The first ‘custom’ item on the agenda for this truck was the gas ‘fillers’ on the bed. First on the list, because the truck bed was the one area that needed the most work, much of it underneath and out of sight. I figured if I was going to put all the effort into making the bed look new, inside and out, I just ‘had’ to do this too!
The original gas filler on this truck bed was a style I've always disliked. It protruded from the side of the bed taking away from the truck's lines, was a constant source of “pilfering fun" for kids passing by, and for catching clothing parts if you were walking too close or tying something down.
I’d always favored the setup on the ’79 trucks that had a square filler door covering the gas cap. So, when I found a bed, with those doors on it while scavenging parts in a local scrap yard I made a deal and picked it up. Unfortunately, the bed was in worse shape than mine (so I got it cheap), the filler door area was about the only good (not rusty or dented) portion of the bed.
What I needed to do, was cut a panel out of each bed (on both sides as the truck has dual gas tanks) and swap the ones from the donor, to my original. First, I marked and cut out a panel on my bed (here’s another shot showing some of the other damage).
I would normally cut out the donor piece first, but sometime before I ever saw it, someone had tried (unsuccessfully) to drive the truck between two trees. This had driven this portion of the bed in about 2.5 inches. Unfortunately the pictures don’t really show the extent and depth of the damage. Let’s just say it wasn’t a simple task to pull out, even in a full on body shop, mainly because of it’s location and depth.
So, by cutting out this piece first, it made pulling the dent out level again much easier, although it still took about a hundred stud pins, in several sessions. Eventually after about two hours of fastening pins and pulling with a slide hammer (in the hot sun), I had it close to right. That didn’t include the 45 minutes or with a hammer and dolly to reform the bed line!
So, after a sweaty day in the sun, this is where I wound up. You can see all the measurements, and ‘register’ lines if you look closely. When I said working with one set of hands took more measuring, I wasn’t kidding!
Not very pretty to most eyes and not exactly where I’d hoped to end the day. The panel is ready though, to be pre-drilled. Once I do that, and attach a few rivets to ‘tack’ it in place temporarily, I can repeat the process in the other side!
Today… well, so far it’s been intermittent rain showers, not the kind of day you want to be working with steel and electric power tools outside. So, my next plan is to get about three other guys over here, snake the motor and transmission out of the truck, move the bed away from the front door of the garage and push the truck cab and frame outside. Hopefully I can get that happening by next weekend.
It’s just too hot in the sun to be attempting to do this body work outside any longer. Epoxy’s, body fillers, primers, essentially everything I’ll be using is very sensitive to temperature, and especially to direct sunlight. Think of trying to wax your car in the sun, instead of the shade, with a paste wax. It can be done, but it adds an unwanted level of complexity and ups the annoyance factor a 1000 fold!
Oh, and for those of you who are interested, this is the tool I use to do the rough cut outs, it’s called a ‘cut-off’ tool. The tool on the far right in this picture is an electric metal shear. I use those like you would manual ‘tin snips’, but it’s a lot faster, makes a cleaner cut and is a whole lot less work.
Finally, here’s a snapshot of some of the tools I needed today. I say some, because I’d already started putting things away before I thought to take this. It’s pretty much everything except the grinders, body hammers and dollies I’d already put up. The big blue, pistol looking thing at the top, towards the left is the stud gun. It’s what attaches those studs in the earlier pictures. Right below that is a ‘contour gauge’, you place it up against an undamaged section, capture the contours, and then lock it in place to use as a guide while you work. Much, much faster and easier than making the cardboard cutouts we used to use!
So there you have it, a glimpse into my Saturday and some idea of the amount of work that goes into restoring, just this one corner, of this old truck. Maybe I’m crazy, a glutton for punishment or don’t know, when, to say when. Then again, maybe, just maybe, I keep picturing the twinkle there’ll be in my wife’s eyes when she finally looks at it for the first time, finished. When I open the door for her, let her climb up in the cab, and fire it up for her first drive, and again when she comes back from that ‘test drive’ with a big smile on her face.
In the end, that’s what it’s all about, the finished product, for her. I’ll complain about the work, the heat, the sweat, and occasionally the money… but the truth is I really do love doing this stuff, I just wish I wasn’t so rusty at it right now!! I keep remembering what I could get done in a day, back in the day. Then I end up thinking I can get close to that production level and end up being disappointed/frustrated. So, yesterday I resolved to stop thinking about time, to focus on the task, let it take what ever time it takes, and then move on to the next one.
If you enjoy this type of post, or don’t, let me know. I’ll certainly have a lot more to post over the coming weeks and months.
Thanks again for stopping by!!
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Ok… I feel much better now….
I spent the past several hours hammering, grinding, nibbling and fitting sheet metal for one side of that old truck’s bed. It’s in the upper 80’s here now, and the sun has the metal so hot I can’t work with it any longer, so, I’m taking a break. It’s amazing to me sometimes how much some real physical labor, a ton of sweat and some tangible, visible results can improve my mood!!
It’s looking good too, as soon as the temps start to drop (and if the thunderstorm they’re predicting doesn’t happen, I’ll have the rough in of the custom work that one side of the bed done. I’m not as fast as I once was, that’s for sure. Also, working with precise fitting is a bit more difficult with only one set of hands.
Normally my wife would be out there working with me and being that second pair of hands. But, with her back troubles, I don’t want her aggravating it over this project. So, I use a lot of tape, some magnets and take a lot of measurements instead. Works out fine, just takes about three times as long.
I’ll post some of the pics I took along the way later today, once I’m done fitting and ready for the final attachment. I need to get the fit perfect and aligned so I can take the panel back off, and then use the sandblaster on the interior metal before painting it with a rust preventative paint. I use a product called POR-15 for that. It’s expensive, but so is having all your hard work ruined by some rust eating through it in a year.
I’ll sandblast everything I can get at and then either spray, or brush it on all the bare metal. I’ve never had anything I’ve coated with this stuff rust again (in that place anyway). It’s pretty toxic though, so, if you decide to try it, be sure to wear an approved mask. You can even paint it right over rust; it’ll bond with it and stop it.
Anyway, it’s good stuff; I don’t want this sounding like a commercial!
I’m going to use a new product to attach these panels I’m forming. It’s an actual ‘Panel Adhesive’ that’s purported to bond the two panels, allowing the use of ‘pop-rivets’ and eliminating the need to weld the panels. What that means is that I can prepare all the ‘back sides’ before final fit up and not have the coatings ruined by the heat of welding. I’m a little skeptical, but, I figure given all the work it’ll save, it’s worth a shot.
I’m headed off to relax a bit…. I hope you’re all having a great weekend!
It’s looking good too, as soon as the temps start to drop (and if the thunderstorm they’re predicting doesn’t happen, I’ll have the rough in of the custom work that one side of the bed done. I’m not as fast as I once was, that’s for sure. Also, working with precise fitting is a bit more difficult with only one set of hands.
Normally my wife would be out there working with me and being that second pair of hands. But, with her back troubles, I don’t want her aggravating it over this project. So, I use a lot of tape, some magnets and take a lot of measurements instead. Works out fine, just takes about three times as long.
I’ll post some of the pics I took along the way later today, once I’m done fitting and ready for the final attachment. I need to get the fit perfect and aligned so I can take the panel back off, and then use the sandblaster on the interior metal before painting it with a rust preventative paint. I use a product called POR-15 for that. It’s expensive, but so is having all your hard work ruined by some rust eating through it in a year.
I’ll sandblast everything I can get at and then either spray, or brush it on all the bare metal. I’ve never had anything I’ve coated with this stuff rust again (in that place anyway). It’s pretty toxic though, so, if you decide to try it, be sure to wear an approved mask. You can even paint it right over rust; it’ll bond with it and stop it.
Anyway, it’s good stuff; I don’t want this sounding like a commercial!
I’m going to use a new product to attach these panels I’m forming. It’s an actual ‘Panel Adhesive’ that’s purported to bond the two panels, allowing the use of ‘pop-rivets’ and eliminating the need to weld the panels. What that means is that I can prepare all the ‘back sides’ before final fit up and not have the coatings ruined by the heat of welding. I’m a little skeptical, but, I figure given all the work it’ll save, it’s worth a shot.
I’m headed off to relax a bit…. I hope you’re all having a great weekend!
Friday, June 24, 2005
This is the week that was…
I think you all know I try to put a good spin on things but this week has just been one of ‘those weeks’, just one thing, after another, all week.
I love programming, building things, taking something from a spark of an idea and making it real.
I’m a lucky guy, most days, weeks; I get to do what I love. What I don’t love about development though, is indecision. Start, stop, hurry up, and slow down, but not that slow…
For six months now I’ve really been spoiled. I get up, go to the office (most days, but, some days I even get to work from home), and just do what I do, and marvel that I get paid for having so much fun!
Then there are the weeks like this one. You all know about the hardware problems at my office so we can just forget about that for now. On the job I’ve started, stopped, backed up, gone forward, and worked harder this week than any in the last 52 and I have nothing, nada, zilch in the way of forward progress to show for it.
Most times I’d even spin it to myself that I’d ‘learned’ something, and maybe, with time there will have been a lesson in this week. But, at the moment, I don’t see it.
I think the single most frustrating aspect, and this is only one of a dozen from this week, is a little package called ‘Hummingbird’. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s what’s known as an ‘emulator’, it emulates the old green screen terminals we used to use for mainframes.
There are others, one from Attachmate is another pretty popular one.
Well, much of what I’ve been doing has centered on extracting information from Mainframe based DB2 databases and making them available on the network in smaller targeted applications, say to produce nice graphic, for publication reports. The emulator in use when I got there was the one from Attachmate.
Essentially my application will, in the background, log in to the mainframe, establish connections to the DB2 tables, extract the data for the reports and present them to the user all without them having to know ‘where’ that data resides or the rules for retrieving it.
Recently, as I started rolling out my applications they would work on some PC’s and not on others. It honestly had me baffled for a day or so. Then I realized that not ‘all’ the PC’s had the Attachmate emulator, some had ‘Hummingbird’, and some had both. After a few phone calls I discovered that the company had switched to Hummingbird; three ‘years’ ago!!
The development machine I was provided had only the Attachmate product configured, as a result, I’ve been building apps around a technology they abandoned. If that wasn’t bad enough, the version that’s “standard”, well its 7.1, the current version is 10 and the vendor’s support for 7.1 ended (as in they no longer support it) in April of this year.
So now, I’ve got the wonderful task of sorting out an automation object model, on an obsolete version of software, against a very rigid deadline. Sweet, the stuff burnout is fueled by!
So, lest you think it’s all sunshine and rose petals on this side of the screen, I’ve typed one of my ‘rants’, without the smoothing effects of time or the benefit of hindsight. Just my total frustration, at the end of a very long week, at being essentially where I was when it started, maybe even back to Wednesday or Thursday of the prior week.
I think I’ll just hit the garage in the morning and hit some steel with hammers and dollies, grinding wheels, welders and whatever else destructive I can find and make some progress on that old truck until it gets too hot to work.
I’ll let you all know later if my ‘physical therapy’ helps at all!!
Thanks for stopping by and reading… I’ll find something much more fun to write about for tomorrow!!
I love programming, building things, taking something from a spark of an idea and making it real.
I’m a lucky guy, most days, weeks; I get to do what I love. What I don’t love about development though, is indecision. Start, stop, hurry up, and slow down, but not that slow…
For six months now I’ve really been spoiled. I get up, go to the office (most days, but, some days I even get to work from home), and just do what I do, and marvel that I get paid for having so much fun!
Then there are the weeks like this one. You all know about the hardware problems at my office so we can just forget about that for now. On the job I’ve started, stopped, backed up, gone forward, and worked harder this week than any in the last 52 and I have nothing, nada, zilch in the way of forward progress to show for it.
Most times I’d even spin it to myself that I’d ‘learned’ something, and maybe, with time there will have been a lesson in this week. But, at the moment, I don’t see it.
I think the single most frustrating aspect, and this is only one of a dozen from this week, is a little package called ‘Hummingbird’. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s what’s known as an ‘emulator’, it emulates the old green screen terminals we used to use for mainframes.
There are others, one from Attachmate is another pretty popular one.
Well, much of what I’ve been doing has centered on extracting information from Mainframe based DB2 databases and making them available on the network in smaller targeted applications, say to produce nice graphic, for publication reports. The emulator in use when I got there was the one from Attachmate.
Essentially my application will, in the background, log in to the mainframe, establish connections to the DB2 tables, extract the data for the reports and present them to the user all without them having to know ‘where’ that data resides or the rules for retrieving it.
Recently, as I started rolling out my applications they would work on some PC’s and not on others. It honestly had me baffled for a day or so. Then I realized that not ‘all’ the PC’s had the Attachmate emulator, some had ‘Hummingbird’, and some had both. After a few phone calls I discovered that the company had switched to Hummingbird; three ‘years’ ago!!
The development machine I was provided had only the Attachmate product configured, as a result, I’ve been building apps around a technology they abandoned. If that wasn’t bad enough, the version that’s “standard”, well its 7.1, the current version is 10 and the vendor’s support for 7.1 ended (as in they no longer support it) in April of this year.
So now, I’ve got the wonderful task of sorting out an automation object model, on an obsolete version of software, against a very rigid deadline. Sweet, the stuff burnout is fueled by!
So, lest you think it’s all sunshine and rose petals on this side of the screen, I’ve typed one of my ‘rants’, without the smoothing effects of time or the benefit of hindsight. Just my total frustration, at the end of a very long week, at being essentially where I was when it started, maybe even back to Wednesday or Thursday of the prior week.
I think I’ll just hit the garage in the morning and hit some steel with hammers and dollies, grinding wheels, welders and whatever else destructive I can find and make some progress on that old truck until it gets too hot to work.
I’ll let you all know later if my ‘physical therapy’ helps at all!!
Thanks for stopping by and reading… I’ll find something much more fun to write about for tomorrow!!
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Pulled out one more…
Thanks in no small part to a product called “TrueImage”
As I told you in the last post, the ‘boot drive’ on my primary PC died on Wednesday. This was a minor disaster in that I didn’t have anything backed up. I hate to even admit it in public, me the ‘back it up’ king when it comes to the client sites, but I didn’t have my own stuff backed up.
Fortunately, today’s hardware is much more intelligent than just 5 years ago, and the drive reported problems and I got a ‘notice’ during start up before it had totally died. I wrestled with buying a new PC, and like Kevin suggested, I almost did. But, buying a new PC would have left me with a long evening of software reinstalls, and, none of my data.
So, like to true techno-dweeb that I am, I decided I would clone the old drive, seemed simple enough, and I had the tools to do it. Or so I thought.
I had a product called ‘Drive Copy’ that I’ve cloned hundreds of drives with, but it couldn’t read something or other of the failing drive (I was thinking “no kidding, if it was perfect I wouldn’t need to be copying it!!”) and aborted.
I also had a copy of a shareware product “HDCopy” or something similar that had also worked on other machines with similar problems in the past, but, this time, for me…. No dice… same answer, it was failing to read something or another of the old drive.
So after, four or five hours of watching these programs post little progress bars, like an expectant father, to no ultimate avail, I called it a night.
Today, I did a little more research and came across this product “TrueImage 8.0”.
I ordered it on line, downloaded it and during the install (which I did on the good PC) it prompts (and suggests strongly) that you build a bootable ‘rescue’ CD, which it did flawlessly. I slipped that new Rescue CD into the dead machine (I still had the new and old drives hooked up from last night) and pressed the ‘On’ button.
It booted a bit slowly, but came up, fully ‘mouse capable’, windows-like screen, each icon you clicked on had an explanation synopsis of the left side of the screen. All extremely easy and straight forward… and I’m sitting there thinking this is too easy, no way is it going to work. But I clicked ‘drive image’ or something similar and got ready.
There were several screens, each very well documented and clear as to what was going on (a very nice change from the norm) and with several clicks of the mouse, we were on our way (with me still thinking this is far too easy to really work).
Or so I thought… after sitting there for about fifteen minutes it started reporting errors, I tried ‘retry’ and ‘ignore’, and then finally I just clicked ‘Ignore All’ and let it rip. By the way, the other programs died when they’d hit, what I assume were, these same errors.
After about 30-40 minutes of analyzing, I got one last prompt asking me if I was sure I wanted to copy the drive image the way I had it configured… I of course clicked ‘Yes’…
Back off into cyberspace went this little program… it sat for the longest time…. Maybe 20 minutes or so... and reported it could not read from “sector 1”. The kiss of death, the whole enchilada, this is about the worst Hard Drive error a techie can see…
“Sector 1” is the beginning of what’s known as the ‘boot sector’, that place that breathes life into any operating system, Dos, Windows, Unix… they all utilize that place to ‘get started’… if it’s dead, the OS is dead… I’m hosed.
So I click retry a half dozen times, ignore a few more… and finally give up and click “ignore all” once again. I remember thinking, “what other choice do I have”, and then let’s just see what this little program can do.
It sat there for the longest time again, maybe 15 minutes more, before it began showing any progress at all, then moving along, then stopping and ‘thinking’ before moving on again. This is all pretty nerve wracking stuff for me, as with each stop in the progress bar I’m expecting it to post some type of ‘failure’ message, leaving me dead in the water yet again.
But that never happened, it kept chugging along and after about an hour and a half it pronounced the drive had been ‘successfully copied’.
I’m still a wreck though, figuring with all the error messages and the other two programs flat out giving up, no way is this going to work. Regardless, I connect the new ‘C’ drive up and hit the go switch….
Miracles do happen… it booted up, complained about some missing links (even Windows is looking for the missing link.), some complaints that the rest of the drives weren’t connected, but overall, it spun right up, I logged in and then Windows told me that to complete the installation of my new hardware, a reboot was required, did I want to do that now?
I thought for a couple of seconds… not exactly sure if I should try to drag some data off first, or not…. But then I just went ahead and clicked “Yes”, and waited for the restart.
The machine ran a complete CHKDSK during the reboot, all three stages, corrected and deleted some bad index entries, all with no help (except moral support) from me, and booted 100% clean into Windows.
So here I sit, totally amazed at this little $49 piece of software that just pulled my butt out of the fire “BIG time”. Everything’s here (on the “C” drive) all that remains is to put everything back together, button it up and I should be good-to-go!
I’m totally sold on this package, I might just go out and get that new ‘bare-bones’ PC and slap this drive in it and see what happens! But for now, I’ll get to eat dinner, finish up some client work (make some backups!) and get a good nights sleep.
Spirit of Owl’s tag reply tomorrow!
Thanks again for all the notes of support and empathy, it really helped knowing all of you were pulling for me!
I’m thinking seriously of resurrecting some old 40GB drives and make clones of this one. It’s got all the software I used everyday, tuned and tweaked just the way I need it. I’ll let you what I decide.
Once again, thanks for reading, I promise some less ‘techie’ stuff for the rest of the week!
As I told you in the last post, the ‘boot drive’ on my primary PC died on Wednesday. This was a minor disaster in that I didn’t have anything backed up. I hate to even admit it in public, me the ‘back it up’ king when it comes to the client sites, but I didn’t have my own stuff backed up.
Fortunately, today’s hardware is much more intelligent than just 5 years ago, and the drive reported problems and I got a ‘notice’ during start up before it had totally died. I wrestled with buying a new PC, and like Kevin suggested, I almost did. But, buying a new PC would have left me with a long evening of software reinstalls, and, none of my data.
So, like to true techno-dweeb that I am, I decided I would clone the old drive, seemed simple enough, and I had the tools to do it. Or so I thought.
I had a product called ‘Drive Copy’ that I’ve cloned hundreds of drives with, but it couldn’t read something or other of the failing drive (I was thinking “no kidding, if it was perfect I wouldn’t need to be copying it!!”) and aborted.
I also had a copy of a shareware product “HDCopy” or something similar that had also worked on other machines with similar problems in the past, but, this time, for me…. No dice… same answer, it was failing to read something or another of the old drive.
So after, four or five hours of watching these programs post little progress bars, like an expectant father, to no ultimate avail, I called it a night.
Today, I did a little more research and came across this product “TrueImage 8.0”.
I ordered it on line, downloaded it and during the install (which I did on the good PC) it prompts (and suggests strongly) that you build a bootable ‘rescue’ CD, which it did flawlessly. I slipped that new Rescue CD into the dead machine (I still had the new and old drives hooked up from last night) and pressed the ‘On’ button.
It booted a bit slowly, but came up, fully ‘mouse capable’, windows-like screen, each icon you clicked on had an explanation synopsis of the left side of the screen. All extremely easy and straight forward… and I’m sitting there thinking this is too easy, no way is it going to work. But I clicked ‘drive image’ or something similar and got ready.
There were several screens, each very well documented and clear as to what was going on (a very nice change from the norm) and with several clicks of the mouse, we were on our way (with me still thinking this is far too easy to really work).
Or so I thought… after sitting there for about fifteen minutes it started reporting errors, I tried ‘retry’ and ‘ignore’, and then finally I just clicked ‘Ignore All’ and let it rip. By the way, the other programs died when they’d hit, what I assume were, these same errors.
After about 30-40 minutes of analyzing, I got one last prompt asking me if I was sure I wanted to copy the drive image the way I had it configured… I of course clicked ‘Yes’…
Back off into cyberspace went this little program… it sat for the longest time…. Maybe 20 minutes or so... and reported it could not read from “sector 1”. The kiss of death, the whole enchilada, this is about the worst Hard Drive error a techie can see…
“Sector 1” is the beginning of what’s known as the ‘boot sector’, that place that breathes life into any operating system, Dos, Windows, Unix… they all utilize that place to ‘get started’… if it’s dead, the OS is dead… I’m hosed.
So I click retry a half dozen times, ignore a few more… and finally give up and click “ignore all” once again. I remember thinking, “what other choice do I have”, and then let’s just see what this little program can do.
It sat there for the longest time again, maybe 15 minutes more, before it began showing any progress at all, then moving along, then stopping and ‘thinking’ before moving on again. This is all pretty nerve wracking stuff for me, as with each stop in the progress bar I’m expecting it to post some type of ‘failure’ message, leaving me dead in the water yet again.
But that never happened, it kept chugging along and after about an hour and a half it pronounced the drive had been ‘successfully copied’.
I’m still a wreck though, figuring with all the error messages and the other two programs flat out giving up, no way is this going to work. Regardless, I connect the new ‘C’ drive up and hit the go switch….
Miracles do happen… it booted up, complained about some missing links (even Windows is looking for the missing link.), some complaints that the rest of the drives weren’t connected, but overall, it spun right up, I logged in and then Windows told me that to complete the installation of my new hardware, a reboot was required, did I want to do that now?
I thought for a couple of seconds… not exactly sure if I should try to drag some data off first, or not…. But then I just went ahead and clicked “Yes”, and waited for the restart.
The machine ran a complete CHKDSK during the reboot, all three stages, corrected and deleted some bad index entries, all with no help (except moral support) from me, and booted 100% clean into Windows.
So here I sit, totally amazed at this little $49 piece of software that just pulled my butt out of the fire “BIG time”. Everything’s here (on the “C” drive) all that remains is to put everything back together, button it up and I should be good-to-go!
I’m totally sold on this package, I might just go out and get that new ‘bare-bones’ PC and slap this drive in it and see what happens! But for now, I’ll get to eat dinner, finish up some client work (make some backups!) and get a good nights sleep.
Spirit of Owl’s tag reply tomorrow!
Thanks again for all the notes of support and empathy, it really helped knowing all of you were pulling for me!
I’m thinking seriously of resurrecting some old 40GB drives and make clones of this one. It’s got all the software I used everyday, tuned and tweaked just the way I need it. I’ll let you what I decide.
Once again, thanks for reading, I promise some less ‘techie’ stuff for the rest of the week!
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
I hate computers!
I'm writing this from my backup PC, well actually the *new* PC I got last fall, because 'old faithful' died last night.
I had Spirit of Owl's tag all done but that PC is suffering from a terminal hard drive, and until I can get it copied and back together that post is lost in an inaccessible, magnetic storm of zeros and ones.
With any luck I’ll manage to get it done tonight, but most likely it will be tomorrow before its ready…. The truth is I’m still debating getting a new PC or replacing the drive… research… time… and G-d I hate replacing a PC!
I’ll try and get back later and let you all know where I stand.
I had Spirit of Owl's tag all done but that PC is suffering from a terminal hard drive, and until I can get it copied and back together that post is lost in an inaccessible, magnetic storm of zeros and ones.
With any luck I’ll manage to get it done tonight, but most likely it will be tomorrow before its ready…. The truth is I’m still debating getting a new PC or replacing the drive… research… time… and G-d I hate replacing a PC!
I’ll try and get back later and let you all know where I stand.
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