pboehmer.com

2015.01.07

Hope everyone had a good holiday and new-year. With the exception of a couple of items, namely the floor, lift, and stairs, I'm pretty much finished up with the garage. I have a feeling that it will always be a work-in-progress, but the bulk of the work is done.

That being said, I undertook yet another new project in the garage. I have a fairly large blank space of wall that needed something decorative. I originally thinking posters or framed pictures, but ended up having an epiphany on my drive home from work. Back in my high school days I did an art project that I used a projector to enlarge a picture onto some poster board. Since my stepmother is an artist, and had a projector, I decided to paint a picture on the wall. Knowing my limitations, I opted for a pretty easy picture and came up with this picture by Aloysius Patrimonio:

I printed the picture in a 5x5in form (to accommodate the projector) and fitted into a 4x4ft space on the wall. Keeping the room dark, I traced the picture out, and voila! Since I have a white, gray, and yellow color scheme going on, I'm changing the blue out for gray. Here is the progress that I have made so far:

With the temperatures dropping to around 0f degrees, I may have to postpone work for a couple of days. We'll see.

2014.12.18

Managed to trace down the exhaust leak. It initially appeared to be a split in the joint between the catalytic converter and the rear pipe, but fortunately what I thought was part of the catalytic converter is actually a flex coupler. Even more confusing, the Chrysler/Dodge OEM parts manual makes no mention of this part in the breakout diagrams. Good news is what I originally planned on being a $500+ repair turned into just under $70 and less than an hour. Here's the before and after. If you look hard enough at the before picture, you'll see the split in the seam.

I had a local tire/exhaust shop do the repair. I'm not exactly thrilled with the welding job, but it is fixed and the ol' girl sounds like her normal self. The big question is how long it's going to be before my OCD takes over and I end up cleaning up the welds (that really no one can see).

2014.12.12

Hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season. The garage/man cave is progressing quite well. I now have a TV installed, pegboard put up, and the cabinets are done. Now it's just a matter of getting everything moved from my old work area to the garage. I've also installed a security camera to keep an eye on things.

I put a hold on the front bumper until after the holidays. I've got a bunch of small around-the-house honey-do projects to do and one of my buddies mentioned it would probably be better not to install it until after the snow, when driving conditions are better. It would be my luck installing the new bumper and then getting into a wreck.

I've been fighting an odd loud exhaust issue for the past couple of days with the 300. On my drive home from work two nights ago, it just got loud out of the blue. I jacked the car up that night and looked for obvious signs of holes or breaks, but no dice. I really had a hard time trying to locate where the sound is coming from. I had one of the car guys at work take a peek to see if he could locate the source, but no luck there either. Hopefully, I'll have some time this weekend to really dig into it. I have a feeling I may be outsourcing this to a mechanic.

2014.11.04

Still haven't made any progress on the front bumper, but I've made huge progress on the garage. I relocated some of the cabinets, built two workbenches and a drill press stand. Tools are starting to migrate from the old basement work area to the garage. Life is good.

Despite being on a Friday this year, Halloween was pretty low key compared to years past. Weather was just as bad as it can get, cold and rainy. Turnout was probably the lowest in years. Also didn�t help that there was a high school football game. We did have some friends over and enjoyed pulled pork sandwiches and home made chili. This pretty much salvaged the night. As usual, I took the day off work, as did the wife, and my daughter had off due to conferences. With the crappy weather, I took the opportunity to introduce my teen daughter to one of my favorite classic horror movies, The Amityville Horror (original, not the remake). We'll just say that she didn't make it very far.

2014.10.09

I managed to get a lot done over the past month My original color scheme for the garage has been modified since the �safety� yellow just doesn't look good. I painted the outside of the cabinets the same color (smokey gray) as the trim, but decided to go with silver/aluminum enamel for the innards. Cabinets are hung and I'm currently painting the shelves. I may experiment with the leftover yellow on the cabinet doors to see if I can come up with something interesting.

I got the rear bumper on shortly after my last post. In my haste to get the darn thing mounted, I didn't take any pictures. Had to rewire the license plate lights, since the new cover takes two lights instead of the one. I also picked up a new rear view camera that didn't required a 1.25in hole in the bumper. I still need to buff out the paint, since it's still a little rough (painter just shot paint, didn't polish). I'm waiting on some goodies from AutoGeek.net and hope to get this done and the front bumper cover mounted sometime next week.

I also managed to get our outside wood deck/stairs sealed up before winter. After some exhaustive research, I opted to go with Behr's DeckOver product. Since the stairs are still fairly new and in great shape I thought Rustoleum's Restore was just too thick to work with. Instead of the 1/2in nap roller, I ended up using a 3/8 nap for the horizontal surfaces and knocked down the rolled on stuff with a dry brush for the vertical stuff. We went with a dark gray color called Top Slate. Very happy with the results. Despite the rigorous prep work, I highly recommend the product. Funny thing about either one of these products is that it seems to be a love it or hate it product when it came to online reviews. We'll see how it holds up over the next couple of years.

Last and not least... the 300 finally past the 200k mile mark and I have pictures to prove it. Unfortunately, I was on the highway when it hit 200k, so it was at a mile after when I had a chance to pull off onto an exit ramp.