{"id":5002,"date":"2025-01-27T14:25:23","date_gmt":"2025-01-27T22:25:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/?p=5002"},"modified":"2025-01-27T14:25:23","modified_gmt":"2025-01-27T22:25:23","slug":"chasing-daylight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/2025\/01\/27\/chasing-daylight\/","title":{"rendered":"Chasing Daylight"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The forecast for this weekend was for warmer weather on Sunday, which was great news. I got a very late start though, because we had a lot of family and house stuff to take care of first, which meant I only had a couple hours of daylight to work outside.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_5011\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-5011\" style=\"width: 2560px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-5011\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/tunnel-scaled.jpg?resize=1170%2C654\" alt=\"\" width=\"1170\" height=\"654\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/tunnel-scaled.jpg?w=2560&amp;ssl=1 2560w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/tunnel-scaled.jpg?resize=500%2C280&amp;ssl=1 500w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/tunnel-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C573&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/tunnel-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C430&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/tunnel-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C859&amp;ssl=1 1536w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/tunnel-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1146&amp;ssl=1 2048w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/tunnel-scaled.jpg?w=2340 2340w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1170px) 100vw, 1170px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-5011\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">before and after<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>First, I scraped off the blobs of silicone and welded up the driver&#8217;s side of the transmission tunnel. This side had been drilled out in three places, probably for some kind of radio mount and the associated wiring, so it took a little more time because I had to cut out three round plugs to weld in place. I used 16ga scrap steel to match the body shell and quickly had the patches tacked in. With patience I welded them all the way in and ground things smooth. With some rattle-can IH red it&#8217;ll look like new. I figure if I&#8217;m going to be featuring my fancy cupholder in pictures to try and sell a couple, I&#8217;d like for the truck to not look completely like shit. I don&#8217;t know why I didn&#8217;t do this over the summer when I welded the passenger side up.<\/p>\n<p>The second thing was to sand down a second application of epoxy to the spare steering wheel. This was to smooth out some low spots left after the initial application. The whole thing needs a careful finish sand to get it extra smooth before I shoot it with primer, but I&#8217;ve got to replenish my sandpaper supply first.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, on the bench in the basement I&#8217;ve got all the parts collected for an auxiliary fuse panel: the fuse box, a relay and pigtail, 25 feet of 8 gauge wire with ring terminals, and an inline fuse block. I soldered a ring terminal to the end of the wire with a propane torch, and today I&#8217;ll measure it out to install the inline fuse and the rest of the wire, as well as figure out where the fuse block will live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The forecast for this weekend was for warmer weather on Sunday, which was great news. I got a very late start though, because we had a lot of family and house stuff to take care of first, which meant I only had a couple hours of daylight to work outside. First, I scraped off the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[70,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electrical","category-welding"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58Ac2-1iG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5002"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5012,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5002\/revisions\/5012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}