Category: life

where everything else happens

Need an Alternator for a ’79 M-B 450sl!


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My father is driving his 1979 Mercedes-Benz 450sl from Colorado to Vermont roughly along that route above. He just called me from western Nebraska with a dead alternator. 🙁

Needless to say, the parts stores in Nebraska don’t carry a suitable alternator, so he’s doing the logical gearhead thing: He bought two spare batteries and a charger and he’s going to keep driving until he can find one.

Here is where you come in dear reader: Anyone know what sort of alternator he needs? I assume it is a Bosch, but googling so far is just getting me link farms. A Lester/Rebuilders number would be great! If you don’t know that, how about a hint of reasonably honest Mercedes service locations (dealers or independents) anywhere from Elkhart, Indiana to Cleveland, Ohio. That is where he’ll be Monday morning.

Thanks in Advance!

Update, 11 PM PDT: I posted this to a couple of car-related mailing lists, and received a ton of useful information, part numbers, potential sources, and a good selection of service operations along his route. I’ve passed it along to my Dad. He & my mom made it to their hotel before dark, and have their battery on the charger. He said the car ran great all day.

Thanks to all who provided information!

My April Fool’s Day prank.

I love practical jokes, but most years I forget about the license to do them on others that is the 1st of April. It just escapes my mind until it is too late.

This year however I was inspired by something that happened back in December. My friend (and client) John Welch posted something of a love letter to my employer on his website. Basically it said “You’ll never see a “bandwidth quota exceeded” page on my site because my hosting provider doesn’t do that sort of thing.”

That is true, but when I saw it I thought to myself, what a great practical joke this will make! 😉 … and made a note in my calendar to do this on 4/1/2008.

So when people went to John’s site today this is what they saw:

LOL

That “(reference)” link on the “bandwidth exceeded” page goes right to John’s post that inspired the prank.

I actually wanted to make the joke more John-specific… like “This user has expended the maximum number of input keystrokes allowed” or “this user has been suspended for excessive profanity” or something… Unfortunately I spent the day yesterday at our facility in Vancouver BC replacing a broken switch, and fixing a broken server, so I didn’t have the time to write up the HTML. Bill Dickson however, whipped up the PHP code required to pull off the stunt, and wrote that HTML page. Without his help, this one would not have been pulled off.

I hope John liked it.

Out Like a Lion…

Plum Tree with Snow

Rhodie in snow

Really weird weather here the past few days. It seemed as if Spring had sprung (as you can see by the flowers and buds on the trees above), then Friday Winter came back for a last gasp. Friday night brought about 3″ of snow. Saturday it went from rain, to snow, then rain, snow, etc. I went out to the barn to work on the Jag’s exhaust and it was coming down pretty hard. A while later I opened the barn door to find the clouds all gone and the sky filled with brilliant sunshine. About that time my friend John showed up with a barrel of WVO to make into BioDiesel. While we were unloading that from his trailer my driveway was turning into a lake! The snow was melting so fast the water had nowhere to go!

Then a few hours later the clouds came back. It is snowing again now. Go figure.

Just a nice picture, with fond memories

Nick

This is a photo from my 2003 “Summer Roadtrip” with Nick. It is a view of him passing time with his gameboy as we drove from Colorado to Washington in the Jaguar. Note the rainbow out the window.

That trip was indeed magical and I have many fond memories from that week. Nick was nine years old, and a joy to travel with. I had hoped to go on another road trip with him (and his older brother) this week. I was planning to drive down to southern California with one kid, then have the other fly down and send the southbound kid home by plane as well. We have some Jag friends down there that would be fun to pay a return visit. Then I’d return home with the other boy. Chris will be leaving for College in the fall, and I’d dearly like to spend some quality time with them both in the meantime. This week would have worked well since it is spring break for both.

Unfortunately the car is still up on jacks in the barn (I need to order a new body heat shield … more on that later) and it is snowing. WTF is up with that?