Thursday, October 10th

The good news is that I got 9 hours and 44 minutes of sleep. The bad news is it required sleeping in until after 3pm to do it. I had enough time to finish most of the base plate install. I'm pretty sure it was designed with the assumption that the car would be flipped upside down and installed from above, as it requires bolting a 50lb piece of steel to the underside of the frame, which was quite a pain to keep it in place while I put the first few bolts in. It was also super-fun keeping their bolt plates in place while I stuck them way back into the back of the frame (would've been really fun if I'd dropped one, would never have been able to get it out) with the little wires attached to guide them into place. After I did that, I had to drill a couple new holes in the frame, using a 13/32” drill bit as that's what the instructions specified, even though the video I found of the installation just used a 3/8” bit. I'm glad I sprung for the cobalt drill bits, as it required drilling through ¼” of solid steel and took forever as it was. I would definitely have broken any lesser drill bit. Anyway, all of that is installed. The bolts are properly loctited and torqued, and the whole thing is very solid, so I'm sure it's not going anywhere.

I still need to install the permanent safety cables and re-attach the wheel wells before I can drive it. Both of those should be super-straightforward and I'm running out of daylight, so shouldn't cause any problems to do that tomorrow. We've decided we're going to move to a Staybridge outside Des Moines tomorrow as it's better suited to a long-term stay and it looks like it might be a bit before ATC can get in touch with the Dimetrodon engine's manufacturer. I'll get to bed early tonight and get up early tomorrow so I can finish up the last parts of the base plate install and have plenty of time to get packed and get checked out before I get over to Des Moines. I got a riveting tool and some rivets for the wheel well, which is a good thing to have anyway, so I've got what I need and won't need to go back to Fleet Farm before I drive out tomorrow.

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