Have SABB Heads

I met Colin at the boat ramp at precisely 8.15 AM. He already had the heads in the back of his car but we needed to get the injector.

When I walked into the injector shop I thought of my friend Reg who had worked in a similar shop in the days when injectors were actually fixed and not replaced in Australia. The shop was in an outer suburb with dirt roads and did not look like much from the outside, but it had what looked to me to be good equipment inside and Colin said that they knew how to use it. At one bench a man was manually working a pump and watching the spray pattern emerge from an injector nozzle. There we picked up my Bosch injector with its new nozzle at a cost of 700 pesos. They did not have a copper seal as thick as the original SABB one so we got two thinner ones and Colin said that it would be OK to put one on top of the other.

Colin got a call from his Mexican girl friend saying that an outdoor light needed for a party had to be repaired urgently so off we went. There was already a ladder in place against the wall and I kicked myself for having left my camera on the boat. This old ladder was made of wood with unevenly spaced rungs of various thicknesses held on by rusty nails. Someone had extended the ladder another 2 feet, then somebody else had nailed on a third extension. While we were there a truck backed up to deliver plastic party chairs and I noticed that it had a rag for a fuel cap. After two trips to the lighting place near CCC and several trips up the ladder by Colin and myself that job was done. Terry, Colin's girl friend, invited me to the party.

Then we went around looking for a shop that could skim three cylinders off an old Volvo MD3 engine. The first two shops were set up for skimming heads and had no way of firmly fixing cylinder blocks, but fortunately the third shop was able to do it.

We also visited another shop where we were able to get the right bolts for my injectors.

Colin charged me 1500 pesos for 2 hours of his time running around on my behalf and the head valve work.

For me it was a very interesting morning where I got to see areas of the city that I had no hope of seeing on my own. La Paz has all sorts of little shops that specialize in all sorts of things, and many of these shops do excellent work. However, these shops are often in out of the way places and are not much to look at. Nevertheless they are there if you can find them. I was told early in my stay that you can find anything you want in La Paz if you look hard enough.

Colin told me that one thing that he likes about Mexico is that what matters is whether you can do the job, not the qualifications that you have. I suspect that this is similar to the US or Australia in the '40s and '50s. These days you get people like me, who got A's in the two welding courses that I took at Midland TAFE back in Western Australia, but can't weld for nuts. (I was brilliant with the theory but need a lot of welding time to learn the practical.)

Colin is a good talker and I learned all sorts of things about Mexico from him while we were driving around. Some things were minor, such as the explanation of why so many cars on the road have no license plates. (They are unscrewed by parking inspectors and not given back until the fine is paid.) Some things were bigger, such as property ownership laws for non-citizens.

I got back to the boat too late to do any serious work on the SABB engine. However, tonight I will try to do a process called annealing [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annealing_%28metallurgy%29] on the copper seals between the cylinders and the heads to make them softer. I'll try to heat them cherry red on my gas stove then quench them in water. Normally I wouldn't try do do anything like this myself but I don't have much of a choice. (Having to do it because I don't have a choice seems to happen a lot to me in this cruise.)