DIY

It seems like forever since I started the project, though it's only really been 3 weeks (you can read more about the start here). With the workshop's priorities shifting to emergency jobs and the priorities of Boya and myself shifting quite a bit during that time, it seemed like it would take forever. And that's not even touching the problems of vehicle juggling, pigeon dodging and taking advantage of time slots to do other necessary things in the same workspace. If we could distill out the time used in the final product, we spent about 3 solid work days on the bumper spread over a 3 week period.

Model inefficiency, maybe, but given what needed to be done I have to admit we did pretty good.

The finished product, above, doesn't even get a glance on the road. Why? The theory is that (1) It's black and (2) it fits the contours of the pickup. I'm calling it the Stealth Brush Shield at this point.

Prior to the rust removal, final bake and paint/undercoating, the then frankenbumper got many stares. It wasn't pretty but people knew well enough not to pull in front of me unless their tetanus shots were up to date. I got quite a few comments, mainly from taxi drivers, that they liked the bumper.

"Dat is bumper, boy!".
Why yes. Yes it is.

The Mazda B2500 Turbodiesel 4x4 I've been driving is great for the offroading I have to do out on the land - but it has it's peculiarities. One of these peculiarities is the turbo intercooler, which seems to have been an afterthought instead of a part of the design. The 2.5L engine does well with the turbo; there is some turbo lag but it isn't a large turbo so the lag is fairly easy to compensate for - though it takes some getting used to on curvy hillside roads if you're used to using compression braking with the manual transmission.

I am constantly reminded by people in front of me that there are people who don't understand compression braking.

Even so, when pounding through the brush at 5-15 km/hr, the intercooler is at risk because, for some reason, Mazda engineers didn't seem to think that a Mazda 2.5L turbodiesel 4x4 would... ever go out in the brush. And so it has the street bumper with the flimsy plastic undermount that may streamline the truck aerodynamically in an extremely minimal fashion. On the road, it works well. And to it's credit (and my own disbelief), it does work out fairly well in tall grass. It does not, however, do well in guava patches and against - as I recently found out - the remains of trees hidden by the tall grass. The clips pop off, the license plate (mounted on plastic to plastic) flies below, and the intercooler can get damaged.

Funny story. Sort of.

When the coffee maker died this past weekend, someone had faith that I would fix it. Another, who commented on the photo, knew where I was coming from. Some even understood my dismay when I encountered the proprietary Oster screws which I used the dremel to fix. I bypassed the faulty switch. It lives.

But another friend pointed out that most people would have thrown it away and just got a new one. I, being the sort of person that I am, looked at him funny. Him, being the person that he is, looked at me funny. We laughed.

I grew up fixing things. There wasn't much I had at my disposal - things were slim - so if you needed something that had broken, you fixed it. You found a way to keep it in operation. And in doing these things, you found out how things worked. Somewhere along the way, you learned how not to kill yourself while doing this and found a comfortable spot between caution and confidence. This is something that few people in the world seem to have.