Saturday, November 17, 2012 - San Antonio Mechanic Shop, San Antonio NM

Tiredflower, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, November 10, 2012

Dang - what next?

Poor Salvador broke three bolts getting the 20 year old water pump off. Three long bolts that go through the water pump and then through the timing chest cover into the block. Before he started, he pointed out to me that these three go through the water jacket in the timing chest and often seize up over time. He was right. Now the timing chest cover needed to come off to extract the bolts. He also suspects a long term leak around the old timing chest to block gasket. There is evidence of a trace of oil in the coolant. So all in all not a bad idea to replace this gasket as long as we are so deep into the engine.

We're getting in pretty deep here but this stuff needs to be done eventually and doing it now saves the considerable labor of getting this deep into the engine at some later date.

What does the open timing chest reveal? Why a stretched timing chain of course. More parts to order...

What's another couple of days sleeping with my head 10 feet from passing traffic in the grand scheme of things?

Night camp

Drycamped - San Antonio Mechanic Shop, San Antonio NM

A Siberian dog signal-howl

A camp in the middle of a clear, dark winter's night presents a strange, wild appearance. I was awakened, soon after midnight, by cold feet, and, raising myself upon one elbow, I pushed my head out of my frosty fur bag to see by the stars what time it was. The fire had died away to a red heap of smouldering embers. There was just light enough to distinguish the dark outlines of the loaded sledges, the fur-clad forms of our men, lying here and there in groups about the fire, and the frosty dogs, curled up into a hundred little hairy balls upon the snow. Away beyond the limits of the camp stretched the desolate steppe in a series of long snowy undulations, which blended gradually into one great white frozen ocean, and were lost in the distance and darkness of night. High overhead, in a sky which was almost black, sparkled the bright constellations of Orion and the Pleiades--the celestial clocks which marked the long, weary hours between sunrise and sunset. The blue mysterious streamers of the aurora trembled in the north, now shooting up in clear bright lines to the zenith, then waving back and forth in great majestic curves over the silent camp, as if warning back the adventurous traveller from the unknown regions around the Pole. The silence was profound, oppressive. Nothing but the pulsating of the blood in my ears, and the heavy breathing of the sleeping men at my feet, broke the universal lull. Suddenly there rose upon the still night air a long, faint, wailing cry like that of a human being in the last extremity of suffering. Gradually it swelled and deepened until it seemed to fill the whole atmosphere with its volume of mournful sound, dying away at last into a low, despairing moan. It was the signal-howl of a Siberian dog; but so wild and unearthly did it seem in the stillness of the arctic midnight, that it sent the startled blood bounding through my veins to my very finger-ends. In a moment the mournful cry was taken up by another dog, upon a higher key--two or three more joined in, then ten, twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, until the whole pack of a hundred dogs howled one infernal chorus together, making the air fairly tremble with sound, as if from the heavy bass of a great organ. For fully a minute heaven and earth seemed to be filled with yelling, shrieking fiends. Then one by one they began gradually to drop off, the unearthly tumult grew momentarily fainter and fainter, until at last it ended as it began, in one long, inexpressibly melancholy wail, and all was still.

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