It’s in the shop. Where to start….
Well, first I needed to make some space. The move came up rather quickly. So all other projects and various stuff got shoved in corners or wherever. This led to a couple weeks of shop re-organizing along with unloading a bunch of unused “things” on The List of Craig. Gotta have some elbow room here.
This isn’t my first attempt at bringing iron back from the dead. Only one place to start: Liquid Wrench. On everything that turns and slides. Every couple of days. More LW.
But mostly I was making trips out to the shop just to look at it. Figuring out what everything does. Why did they design it that way. In what sequence did it get assembled. What’s missing or stripped or bent or broke. It didn’t come with a manual or parts book. I’ll need to find one of those. Jeez, what a great smell. A combination of diesel, oil, soot, grease, wood rot and God knows what else. But what a perfect nasal bouquet. This should be a cologne (hmmm, GoFundMe idea???).
I took off a few inspection plates to see what’s behind the curtain. Oh yeah. Oh baby. This is cool. The best surprise is the overall condition. There is amazingly little rust on the things that you don’t want to rust. I can’t imagine there are too many Kahlenbergs around in this good of original condition. This example isn’t perfect by any means but it is still very complete. There aren’t a lot of things that appear to be missing or broke. I’m feeling very fortunate.
One of the inspection plates I removed is on the exhaust manifold. The manifold is a big water cooled monster. I knew from prior reading that cleaning out these exhaust ports is part of the occasional maintenance. The #3 cylinder had particularly thick amounts of carbon. By thick I mean measured in inches. I half filled a five gallon pail by scraping and prying out chunks of what looks like a hardened post-Exxon Valdez beach, an oily, sandy, chunky and very black waste. The job was made slightly less messy with the aid of shoulder-high disposable calving gloves from Fleet Farm. They didn’t have those at Costco.