Well, I was going to take my junk to Dr. Smash, but I'm running out of money. I can't spend another $500 for welding, so I'm going to just do it myself.

So yesterday I started welding on the trusses. I haven't welded in awhile, and from what I read if you stop for awhile you have to re-learn again or something. Personally, I think my welds look just fine.

So I have the rear truss mostly welded on and the tabs are going on tonight. I'll get photos later.

I received all the parts for my axles yesterday. This weekend I'm going to mock up everything and see how it fits. Then Tuesday I'll haul the axles and parts over to Dr. Smash so he can weld it all up.

The trusses are going to need some work. The rear is too narrow, so it will need to be bent out a half inch on each side. Should be no problem. The front will need to be cut to fit. One side will need to be cut off and redone so it will fit over the offset diff housing. I'm sure it will be easy for Dr. Smash to do.

I also have the drive shaft flanges for the pinion inputs on the axles. This will make it easy to mount my drive shafts to my axles. I have the rear on and it's going to work just fine. The front will be a different story. The rig has a Samurai drive shaft on the front. So I'm going to have to make it fit the front flange by drilling new holes. They are like a 16th of an inch smaller than the Toyota. I think I'll put my extended yoke on the front also. Give it that extra bit.

Anyway, I'm totally excited about it. I'm hoping I'll be wheeling very soon.

Now I just need to figure out brakes, brake lines, hydro steering mount, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Well, I haven't been keeping up with my online journal. Mostly because I've been really busy with programming. But I have some news...

Last week I bought a buggy from a friend in Reno. It's really cool. I picked it up for $4,500. I purchased it mostly because of what it has already on it. It would cost me more to buy the stuff separate to build my crawler.

What I got was a working buggy for this summer and parts for building my other buggy this winter. It has full hydro steering, air system for ARB and tires, all the links and rod ends for a four link suspension, a good CB radio, fuel injected Suzuki engine with dual t-cases, fuel cell, two winches, removable steering wheel, real nice seats with harnesses, and other things that will work great with my buggy.

The only catch was that it had no axles, wheels, or tires. So I'm in the process of putting my D44/D60 under it. I should have it wheeling very soon.

Today I received my D44/D60 to Toyota flanges for my drive shafts. This will make it very easy to bold up to the current setup and even my Toyota T-Case in my other buggy. I should receive my trusses and link tabs for my axles by Thursday and I'll have them all tacked up this weekend.

If I can get in to see Dr. Smash next week, I'll be wheeling it by the 16th. Whooohooo!

What a weekend. So Jane graduated from college on Friday and Randy, Tim, Michelle, and Craig drove over to hang out for the weekend. It was a blast.

One of the things I wanted to do was fix my Samurai. The plan was to pull the broken front diff out and swap the good rear diff with the locker in it to the front. Then weld up the locker in the broken diff and make it fully locked.

Well, after getting the rear in the front all bolted up and finished then welding the broken one up and putting it in the axle housing I run into a problem. The axle shafts won't go into the splines. After messing with it for 15 minutes I grab another diff and checked the splines. The front axle has smaller splines than the front axle.

Great, I just ruined that diff and all the work I did has to be redone.

So now I'm going to pull both diffs. I'm going to take them completely apart. I'm going to swap the good locker into the front diff and get that installed. Then I'm going to toss the broken diff in the garbage and put the original spider gears back in. Then I'm going to weld them all up and make it fully locked. Toss that back into the rear axle and call it done.

This is going to be another two days of work. I don't know if I'll be able to do it for awhile.

But I did however come up with a new plan. I'm going to finish my new buggy, then fix up the Samurai and sell it for whatever I can get. I'm just tired of messing with it.

Nothing new happening. I've been working my tail off and the weather has been bad. So same ol same ol.

Next weekend I need to clean my garage and do some water line installs for the garden. Just some simple spring stuff. I'm hoping to get a full watering system setup this year. One that won't have to be redone every year. Something in the ground.

I have a quote from Dr. Smash on doing my four link. I figure that all the stuff I need to have done will cost me about $1000 in labor. I'm still tossing around the idea of having him do it or doing it myself. I'm still not sure. I need to start buying all the stuff for next month. I really want to be rolling in June.

Anyway, that's about all there is to report.

Not a good week so far. My Mac died this morning. My TV dies the other day.

This morning I went into my office to start work and smelled something not right. Smoke. The kind that comes from electronics. The kind you don't want to smell. Anyway, I searched around and could not find where the smell came from. So I went to my Mac to start working and the computer just turned off.

I messed with it for a few hours, but it's apparent that the power supply is bad in it. It will run for about 10 minutes then die. I was able to copy off all of my work, but none of my movies or things like that. I do have backups of a lot of my movies, so I'm not too worried about it. My work was the most important. If it comes down to it, I do have backups on DVD and CDROM that I can restore. But that's a pain.

So now my Mac is off to the Apple store to get repaired.

Oh, what about my TV you ask... The projector bulb went out the other day, so no TV until I have an extra $150-200 to buy a new one. ARG!

Well, at least I get to play with Ubuntu Linux now and see how the new stuff is working. Installing software in Linux is so easy compared to other operating systems. Just apt-get install packagename and your off to the ball game. I have Rails and Subversion all setup now and ready to go. Now I just have to get used to VIM again.

I've been moving a bit on the Buggy lately. It's been warm outside, so I've been in the garage working on stuff. I have the hood and front clip mocked up right now. I'm also working on the front axle. I need to get it back together to mock it in for the four link setup.

I'm going to start buying parts from Ruff Stuff for my four link. It's going to be around $1500 for all the parts. Wow.

I also mentioned awhile back that I busted my Samurai axle. I fixed it and then had problems with my locker. Well, I tore it down last weekend and tried to figure it out. I could not find anything wrong with it so I put it back together. I didn't finish, but I'm hoping that it just works after I put it back in.

I've been super buys with work, and not much else, so news is kinda slow right now.

You might have noticed that my home page has changed. Instead of redirecting you to my blog, I have a menu. I did this for a few different reasons.

1) I wanted to use phill.kenoyer.com as my OpenID.
2) I wanted to change things up a bit.

Mainly, the OpenID is the reason, but change is a good thing. Plus I got to flex my CSS3 muscles on my new home page. You probably can't see all the CSS3 goodness because most likely your not using a browser that can support it. MSIE doesn't even support rounded corners. Mozilla doesn't support the box shadow. Only WebKit (The next version of Safari) supports all of it.

I hear that the next version of Safari will be available for Windows. hmmmm

So I setup a FreeNAS box today. All in all it was easy to setup, but...

High Point RAID, specifically the HPT370, doesn't work. I tried and tried all day to get it to work, but it would just mess up. I would use the config tool to setup the RAID and when I tried to format the drives it would just blow up.

I'm not sure if it's because of FreeNAS or if it's just a bad card, but I wasn't able to use it. I'll probably try again with some other release of the FreeNAS firmware....maybe.

What I really need to do is get some bigger hard drives for it. Right now I'm using two 40 gig drives and I have to run them on a single controller without RAID. Kinda sucks actually.

Some day I'll upgrade it, but for now it works. Jane really needed a place to store her files.

It's that time of year again and this year we have the wind. The last few years it hasn't been that bad. Kinda nice. But this year I'm expecting it to be like when we first moved here. Very, very windy.

Yesterday a whirl wind came through and shook the house pretty good. It even blew over one of our driveway borders and pushed open the skirting on our house.

Today the clouds are coming in and it's getting dark outside. Looks like rain is on it's way. My battery systems are running good now, so I'm safe from power outages.

Yep, windy again.