Like I said last time, UPS delivered the new air cleaner.  I've got it almost installed. I just have to cut a hole in the side of the Bus and build a NACA air inlet. Here is a drawing. It's designed to suck in air off the dead zone along the side of the body better than a scoop and with much less drag. You see them on race cars all the time. I may have the equivalent of an engineering degree before I'm done.

The engine sits transversely in the very back of the Bus and the intake to the blower is pretty much in the center. After looking a three or four ways to install this, I decided the left-hand corner of the back of the Bus worked best. It'll be enclosed in a closet. Here is what I have installed so far. The air cleaner has a 7” intake and outlet, so I ducted with 7” all the way to the blower, then reduced it down to the 4” blower intake diameter. That gives me about 38.484510006474967171167381445174 square inches of ducting before it reduces down to 12.566370614359177295385057533118 square inches, so that's about 3.0625000029841551863829322366157 times as much air moving through the ducting before entering the blower. (Damn calculators. Why do they have to carry these numbers out to so many decimal places?) I'm hoping that will give me, maybe another mpg. I'm also putting down thermal and sound deadening material over the whole engine compartment.That's the silver stuff under the air cleaner.

I have to get some aluminum to build the inlet, so that'll have to wait a few days. In the meantime, the heater cores arrived! I bought two school bus heater cores which, together, are almost the same size as the original I got all fired up about getting these babies installed. All I needed to do is clean up the heater fan compartment. There was an eighth inch of black, greasy, sooty, sticky, tenacious dust that had accumulated over 55 years of blowing cigarette smoke, diesel fumes, belches, farts, beach sand, Miami cigar smoke and god knows what else through the heater unit. I spent three hours trying to clean it without complete dis-assembly. I used Goop, liquid concentrated cleaner, paint thinner and carburetor cleaner. Once I was totally black from my elbows down and stoned from the toxic chemicals I had amalgamated, it became obvious there was just too much grease and grime that I couldn't get to. OR as Mrs. Veech would say “to which I couldn't get”. “Remember, a preposition is something you should never end a sentence with!”

I gave in and took the whole fan assembly apart. It took me a half hour to get the pillow-block off the shaft using a gear puller. Then, I had to clean and sand the shaft to get the fan itself to slide out – another hour. Then I spent about another half hour brushing the parts in more mineral spirits before I said to hell with it and quit for the evening. All in all I spent from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm and still have another couple hours to go before I can begin assembly.

Some of my friends have asked me if there is ever a little doubt that creeps in when I look at the scope of this project; the thousands of small tasks that take five times as long to complete as I estimated, the unexpected broken parts, the upgrades needed, the parts that need replacing, the parts that I'll have to make myself because nobody makes them anymore, and the mile or two of wiring and plumbing that lies ahead. I hesitate, look at this 18,000 pound beast and say - “no” (sorry, I sat here for fifteen minutes and couldn't think of a single profound statement).

Then I thought of Mrs. Veech again. She was our eighth grade English teacher. She came from a one-room school setting and was the toughest and best teacher we ever had. When we were Seniors, we dedicated our yearbook to her. Anyway, she had us memorize a poem by Edger A.Guest. I think it goes like this:

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,
But, he with a chuckle replied
That maybe it couldn’t, but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried, he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.

Somebody scoffed, Oh, you’ll never do that
At least no one ever has done it.
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat,
And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit*,
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.

There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure.
There are thousands to point out to you one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle it in, with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it.
Just start to sing as you tackle the thing
That couldn’t be done, and you’ll do it!



P.S.
Quiddit means “equivocation”. She taught us that too!