In the bible it says "When the eye is sound the whole body is sound." I wear glasses of the polyfocal type. Unreliability, Numeric Control and the Concept of Buick In my youngest years my father got his paycheck from the President of the school board directly by walking over to his veterinary office across from the high school. This old veterinarian owned a Buick straight eight which I later heard he would warm up in winter by placing a cement block on the gas pedal and going back in the house to finish breakfast. When I was in high school and approaching graduation I happened one winter to be passing a car on a road between snow heaped high in banks by the county graders. As I pulled beside the car my car suddenly began to miss andmake a popping sound through the intake. Worse yet a car had rounded the curve ahead and there was no longer room with these two factors to complete the pass. I was almost beyond the car I was passing but lacked power to finish. Dropping bak would have taken too long and requied somehow knowing exactly when to pull back into the other lane without hitting whatever unknown was behind him now. So I dove for the snowbank on the far side. With snow from the three to four foot high snowbank pouring over the hood and around the sides the car slowed dramatically and son I was able to reenter the now empty lanes of the road. The shaft was suddenly too short. Discipline demanded an answer. A couple of years passed and I was nearly ready to graduate from college. I had noticed an old heavy transmission converted to Ford torque tube in a friends garage. He said he thought it was a 1937 buick transmission. It had a big tall shaft sticking up for the floor shift. The next year had been column shift or "three-on'the-tree" as we now called it. I had broken several 1937-1939 Ford floor shift transmission and even one with 1948 gears and brass synchronizers in my Chevrolet powered 1948 Ford. I asked him how much he wanted for this oddity. He did not want to sell his mechanical art. It seemed to settle and issue in his soul. I persisted occasionally when I saw him in town. Finally he sold me the transmission and I ordered the other end of the problem from Warshawsky's in Chicago. Soon a brand new Chevrolet to early Ford adapter in cast aluminum arrived to replace the one centrifuged out by ball bearing from a drag strip falure of the input shaft bearing. with it in a separate box was a fine piece of workmanship-an early Ford to early Buick adapter. It was no plate with bolt holes to match but a complete bellhousing with the correct two ends. Perhaps I had one ace in this. I had gotten a "disciple". The local TV installation repariman had replaced the failed International engine in his pickup with a Buick V-8 and made his own plate adapter. There is no mechanical reasoning that cannot be conveyed in a conversation and I had seen the installation and even ridden in it. When I put the parts together with the wooden pilot bearing alignment tool also included I felt rewarded. I started the engine and let it idle then put it in gear. It did not drive the transmission. Huh! So I got under and figured out that the little bellhousing was too deep. The input shaft did not reach. I summoned my roomates from the Engineering Mechanics Laboratory and after some consultation we concluded that a few passes throuhg the Bridgeport milling machine would leave enough meat to conclude this faux pas. That was solved until one day I had to push my friends Ford six up an incline to get it started. My clutch was slipping disastrously!! How could that be? It was a 3000 pound pressure Weber with steel face against a Velvetouch sintered iron springless disk and a plasma sprayed bronze on aluminum Shieffer flywheel. The answer was soon seen on the ground. The front bearing of the Buick transmission was leaking oil onto the clutch. We tried sevral fixes from replacing the leather seal to macining a place for two leather seals and concluded the engine turned the wrong way and somehow the gears were pumping oil faster than the slinger could exclude. So I had to remove that assembly and install a 1963 Corvette Borg warner aluminum case 4-speed with 2.20:1 low gear. Everything here was stock and the driveshaft was even long enough to a 1955 Chevrolet open rear. I did not split the wishbone but only removed the bottom of the x-frame and made it removeable with bolts instead of rivets. You would think this would conclude the arrangement with Bucik. He was an inventor and a scotsman. In a little more than a year I was In California and proceeding down Lakewood Boulevard checking to see if the guards had openned the gate into the overflow executive lot. I glanced left over the center fence saw the gate was not openned and then as I looked ahead saw the traffic was halted in my lane not moving with the green light. The secretaries apparantly had not chosen to proceed forward into the regular lot and were going to wait for the closed gate to be openned by someone later. I was suddenly too long. The sinter iron brakes on my 1966 Chevelle SS-396 soon had the extra wide U.S. Royal red stripe tires howling in protest. I considered a jog to the right but something prevented it though there was no car there nor behind me. I had to stop in my own lane and that proved to be not quite enough. I bumped a Volswagen hard enough to bend it's bumper down but not hard enough to move it. The front of my car was bent but moveable. I got to meet the Director of BioMedical's daughter and we exchanged insurance facts. This then led to my second Buick adapter. In 1973 just before the Yom Kippur War I decided that the engine in my 1967 chevrolet truck had to come out. I had dropped a crescent wrench and nicked a radiator tube. Instead of getting it repaired I had used Bar's Leaks. Gradually the lack of Prestone had caused the Welch core plugs in the block to rust out from the aggressive saline water of California. The engine had given 120,000 miles of service and did not burn oil but was always underpowered for even a pickup when loaded with motorcycles on the route through the mountains to Palmdale, Lancaster and Mojave. I had had a bad incident with the SS-396 in Mexico when the Pemex spark knocked when passing a car with four passengers so I wanted a more docile yet powerful engine. A Riviera or Wildcat engine seemed right. I had the mild tune of small exhausts and a four barrel carburetor and 430 instead of merely 396 cubic inches. It was two years newer and had better smog controls by being a mid-price engine. I had a tough search for an adapter though since no Buick cars of 1969 had stick shift and I had a wide ratio truck four speed. I researched a bit and found some Skylark 400 cubic inch cars had been fitted with four speeds for drag racing in NHRA. I ordered a stock flywheel and pilot bearing for one of those which was similar. At Reath Automotive I found a listing for an adapter in the catalog but the clerk did not want to sell it. Putting engines in odd combinations was forbidden by the Air Resources board and EPA. It could have been a big fine like $50,000.00 or such. We decided to try the manufacturer. He was a local concern Striped Assed Ape Performance Engineering SAAPE. He thouhg he could do it and was proud to show off his new numerically controlled tools. The adapter would be machined to one ten thousands tolerance. I decided to buy it. When I openned the supposedly Chrysler New Process transmission to rebuild it what did my eyes behold but a synchronizer almost identical to the one in the 1937 of some yeares yore. It had a broken cage and no synchronizer for low gear as produced. Here it was living in a four speed case. I had some difficulty fitting bolts to the transmission mounting flanges in one position as the clearance was just too tight for a hex bolt. I found the requisite allen recessed head bolts at Fasteners Incorporated and proceeded. Proceeded to crack the adapter!! The shaft was too long!! Good Grief!! Machined to exacting precision tolerances by NC machines the fit had never been checked on a real installation and was about 1/2 inch off. I was dejected. How could this happen twice? I would never be suckered like this again. Meanwhile I packed up my pride in a grease rag and took it to a heliarc shop to repair the crack then to a machine shop to remve the excess weld bead. I had one important transaction to undertake. I located Henry's axles a machine shop that shortened rear axle shafts to create narrowed dragster rear ends. I had seen a Lincoln transmission shaft that had been cut and welded to shorten it to fit into a 1948 Continental break cleanly. I needed it cut resplined and the pilot reestablished. This was a really big and expensive job for an indeendent firm. He was busy with all sorts of production jobs now. Finally after two months I had my shaft. End of story I suppose. It gives you some idea why I am so singular in ranting about accuracy vs. precision and ultimately choosing something today I would call "magic." I have been down the road of pilots who home and navigators who extrapolate and fix and even EWO's who tune. Somewhere in there I found that the ordinary thing called an error budget can get you in jail for "working with error." I guess that is why I like nudes and they like me.