This is cool!
I'm Peter (Pete) Long. I'm 36, and I live in Guelph, Ontario, which is about a
45 minute drive north-west of Toronto. I'm married to one of the smartest
people I've ever known, Tara, and we have 3 great kids, Becca (8), Maddie
(Madeline)(6), and Finn (3.5). Tara home schools the kids, a very satisfying
challenge for both of us - we'd not change a thing. We are considered as
modern-hippies by some, and I won't disagree with the implication, although
without the chemically-inspired views enjoyed by many of the '60's flower
children ;)
I work for a company called Eco Logic, which owns a few patents on a
chemical/mechanical process called Gas Phase Chemical Reduction (GPCR), for
rendering toxic organic chemicals harmless, through the use of high heat and
hydrogen. Check out the web site for more depth: www.ecologic.ca.
As to what I do here, well, I don't actually have an official title, which
suits me just fine. I work in the R&D division (all 4 of us, presently), and
have a hand in tons of cool stuff, from designing equipment (pilot plants and
bench-test prototypes of our system), fabricating vessels and equipment,
running tests with our in-house pilot plant (oh, if the neighbours knew what we
were up to at 3 in the morning....!), working with suppliers on getting the
weird-ass stuff we always seem to be needing. Our company is really lean right
now, but we are hoping/praying on 'bagging the elephant' sometime in the next
year, the culmination of about 4 years of working with/for the U.S. military on
securing a full contract to (help) clean up the chemical weapons depot at Blue
Grass, Kentucky.
I was hired into the company because I was good with my hands, not because I
have any background whatsoever in chemical engineering - that just sort of
happened along the way. I became good with my hands because my dad was, I
guess, although his thing was/is, wood working, whereas I've been into cars
since way before I was legal to drive. My first car (bought when I was 15) was
a '68 Mustang Coupe, which had sat in my next-door neighbour's garage for a few
years, after his (not the car's)timing chain jumped a tooth, and he began to
systematically disassemble it, so that his wife couldn't sell it to pay for
their son's education. Anyway, I ended up paying something like $295 for it (he
didn't like round numbers, I remember). It took me about a year to put it back
together, and in the interim decided that a 289 V8 would be more to my liking,
and so found a donor parts car and did the swap....see where this kind of
behaviour leads?!
Anyway, nice car, but handled like crap. I got the small-car bug when I had a
ride in a friend's father's Mazda something-or-other, which, compared to the
Mustang, went around corners like a champ. So, I sold the Mustang for a tidy
profit (another fateful trend) and bought a '76 Ford Capri (European model)
with the 2.3 L four. Under the guidance of the brother of list-lurker Fred
Davidson's wife, rebuilt the engine with a few 'tricks', did a little
suspension work, and built a custom short-shifter for it. I autocrossed
irregularly for a couple of years, and was never as good as the car...actually,
I sucked.
I did not know Fred then, but connected with him and Rita somewhere around
1989-1990, around when I bought my first roadster. The ad in the paper
mentioned A) 5 speed, B)150HP, and C) convertible. Say no more, I thought, and
I dragged home my pile of rust. After realizing that there was no way I was
ever going to resurrect that car, I began watching for a driver. Meanwhile,
Fred's car served to inspire me. Between then and now, I've had a total of 4
roadsters in varying states of being, currently with 2, a '68 project car -
getting an S14 KA24DE transplant, amongst other mods - and a '69 parts car,
which has served me well as a source of needed bits and pieces, and a source of
various parts to sell to fund the project car.
So, there you have it.
Pete Long
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