The Sweet Smell of Garbage

Well, it's that time again. Spring is here. The flowers are blooming. The air is warming up. And the dumpsters are filling up. That's right. MSU has been a gold mine for me year after year as these young college brats toss out everything their parents bought for their dorm rooms 9 months prior. See, today's average college student owns a lot of clothes and a large percentage of these students drive small cars. So, it's everything they can do just to make sure and leave for the summer with all their clothes. Everything else gets left in the dorm to be thrown out by those whose job it is to clean them or gets tossed by the students themselves. Either way, the dumpsters are filled up with some great household items that you didn't know you needed until they became available for free. I've yet to come across anything that's worth a lot of money, but that's not the point. I have many cherished posessions that came to be in my possession by finding them needlessly discarded amongst real garbage.

I was a little upset this morning when I found out that all three items that I intended to buy at Autozone today were not in stock. I called the store and the guy assured me that if I ordered them on my lunch break they could be delivered the day after tomorrow. I hope this is true, because the Big Bad Ford is down with it's head removed. Yes, you may have read the blog about three blogs ago, I think, that explained the problem with it. Well, I just got paid today so I need to pick up a head gasket, intake/exhaust manifold combination gasket, and valve cover gasket so that I can put the thing back together. Friday night is the graduation commencement ceremony and while some will leave directly afterwards others will drag their butts out of bed tomorrow and hustle out of town pretty quickly. So, Saturday marks the first and best day to load up. If the truck is not ready by Saturday, then we will be stuck driving a car. Cars aren't that great for dumpster diving. The Ford can park right next to a dumpster and all the good finds can be tossed over the edge without looking. It's pretty hard to miss a true 8 foot long bed.

So, here's a picture of the dismantled 223. If you blow this picture up by clicking on it then look at cylinder #6, which is on the far left, you can see a couple of pieces of what was left of the nut that fell down into the cylinder. The nut broke into at least three pieces and dinged the crap out of the piston head. It was great, though, to see that the piston was only cosmetically injured. There aren't any cracks and all the damage was easily ground down to be made flat again. The three pieces of the nut were embedded into the head of the piston. Two pieces popped right out when I levered them with the screwdriver, but one I had to cut a grove into to give the screwdriver a ledge to grip before it let go. Anyway, just another story for the old boy and another test of it's awesomeness!

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