[TR] California Wildfires; some actual LBC content

[Jeffrey Barteet]

Hey, Folks,

well, Bob Danielson asked how we were doing. I'm up in Santa Barbara 
County in California, and the fires start at the southern edge of our 
county and extend sporadically all the way down to the Mexican border.

We have been spared the Santa Ana winds that are blowing hair-dryer-hot 
wind into the areas affected by the fires. Still, my home is in a canyon 
much like those currently being burnt to a crisp in  San Diego, and I 
have made a few preparations in case I would have to grab my family and 
bail out.  Scary. The images from farther south are certainly bleak, and 
the shocking and scary part to me is I've been to most all the places 
I've seen on TV and the fire line starts about an hour south of here. 
The speed that the fires cranked up is perhaps the most alarming. 
Saturday was a beautiful day. We've had smoky skies since then.

Randall is down there in the L.A. basin somewhere, perhaps he'll give us 
a man on the street report.

*** LBC Content ***

Unfortunately ol' CT 7468 LO is undergoing periodic maintenance and 
isn't going ANYWHERE for a couple of weeks.

Per recent list research, I did send my rocker assembly to Rocker 
Specialists and had them rebuilt. The cost was $140. That's LESS than 
what they have listed on their website. ( How often does that happen? )

Their website:  http://www.rockerarms.com

They replaced the rocker shaft with a new, harder one, rebushed the 
rockers, reground the tips and replaced the adjusters and lock nuts. 
They disassembled and reassembled the rocker assembly. I dealt with a 
guy named Blaine and he was very pleasant.

The assembly looks nice, but I haven't run the car yet because I also 
sent out my distributor to be rebuilt by Robert Samara 
(lucasdistributors at yahoo.com) who put my dizzy on his machine and sent 
me this really cool excel spreadsheet with my curve on it before any 
work started.  I was somewhat surprised to find that my vacuum advance 
wasn't working at all, and that my mechanical advance springs had become 
weak and all the advance was all in by 1600 Engine RPM. This is too much 
advance too early. It will be very interesting to see how the recurve 
affects performance.

I'll let everyone know how the rockers and dizzy work when it all comes 
back together, and hopefully we'll be through this set of fires by then.

-jeffrey