A proud moment...

Today's lead off line really has two veins, one is difficult for me to say and the other is a fun and easy one. Let's go easy first.
My son Jeff and I often have what I call, no boundary brain storming sessions. Meaning that we often talk in hypothetical terms, you hear kids do it all the time. Stuff like " what if we...", and "imagine what would happen if we..." More often than not these thought threads end right there at the end of the sentence. Sometimes however, an idea will mill around and keep popping up like an empty beer can  that you threw over the gunnel of the boat in panic when you saw an approaching RCMP boat while fishing ....Uhhhhh sorry about that... (I have to remember inside voice! INSIDE VOICE!)
Where was I...oh yes, recurring ideas!
So one of the ideas that Jeff and I have batted around for quite some time is to figure out a way we can put Jeff's desire to ride the quad around the house to good use. How can we turn the ride from pure recreation to productive job?(Dad's point of view) Or how can we make the quad do something really cool!(Jeff's point of view)

 Thus enter my first proud parenting moment of the weekend....

 It's bolted to the quad and the rear rider must hold down the engine brake, if he lets go it all shuts down, so its safe!! Really it just looks dangerous!

 Oh sorry it doesn't look dangerous, it looks like back country red neck...where's my banjo??

The second proud moment is one of achievement. To many this will seem like nothing more than child's play. I'm sure there are guys out there that do this kind of thing in a matter of hours as opposed to days, or in my case months! But this is me and this is not my vocation and this is not even something that I 'did all my life'. So sometimes I step back and say "holey crap!! I just did that!" and this was one of those times. I don't often say this, because excessive tooting of your own horn can make you go blind.... no wait that is something else...oh well, same idea... but I am proud of myself!
There, I said it. That wasn't so bad...

 Here we go. This is a shot of the angle between the diff and the tranny from the backside of the drivers side rear wheels.

 The engine is in.Bolted, fully supported on it's mountings! It's been a long while since all the junk was out from under Fillmore's butt!

 Here is from inside the engine compartment looking down at the set up. Those in the know will see that the whole ram air chute is gone. Yes I cut it out. My next step is mounting the rad, which is larger that the original and thus required there to be radical modifications to the existing chute. So I decided to start a new, take the old out and once I have the new rad in place on it's frame then time to re-sheet.

Here is the forward tranny mount....it looks so nice!!