Saturday morning I drove out to Elmira to do a bit of work on the car and hang out with Andrew and Dov. Andrew just picked up another Subaru Legacy, and it came with a bonus Subaru Justy. The justy had a serious head gasket leak though, so they were stripping the head off the engine to fully diagnose the problem. Here’s Andrew working away on legacy heads…

I, on the otherhand, had a simple list of things I wanted to do: swap the subframe, swap the springs, and change some bushings.

Wouldn’t you know it, my replacement subframe was bent…and the one that came off the car was so bad I wasnt’ going to drive home on it! So, a frantic call to all my Audi buddies was put out and we waited.

and waited…

and waited.

While we waited I figured I might as well do a timing belt job. They’re only good for 100,000km…but I’ve been playing with fate and ran mine 200,000km. To say it was a little stretched is an understatement. So stretched, I pulled it off the engine without loosening the tensioner! I can’t believe it lasted as long as it did without grenading the engine.

Nice shirt Dave…

Eventually we realized we’d be spending the night at the shop, so we hit Moose Winooskies for dinner. Everyone knows you can’t go to sleep on an empty stomach! Upon returning to the shop we discussed the sleeping strategy. Andrew owns the only cot in the shop, so he got the cot and the draft that flies under it while you sleep. Dov was convinced he could squeeze his explorer into the shop, UNDER my car that was stuck on the lift. This way he could have a nice comfy sleep in the back of the truck. The first adventure was getting the truck in…the roof of the truck is about .5″ taller then the bottom of my car tires…we got it into the shop, but not without putting some nice tire marks/scratches in the roof of the truck. Here’s a photo of that adventure:

(okay, yes, I’m cheating and that’s actually the next morning pulling the truck out).

That left me with nowhere to sleep. I had two choices; sleep on top of my car (been there, done that) or sleep on the floor. Since my car roof was about 15t in the air and would require removing the RX7 from the shop if I needed to go to the bathroom, I wisely took the floor. The shop is equipped with enough blankets to make that comfortable actually…which was rather surprising!

Now, being the proper gentleman that we are, the evening (okay, early morning at this point) was capped off with a nice bottle of wine. The chosen bottle was a Blackstone Zinfandel, 2002, from California. While I did have a bottle of Promis with me (my favourite wine) we wisely chose to save that for a time when we had a shower accessible. We are, after all, proper gentleman.

We did have two issues with our wine plans, however. 1) no bottle opener, and 2) no wine glasses (geesh, we must equip the shop!). Andrew, our wine steward for the evening was quick to solve the problem and produce a spot of wine, served with his best Oxford wine tasting snobbery:

Did you catch the use of our finest ‘glassware’?

Ah yes…nothing like a fine wine.

-Dave

This entry was posted on Monday, October 24th, 2005 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Thoughts from the Podium. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.