So, with the engine and transmission built, I moved them out of the way, covering them with a sheet and wheeled the body into my shop. This will be a total rebuild. By the time I'm done, I will have degreased, media blasted or replaced every single part on this car.

Although the body needs rust repair in several spots, generally its in good shape. The previous owner gave it a very poor paint job, tho - one of those where you just put masking tape over the bare minimum and give it a quick spray w/o much prep work. So, I need to strip all the paint down to the bare metal and cut out the rusted sheet metal and weld in new panels. To do this, the car must be completely disassembled. Interior, suspension, everything off. The easiest way to do this is by putting the car up on a rotisserie. A rotisserie, just like the one you use on your BBQ, attaches to the front and rear of the car, suspending it in air allowing you to rotate the car freely.

So, after removing the interior of the car, I welded together a rotisserie for it. Once up on the rotisserie, it was easy to flip it over and remove all the brakes, suspension, steering et cetera. All that's left now is the bare chassis.

That was about where I got to by the end of the summer. A couple other things took up my free time over the summer that slowed things down (building a shed, helping Anna paint the house). Since then, I've repaired the rust on the chassis by cutting out the rusted parts and welding in parts cut from cars that were being stripped.

I have now moved the chassis out of my shop and have it bundled up for the winter. I've lined up a guy who is going to sandblast the chassis, but I'm not sure if I'll do that this winter as I need to be able to prime it immediately after stripping the paint, and I'm not sure if I want to do that in my shop in the winter. Its difficult to get good ventilation in my shop for painting - I can do the epoxy priming outside next spring/summer.

But, I have all the suspension/brakes/steering parts to refinish this winter. Lots of media blasting and painting that should keep me busy.

That's the update.

Since I added this blog as one of my websites on Facebook, I thought I should at least put a post up to say what I've been doing. I see my last post was dated over a year ago!

Ok, so last year I wrote two applications - iPodifier and AnalogWhole. iPodifier is used to automatically convert TV content for the iPod, and AnalogWhole can be used to remove DRM from music. Both apps are doing ok now. I do absolutely nothing with AnalogWhole now. The program works and gets downloaded a lot, but after the online help forum for it got overloaded with spam, I gave up trying to keep it clean. iPodifier is doing great and I regularly monitor its online forum to help out users. There are some things I should update in iPodifier, but it seems to be working fairly well, so I'm not touching it.

Last fall, I found I was spending way too much time in front of a computer, so I began to look around for a more hands-on project. I hadn't done anything really mechanical since rebuilding my motorcycles a couple years back (Kawasaki GPz-750 and a ZX-11). I remembered reading an article some time back about a guy who rebuilt a Porsche 911. I did a bit of research and found that there is a great online community around the Porsche 911. Also, 911's have been appreciating in price nicely, so it looked like the effort put into rebuilding one could be realized if I wanted to sell it.

I began looking around for a distressed 911 for cheap and after about a month of searching, found on in Concord, New Hampshire. The guy selling it was a bit shady and had had the 911 up on ebay. His ebay ad had very little info, and a pic of the car from a deceiving angle that made it look pretty good. The car sold to a guy from Germany, but b/c he didn't have a title for the car (not req'd in NH), the guy from Germany couldn't import it, so the deal fell thru. I went to see the car and found that it had some pretty severe rust on it, and the engine/transmission was pulled out and sitting beside it with only a flimsy tarp doing little to protect it from the elements.

Perfect - a real basket case that I could get for a good price. So, here's the car as I purchased it. Anthony and I dragged it home on with car dolly. There were no real surprises - it was in tough shape, but everything was there and I got it for a very good price.

I covered the car with a tarp and pulled the engine/transmission into my workshop. From ~Jan-Mar I worked on the engine. First time I'd seen a Porsche engine before, but since there is a great online community, technically, it was not too difficult. Because it was very rusted/dirty it took a lot of cleaning and sand/media blasting. I made a sandblasting hood which turned out to be very useful. After I completely disassembled the engine, I send the critical bits (i.e. heads, cams) to a shop in CA for machining and worked away at cleaning up the other parts. I won't bore you with the details, but in the end, it came out pretty nicely.

After finishing the engine, I did the same with the transmission. First disassembling it, cleaned all the parts, sourced replacements, then re-assembled it.

More in the next post...

We bought a laser engraving machine at work. Althought it will cut a variety of materials, it cuts acrylic especially well. I slapped together a simple iPod dock using it. It is basically three 1/4" acrylic pieces assembled using stainless-steel press-fit pins in each corner.
The top piece has a cutout to accomodate the standard iPod dock adapter that comes with every iPod.

The middle piece has a slot cut so a standard iPod docking cable slides in. This cut needed to be made on an angle. This angle cut was made by propping up one side the acrylic piece while laser cutting it.

The bottom piece has a slot cut to allow the docking cable cord to lay in.

Pretty simple, eh? This is just a prototype that took me about 1/2hr to design, cut and assemble. I'll probably put a few of these together for some co-workers.

If anyone wants detailed drawings, lemme know and I'll post them. Although I used a CO2 laser engraving machine, this could be made easily using a standard mill, or even a drill and saw.

If you haven't already, head over to www.ipodifier.com. I will be releasing the first version of iPodifier (the replacement for SageToiPod) shortly.

This will likely be my last post here regading SageToiPod. Once iPodifier is released, I suggest all SageToiPod users switch to using it as I will no longer be supporting SageToiPod. iPodifier has all the same features that SageToiPod has and then some. iPodifier is a complete re-write of SageToiPod that is built to accept video from a variety of sources, including SageTV.

I look forward to seeing you at iPodifer.

Geoff

Ok, just to show that I haven't been sitting on my ass doing nothing, here's some screenshots of the new version of the software.

• Screenshot 1
• Screenshot 2
• Screenshot 3
• Screenshot 4
  

As you can see, the new name of the software is iPodifier. You might also notice that I have a google Adsense add embedded in the software. I'm just playing around with that now. Not sure if it will be in the final version.

In addition to re-writing the entire program and re-implementing all the old features of SageToiPod in the new software, the user interface is as you see, juiced up a bit. You'll notice also from the screen shots that you can now use different transcoding options for different video sources.

One thing that I want to add to the software is a new feature - the ability to create a video podcast of any show. I'll explain more about that later.

For now, if you are interested in testing the new version, send me an email. I have registered the domain name ipodifier.com, so you can keep checking there for a website.

I'm a bit burned out now, as this re-write has taken quite a lot of my time. I now need to focus on making a website. If anyone out there has website building skills and some time on their hands, let me know as I could use a hand with it.

Stay tuned...

Again, sorry for the long delay between posts. I am busy working on a complete re-write of the SageToiPod software. It will not be called SageToiPod anymore, as it will no longer be dedicated only to SageTV, but hopefully will import lots of other video sources as well (i.e. bittorrent, Tivo, Windows Media Center et cetera). I have made a lot of progress recently and it is looking very cool. I have completely re-written the engine as well as the UI. The basic engine is working and I'm now integrating it with the new UI. I hope that in a week or two I'll have a first release. Stay tuned for the new name and website for the software.

I finished v1.76d of the SageToiPod sofware and several people have beta tested it. I hesitate posting it, tho, as it includes some of the features that will be in the new version. I'd rather just wait and post the new, rewritten application. Email me if you can't wait that long and I'll send you a link to v1.76d of SageToiPod.

Sorry for the long delay between posts. Th next version will be comming shortly. This will likely be the last version before I do a major revision. This version is a start towards moving the SageToiPod application beyond just supporting SageTV. This version will allow you to specify the type of video each source has (i.e. TV show, Movie, Music Video et cetara).

Because some changes were made in the way the videos are organized in iTunes, you will need to delete all entries of videos it iTunes and have SageToiPod re-add them. This doesn't mean you need to re-encode them, just delete the reference to them in iTunes. I'll explain this more when I release this next version.

Anyone wanting to test this new version, email me (geoff.gerhardt@gmail.com).

Geoff

I am working on the next version of the software. I am moving away from it being a dedicated application for SageTV and more towards an application that can funnel a variety of video sources into the iPod. I will be adding the ability to indicate whether a video source is either a TV Show, Music Video, Movie, Home Video or Other. If it is designated as a TV show, playlists will be generated for each show. It will be able to take TV shows from any source (i.e. TiVo or downloaded BitTorrent TV content) as long as the naming convention is Showname - EpisodeName.xxx. If the source is designated as a Music Video, Movie, Home Movie or Other, it will be put into the appropriate playlist (playlists for each will be created).

I will also be adding the ability for users to specify all encoding parameters for FFMPEG. This will allow those non-iPod users to adjust the encoding parameters specific for their application.

Let me know if you have any other ideas.

Geoff