Surprise!  I'm baaack!  I've been having too much fun with Manny to bother telling Y'All about it.  I can't believe it's over a week since I posted -- and that I've been here for 10 days already.  These photos of Manny & Deo's place should explain how easy it is to forget:

That's my GMC at the left in Manny's driveway.  The shop's to the right of the other GMC, on which he's installing 1-Ton and Manny Brakes.

Here's the view from the window of my GMC; how could it be any better?:

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And here's a view of San Jose from their back yard:

With the Honda's brakes repaired, I've been able to hang around in Manny's shop enjoying myself.  After a few days, he even let me play in the grease a little bit.  And finally, after much cajoling, he actually let me install some bolts and turn some wrenches.  He even let me install the chain cover bolts in 3 freshly rebuilt transmissions and even torque them down!  Can't tell you how honored I was, 'cause he don't like nobody fooling with his stuff! :-)

Whatever you've heard about Manny being a workaholic, it's true.  Since Ive been here, he's finished rebuilding 3 transmissions and completely rebuilt 3 more.  All but two of those have been delivered, in one

way or another.  On top of that, he's packed and shipped at least one 1-Ton kit, rebuilt 10 sets of lower A-arms for 1-Ton kits, modified drawings for several parts, ordered the material for and placed shop orders for those parts, checked into the shop's progress, entertained me, and worked on more upgrades.  Dawn to dark seems to be his schedule.  I'll tell you GMCers more about all that on GMCNet, many who follow this blog won't be interested.  But here's some of the in-progress work:


A-arms with old tips cut off.

Here, the first 1/2 of the new tip has been welded on and the second 1/2 is about to be:

All finished and ready for lucky GMCers:

Finally, last Thursday, he and Deo took off for a family GMC outing for the Father's Day weekend.  I'm sure they had a great time with their kids and 8 grandkids.  I chose to stay here and catch up on chores like cleaning the coach and doing laundry (and catching up on my rest).  But I did get out and do a little sightseeing.  This photo was taken from the road a couple of miles past and above their home:

Just a few miles further, there's almost complete wilderness (sometimes interrupted by the hillside mansions of some of the Silicon Valley nouveau riche).  It's surprising how easily one can get away from the 1,000,000  or so folks in San Jose.

That's enough for now.  We've got a big day ahead tomorrow.

Ken H.