Scoobywagon

No. Sorry. I think I actually have some L-body glass in my garage. I'd have to go dig, but I think I have both left and right. Just don't own any L bodies anymore.

The legacy glass won't work, but I may have one in my garage, if you want it.

Yes, I've transplanted an air head. Works great. At some point I'm going to have to do it again.

What car do you have? The factory speaker on MOST subaru's is 155mm. I can see having depth problems, but they should fit just fine with a small spacer.

I think with a bit of observation you'll find that not only do they offer a more precise fit, the jaws on the open wrenches don't flex when you REALLY start herfing on them. I LOVE that fact. You may also want to think about getting the longer wrenches. I've never yet come across a situation where I thought to myself "What I really need here is a shorter wrench." Its always been "I need a bigger lever." Not saying that's how you'll find things, but long wrenches are nice.

When you make your living on your hand tools, it never pays to go cheap. Here's what I did. I initially worked out of a large tool bag. I had an assortment of Craftsman and Harbor Freight tools in it. Later, I discovered the Snap-On guy would let me set up a truck account. I bought Blue Point SAE and Metric wrenches to replace the ones I'd broken and discovered something I hadn't realized before. There IS a difference among them. Harbor Freight and Craftsman wrenches are soft compared to my Blue points. The HF wrenches are worse than the Craftsman, but having used the Blue Point wrenches, I won't go back to either of the others. I find that because the Blue Point wrenches are harder, the don't flex and therefore transmit applied torque more efficiently. That means I don't have to work as hard and that makes me faster. Craftsman is a good starting point, but that's all it should be for a professional.

Buy professional tools. Period. My air tools are Blue Point (Snap-On's entry level stuff). My impact gun makes a metric grip of torque, but also eats up a pretty fair bit of air. My air ratchet makes almost no torque, but it is SO fast. Actually, that's not fair. It makes enough torque to pull the nuts off of gummed up and nasty seat bolts. I'm also a big fan of the Blue Point 130* angle grinder. Makes a heck of a surface prep tool. More recently, I've become a big fan of Snap-On's line of cordless tools. I've got a 14.4v 3/8 drive cordless impact gun that will ALMOST keep up with my 1/2 drive air impact. Definitely worth a look.

I think my first engine pull, I had the engine out in 2-3 hours. But that was an EA81 in an 83 wagon. That's an easy one.

IN that case, the best thing is to haul the compressor in to your parts place and match things up.

If I remember correctly, most of them are #8. I'll check tomorrow and see if I've got a reference sheet. Otherwise, the thing to do is to haul the compressor to your parts store and match up the o-rings if yours are completely gone.

Actually, R134a is some fairly nasty stuff. Not at ALL harmless. But, for whatever reason, it IS on the EPA's list of acceptable refrigerants for automotive use. Also, there is no requirement for any certification to work on an A/C system. There is IS a requirement for certification when buying refrigerant in quantity. They'll sell you the little cans all day long, but if you want the BIG can, you have to have a certification. If you want to buy a machine capable of recovering and recycling the refrigerant, you must have that cert. There is, however, no law requiring Joe Schmuckatelli to have any certifications AT ALL when working on his own car. Doing so for money is another story. Markus is correct in that purposefully leaking refrigerant, whether R12 or R134a, is illegal and punishable by some stiff fines. The definition of purposefully leaking is generally accepted to include adding refrigerant to a system that is known to leak without also performing diagnostic or repair work. Just to be perfectly clear on the matter, a leaking A/C system on a car that is AT LEAST 13 years old is simply part of the cost of ownership. Like all things, your A/C system requires periodic maintenance. Rubber hoses and seals develop leaks over time. Aluminum fittings corrode. That's just the way it is.

So I just gotta ask...is there such a thing as UN-fair Dinkum? Welcome to the board, mate!

Either cut openings for them or build a jig to hold them. Just something to make sure that the air only goes one direction and that it doesn't stir up a bunch of crap in the air to get all in your paint.

Spent a fair bit of time out there. Best place to do any meet ups is the Safeway parking lot there in Belfair. Tahuya is pretty easy for most things with a couple of exceptions. The is a rock crawl that's pretty gnarly and then there is mud lake. Those two have stymied a Unimog with 49" michelins. well, actually, he made it through mud lake, but it was looking pretty doubtful for a while. We think they may have recently added a bunch of clay to the bottom.

Nipper is quite right. Charging on the high side from a can is a bit of a no-no. Having said that, you've already gotten started this route and you can't really undo that. So here's my advice. You've added liquid to the high side, so you're going to show high pressure on the high side and little or nothing on the low side. That's because the refrigerant can't flow backwards through the compressor and the only direction for it to expand is through the expansion block. It'll take a while to equalize, but it will. Your guage should have a valve just above the fitting. Turn that off and put the can on the low side to finish charging that can. Then start the engine and run the A/C on high. That should get it straightened out.

It undoubtedly has a shelf life, but I've never run into it. If you find that you've mixed up too much, you're kinda hosed, though. You'll end up throwing it out, so be careful about how much you mix. Then again, this stuff is cheap enough that if you throw out a few ounces...meh...

A few tips for painting. Invest in a breather. THose little filter mask things aren't going to get it. Also, a good set of goggles. Paint in your eye is no fun. Make sure you have plenty of ventilation. If I were you, I would invest in at least 4 box fans. Cheap ones are ok. I'd also get enough of that bulk furnace filter media to cover them. I'd install 2 up high and blowing into the canopy through filters. The other 2 you be down low at the other end of the canopy and blowing out, also through filters. That should get you enough air flow to let you work without kicking up a bunch of dust and dirt to get stuck in your paint.

There's not a kit, per se. Any paint you buy is going to consist of several parts. There's going to be paint, reducer and (in some cases) hardener. I'm not familiar with the Omni product, so I looked it up. It seems to be targeted at the auto rebuild market. It is a 2-stage system, meaning basecoat/clearcoat. It also consists of primer and, of course, the requisite reducers and hardeners. Nason Fast Dry, on the other hand, is a single stage system. All you need to shoot it is the paint and the reducer. In your case, since you want flat black, you'll also want flattener. The paint mixes 4:1 with the reducer and the flattener is mixed in at not more than 10%. So, if you want to mix up 4 oz of paint, you add 1 oz of reducer and not more than .4 oz of flattener. A gallon of fast dry in black runs about $100. A quart of reducer is about $10. The flattener is kind of spendy. Runs about $5 per ounce. For your application, you're likely to need 2-3 quarts. I'd go ahead and get the gallon can, as there is usually a bit of a price break there and it gives you plenty of paint in case you screw something up. In that case, you'd need maybe 7 oz of flattener. So you're looking at about $145 in paint. My guess is that you'd be looking at closer to $250 in the Omni paint. The Nason is intended for use on heavy equipment, so it tends to be fairly hard once set and resists UV pretty well, too. I've always been happy with the stuff I've shot with it. Just my 2 cents, but that's the way I'd do it.

Its Fluorescent Green and Atomic Purple. It may remind the geekier amongst us of this.

The HF hoists are just fine for light work of this type. Also, the penumatic cylinder is just the thing to make one-man engine removal easy. It lets you run the engine up slowly so that you can guide it. Then, once clear, you can simply hold the control lever down and it goes up much faster than you could do it by hand. Well worth the price of entry. $180 for the crane. I can't find it now, but I seem to recall paying about $60 or so for the pneumatic cylinder. So $240 + tax. Not bad at all.

If you're just going to paint the car flat black, save your money. Use Nason Fast Dry and add a flatter. Stuff is both cheap and TOUGH!

If you're starting to do that kind of work, SERIOUSLY...invest in an alldata subscription.

It is a tad rickety. On the other hand, the things I tend to use if for don't even come CLOSE to its rated capacity so, for me, it just doesn't matter. I'm not sure I'd want to use it for something like a brand-new hand-built big-block, but it's awesome for lighter stuff...like volkswagens. I've had that crane for several years now and its a bit beat. You can't see it in the pics, but I had to do some repair work on it. I laminated some .25 inch plate to the center cross beam. The manual cylinder crapped out about 2 years ago. At the time it was about $20 for the manual cylinder or $40-something for the air cylinder. So I upgraded to the air cylinder. It is really just a secondary air-operated hydraulic pump on the same cylinder. It can still be operated manually. Makes one-man engine-ectomies a breeze. I will NOT go back to a pure manual cylinder again.

Try these.

In my shop, we use the PRP (Precision Rubber Products) gaskets and they're usually pretty good. The thing that seems to kill them is sitting in the little bag wadded up in some warehouse for a few years. But, really, that's a problem for ANY rubber product. For the most part, as long as the gasket will uncoil and lay down reasonably flat, it should be good to go. BTW, that's a pretty good price.