When It Rains It Pours

[whc03grady]

Rocky Jennings of Walla Walla finished Ludwig's powerplant last week and was kind enough to send along a couple pictures.

I'm not sure this engine is fancy enough for these pictures to qualify as engine pr0n, but it looks pretty nice anyway. And look at that vacuum can on the distributor--no more 009! Finally.

We've always promised ourselves that when the time came, we'd rebuild Ludwig's engine ourselves. And had we needed to do it any other time, we would've. But fate determined otherwise.

As is was, the trip we were on when Ludwig's crankshaft snapped wasn't merely to retrieve new rotors for Gertrude. We were also scoping out the town of Anaconda, where I'd applied for a job. And a couple weeks later, I got it.

So with the moving and the house buying and the new job starting and all, we really just didn't have time to rebuild Ludwig's engine ourselves. (The dream plan, once Ludwig is up-and-running and we're settled in, is to rebuild Gertie's engine (cylinder #1≈100 lbs of compression, cf. 110-120 on #2-4) on our own schedule, in our own garage.) I feel kind of bad about this because I've always been so gung-ho about doing it myself, and now I come off as a bit of a hypocrite. But those pictures of the engine made me feel better.