The Art of Tim

Britanny and I went to the shop yesterday to take some pictures of my car. It’s hard for me to see it like this, but I want to get some in-progress shots for posterity. Still a long way to go, but they’ve done a lot of the general body work, and cut in one of the NSX side vents.

The guy that I got to do the project has been working with fiberglass for 30 years, and has had his own shop for 20. He does a lot of custom fiberglass work for cars.

He’s got a Datsun 240Z, (the original import tuner, and a beautiful machine, for those of you that don’t know cars), that he got in 1976. It has a fully custom front end, as well as a new rear bumper and rear window made just for the car. He used to take it to shows all over the US and Canada.

And he also owns (my personal favorite in his shop), a Delorean (the Back to the Future car)! Until this, I had never seen one that wasn’t the regular steel gray color. It was in an accident, but he’s restoring it. He makes Delorean parts out of fiberglass for companies all over the place. I’ve only ever seen three of these in person, and only one was on the road.

My Parks Saber™ Lightsaber came today.

It serves no real purpose whatsoever.

It’s just really fucking cool.

Well, yesterday I took Britanny up to Providence for the day. I had been keeping the whole plan a surprise for about a month now. We ate lunch at Fire and Ice, then walked around Providence Place and caught a movie. Inbetween it all I dealt with the rocky book pre-sale via phone conferences. But I’m tired of talking about that, so I’m not going to get into it. Dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, some more hanging out, and then we went to Lupo’s to catch The Killers.

It was a pretty good show. We’d never heard of the opening band, Louis XIV, and they weren’t that great. And they played forever. Then there was a huge wait while they set up for the main show. It had been a long day and Britanny and I were tired. It was really hot in the pit and neither of us wanted to stand there all night, so we snuck up to the mezzanine and grabbed a couple of unoccupied seats and kicked back to watch the main show. I enjoyed everything The Killers played off of their album, but they slipped in a couple of new songs and I didn’t really like them. Might be because it was the first time hearing it.

Music is always like that for me. The first time I listen to an album, I usually don’t like it. Second or third time through I can make a sound judgement. Picked up the new Oasis album the other day. Really didn’t like it at first. Just seemed really slow. We listened to it again on the ride up to Providence and it grew on me a little.

Today was all about doing car work, since my baby goes in for body and paint tomorrow morning. Once I drop her off I’ll be confined to the apartment for 2 or 3 weeks while I don’t have a car. Tonight I went and picked up another air conditioner to put in the CAD office, and some more survival supplies like milk, butter, and pudding. I won’t have the luxury of driving to Quiznos or going grocery shopping.

So anyway, today was all about prepping the car for the overhaul. First order of business was to pull the doors and front fenders off of my parts car, because they are going to replace the damaged ones on my main car. For instance, the drivers side door has rusted through, and cannot be fixed. So we replace it. The other door and fenders only have a couple of little dings, but the ones from the parts car have none. If I use the flawless ones, that’s less stuff I have to pay the shop to fix.

Doors and fenders stipped off the parts car.

All of the pieces ready to bring to the shop tomorrow. They’ll do the actual swap onto my car, since it’s easier to do a color change (paint job) when parts are off the car.

I also gutted all of the interior panels from the parts car. They were in fantastic shape, and some of them will be replacing the ones my car came with.

You can see I was also using the parts car as trash and tool/parts storage.

Finally I took some pictures of my baby to serve as “before” shots. After I drop her off tomorrow, she’ll never look like this again.

Obviously I’ll post more pictures once she comes back from the shop, when she’ll have her body kit fitted, inverted carbon fiber hood, and will be painted shining silver metallic (one of the new RX-8 colors).

So as many of you know, Volume One and Volume Two will be available for pre-order on Monday. For the past few months I’ve been busting my ass remastering all of the strips for Volume Two, and then putting the book together. Everything is almost finished. As soon as Volume Two is out the door, I can finally shift to a lower gear and take a break. The re-printing of Volume One is great too, because I’ll be fixing all of the typos in the book, and it will finally be available online once again.

I’m going to be self-publishing the books again. I was approached by Dark Horse about publishing the CAD Collections, but I was already too far along in my plans for a July release of Volume Two. It takes time to get a deal like that moving, and if I waited for Dark Horse, who knows when the books would be out. I’ve given them permission to start costing Volume Three for next year, but for now I’m going to continue to self-publish.

On my rare breaks from work I’ve been trying to get outside to work on my car a bit. I installed a CAI and a front strut bar, and I’ve got an oil catch tank here waiting to go in. I also need to take the valve cover and intake manifold in to get “cold tanked” and powdercoated. But priority for this week is pulling the doors and passenger side front fender off of my spare MX-3, and swapping them out with the ones on my main car. My car should be going in for body and paint next week. Here’s a picture of the engine bay after the cold air intake and strut bar were installed. I really need to clean the bay. It’s filthy.

Really looking forward to getting to work on some things other than these books again.