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nut machining Tuesday, April 29 2008
The rain had stopped, leaving us with temperatures at least thirty degrees shy of where they had been last week. I spent the entire day working on the new black hatchback, starting with the installation of the stereo from the stripped hatchback. (The black hatchback had come with a stereo, but it had been an old one with a cassette deck instead of a CD player and it had lacked a face plate.)
As I worked, both dogs sat optimistically in the back seat. They stayed there for hours.
The weather was so cold that my fingers were stiff and even a little numb at times. I've found that my fingers are more susceptible to injury when they are cold like this; scrapes and scuffs seem to damage cold flesh more than they do the happier, warmer kind, although it's possible that one has a better sense of where one's hands are when they are warm.
While I was already in there with two different soldering irons, electrical tape, and needle nosed pliers, I figured I'd go ahead and install the CB radio that had once been in my Toyota pickup but that had never made it into the erstwhile hatchback. To hide its antenna cable, I removed all the plastic from the ridge running between the seats and this was how I discovered another problem with the car. The cable running from the emergency brake to the driver's side rear wheel had broken off at the nut, rendering the entire emergency brake system non-functional.
I don't know about you, but I prefer to have a working emergency brake in my car, so I immediately set about fixing it. I could have salvaged a good cable from the stripped hatchback, but I didn't feel up to the task of stringing it, particularly without a good way to raise the car. So I decided to weld a replacement nut onto the frayed end of the broken cable. I might have attempted to weld the old nut on, but it was made of aluminum and I feared it would either melt or catch on fire, so I machined a steel replacement out of a suitably-thick nail (a nail that, incidentally, I'd found amongst the ashes in the wood stove; salvaged wood has a higher metal content than the non-salvaged kind). This machining started with me cutting a half-inch long segment of the nail, then drilling through it sideways in the drill press. If the cable had been longer, I might have threaded it through this hole and welded it there, but since it wasn't I used a smaller nail as a cable replacement at the nut and welded the cable to the smaller nail. This was, I have to say, my cleanest and least-complicated weld to date, done at the welder's lowest setting. I'd even taken measures to keep the carpeting and upholstery from catching on fire.
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