Safe, Flat, and Bland.

So here I am in the land of 'fromage l'orange': Wisconsin. I was in New Mexico and while I might not have stayed there forever I did LOVE the state. Vast, varied, vicious and sometimes voluptuous. I liked NM for all the reasons that I am struggling with Wisconsin. NM is extreme. It is still the Wild, Wild, West and you have to stay awake some of the time if you want to stay alive. The traffic is nuts but one thing they don't have in NM is lots of white folks driving around looking for an excuse to self righteously honk the horn and flip you the bird. There are lots of idiots driving in NM and some of them are white folks but mostly people just don't seem to ask for trouble on the roads. The streets are a mixing board and you cannot tell where someone is from and what there predisposition to using a vulgar display of force might be. Which is to say if you honk your horn at every person that acts like an ass on the streets sooner or later you will attract the attention of someone who is seriously having a bad day and now they have someone to blame it on: you.  This is not true in Wisconsin/Madison. Lots of self righteous white folks here looking for trouble which is typical for people who have never really found it.  It is not something you go looking for. I think in general folks in Albuquerque have enough REAL trouble and on some level they know better. 

Generally what I have described about the human culture of Albuquerque is true for the food and the ... topography and climate of New Mexico. The food is interesting and spicy and not bland with many different contributing influences. It won't get you killed but it might make you turn bright red. The landscape and climate is extreme and this was my favorite part. I loved disappearing into the 'wild' and having to manage energy, water, food, daylight, temperature and judgment to keep from getting killed or hurt. It wasn't safe; like most things that are VERY challenging and VERY interesting. I felt alive and beautiful out in the desert, I felt a sense of place and appropriate size: which means that I felt really small, not without any meaning or importance but I had left the world that humankind has created and the sense that we are the most important thing in it. This was and is predominantly the feeling and the phenomenon about being outside 'in it'that keeps me feeling alive gives me sense that I fit in to the world.  : be it paddling big water in a sea kayak or riding a mountain bike in the desert 20 feet from a 200 foot dropoff or skiing up a mountain and then down: your skills and your brain and your experience are the safety net. Sometimes you have to just grit it out and the ability to do that comes from doing it.  New Mexico is hard in the way that Wisconsin is soft, soft like someone who uses the AC in their car a lot and always finds the parking space closest to the entrance and drives to the store when it is a ten minute walk. Wisconsin is relatively flat and there is no 'wild' very close. Even if it is rural it is cultivated and tilled and rolled flat in neat, ordered rows and the only trees are between your land and mine or where the boggy spots are.

It feels like the entire city of Madison is one big, sprawled out mall: car dealerships, OfficeMax, nail salons, supermarkets etc. The worst neighborhoods aren't that bad the pretense that Madison is a 'cool, trendy, and happening' place is thick.  Don't get me wrong, if I had to live here (and in a way I do) I could be in a worse place but ... crazy as it sounds I would rather have to be in Milwaukee or Chicago because they are both places that unlike Madison require some experience and skills to survive and this makes them interesting, not always pleasant but too much even pleasantness and this kid starts to look for trouble.

A Project Too Far ... ?

After I finished the MAD New System install I decided to start installing some of the stuff that I bought right after I got the truck. Notably I had put off installing the Mallory Unilite distributor because I was unsure about wiring, ballast resistors and the like and wanted to wait until the New System was in.  It was classically anticlimactic and aside from having to find TDC (Top Dead Center) a few times it was almost too easy.  The new distributor dropped right in, after a little fiddling the truck started and I advanced the timing a bit and set it with the timing gun and then I replaced the copper core wires with carbon core wires as recommended in the Mallory Unilite instructions. The truck seemed to run just fine with copper core wires but ... what the hell. Yearwood Performance wanted $85 bucks for carbon wires, Napa wanted $16. Guess who got the business?

(an aside on Yearwood Performance and their equivalent in the auto industry: Yearwood sells all types of 'gofast' for cars and trucks, typically marketed for the V8 crowd they have all sorts of generally overpriced bits some of which are purely esthetic and some is good solid perfomance equipment.  The thing is ... you have to know what you want before you walk in there because 9 times out of 10 the guys working there don't know what the hell they are doing and are too proud to say 'I don't know, let me find out." I am no expert but more than once I have gone in and asked a question about a piece of equipment armed only with information that I have learned from a website or instructions I seem to know more about it than they do ... which is frustrating when I am trying to make up my mind about what to buy.  I have run special orders for an outdoor store and I devised my own system of keeping track of who ordered what, on what day and who to call THE DAY it came in, our store became known for special orders partially because I kept track of them in a way that the customer could be kept in the loop and knew who to talk to and was informed very quickly when their order arrived.  I didn't think it was that extraordinary as far as service goes but given my experience at Yearwood and their equivalents it WAS extraordinary service.

After I got the Unilite installed using the resistance wire that the truck was equipped with and a surge protector that plugged inline to prevent electrical surges from burning up the electric eye I didn't have anything else that HAD to happen before moving from Albuquerque to Madison, WI.. Of course I did have time to kill and too much free time is problematic for me and really bad when your two year old daughter is being kept from you by the vindictive ex so ... I decided to replace the solid mounted, belt driven fan with thermostatically controlled, shrouded Derale fans. I measured, I searched around (at Yearwood where I was laughably misinformed) and finally I found some fans that looked like they would be a close fit on Amazon.  The fans came and tried to place them in the space available and there was not enough room between the radiator and the bolts on the fan pulley.  At first I said the hell with it and got an RA (return authorization) from Amazon. Then I reconsidered and decided to move the radiator forward a couple of inches, which I did, which was a big ol' pain in the ass but I eventually succeeded ... but not without putting another hole in the engine side of the radiator which I fixed with solder just like the first hole.  Once I got the radiator in I had to mount the shroud and fans against the radiator in a way that would render it stable and removable if the need arose. This too was a pain in the ass, lots of fiddling and eyeballing. Then I had to wire it and bear in mind that this unit has two fans each of which draws 25 amps for a potential 50 amp draw which is considerable. Each fan has it's own relay so in the end there are quite a few wires that all need to be going the right place. Ultimately I wanted to have switches on the dash that contolled fan functions such that I could turn the fans off (for highway driving),or have them controlled by thermostats or have them both on regardless of temperature.  Sounds great right? Well let me tell you what a complete PITA getting all that to happen was ... Good grief.

"New System" installed!! (finally, 15 months after I bought it)

So 15 months ago I bought MAD Enterprises 'New System' which is basically instructions, wiring and hardware to not only rewire the starting system, the ignition system, the charging system and the headlights but reconfigure it to minimize voltage drop (which causes the classicly dim headlights in these old vehicles).  I had the box and had read the instructions many times but never got up the gumption to dive in to the project because the truck would not run while it was being rewired.  I broke up with my girlfriend, got a job, found a place to live and am now in the middle of a typically awful legal battle over our child so I have had plenty of excuses NOT to do this project. However, about two months ago I just said fuck it.  "I will just take it a step at a time and see what happens."

Well it took me roughly 5 weeks working on Thursdays after I dropped Gracie at day care.  June in New Mexico is hot and dry and this year it is so dry that all the local forests have been closed due to risk of fire. So working on the truck on a gravel parking lot in the full NM sun was challenging.  I would work four hours and drink 3 liters of water just to keep from passing out. Over a year ago I wrote an entry titled 'Boogered Up Electrics' and took a picture of the kit laid out on the floor.  In short there are a lot of little pieces that need to be put together in by crimping, soldering and shrinking tubing over the joint.  I won't go on ad nauseum but even for someone that has lots of automotive experience (I don't) this might take an entire weekend if you didn't make any mistakes and had a nice shop. But in the end after a few 'redo's' and noodling about how to fix my goofs I got it done. When I started I did the starter rewire first and I did something wrong and couldn't get it to start when I had finished that piece of the project. I kept going: replacing the alternator with a more powerful 3 wire internally regulated unit and lots of other wiring, relays etc.All the while knowing that I still had to go back and figure out what I had done wrong wiring the starter. There was a great 'moment of truth' when I got in the truck and put the key in the ignition and crossed my fingers that I had not crossed any wires. At this point it had been weeks since the truck had run and life had been a little rocky so I really wanted it to work for more than just the obvious reasons.  So I turned the key and the motor turned over (a good sign) three times and Vroooom! I was sooooo excited!. This sort of performance improvement doesn't necessarily translate into torque or horsepower but I have noticed the following: Before when the truck was running at idle the headlights were dim and yellow and brightened up noticeably when engine rpm increased as did the gauge lights on the dash.  After the headlights are bright and white and do not get brighter with an increase in engine rpm. The gauges are bright and do not get brighter when the engine is revved up. The intent driving this project was to provide a solid electical system platform upon which to build with air conditioning or electric fans etc. It is clear that at first glance I have achieved this, checking output with a multimeter is the next step but the change is very noticeable. 

I had a typical Homer Simpson 'Doh!' moment the last day when I was just securing the wiring with electrical tape and zip ties.  The system worked and as advertised it had improved things in various ways. But I realised that I had wired in a redundant circuit charging the battery which was superflous so I was in the process of pulling the redundant wire out across the front of the radiator when I remembered that I had not disconnected the ground on the battery which meant that this positve wire I was removing could ground on any part of truck, I thought it moments before it was too late and I heard a loud 'POP' and heard a hissing liquid sound only to see a small stream of coolant jetting out of the front of the radiator.  OOPS.  In the end it was a good thing because I drained the radiator and treated it with radiator flush to clean out some of the calcification.  I repaired the hole with a soldering gun and solder and it has held up for a few days of summer driving so ... cross your fingers.