rocket scientist" status at that point.

Now, some of you may be thinking that a reasonable person would mediate this problem! But I, being a rational but unreasonable person, concluded that they were happy that way (after all, the engine had been running fine for many, many miles) and thus that they would not want to be touched. So I turned a blind eye. And no, they didn't end up being the source of any future problems in this post

Moving on...

 

[Kelly_H]

Sunday, 7/26:
Didn't really do anything - just researched parts. I had been working on the car 12 hours a day and then going home and researching parts til 2 in the morning for the past week. There's a lot to learn when it comes to refreshing an engine so I had my hands full.

Ultimately I ordered a Lunati 10350700 (a cam that a lot of people seem to like as a nice mild performance cam), Lunati lifters, a new FlowKooler water pump, a Cloyes standard timing set (double rollers won't fit behind a '64 timing cover and I have a '64 block), a RAM 10.5" 3-finger clutch, new valve springs to match the cam (in case one of my old ones had lost its "springiness" somehow, leading to a loss in power), a Felpro full engine gasket set, aluminum header gaskets (Jane blows out header gaskets way too frequently), a new harmonic balancer (the original was losing its rubber), a bunch of Comp Cams break-in oil, and a degree wheel to double-check my old cam.

Monday, 7/27:
No work on the car - had a million things to do in preparation for travel.

Tuesday, 7/28:
Began cleaning up the engine bay in preparation for paint. At first I was just going to rattle can it, but I couldn't find a good solid engine bay semigloss or eggshell rattle can that I liked. So Chas offered use of his paint gun, opening up the holy BC/CC door. We decided we'd go with eggshell black.

I figured if we were going to go BC/CC I'd have to really do it right. So I spent the day sanding down all of the imperfections of the engine bay.

Wednesday, 7/29:
More sanding! I alternated sanding the engine bay with degreasing and cleaning up the engine. Because, you know, if we're going to paint the engine bay... well, the engine should look good too. Painted the engine Duplicolor Ford Blue. It's beautiful!

Thursday, 7/30:
Brief interlude during which I had to fly to Denver, see Motley Crue / Alice Cooper in concert, and then drive my secondary vehicle to Austin, Texas (my new home).

Tuesday, 8/4:
Arrived back in NC from TX via plane. Went straight back to work. Had just a little more sanding to do to get it perfect! Masked off everything.

Wednesday, 8/5:
Painted the engine bay! I forget what brand of clear coat / flattening agent that we used, but they included a recipe with the flattening agent that said to mix 92% flattening agent to 8% clear coat to achieve an eggshell gloss. So we measured it out exactly, sprayed it out, and... yeah, way too glossy, even with only 8% clear in the mixture. Bummer.

Avoided the problem with the assumption that it would dull up as it dried and instead moved on to parts installation! First, we put the old cam back in the engine and bolted up the degree wheel to check out the specs.

It turned out that the specs on the cam using the very precise degree wheel were a lot... stronger?... than they had read out when only using the dial indicator. Lift measured at a hefty and simultaneously puzzling 0.418"intake/0.500"exhaust. Duration measured at 266/279 at 0.006" lift and 217/238 at 0.050" lift. Surprise, surprise. What I thought was a mild cam turns out to have been a pretty nasty bugger. I began to worry about the Lunati cam, which looked quite weeny in comparison. But it was too late to think about that!

We put in the new cam and lifters with a ton of assembly lube. I then swapped out the valve springs and put on the timing set.

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[New springs on the right, old on the left]

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[Old springs had little rings under them - I left them there as supposedly they are for improved oiling?]

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All the new shiny parts were exciting but Jane's Law of Threes lurked in the back of my mind ominously.

Thursday, 8/6:
We started the day with a survey of the engine bay, which was still far too glossy for either of our tastes. I prefer semigloss, Chas prefers eggshell, and neither of us prefer glossy. So I sprayed out some more flattening agent - just straight with no clear coat added in this time - and it came out PERFECT. Just gorgeous! This picture does it no justice.

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While that dried, I continued engine assembly. Put in the rockers, adjusted them correctly, put on the oil pan, put on the intake, etc. Put on the timing cover, forgot that a bolt needed a spacer on it, and.... broke the timing cover. Just an ear off the top, but I figured that if I was going to go to all the trouble of painting the engine bay and the engine perfectly, it would be pretty stupid to then saddle it with a broken part. So off I went to NPD 2.5 hours away in a terrible thunderstorm to deflate my wallet a little more.

Friday, 8/7:
Started the morning by painting the new timing cover and vowing to not break this one. Installed it, the new FlowKooler water pump, the intake, and all kinds of brackets and dampers and what have you in preparation to stick the engine in. Also bolted up the new-new clutch.

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[Kelly_H]

Saturday, 8/8:
Got there bright and early and put the engine back where it belongs. Bolted everything back onto the front end (A/C, power steering, alternator, fan, etc.), at which point I found that I had left the oil slinger off of the crank. Though the internet consensus appears to be that it's unnecessary, I didn't want to leave anything off that could possibly cause something to go horribly wrong. So everything came back off the front end of the engine... the oil slinger went on.... and everything went back on. This took quite a bit of time but I figured I was wrenching at a pretty good rate so it would be okay, even though it was now 5 days til I needed to drive to Texas.

Sunday, 8/9:
With everything back on the engine, hooked up, and ready to go, I filled her up with coolant! At this point I found that the water pump leaked horribly (and who knows why). I had an extra gasket laying around so I drained all the coolant, took everything back off the front end of the engine AGAIN, and resealed the water pump.

After ensuring that the water pump didn't leak the second time around, we cranked the engine up for the first time! We spent twenty minutes breaking the cam in - all was well. However, Jane's idle was quite a bit smoother than it had been before and I was really apprehensive about driving for the first time. Fortunately, the sun went down so I was able to put off driving her for another day.

Instead, I went home in a state of total rage. I was totally burnt out from the car continually throwing wrenches into my plans so I threw rocks into the woods for a while and then went to bed.

Monday, 8/10:
I arrived fresh in the morning with a clearer head, just as intended. The moment of truth had arrived! I started Jane up and went to take her for a drive. And... well... I hated it. The new cam might have been "mild performance" compared to stock cams, but it wasn't anything compared to the grunt of my old cam. It was smooth, it was reliable, it made better vacuum, it didn't stumble right off throttle like the old cam did, and I hated it. Low end torque was fine but the mid range suffered a lot and there was no "holy cow I am about to die" seat of the pants feeling like she used to have. But that was all irrelevant because I didn't have time for another cam swap anyways - I had only 3 days before I had to go to Texas!

I put seven miles on her, at which point she had developed a pretty substantial oil leak. Surprise, the front seal had gone bad. I was looking at pulling the front end of the engine off... again... for the THIRD time in as many days.

To add insult to injury, as I was sitting there in the driveway contemplating the misery of my life, oil pressure started fluctuating like crazy and the engine then developed a very ominous WHUM WHUM WHUM sound. You know, the sound that a bearing makes when it's spun.

I went home before I burned the car to the ground.

Tuesday, 8/11:
I was not at all interested in messing with the car again at this point, but something just kept pulling me back. So this is where it gets kind of insane.

We pulled the engine early in the morning to figure out where the problem was. It was definitely a bottom end problem, which was odd because we hadn't touched that part of the engine at all. I guess all we did was make fun of the pistons and that was enough to make it angry.

Interestingly, the oil showed no traces of metals at all - no chunks, no silvery sheen, nothing. We remained suspicious and tore the bottom end apart.

We started by pulling the oil pump. Now, I had tested this thing back this past spring when I was rebuilding the distributor, and it seemed to turn fine. And so it did this time as well - going FORWARDS. Going backwards was another story. The dang thing wouldn't turn at all going backwards, and going forwards it had a tendency to occasionally get stuck.

Some may remember that I've been having weird oil pressure issues this year where oil pressure would randomly drop a little (not frequently, and never to dangerous levels below 25psi). Because the oil pressure never dropped completely or reached dangerous levels, I pretty much lived with it. This was a big mistake, it turns out.

We dissected the pump and found that the insides were heavily scored. Chas commented that it was the worst he'd ever seen and he had no idea how it was still working even a little. Because of the scoring, the pump would get hung up intermittently. Hello, source of oil pressure problems.

We moved on to checking out the bearings. All of the rod bearings were happy - somewhat worn, but all okay. But two of the central main caps were a different story. None of them were spun but two had seen a lot of heat and were heavily scored down into the copper. Hello, source of noise.

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So here I am with an engine that needs a crank kit and an oil pump. Pretty simple, really. But somehow no parts store within a 3 hour radius of me could get a crank kit in that day, and I really needed to get this thing back on the road!

This is the part where it goes from a frustrating story to an epic struggle of heroic proportions.

We were determined to not let the car beat us.

 

[Kelly_H]

So it's the afternoon of the 11th, approximately 54 hours before I need to drive to Texas. Any sane person would have said, "You know, I think I'll mess with this at a later date." But fortunately (or unfortunately), the two characters in this story are both crazy people. We were NOT going to let Jane get the best of us, no matter what. We were hellbent on making her run in whatever way that we could. In short, the project was about to go full-on HOT ROD.

Conveniently, there was a freshly rebuilt 2V 289 bored 0.040" over on Craigslist not too far away. The engine was a pretty reasonable price and came with absolutely everything it could possibly need from the carb right down to the pan. It even came with platinum spark plugs! Hotttt dog!

Chas went and fetched it while I went home to have dinner with my folks for the first time in a week or so. Once I got back, we went to town on this thing.
[Twins!]

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Originally the plan was to swap my intake onto the engine, then plop it in the car and run it. But we looked at the springs and degreed out the cam and... well... it was way weeny. It was just a little stock 2V build and I was used to the grunt of a mad scientist's creation. So we swapped Jane's heads onto the engine and took the opportunity to swap the old cam - the original nasty one - into the engine. Fortunately, I had kept the lifters in exact order so the matching set went in with the cam. It may have been a little crazy to put in a known worn cam, but that Lunati just did not sit well with me and I just wanted MY Jane back. So in it went.
[Old pistons/valves were super crudded up - this is odd because my spark plugs showed that it was running dead on as far as mixture goes, so the carbon must have built up a long time ago and got cemented in there.]

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[New bottom end is nice and shiny and new!]

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The new engine was all in one piece two hours later - 9:30 PM.

 

[Kelly_H]

Effectively, we had just swapped the short block. Now, the problem with this block was that it was a '65 block and my old block had been a '64. That means I was swapping from an early 5-bolt to a later 6-bolt block. Those that have done the swap know that that comes with a whole host of problems, which we tackled with creative gusto.

The first step was to machine new guide pins and a pilot bushing for it. The guide pins were necessary because the ones in the engine didn't match, and the pilot bushing was necessary because the parts warehouses had all failed us again and weren't able to acquire any.

The second step was to find a block plate and bellhousing to fit the new engine. Fortunately, Chas had those buried in his basement - quite literally. I spent an hour cleaning the clay off of them and repainting the bell to an aluminum silver, which I found to be more acceptable than the previous authentic rust color.

The unfortunate part is that the later year bell obviously did not mate up to my old early transmission. We first found that the bell required a larger diameter bearing retainer than my old one. So we dug up a bearing retainer that matched the bell.

We then found that the correct outer diameter bearing retainer was too small on the inside, so Chas turned it down to perfectly match the old bearing retainer's inner dimensions.

We then found that the clutch fork used a different clip style than the early clutch forks. I didn't want to ruin my old clutch fork by modifying it for the new style, so we dug up another clutch fork and modified it to be the correct length with the correct clip style for the bell.

The new bell's bolt pattern was drastically different from the narrow bolt pattern on my old transmission. So we lined the bell up with the transmission correctly, marked the bolt hole locations, and drilled and tapped new holes into the bell for my old transmission.

We then found that the starter wouldn't contact the old flywheel when bolted up to the engine, as the block plate / bell were meant to be used with a bigger flywheel found in the 302s. The solution, obviously, was to dig up an appropriately sized flywheel that would engage the starter.

After cleaning up the newly discovered flywheel, we realized that my 10.5" clutch had a narrower bolt pattern than the flywheel. Undaunted, Chas machined the flywheel for the correct bolt pattern. It had to be exactly right because otherwise the flywheel would vibrate horrifically and self destruct. Fortunately, Chas is very precise.

Are you tired yet? Because we were. Problem after problem kept cropping up and we (mostly Chas) just kept nailing them back down. The car was not going to win - not this day.

3:30 AM rolled around and I was bolting up a crazy conglomerate of parts to the new engine. Onto the modified guide pins went the block plate, modified flywheel, clutch, modified bellhousing, and modified clutch fork. Everything bolted up and everything fit.

At 4:40 AM, the engine was in the bay - 9 hours after we had started tearing into it. That number wouldn't be so impressive if you didn't consider the amount of work that went into getting it to that point.

We decided to grab a few Zzz's, some breakfast, and were back at it by 8AM.

Wednesday, 8/12, 8AM:
We were into the home stretch and I was thinking that we might just pull this off. All of the accessories went back on without a hitch. We had to grind some of the ear of the bellhousing off to make it clear the headers (which were made to fit around the narrow bell), and we had to shorten my long z-bar clutch linkage to properly fit the larger bellhousing, but that was it.

At 1PM, it was time for the moment of truth.

I turned the key and Jane snarled to life. It sounded like MY Jane - that wonderful authoritative growl with those mean, spine-tingling revs.

But, this being Jane, my wonderful, horribly cursed car... the joy was short-lived. After a couple of minutes the engine developed a horrendous screech in the front end when revved. We pulled the belts off and the sound stopped. Yep, the brand new FlowKooler water pump had decided that trashing its bearing would be prudent. It was toast (the nose rocked around pretty good) and, more importantly, it had no replacement waiting for it. We had the old pumps off of both blocks but they were pretty heavily corroded and I was not interested in putting either of them on.

So there we were back again with a broken vehicle and no parts warehouse to back us up. Advance Auto said they could get a pump as soon as tomorrow morning, but that's when I was supposed to leave for Texas.

So, I quit.

I can't say that I'm not a little ashamed for quitting after getting so far, but the car was just trying to tell me something. Sure, I could have left for Texas on the 14th and driven all through the night to get there the 15th (which is when I was required to be there). But I would have been doing it on a totally untested engine that had more than its fair share of recent problems, and I would have been doing it on little to no sleep while at the end of my rope. Didn't sound like a great idea to me so I scratched it.

Instead, I went home alone.

 

[Kelly_H]

Thursday, 8/13:
Yeah, we're still kicking.

I got a call from Chas in the morning telling me that the water pump was ready to go. Got there and he had already put the dang thing in without me. After piling on all the accessories AGAIN and filling the coolant AGAIN, we brought Jane to life. This time there was no telltale horrible howl, no ominous bottom end sound, no fluid flying about, no nothing. Just Jane.

I took her out a spin and suddenly, all was right with the world. She was back to the real Jane - that nasty, snarling, almost-unreasonable little pony car. She felt just as good as she ever has been, plus a little extra. Sure, the throttle once again doesn't like to be goosed - something about it kicking the vacuum too low - and sure, it kicks you at low rpm. But it spins tires all the way through second and throws you right back into the seat when you put the pedal on the ground. I went sideways the entire way down our "test stretch" of road and it was incredible. I've spent this entire year babying the clutch and the engine and it was beyond really good to stretch her legs some.

I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning up the shop and saying my goodbyes. Couldn't have done any of this without Chas's help. To be honest, I really didn't want to leave because leaving meant going back to reality. The week had been trying (at the least) and pretty damn awful at times but it was just way too much fun. And now I guess I can consider myself a "real" hot rodder

I drove Jane home triumphantly. The new clutch is perfect but the new engine runs hot - overheats at freeway speeds and idle, though it runs just fine at city speeds - so I need to figure out what it's not happy about. I need new fuel lines (swapping from rubber to PTFE braided so that I don't have to replace them again) and some front suspension parts. I've got my work cut out for me come December, when I'll be home again to take another stab at dragging Jane out to Texas with me. The current plan is to actually rebuild my old 5-bolt block (lighter, everything bolts up "right", sentimental value, whatever) and resell the 6-bolt block (already have a buyer for the complete engine).

Over Thanksgiving I'll have a day at home and I'm going to rip everything all apart and get things off to various shops as needed. Then it'll all be ready to go so I can hit the ground running when I get home for Christmas!

In the meantime, I'll be around. Probably more so than usual, as I am now exceptionally bored. I clay barred and waxed my 2002 Ford Escape yesterday, that's how bored I am!

Anyways, there you have it. Reading for the week and a pretty silly series of events by a couple of totally ridiculous people.

 

[Grabber70Mach]

Wow sounds like a great learning experience and test of your determination to see things through, way to go. By the way its not all that long I read it all in one setting.

Sent from my GT-P5210 using Tapatalk

 

[turq66]

Hey, didn't I see all this on another forum?

Just kidding. Still a good read and good to see you posting here. Good luck with the car and with your studies.

 

[Kelly_H]

Hey, didn't I see all this on another forum?

Just kidding. Still a good read and good to see you posting here. Good luck with the car and with your studies.

Ha! Guilty of copy/pasting But you know, a lot of people have sworn off VMF for forever and Stangfix has been kind of dead as of late... gotta liven the place up!

 

[opentrackerSteve]

Kelly,

Your story is familiar. I have not driven 'Tigger' in over 2 years and have had similar issues since Knott's 2013 trip home. I have put new heads on the motor but have not been able to get it fired off.

Work and life has prevented me from progressing on Tigger.

Keep the faith. Jane will ride again as my ride will. Glad to hear you are investing in yourself with an advanced degree.

Peace, out.

 

[Midlife]

Wow...just wow...

 

[opentrackerSteve]

Kelly,

Just a data point. I had converted my 'explode every 4 or 5 years' C-4 transmission to a Toploader and had originally purchased a stock clutch for the package (a 3 finger design). Shortly after converting things over and getting the car on the road, I had a terrible time getting the car to get out of gear using the clutch (putting the trans into neutral was fine, complete dis-engagement of the clutch was the issue). Lo and behold, one of the fingers of the clutch broke. At that point, I dropped the cash and obtained a Centerforce Clutch which to this day is still very operational.

If you're still farting around with the powertrain, go get yourself one of these animals.....

 

[Kelly_H]

Kelly,

Just a data point. I had converted my 'explode every 4 or 5 years' C-4 transmission to a Toploader and had originally purchased a stock clutch for the package (a 3 finger design). Shortly after converting things over and getting the car on the road, I had a terrible time getting the car to get out of gear using the clutch (putting the trans into neutral was fine, complete dis-engagement of the clutch was the issue). Lo and behold, one of the fingers of the clutch broke. At that point, I dropped the cash and obtained a Centerforce Clutch which to this day is still very operational.

If you're still farting around with the powertrain, go get yourself one of these animals.....

You know, it's funny, everyone I've talked to has had one of the three types of clutches (3-finger, diaphragm, and centerforce-style) fail on them. So I've killed a diaphragm clutch right out of the box and swapped to the 3-finger type. I have a friend who did the opposite - killed a 3-finger 50 miles out of the box and swapped to a diaphragm. I've got a friend who swears by Centerforces and a friend who has destroyed enough that he's sworn off of them for forever. I think at this point it's a crapshoot with quality control the way it is.

If I kill the 3-finger, I'll swap to a Centerforce as it's the only type I've yet to try!

As for an advanced degree... well, I would have done it regardless, but I also didn't really have a choice. Everything's taken a huge dive recently so very few jobs are hiring, and the market is flooded with Master's graduates. Essentially, I have to have a Master's degree in order to be even remotely competitive for any kind of position above grunt work. Such is life these days.

To Midlife - I'm going to take your comment as meaning "Wow, that's amazing!" not "Wow, you're an idiot!"

 

[KBMWRS]

I first wondered what happened to the job in Colorado?

And I agree with Mid...wow....as in you are great.

 

[Kelly_H]

I first wondered what happened to the job in Colorado?

And I agree with Mid...wow....as in you are great.

It was a 1-year contract job! Also, I found out that snow and ice do not agree with me as they do not agree with my RWD pony car It hailed every day for 3 months straight this spring and that's about the time that Texas started to look pretty good to me. So I guess I'm stuck here for two years and then if I don't love it, I'll keep on heading west... I swear I'll get to CA sometime!

 

[Midlife]

Wow: you're surely dedicated to the task more than the rest of us! I would have given up in disgust days before you did.

 

[opentrackerSteve]

then if I don't love it, I'll keep on heading west... I swear I'll get to CA sometime!

Ventura County - God's Country.......... Close enough to the insanity of LA, but far enough that you can still buy fresh strawberries, corn on the cob and not be stuck for hours on end on a concrete parking lot called an interstate. And only two seasons! Dry and Hot! 8^)

 

[msell66]

Giant props to you Kelly. You have shown determination and resolve that is a rare commodity these days! No doubt that you'll go far in this world...job wise and car wise