Who's in Charge Here?

OK, so I've been absolutely terrible at updating this.  For a while that was because I wasn't getting much done, or at least it didn't feel like I was.  And that was also partly due to some Corvair projects that came up and pulled me off of Matilda.  And also due, in large part, to laziness.

To bring things up to speed, the current situation is something like this:

* The engine block has been back from the machine shop for months and is sitting on my engine stand, awaiting assembly.

* When I got the engine block back from the machine shop, I ordered a bunch of parts to start assembling the bottom end.  But then I realized that it didn't make sense to start assembling the engine when the car still has to go out for bodywork.  So now I have a bunch of parts sitting on the floor just inside my front door, and I've been working on getting the body ready to go to a body shop.

* Last weekend I visited a local body shop, which is called "Muscle Rod Shop."  It's a very impressive operation, they do some very cool stuff.  A lot of custom touches and extremely high-quality work.  In fact, probably higher quality than I even want, considering my car will be mostly a driver, and considering that they would certainly charge me for it.

* I am planning to go visit another body shop on Friday afternoon.  It's outside of town, on the way up towards Austin.  I looked at their website and talked to the guy on the phone, and it looks promising.

* Last weekend and this weekend, I used the blast cabinet at work to clean up some parts, including bumper brackets, blower housing, heater core housing, oil pan, rocker covers and intake manifold.  It took a lot of time (I spent eight solid hours there yesterday), but it makes everything look nice and clean.  I think next weekend will be painting weekend for all that stuff.  First, though, I also need to figure out a good way to try and make sure that I've cleaned all the blast media out of the engine parts....

* I've been doing a lot of online window shopping for parts and trying to make some lists of what I'll need to buy as the project progresses.  It is kind of incredible how much time can be consumed by this....

I also spent a week or two trying to figure out how I could build the engine with dual quad carbs.  Actually, I became briefly obsessed with building the engine with dual quad carbs.  I worked out a couple of workable options, but in the end I decided it wasn't quite cool enough to offset how impractical it would be.

Anyway, the blasting work in combination with the move to pick a body shop gives me an encouraging feeling of progress, which is exciting.  I'm going to try to put up a couple other posts this week, with photos and more specific details of recent progress, but this one should help to update the current state of the project in general.