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Fastinating Fasteners
January 29th, 2019
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Today I did not feel exceptionally productive. For the first ~hour or
so after taking the kids to school, I looked at job postings while
drinking coffee. I spoke with one recruiter in Portland, though the
job is not a good fit. I also messaged two contacts for networking,
and contacted another recruiter to express interest in a job posting.
We'll see whether any of that pans out. I'm still waiting to hear from
the company I had a phone interview with the other day.

At this point, I was ready to go out to the garage and attempt to be
productive in one of my last days of paternity leave freedom. I donned
my Dickie's Onesie, nitrile gloves, safety goggles, and got to work.
Then I remembered I needed to pick up the distributor gasket from
NAPA, so I stripped back down and went to the store. 15 minutes later,
I'm back home and ready again. 

I set out on the day determined to do some assembly and make progress,
but as I started looking at things to do, I realized I didn't want to
assemble with dingy old fasteners. After finding top dead center on my
engine -- required to mount the distributor -- I decided to clean and
paint some fasteners. I'm reusing the stock fasteners for the oil pan,
valve cover, pushrod covers, and timing cover. I figure as a general
rule, I'll use new fasteners for anything mechanical, and reuse
fasteners on these covers.

I set my drill with a wire cup brush on the workbench, and holding the
bolts semi-securely in a pair of pliers, I brushed all the bolts I'm
reusing in this phase. Turned out to be 6+24+4+7+8, which is a lot of
bolts to hit with a wire brush. 30 minutes later, the bolts were
clean, and ready to paint. Of course, after one light coat, I ran out
of paint and had to make another NAPA run. Now I'll give them a day to
cure, and I can do some light assembly tomorrow.

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