Happy Karate Chop birthday, CJ

Here is a sweet karate chop to celebrate CJ from Jed.

Jed's Landcruiser bodywork extravaganza

I tried my hand at body work during October, and here are the results. I attacked a spot on the driver's side quarter panel, and another spot on the passenger side rocker panel. I poked most of the quarter panel hole with my hand; it was pretty rusted out. I had previously tried to clean up and paint the rocker panel hole before deciding to fill it in. Here are the before pictures:


Here are the holes with most of the rust ground out and shaped to make fitting a plate in easier:


Here is with a plate welded into the support behind the quarter panel and a plate welded into the rocker panel hole. The welding was a real pain because the body steel was so thin due to corrosion. I had to cut it back a lot to get to the thicker steel.

Here is the initial paint job (I forgot to take a picture of the outer quarter panel weld job before painting it):
Then I threw on some bondo for smoothness. The bondo instructions wanted me to put it on bare steel, but I don't trust it to keep the rust out, so I put it on top of the paint. Hopefully it won't fall off when I hit a bump.
Here is the final paint job on the quarter panel. I forgot to take a picture of the rocker panel paint job, but you can just imagine how swell it is.

So now I know how to do low quality body work. If I get around to it I might put the black stripe back on the quarterpanel bottom, but I don't know if I've got it in me. Next up is making the spare tire not rattle around.

Jed's Lab

We visited Jed in October to celebrate his 31st birthday. These photos are from his NIST lab. One is a photo of the fridge running experiments and the other photo is of the software Jed created to take data from the cubits in the fridge. On this tour we had photo id's and more security than during previous visits. It was fun to see his physics friends again. They were all working hard to prepare for a site inspection which included reports from each member of the team.

It was rainy and cold in Boulder; this weather was followed by warm weather the day we flew home.

Jed's birthday dinner was ribs, salad and cheesecake. Guests included Cory and Nate (roommate).

We saw Eagle Eye (the movie) and Jed bought new black cowboy boots with his birthday money.

Fall

Ok - I couln't resist. Here are the rest of the potatoes and more tomatoes. Our tomatoes are still ripening on the vine. The weather is getting bad today so this week may be the end of the garden. Oh how I hate winter and the dark - we went on standard time last night.

Halloween was great - the kids are so hyper they could hardly wait while we handed out our candy and the Coomb's candy. On tiny tot said "Do you have treats" in the cutest sweetest voice I could hardly stand it. We had three bags of 50 pieces each and that was gone by the end of the night. John did help devour some of the candy.

Oh yeah ... and we won the ward chili cook-off. Jed won his chili cook-off last year with the same recipe. Since my business is dying maybe I should go in to the chili canning business.