My son is interested in cars, but for the most part he’s memorized the specs on all of the exotics. He’s somewhat interested in the SL-C project, but I’ve been careful to not push it on him. One of the good things to come out of sheltering at home is that we’ve had an opportunity to spend some quality time in the garage — what’s better than that?
The battery in my 1993 BMW 850 CSi was dead and my charger couldn’t revive it, so I figured I’d teach my son how to swap the battery. In the end, I learned that the car has two huge batteries in the trunk. To get to the second one, we had to remove the CD changer (the black box above the wrenches). It was the first CAN Bus car and it had two ECUs, one for each cylinder bank — apparently one wasn’t powerful enough to manage 12 cylinders. I guess to power all of the new-fangled electronics it needed two batteries. It’s kinda cool because the car is passing through three generations — James Richard bought it, James Scott is enjoying it and James Connor is being groomed for it LOL
Last week we also went over thread pitches, tapping and drill press basics. He then drilled some holes in scrap, used clecos to keep everything aligned and then riveted them together. Connor thought the clecos and rivet gun were cool. Next week we’re going over milling machine basics — fixturing, edge finding, facing, making slots, using the DRO, etc.
So being stuck at the house isn’t all bad!