Apology Letter

It's time for me to get rid of what's been bothering me these last few weeks.

I would like to send my sincere apologies to all my dear readers out there, no matter how small you are. You may expect that my blog would be filled with DIYs and How-Tos related to engine conversion of 4A-GE to a Charmant, i.e me doing all the actual work myself and share you stories of the work. Instead, you find me moving The Dog from one workshop to another, letting other people do all the dirty yet fun work and missing out on exciting stuff i should be sharing with you, stuff found only if i do it myself. For this, i truly apologize.

I would like you all to know that i wouldn't hesitate to do the work if my full-time job hadn't interfered. Maybe i won't be doing the engine installation as i don't have the tools and hard-wares to do it but at least i would be happy to do the wiring and total body cabling if given the opportunity.

I am not sure you'd be interested but allow me to explain about my job and how it prevents me from doing the engine conversion myself..

I am a GSM RF Optimization Engineer and basically what i do is optimize the performance of cellular base stations. By the way, RF stands for Radio Frequency. Have you experienced dropped calls or noise problem when talking on your cellphone? Well what i do is achieve the lowest possible number of dropped calls and obtain the best voice quality during mobile calls so that the subscriber can talk comfortably on their phones. This requires me to actually visit the base station towers and conduct signal strength test, voice quality measurement etc. What's a base station tower, you ask? Here you go..

Familiar sight? Well if you live where there's cellular operator service, you're bound to see one that looks like that around the neighborhood. Here's a shot not all of you have seen; a view taken from the tower top, just behind the antenna which transmits signal to your cellphone.

Anyway, since base stations are practically everywhere around Indonesia, it goes to show that i have to be anywhere where there's base stations to optimize. As for now, my contract orders me to work in Lampung area with me stationed in Tandjung Karang district. And where's The Dog? It's about 35 minutes of flight or 8 hours of land-sea-land travel from where i work: my beloved hometown Jakarta. I have to cross a channel because Lampung and Jakarta are on different islands, Lampung is in Sumatra and Jakarta is in Java. Here's something that's worth more than a thousand words.

"35 minutes of flight?! That's peanuts! You can go back to Jakarta every weekend and do the work", you may say. I certainly can but then i'd be writing my blog from a hospital, resting due to exhaustion. Not to mention the money i'd spend on airplane tickets which cost me about USD70 both ways.

Hopefully now you understand why i can't do the actual engine conversion. I do apologize for this. I have to make a living and to prevent me from getting stressed out from working, i started the Dog project. Doing researches on Charmants and 4A-GE, planning out, hunting for stuff, buying engine and body parts, etc; those activities gave me some timeout from this otherwise stressful and deadline-packed work.

I can only try me best to show you what SHOULD be and what HAVE been done to swap a 4A-GE to Charmant. I might not be able to warn you of any obstacles you might find from doing similar conversion but i will certainly share if i find one. As always, comments and critics are always welcomed.