Time & Money

October 3, 2012. Gas Turbine Technician Kathrine Shost cleans out a gas generator in Main Engine Room Two aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Stout (DDG 55). Not much to do with this post, but nothing like a cute girl and some hi-tech machinery to make my heart go pitty-pat.

I plugged the ABS connector back in. I was thinking that we could drop the radiator and the ABS controller out along with the engine all in one fell swoop, but we would have needed to disconnect the rear brake lines and the lines to the master cylinder, and I didn't see any easy way to do that. Younger son got tired of waiting for me to come up with a plan and suggested we just do it the way we did last time, which was to pull the radiator. When you are doing things you at least feel like you are making progress, even if it ends up taking longer. Standing around puzzling how to do things is a good idea if you have never done a task before, but once you have a plan, no matter how good, bad, or indifferent, it makes more sense to just start working on it rather than spend the rest of the day trying to figure out whether it is the best way or not. Me, I like puzzles, so I like the figuring it out part, but that is not necessarily the quickest way to get the job done.
    On some jobs it looks like all you have to do is remove this one little part, and that should be quick and easy, but that part is so inaccessible you could spend hours trying to finagle it out. You could get to that part easily if all this other stuff in front of it was out of the way, but taking all that stuff off would be a lot of work. It might be a lot of work, but it will likely be quicker than trying to finesse it.
   And then there is whole business of telling you all about it. It took me longer to put together the post about the Catalytic Converter than it took Mr. Hortnagl to do the actual work.