The big trip 2016 (part 1)

The plan is set, the time is requested off from work, and we are mentally already on island time.  We are finally setting out on a big trip in our boat "Happy Day."  We are going to The Florida Keys traveling slightly over 300 miles down the west coast.  We have the entire month of June requested off to give us enough time.  

The plan involves us sailing roughly 40 miles per day for 2 days. Then stopping on the third day to re-provision.   Another 40 miles for 2 days and then a re-provision day. Then one 40 mile day and a re-provision day.  Then finally two 50 mile days to reach the keys.

This probably sounds like a slow pace, and it is, but we don't want to kill ourselves trying to get to the keys. We want to watch the weather and play it safe. Our boat is arguably not the most seaworthy boat and we are well aware of it's limitations. We will pay careful attention to the weather and not take any risks.

So essentially we have figured 11 days to get down. We spend 7 days with the rest of my family in the keys and then 11 days to sail back.

While in the keys I will most likely be renting a car to drive 5.5 hours back home to pick up Austin and Aaliah only to immediately turn around and drive back to the keys.  This is the only way I can figure to get them there without with 4 of us being trapped in a 26ft boat for 11 days.

I'll be posting more regarding preparation for the trip as soon as possible. 

Project Drift S14 (part 6)

It's been 5 months since the last update and there has been progress but not nearly as much as I would like. 

So far completed:

• rear subframe fully bolted on
• interior cleaned
• engine bay cleaned
• wiring harnesses re-ran
• airbag systems removed
• door panels and rear seats installed
• fabricated new center dash panel
• pillar mount gauges installed
• intercooler and piping installed
• radiator installed (although it gets pulled back out when the motor goes in)
• new water pump installed on sr20
• front main seal replaced
• hood latch reinstalled

So far purchased and waiting to install:

• pilot bushing
• clutch release bearing
• isr radiator lines
• isr thermostat
• clutch slave cylinder
• isr power steering line

Still need to buy:

• GT2871r turbo from twisted motion $350
• turbo clocking adapters $65
• turbo lines $120
• starter switch panel $70
• front and rear driver side 300zx brake calipers $120
• battery $110

Still have to install:

• center dash panel
• all gauges
• Greddy boost controller wiring and mounting
• Apexi fuel controller mounting
• starter switch panel
• turbo/motor/trans once all assembled
• battery
• brakes
• clutch slave cylinder
• thermostat
• radiator hoses

Things are getting close now and the list of todo's is not nearly as daunting as it was in the beginning. The big hold up has been the turbo. When we pulled the t25 apart the bolts holding the exhaust side to the center housing were seized. Even after grinding the bolts off we found that the exhaust side and central housing had seized itself together. We banged, pried, leveraged, and wacked in every way we could think to try and separate the two without damage to the fins and center shaft. 

Finally i threw in the towel. After calling a local certified Garrett turbo rebuilder and getting a price quote of 350 we changed directions.  My original goal for the car was 375 horsepower. I feel that's plenty of power and I don't have to upgrade the stock internals of the motor.  Instead of rebuilding the stock t25 for $350 we are putting that money towards another turbo.  

Twisted motion turbos, even though they are not garretts, seem to have good feedback and they come with a year warranty. The turbo itself runs $350 but requires $65 clocking adapters to mate with the the intercooler piping correctly. Also highly recommended by Josh from Twisted motion (who returned my text immediately with a call and was extremely helpful) was the stainless turbo lines ($120) which helps avoid stripping the threaded fittings on the block.  

That's not much more than the price of the rebuilt t25 turbo and we are at the power levels I originally wanted. It kind of seemed like a no brainer to me with the warranty and since the car won't be daily driven the longevity of the turbo should not be an issue.

As far as short cutting things we decided to put back in the act clutch that is almost worn out. The friction pads are touching the rivets but there is still some pad.  The motor is easy enough to pull out when the clutch goes. Keeping $300 + or - in my pocket is nice too.

I will do another post once more significant progress has been made. Hopefully that post will be when the car is running!

JFK and the sea

“I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it's because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it's because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea - whether it is to sail or to watch it - we are going back from whence we came.

[Remarks at the Dinner for the America's Cup Crews, September 14 1962]”

― John F. Kennedy


The sea is calling to me hardcore.  It consumes the majority of my passing thoughts and whims. The draw to it is exponentially worse now that it is winter time. Winter time in Florida is a relative thing but the air is still too cold, the water is too cold, the daylight hours are too short, and we are too busy at work to be able to squeeze in that precious time at sea that I cherish so much and never take for granted when we are basking in it's presence.

Soon I will have to slake my thirst for the sea. Maybe soon it can be in large gulps rather than small sips.

Compressing 3 months into a few paragraphs

I haven't done a post since September 18th.  "What have I been up to," you ask yourself? A lot. A lot is the answer. Ups and downs. Highs and lows. I'll mainly stick to the highs because there are enough terrible prime time TV dramas for your daily dose of negativity.

The reason for not writing much on the blog is because Instagram has absorbed the entirety of my social networking life.  It's fast, elegant, personal, and relatively low on bull shit.  I like it a lot. You think up a clever (or not so clever) sentence or two to go with your picture, add related hash tags, and bam, done! If you want to see me on Instagram look me up at "Kasey_Clyde_dot_com".

-So I just looked back through my Instagram pictures for the past few months and we really have done a lot.-

Here's a walk through:

• Golfing: 
• Got some silver hawk clubs from Amber's dad that were quickly replaced with some Callaway Big Bertha's also from her dad. Score!
• Transmission rebuild: 
• I dropped the tranny from the 02 Silverado and I'm currently in the process of rebuilding (which is almost done) and reinstalling.
• "New" truck: 
• Got a flat black 93 chevy 1500 single cab step side truck to drive while the 02 is being fixed. Its pretty awesome and has a nasty v8 in it with straight pipe exhaust. Love it!
• Divorce: 
• Woohoo! Time for a new chapter of life!
• Sailing: 
• Trips on Happy Day and I took the kids out on the Buck Board and the 8ft Pram dinghy. All awesome trips!
• Farm animals: 
• The compound slaughtered meat chickens, which were delicious. 
• We added meat ducks, which we are currently picking off systematically. And I have to say these ducks are by far the stupidest animals on the farm and I feel like we are putting them out of their misery when we harvest one.
• A brown chicken that we thought got picked off by a predator turned out to have been hiding in the barn and emerged with 8 baby chicks in tow. Unfortunately, Hercules (being the cold blooded wiener dog killing machine that he is) took out two chicks. He was on the compound shit list for about two weeks after that. 
• Lastly we lost our goat guard dog "Tank" to cancer and had to get another. The new dog's name is "Chewie" and he is doing a fine job so far even though he is still a puppy.
• 1965 Chevy C10:
• We finally got Pop's Dad's chevy truck from it's tomb in the woods where it has rested for 20 years.
• Epcot:
• We drunk it up at Epcot for Jonah's Birthday and got to see Smash Mouth again in concert!
• K1 speed Orlando:
• For Austin's birthday we went to K1 speed in Orlando to race electric go karts. It was a lot of fun. You might be thinking that electric go karts wouldn't be that fun but I assure you they were faster than your skill level could make use of. It was a blast!
• Animal Kingdom:
• For Aaliah's birthday we went to (you guessed it) Animal Kingdom. Another awesome Disney adventure thanks to little sis Carey.
• Longboarding:
• Not boarding as much as I would like but I plan to fix that soon
• Bicycling:
• Inverness has a great biking trail, and great restaurants ( like Mcleod House Bistro) that Amber and I love to visit.
• Weightlifting:
• I've gotten pretty serious about weightlifting because I have never been very muscular and I want to change that. With the aid of the phone app. Jefit, I have been steadily working out 3-4 days a week and i'm really hooked.
• Car Shows:
• Ah, one of the best parts of fall. Ocala Pumkin Run, and Daytona Turkey Rod Run. I love car shows and these are great.
• Welding:
• Between building a drift trike from old bicycles to fixing trailers I have slap ran the welder out of wire.  I like welding a lot more than I thought that I would.
• Fishing:
• Thanks to Amber's Dad I have been going fishing about every other week and there is nothing I love more than being out on the water.
• Bearding:
• I'm cultivating a pretty epic beard. I don't know how far I will go with this but we will see.
• Bartending:
• I finally broke down and I'm back at redsauce bartending 3 days a week.  I really missed bartending and i'm glad to be back in that capacity.  Also there has been enough time since the sale of the restaurant, the money is good, and I miss a lot of the customers. It is what it is.
• Amber started bartending at her restaurant too and is loving it. She's a natural at bartending and has also become a certified server trainer. She's amazing!
• Shooting:
• At thanksgiving we did our annual clay pigeon shoot. We shot pistols and AR's as well as the shotguns. This only reminding me how much of a diminishing skill shooting is and lit a fire in me to get my edge back.
• New Computer/Gaming:
• We got a second computer so we didn't fight over them while gaming.  I've always been a big gamer and having a laptop with some serious hardware is a huge for me.

Well...there you have it. Our plate has been full, but full of good stuff. We don't plan on slowing down any time soon either!

For picture references to all these go to https://www.instagram.com/kaseyclyde_dot_com/

I like things that go booom!

There are few things in life as satisfying as griping a finely engineered collaboration of metals and sending volley after volley of high speed projectiles downrange at the target of your choosing.  Rather it has to do with wielding a contained explosion in your hands or the ultimate destruction at the target I can't quite say.  It's probably a combination of the two.

It only gets better when for every input of your finger you yield more than one response. If i'm being to enigmatic let me sum it up for you.

I'm talking about shooting full auto guns brutha!!!

It's something that Amber and I have always wanted to do and now we have thanks to Jesse and his friends from work who have quite a collection between them.

Amber and I are gun enthusiasts and conceal carry holders with a decent collection of practical and fun firearms but these guys are way out of our league. They have legitimate fully automatic rifles with class 3 documentation.  They brought two of their full autos this day including a real Uzi 9mm and an actual German MP40 9mm that was used in combat.  While not a real full auto they brought a ar15 chambered in 22lr with a bump fire stock.  It was an absolute blast to shoot!

It was a real treat and the staff at R&D Tactical in Ocala, FL have a top notch facility that we used.

Popping my cement cherry

Longboarding has its inherent dangers. These are pretty evident when you put it into the prospective of going downhill on a plank of wood at 30 mph. (sure some people can go faster but i'm not that good)

I have had my share of spills and bails but this is the first one that put a hurting on me.  This was a relatively tame fall but it did scab up my left hip and grind my headphone cable right in two.

Luckily I'm only half stupid and I do wear full protective gear. I have on a triple 8  helmet, bell knee pads, bell elbow pads, and homemade slide gloves.  Thanks to all this the only thing hurt other than my hip was the tip of my left ankle bone.

In the video when you see me fall I'm not even going that fast but when I transition from the dark concrete to the light concrete it become insanely slick.  The board slides out and I make about 2 steps before I dive for home plate (into a curb.)

Enjoy!

Oh honey honey

As it normally happens with me time slipped through my fingers and before I knew it July was gone.  I was suppose to pull the honey supers from the bee hives and collect that sweet delicious nectar of the (tiny) Gods. Now that it's August I finally got around to pulling the honey extractor out of the shed, cleaning all the equipment and suiting up on a cool evening to nab those bulging frames.

This time Austin helped me and could just barely fit in Amber's bee suit. Armed with the GoPro we set off to claim our prize.

Unfortunately for us the bees were lazy bastards this year and out of all the honey frames (the frames in the box at the very top of the hive that the queen can't get to) only 2 of them actually had honey. This is primarily do to the fact that we fed the bees very minimally through the winter. I think only twice did I fill their jars with simple syrup.  I knew they had stores of honey so I wasn't really worried about them.  My thinking, being the inexperienced bee keeper that I am, is if I kept their feeder full through the winter they would eat the simple syrup and save their honey stores. That way when spring comes there is less honey they need to produce to fill the lower boxes and they will start filling the top box.  We will try that this winter and see what happens.

As for this year I once again cleaned all the honey extracting equipment for nothing.  We used two colanders to strain the honey from the two frames into a bowl and then poured the honey into 4.5 mason jars.  

I really can't be mad about honey production. I almost literally do nothing with the bees all year. I don't use and chemicals or pesticides or any techniques to coax them into higher honey yields.  I like them to "bee" as natural as possible and so I am grateful for whatever they give me.