Pinks All Out Last Chance - Indy

It was one hell of a week getting prepped for this thing, and there was no guarantee at all that we were going to come away with anything except a lighter wallet, but we went, and here's how it all went down:

Friday night around 10pm we were doing some final checks after finally getting the trans back in the car. Some minor alternator belt problems had to be addressed.

My brother backed it out of the driveway and ran it around the block a couple of times, proclaimed it "good," and we celebrated our apparent success by getting some pizza and sleeping!

Friday morning bright and early at the track, Ben fills out our tech card.

We ran around the pits and visited some of the other racers and checked out their cars. This guy with the '55 asked me to help him lower and pin the flip front after we got done talking. It's one of the coolest car things I've ever been asked to do!


This guy was running a stout '69 Camaro. Clean car, too. Check out the motor below.

This was a very nice '67 Camaro that looked like a real street-fighter. I saw a "12." in his window later in the day, so he was running real respectable times for what looked like just your average show-car Camaro.
Whether you like imports or not, this Neon was running 12s with a turbo. That's impressive for any car, and this one had half the cylinders of most that were running that day.


This Turbo Coupe had slicks that looked like they were touching the fenders, so I went over to look. They were. The owner saw me looking and laughed, "They rub a little, but there ain't nothin' sharp under there, so it all works out okay!"


Big, bad Buick.......runnin' a Chevy motor. Sorry, Buick guys. It was still a tough one, if that helps ease the pain.


Never saw or heard anything else about this Camaro that day. Clean car.


Can't have a meet without Mr. Horsepower showing up.


I think this is an early Capri??? Not sure. It looked well-used. For some reason it kind of scared me. It looked...strip-wise. Saw him run it down, but didn't get a time on it. It was a handful.


Mustang running a bottle...
...and a little attitude.
Does my heart good to see an AMC product anywhere. Would have loved to have seen this on make a pass.


Now we're getting down to business. Getting lined up for the first round of time trials.


Here we have a little more of the field. They were advertising 512 spots for qualifying, and Ben slept in his car all night in anticipation of a huge turnout. Everyone, and I mean everyone there, was surprised when only about 100 cars showed up to run! We heard a lot of people stayed home because they thought it was going to be a madhouse with too many cars running around. The missed an easy chance at qualifying!


Duster in the lanes.


Here's some leftover rubber on the quarter from last week's race. Maybe we should wash this thing a little more often.

We're in the final stage of lanes, and Ben is ready to give it hell and see how she runs today.

Another Plymouth, this one with a big wedge. Probably not exactly what the factory put in these little things, no?


Ben heats up the M/Ts and prepares for his first assault.


The Red Baron is one of my favorite cars out at ORP. I love classic-era-styled hot rods.


He doesn't disappoint with a wheels-up launch! I wish I'd been out front to catch the grille end of things.


Duster tortures the tires before a pass.


Tony was having converter trouble at the meet, unfortunately, but he still gave it his best shot in his Gremlin - which is powered by a 383 Chrysler. Sure, you saw that coming, right?


Ended up talking with this guy in the lanes. He was out of Illinois, ran a stout 11.53 and made the show in his first round of eliminations.

And here we jump to the first round of eliminations! There was a bunch of standing around and goofing off in between, plus another couple of rounds of trials, which I won't bore you with, plus the part where I locked my keys in my car and had to borrow four screwdrivers and a coat hanger to get them out, but again, I won't bore you with that. Here's the meat of the matter. The heart of the story. The part where it all gets good, where all our hard work comes down to the wire. The part where Ben's heart is hammering in his chest, and my hands are shaking so much it's getting a little difficult to hold the camera.

Ben pulls up and smokes 'em good, plenty of heat to the hides for maximum stick. We're running against some guy I don't recognize, which doesn't really put me at ease in any way. It's a good match. The other car is a late 70s Malibu, looks to be a sharp car. That guy is dialed at an 11.53, and Ben is at 12.90. Ben will leave a moment earlier. It should be a close race all the way down the track. Damn. Tough!

I am nervous. I'm worried. I want this. All I've been worried about all week was getting that damn trans in the car, and now, suddenly, I WANT this win! I never care all too much about winning on your average points weekend, but I WANT my brother to bring it home on this one!

Ben stages. The other guy eases into it. Come on, ya turtle, light them bulbs!
He gets them lit. I'm looking at Ben through the viewfinder. I can't see the lights, but their motors go up. Ben revs, holds it, a split second rips by, and:

He's out of the hole! He launches like a champ! No bog, no stutter, he's gone!

Ben shoots by me and I'm still snapping, looking only at him. Right about here the Malibu in the far lane nails the throttle. (Make note of that last part.)

I squeeze off another half dozen shots for the hell of it, and then I look up, heart still racing as fast as the revs in that damn Chevelle.

Huh? Why is the win light on in Ben's lane? He's not even halfway down the track? Did something go wrong? Why....why does it look like he's going so slow? The other guy is getting past him and it's only half track! What happened?

I watch Ben go through the lights: 15.26 at 62mph? Wha-????

I'm confused, but I'm pretty sure we lost. What the hell happened there?

I go immediately to the return road to wait for Ben. We still have a shot at qualifying. There should be at least two more rounds, maybe three to make the show. I wanted to get in on the first one, but maybe we can...

Ben pulls up. He's grinning ear to ear and waving his arm out the window.

"What the hell happened?" I ask.
"We won!" he cries.
"We won?! How the hell did we win?!"
"He redlighted!"
"He DID????!!!!!"
"YES!"
"WOOOOHOOOOO!"
"WE WON!"
What followed was the driver's meeting, where I stood around worriedly suspecting that we had, in fact, fallen through some mysterious Pinks Rules loophole, and had not, in fact, truly won the race. About two minutes after I took this photo, the guy calling out winners' names flipped through his cards, pulled one up, and then drawled out, "....Ben Harold?" I raised up my hands in automotive jubilance. "YES!"

Ben was happy too. After we stepped out of the meeting, I shot this one. This is the little piece of paper we stayed up hours repairing a broken transmission to get. This is the thing Ben slept all night in his car to win. This is the scrap of white printed goodness that gets us enrolled to run in Pinks All Out trials come May 29th!

We are quite happy. Rock on!


We celebrated our victory by putting the car back together so that we could drive it home. Well, it was really pretty much a necessity, since we don't have a trailer, but I include it as a sort of celebration, because we were pretty damn happy, and I didn't even really care that it looked like we stripped out yet another lug nut and another damn wheel stud. There will be time to cuss that later.

Let's go back to the victorious sweetness one more time, shall we?


It was a good day. It was a very good day.

Shattered, shattered - she-do-be

Wow, it's been a year, and yet here we are again - transmission problems.

It's two nights before the Last Chance race to get a spot in Pinks All Out coming the last weekend in May. I don't know if we have a shot, but we're going to give it hell.

However, this is not what you want to see on your garage floor two nights before the event begins:


See the ring toward the lower left of the collection of parts? It's not supposed to look like that. Here's a closeup:


That's the forward bearing retainer at the bottom. We thought the throwout bearing was going bad. Not so. It was the front gear on the main shaft rubbing against the inside of the main case. The retainer should look like the piece at the top of the photo. It completely shattered to pieces all around the snout, which is lying there all forlorn and helpless. The other piece looks like one that will replace it, but it won't. It's a retainer for a three speed. Besides not physically bolting up, it's a weak casting. I'm glad it didn't fit, as we would have put it on and destroyed it likely after two or three launches.

So, now my brother is sitting in his car sleeping in line out at Raceway Park to get his spot in line for tomorrow's registration process, while tomorrow morning I will wake up bright and early and start calling around town trying to find a piece to replace this one. I guess I know now why they make billet retainers. Huh - that used to seem like overkill to me. It's not like we're doing tens, but I guess enough six-grand launches will take their toll.

If we get this together and make the show, it's going to be friggin' awesome.

Summer Teeth

Previously on the Man and Machine Blog viewers will recall that our intrepid duo were having a bitch of a time with their '67 Chevelle, specifically that it was spitting out broken parts with alarming regularity.

To backtrack just a touch, the 'Velle and scrubbed a cam love and required a new cam and all its attendant parts and pieces. We got that handled ("Applause" sign blinks on.), and Ben made it to the drag strip one or two more times after that. During one of those trips a stud for the right rear wheel stripped in the end that goes in the axle, meaning that when you try to remove the nut and take off the wheel the stud just spins in place and you can't remove the nut. This is a problem when you're trying to swap the drag slicks out for street tires so you can drive back home.

Since the drag slicks are legally street tires, Ben was able to drive the car home with the race meats in place (Don't try that at home, kids, it's a "loose" ride). A few days later I got the nut cut off with a Dremel and carbide cutter. Ben came over one night after that while I was away, and when I returned home I found this on the stove (click/enlarge):
For the ocularly challenged: "Tom, Got the stud pulled in using your method. Now the shifter is fucked. It won't stay in neutral and is acting generally gay. I hope it just needs to be adjusted. Ben"

Having read the previous post, you will already know the answer was a resounding "like hell!" Adjustments made no difference, and the phone came off the hook while the mouse clicked away on the 'net in search of possibilities for a swift and cheap repair to our tranny problems. We lost on both counts.

My good buddies at the fabulous site Team Chevelle helped me determine that there was much doom and gloom in store, and that we had to remove the tranny at the very least, and likely a rebuild was in store. Yay. I did not dance about this, should you be wondering.

Since the Goodguys Hot Rod Nationals were fast approaching at O'Reilly Raceway Park, we wanted the car done by then. Since we'd never done this work before, we agreed that having a professional do the work would be the quickest way to make sure it was done - if we could afford it. We took our lump of busted Muncie over to a local tranny shop. They quoted us 900 bucks. We groaned. A rebuilt Muncie of higher quality than ours is only about 400 bucks more than that. Parts for ours ran to six hundred. We could not afford 300 bucks for labor. Ben went and got what was now a box of Muncie parts.

By now it was obvious we weren't going to get the beast up and running for the Goodguys show. There was much unhappiness. Come the weekend of the show, however, it rained most of the time, so we felt okay about not missing much. Given all this, it was decided that our only realistic option was to do it ourselves. The guys at Team Chevelle had told me that "if you got that out of the car, then you know enough to rebuild it. It's easy." Um...okay, if you say so!

Ben swallowed hard and got on the phone. He ordered parts and footed the bill, for which I am heartily grateful, as this summer finances are very slim.

The most expensive single part is pictured below, the input shaft. The shaft portion of the part was really completely fine, as were gear teeth for fourth gear. Because of this, Ben said, "Maybe we'll be able to not use this and send it back." The synchro teeth that mesh up with the slider, however, well, take a look at the image below of the top/new part and the bottom/used part (click to enbiggen):

As you can no doubt see, those very small teeth in the bottom image remind me of the "summer teeth" joke: Som'er there, some're not. We hadn't totally sheared off any teeth, but LOOK AT 'EM! There are big chunks missing! If the synchros hadn't failed and jammed up the tranny in multiple gears at once, we surely would have destroyed this thing before the end of the summer. It was a difficult choice (this piece costs one-eighty all by itself, and was a huge dent in the total bill), but we went ahead and replaced it.

Our automotive back alley dentistry continued into other parts of the transmission as well. The image below is of the interior of one of the two sliders that we replaced. The little red circle (clicky to enlarge if ya like) indicates one of the more seriously damaged/chipped teeth on the sliders. The others are all rounded off at best, chipped and similarly mangled at worst. If we didn't race this thing it would probably have outlived us both. However, if we didn't race it we'd need to find something else to break and pour money into, and this car is pretty cool, so why not have fun with it?

And below us here we have a stellar example of a trashed synchronizer ring. See the green circles? Those are nice, new, well-formed parts of a synchro ring. See the red circles? Bad. Very bad. (click/enlarge the destruction) When I was looking at them, having never seen one up close before, I went, "Huh, that's kinda cool. They put little ridges on there so that it would slide toward that slot if you missed it on a shift." Um, no. Those ridges are there because it was repeatedly SLAMMED into gear at upwards of 6000rpm. Can you dig that, kids? Well, can ya?


What is not so easy to see in the pic is that the little teeth around the outer perimeter of the ring are also all damaged. None were broken off, which genuinely surprised me, but they were all rounded off. Much of the brass from the ring damage indicated here ended up in the sliders, and when sliders get handfuls of brass filings in them, well, they don't do what their name implies. When sliders don't slide you end up getting sorta/kinda stuck in two gears at once, or at least that's what it seems is happening. It feels like you can't select any one, single gear, and they are very hard to select if you can make that happen. We couldn't get it into neutral either, because the general bad shape of the rings was causing interference with the main shaft and locking the gears against the shaft. The gears couldn't freewheel on the shaft anymore with all those filings roaming around in there. Poor tranny, it never stood a chance against Ben's mighty powershifting capabilities.

In my next post I shall detail a bit of the rebuild, trying not to bore you mightily in the process. I'll put up some fun pics, now that I seem to be getting the hang of this site a little better, plus figuring out some niftiness with Photoshop Elements a little better.

As an added future bonus, I'll not here that Ben made a video of the entire friggin' rebuild process, and he says it will be available on the web in the future, and I believe it's not even gonna cost ya! So, if you're curious about this sort of thing, you can see what two total Muncie rebuild greenies went through to get this thing back down the track.

Happy Fourth of July!

The Hungry Thing: Feed Me!

There was a book my mom used to read to us when we were kids. Darned if I can find it online at the moment, but I think it was called "The Hungry Thing." In it there's this rather friendly, scaly beast that walks into town one day and asks to be fed. He doesn't speak english, but he does have a sign hung around his neck that says "FEED ME," and he points to it and then says some monstery gibberish concerning his favorite dish, and the good townspeople have to try and come up with something that sounds like what he's asking for. Much fun and hilarity ensues.

I have a Hungry Thing in my garage, only it is not scaly, and it does not have a sign around its neck. However, through a series of sounds, often terrifyingly loud ones, it induces me and my brother to "FEED ME!"

Some weeks ago it made terrible noises and then presented us with this:



It wanted a new camshaft lifter. Actually, it wanted a new lifter and a camshaft lobe to go with it. Since one lob is part of the entire cam and it's physically impossible to separate them, it was new cam shaft time. This meant a new set of lifters as well. This meant new gaskets for all the parts that were removed when the engine was disassembled. It also meant more oil and a filter, plus some special additive for the oil now that oil companies make shite for lubricants, apparently.

That quieted the beast for about, oh, two weeks whereupon it once again began making a terrible racket from the transmission area, and my brother pronounced it "F***ed up." I took a listen, agreed that it was indeed SNAFU, and we removed said transmission. Turns out the Hungry Thing now needs a transmission rebuild. The shop says: synchros shot, bad slider assembly, bad input shaft = 900 bucks.

Feed me.

This ain't McDonald's, nor is it Taco Bell. There's no Dollar Menu or Super Value Meal on tranny rebuilds. Sure, you can do it cheap, but the Hungry Thing will likely chew it up and spit it out in short order, because, like you and I, cheap s*** does not sit well, particularly if you beat the hell out of it at a drag strip.

So, here we are with a shot tranny sitting all forlorn and leaky on the garage floor (didn't have the shop do it, couldn't afford the extra cash). I now own a copy of a Muncie transmission rebuild book, and we need to shop for parts and do it ourselves. We're both somewhat broke at this point, me almost entirely, my brother falling into the "somewhat" category. I really don't know how we plan to feed the Hungry Thing at this point.

In addition, last time we were in the garage together, my brother stopped as he walked by the pair of racing slicks sitting by the door. He looked at them and said, "Gonna need to replace those soon, looks like." I said, "Nah..." and then leaned in closer and looked at the wear indicators that are cast into the tread. "...okay, maybe, yeah. Thanks for noticing what I'd rather not know. Three hundred bucks for those, right?"

Feed Me.

That's not a good sound

On Wednesday my brother and I were working on the Chevelle and getting it ready for another summer of strip passes. One really odd thing we noticed was that the exhaust rocker for the #4 cylinder was loose enough that it was clattering loudly. We got it adjusted, and it seemed to be okay. Today we goofed with the car some more, just tightening up some stuff, and then took it out for a drive. When my brother put his foot in it and the revs came up it started backfiring through the exhaust. Sounded like the right side, but there's a crossover pipe on the duals, and I was sitting on the right side, so that thought doesn't necessary mean a lot. Still, my thoughts were on Wednesday, and still are, that maybe we have a cam lobe going bad. Neat-o. I don't have much money right now, and I don't want to spend time putting another cam in this thing. I hope that's not the problem. We'll just look into it some more and see what we see. Maybe it's just crossfiring plug wires or something. I hope.

Back to the Grind

Astoundingly enough, as some of you shrewd readers may have devised from the above title, I set to work on the RBS parts some more tonight, and this time a grinder was employed. I also used my Dremel with some new cutting wheels I bought. The cutting wheel came in VERY handy, and I imagine we'll see a lot more of its use in the future. The grinder I hope to get more use out of as well. I bought it used off of Ebay. It's an old Craftsman Commercial model exactly like the one my dad has had for my entire existence here on earth. His is at least 40 years old, so I'm figuring mine will NEVER die, and that's a nice thing in a hand tool. I'll have some pics up of some of this general grindy foolishness here before much longer.

One Shaft = Two Chutes

Had a happy little surprise yesterday when I went to the shop to pick up my cut driveshaft and they told me it was only going to be twenty bucks! That was nice. Now I can spend the saved fifteen to twenty dollars from the estimate on the termite exterminator I just found out I'm going to need. I guess it's a good thing I started this project, because it got me back down in the back area of the basement where the damage is located. Wow - somehow I've summoned gratitude involving a termite problem. Weird.

Moving on to happier things, here is a shot of the cut drive shaft.



Isn't it cool?! Look at my new long, straight rolling ball chutes! In the right chute you can see a piece of the inner balance tube still laying there. It had two bands of rubber around it securing it tightly within the shaft. The shop did a decent, if not exacting, job getting it sawed down for me. I knew this would be the case, that they were only using a bandsaw and the cut would not be exactly true, but I think the results will be fine for my purposes. So far, so good.

Later in the evening I attacked a not-so-fun portion of the project, the cleaning up of the axle shafts. They need cleaning in the literal sense of getting all the rust and dirt off of them, but they also need cleaning in the visual sense. There are two brackets on each tube that need to be cut off. One bracket is a coil spring pad. No biggie, three welds with my recprocating saw and we're done:



The other bracket, which you can see part of in the photo...not so easy. I looked at it closely last night, and my thought was, "Why did I decide this would be a good idea?" The bracket has a lengthy and substantial mounting point. It's going to take a lot more than three straight cuts to get it removed. If this were a shop job, there would be no sense in persuing it. It's going to be labor intensive, and in man-hours it would cost a lot more to strip it down than it would to just find something else. However, I want to use it just because I want to, so you get to follow along in future posts while I bang, cut, and chisel at it until it's removed. Maybe it's time for a cutting wheel. After the bracket is removed the whole thing will need cleaning with a wire wheel and degreaser (It's loaded with differential fluid inside the tubes - smells awesome.). Fun stuff!

Shafted

Friday I stopped in at the welding shop down the street from where I work. As mentioned previously, I have a driveshaft out of an old Dodge Dart that should make for a couple of nice U-channels for the sculpture once it is cut in half lengthwise. They said they could do the job for probably fifteen bucks, which sounded fine to me. They also advised that it would save me a few bucks to cut off the ends of the shaft myself beforehand, which I knew wouldn't be a problem.

Last night I headed out to the garage, sawzall in one hand, camera in the other. I didn't figure there'd be much to photograph, but I know sometimes I find the unexpected in a project, so why not?



Here we have the dismembered front yoke for the drive shaft. I cut it close to the weld, so close, in fact, that I ended up cutting into some of the weld itself, slowing the job down a bit. Not really a problem overall, however, and I was pleased with the relatively quick job (as well as all the noise and smoke I was able to make with the sawzall). I was pleased, that is, until I looked at the drive shaft and saw this:



What? What is that? There's another shaft in my shaft?? Why is that made like that? I didn't know they made 'em that way! Shoot. Now how am I gonna - how is that going to affect cutting the shaft in two?

I looked at the shaft some more and it appears the second tube is held in place with a surrounding piece of rubber. I'm guessing it's a sort of elastic damper, but if you know any better, please feel free to enlighten me. This may surprise you, but I've never cut a driveshaft up before, so I've got a bit to learn.

In spite of the weirdness, I needed to carry on. It was growing late. I picked up the sawzall and went at the other end of the tube.



Here's a view down the shaft from the rear of things. Inside you can see the light ring where the inner tube is fixed at the far end of the shaft. I believe it's only about twelve to eighteen inches long. It's pretty stout stuff - about the thickness of water pipe.

I tried to think of a way to remove the inner tube, but my brain was pretty tired and nothing came to me. I put the shaft in the car and shut the lights out in the garage for the evening. I can only do so much thinking for one day, and my time was up.

Today I took the whittled-down shaft to the shop. Not great news. Apparently, it's not going to cost me fifteen bucks, but thirty-five or forty. I guess that inner tube adds to the labor involved. He said, "Well, do you want us to do it?" I said, "I need it done, and this is the only way I know how, so yeah."

I hope all my "cheap" ideas for this sculpture don't turn out being this expensive!

Rolling Ball Sculpture - Kinetic Art

The first time in recent memory when I was presented with a large scale piece of rolling ball kinetic art was at the Indianapolis Children's Museum. They have a pretty killer setup in there (really need to find out who the artist is) that I first saw when I went with my nieces three or so years ago. I could have watched it all day.

I don't know what has tripped my brain lately, but this sort of artwork has been on my mind. I have some parts from the Chevelle that we're not using and won't need, plus the other automotive gack that gearheads accumulate like the crap magnets that we are. A few weeks ago I finally cut up the old ten bolt rear end out of the Chevelle after letting it sit out on the back stoop for a couple of years. For a very long time I had planned on using those tubes for a sculpture like the one I'd seen at the Children's Museum.

Thing is, I didn't know what I was talking about. I mean, I had no name for it, no frame of reference. I kept telling people, "I'm going to use this stuff to make one of those ball things like I saw at the Children's Museum." Fortunately for me, I have some cool friends, and my buddy Jay kept talking to me about it. A couple of nights ago out of nowhere he sends me some Youtube links like this:



Is this stuff incredible or WHAT??!!! The guy's name is Eddie Boes, and he does incredible work. He's an engineer, and he brings together his engineering skills and some pretty fantastic creative abilities to make these outstanding moving sculptures utilizing rolling balls.

After viewing this and following up on his web site info, I was off and running. I looked through his entire web site, sent him some geeky fanatical-sounding email, and then whipped through a bunch of other sites on the net looking for more info. I found out that what I'd been talking about is called "kinetic art," and that the style I was specifically interested in is called "rolling ball sculpture," or RBS. I found a bunch of other sites with creations made from a number of different materials including wood, plastic, metal, and even Legos!

After work I had dinner with Jay and I ended up talking about my idea some more. He offered some other thoughts, and with all that in mind I decided to do some real world research and see what I had and what I was going to need.

I need: a set of billiard balls. I can get some used off of Ebay for between fifteen and thirty bucks. I may try and score some used ones near to home, or even new ones, as half the price of a cheap set of billiards is the shipping charges. There's no getting around that they're plain heavy.

What I have: good junk! I wandered out to the garage with a tape measure, note pad, and pen. Check out what I found.



My Chevelle ten bolt axle tubes. These were a given for the project, and the pieces that really, um, started the ball rolling? (Sorry.)



A cheesy old front motorcycle fender off of my Triumph chopper (oh, I miss her sometimes...sniff) that would make a pretty good turn for the sculpture. I'll have to remove some bracketry, same as with the axle tubes.



These are brake drums off of the same rear end. I may use them. I'm not decided on these at all yet. They do make a wonderful noise when they're hit, though, and that's a good thing!



The coup de grace! I forgot all about having this thing! It's the drive shaft out of a '71 Dart Swinger four door that my buddy got from his grandpa when we were in high school. After he wore it out he turned it over to my younger brother, who pulled the motor. This thing has nearly four feet of tubing to it - that's eight feet if cut in two pieces lengthwise. Plenty of material!

Regulation billiards measure 2 1/4" inches. The axle tubes are 2 1/2", the driveshaft 3", and the fender a generous 4 1/2". I'll have no problem using any of these.

Currently I guess some immediate problems are that I don't know how to weld for crap. The tubes are cast iron, which I guess requires brazing, but I want to use them anyway somehow. The rest of the stuff is mild steel (well, not the drums - cast iron again), so those pieces should be okay for general welding purposes...although that fender is chromed. Hmmm...

I need more spare parts. I need welding knowledge and practice. Uh...I need a welder (a real one, as my buzzbox is crap). I need a few more tools. I need some space. I need to start planning a specific design (all I know now is that it will have a chain lift). I want it to have sound elements to it, too. It's going to make noise in some way or other, probably in more way than one.

Stay tuned. I think it's going to be an interesting summer...