A Little More Work On The Van...

We took a pounding, weather-wise, yesterday. When I came home from work, there were tree branches strewn all over the yard and lots of standing water. Seems we had a strong storm blow through the area and according to Dad, the power even went out for about 10 minutes. In spite of all that, we fared pretty well even though about half the traffic lights in the area were offline.

Since I had wanted to work on the bike tonight, I was a bit disappointed, but after a dinner of Gado-Gado (thanks Dad) I decided to change out the radio in the van because it was acting up. I had a spare unit that I had taken out of a Chevy truck back when I was working for B&B Stereo, so this should be a snap, right?

Well, it turned out to be quite a bit of work adapting the faceplate, mounts and casing to make the radio fit in the van, but it does look good. I ended up trimming the faceplate facia by about 1/4-inch all the way around, then reworked (cut down) the mounting ears that are used to bolt it into the dash. While I was at it, I brought the radio inside, dug out my box of cassette deck and VCR belts and replaced the belt in the cassette deck, then put it all back together. Somewhere in the middle of all this activity, I watched Bender on Futurama get turned into a water heater and Leela & Fry get stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits. Oh, and somehow, while I was busily dividing my attention between working on the faceplate and the television, I cut my thumb with an exacto-knife. No big deal, slip on a band-aid and I was back to work, even more focused on my task than before...

Well, the re-mounting of the radio went off with no problem, the thing works great and sounds good. Unfortunately, the improved radio makes the not-so-good rear speakers sound bad, so I'm going to fish around in some boxes of electronics I have and see if I've got a better set of speakers to put in back there. While I'm at it, I'll work on repairing the rear, left-hand window shade that has a broken guide string. I'll need to find some braided fishing line to replace it with.

I think this weekend, I'll clean out and detail the interior of the van after I replace the driver's side window lift assembly and fix the motorized system for the rear seat.