I get the doors mounted, new wheels mounted, repair the front apron, test fit the fenders, do some rust repair, and make brackets for the front bumper. Almost done with stage 2!

It's been a few months since my last post on this project and a lot has happened since then! Including building custom rocker panels that connect the VW door sills to the Miata pinch seams.

I needed to get the size of an mp3 file in the PHP code that I wrote to make XML data for Podcasts.

Bellow is three different functions that achieve that objective, using the curl, get_headers and fopen functions. Hope this helps!

I learned a valuable lesson on the morning after submitting my latest Alexa skill for certification. I had an email from the Alexa certification team letting me know that their tests had failed. I thought that was odd because everything was working perfectly fine when I left work the previous day. I was using AWS Lambda to host the back-end code (within a Node.js environment) and hadn't set up the versioning system because I didn't know about it. [update: I'm now using the AWS CLI to locally host my code and push it to Lambda, which is what I recommend.

You can't really call yourself a Drupal developer if your site is still on Drupal 7. Right? So it was high time for me to upgrade Dannix from D7 to D8. Here's how I did it, the problems I ran into, and what I did to overcome them. 

This was a big milestone for this project.

With the Miata's wheelbase stretched to match the VW's I started prepping the rest of it for the body/chassis swap. And I got the Type 3 Squareback ready as well. 

With the house remodel finally finished after two years, I really wanted to use the work shop as a garage for a project car. But the problem is that the work shop, although it has a garage floor and concrete driveway leading up to it, has a wooden floor that absolutely could not hold up even a small car. I decided to change that!

At the last second, I decided not to use the Super Beetle body for my Miata chassis swap after all, and instead use this beautiful gem: a '67 VW Type 3 Squareback.

After cutting it in half and pulling it apart 6" to get the wheelbase I needed, it was time to put it back together. This meant new driveshaft, a bolt-on extention for the aluminum PPF, extended fuel and brake lines, etc.

Before I can put the Miata that I cut in half back together, I needed to build and install frame rails. Here's how I did it.

Ever wanted to know what it takes to cut a car in half, and then put it back together again? 

My wife (or I guess she was still my fiance at the time) asked me to make the alter for our wedding. Or maybe it's called an arch, or arbor. Whatever it's called, its the big tall thing you stand under at your wedding ceremony.

This is how I made it.

These two cars will become one.

I go further down the rabbit hole, and I've acquired my victim: a '73 Super Beetle.

I've done lost my mind this time. 

How to overhaul a kitchen, from floor to ceiling. Or, "how to polish a turd." Everything we did in 6 months: All new plumbing. All new electrical wiring and outlets. All new ceiling lights. All new appliances. New flooring. New cabinets and countertops. New garbage disposal and added a switch to control it. The interior doors where all renovated. Backsplash tile and paint. Removed the ugly AC unit that was in the wall (not the window, the wall) and patched up the drywall. Added a heater duct from the furnace to the kitchen (it used to be heated with baseboard heaters). Knocked down a closet that was taking up space for the kitchen table. Range hood vented through the roof. Custom cubby in the wall for the fridge. New baseboard trim. And more....

From the beginning, Logan and I knew we wanted wooden countertops in the kitchen. Thankfully, they were also fairly affordable compared to grantie or a similar stone countertop. And because they're made out of solid wood, I could do all the work of cutting and fitting them myself. Which is exactly what I did.

We ripped out the living room carpet on the first day we got the keys to the home in December 2016. But we were't fully finished renovating the living room until May 2018. How did we do it? Stay tuned and find out on this exciting new episode of This Old Fixer Upper! 

An overheating issue really had me stumped for a very long time. It had the characteristic of a mild blown head gasket (it would only run hot on the highway, no other problems), but non of the physical symptoms - no coolant visible in the oil, no oil in the coolant, no smoke in the exhaust, compression was great on all cylinders (cold engine), it passed the combustion "block test" both with the rental kit from a parts store and when I took it to a local garage with an emissions test machine, and it passed the cooling system pressure test. Finally, I sent an oil sample to a lab and they said there was signs of coolant in the oil - not a lot but enough for concern. Off with the head!