Monday, October 22, 2012

Rituals of Fall

One of the rituals of fall for us has been the final car club cruise of the year. This year we returned to the Calabogie Motorsports Park. It's a wonderful drive through some very scenic countryside.

At the first stop in Almonte, ON for a coffee break and pickup of a few more club members we headed out, probably 60 cars strong in the group. We quickly spread out along the road and half of us took the long way while the others got a taste of some real twisty turny roads. I missed that part which sucked.

One of the highlights of the trip was this beauty. I hadn't seen it before. Quite exceptional.

I apologize for the crappy cell phone pics. Lori has some on her camera that I'll get today. The cars lined up after the laps on the track.

We got three laps with a pace car on the track. It's a very nice track, 5.25 kms long. I haven't been on a race track since 1987! It felt good lemme tell ya! :-) We didn't set any speed records but it did feel really good to power through some of those corners. The only problem was I kept having to lift off the gas for fear of running over the '69 Camaro in front of me! ;-)

The Roll Out of the first group to go around the track.

One Lap of the Track

Around the track again looking out the other side from Lori's camera.



Unfortunately it's now time to put the car away for the winter. :-(


Saturday, October 20, 2012

Got tired of tripping over sh*t

so added a little organization to the boat shed.

Just happened to be on sale yesterday at Crappy Tire so I snapped it up. I added the shut off valve and the pressure regulator that I had left over from other projects.

My Jeep has developed a case of "Death Wobble" so it's going in the shop on Tues to see what's going on. Hopefully it's not an expensive fix. The Camaro goes away for the winter likely Monday night. *sigh* And......... My neighbor is tuning up his snow blower! :-(


Saturday, October 13, 2012

It's that time of year

to start buttoning up everything for the onslaught of winter that'll arrive soon! *sigh*

I had a visit from a fellow boat builder, Peter Lenihan. I don't know if you remember Peter but he built a Bolger Windemere (Turtle Bay) and launched it last year. He came up from Montreal for the day to hang out in the Big Blue Boat Building Building I Built! :-)

Peter fully in command of his vessel!

Peter built his boat in a bow shed similar to mine. He has missed his shed and enjoyed mine, maybe a lil' too much! :-) He looked over the boat project so far and was impressed with the amount of work. He'll be back in the spring to help me with the epoxy & fiberglass work. What a great guy, he even bought me lunch when I forgot my wallet!

Back to buttoning up. Well more like cleaning up and organizing stuff. One of the jobs I had to do was clean out the epoxy metering pump thingy. I'm changing epoxy systems and wanted to make sure there wasn't any of the old stuff left that might contaminate the new epoxy.

This is a great gizmo. All you have to do is ensure you keep the reservoirs full and the pump will accurately meter and mix the epoxy ready to go. No muss and very little fuss. The downside is the reservoirs are small, 4 qts and 2 qts. The ratio is two parts resin to one part hardener. Just means you have to refill them often. The hardener container is opaque so you have to be careful and make sure it's got stuff in it. We learned that lesson the hard way.

All reassembled and ready to go next spring.

Well that's about it. I have to cover the cabin roof with a new tarp and get my buddy Andrew over to patch a few small holes in the shed roof and we should be good for the winter. I know it's not very exciting but it's all I got.

Stay Frosty My Friends.   :-)