What did you do this week (and weekend)?

I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once at my local theater. I had a great time and I recommend the movie to everyone here. It's witty, exciting, and moving, with a creative and distinctive aesthetic.

ElixirConf EU. Travelled to London to attend, which is neat since it's my first time here where it wasn't just for a transfer at Heathrow. Company went all out and got us a great hotel near the center of London. The people are mostly nice, and it's fun just walking around and taking everything in.

I'm planning to spend the weekend doing standard touristy shit now that the conference finished about an hour ago.

I need to write up a more detailed trip report, but I bike camped the Virginia Creeper trail Saturday and Sunday. It was a blast!

I did my hobby electronics stuff. I am so happy that I had some success. I have not done this stuff in ages and I've got a lot to learn about how circuits work.

Hi everyone!
It's a million degrees outside!
Which is hot no matter your chosen temperature scale!
You like to sweat?
Of course you do!
So get your ass in the shop and start sweating!
Drink plenty of fluids, try not to die!
And while you do so curse the name of the city inspectors who still haven't done their damn job that would allow you to have an insulated and air conditioned workshop by now!

Being that I knew I had ordered a new old stock (called NOS in the parts world, but not the kind the kids talk about after watching F&F) outer tie rod after coming across it randomly at a very low price, but couldn't remember where I put it to see which side I still needed to order, I didn't remove the tie rods last time. Now that I have all the parts, time to do so. Grab the outer rod with a set of vise grips, the inner rod with a wrench, and spin it off. As with all the other ball joint ends, these boots are also torn.

With the outer tie rods off, you'll need to remove the grease/dust boots to access the inner rods. The outside opening to the boot is held in place with a spring clamp, squeeze and remove. The inside is held with a screw clamp with these tiny little screws that you're destined to strip when attempting to remove. Think it might be your lucky day when the first one comes out cleanly, realize the universe is a cruel (or at least indifferent) mistress when you strip the second, exactly as predicted. So you'll need to cut the clamp off, which will also result in cutting the boot, therefore compromising it's ability to keep dust out and grease in. Check the price of new boots online, see that while one side has plenty in stock, there can be is only one in stock anywhere you can find for the other side (also NOS), so order it immediately before some poor fool doing the same thing you are sees it and orders it first.

Once the boot is off you'll have access to the inner tie rods. There are flats on the steering rack and on the tie rod to grip with adjustable wrenches to remove, but first you'll need to de-stake the locking washer that sits between the two. This keeps the tie rod from rotating while driving, if it was allowed to do so at best it'd mess up your alignment, at worst it would completely detach from the steering rack and you'd no longer have control of that side of the car. I probably don't have to tell you what would happen if you're driving along and one of your wheels decides it wants to point perpendicular to the other. These are actually in pretty good shape and could have stayed on the car, but I'm in full "replace everything" mode and since this is being turned from someone's winter beater into one of my fun cars, the parts I'm replacing will likely never have to be replaced again for the life of the car. Since these are in good shape and having an incredibly strong, threaded, ball joint could come in handy for other projects I'll set these aside in my scrap pile (don't look at me like that, I'm not a hoarder, I'll use it some day!).

Grab the new inner tie rods and chuckle to yourself about there being a holographic security seal on one end of the box, but clear tape on the other... That'll surely stop someone from tampering with inner tie rods? The end of the steering rack has this slot machined into it, that slot receives these tabs on the locking washer in combination with the flats on the tie rod that you stake down after installation to keep it from rotating off and you becoming a smudge on a highway barrier. Once in, grease the steering rack and run it from lock to lock several times to distribute. Grease, run rack back and forth, repeat until the shaft doesn't come out cleaner than it went in (aka you know that the inner housing is full). The "correct" way to grease the steering rack is to disassemble it entirely so you can fill it from the inside. This requires "special service tools" I don't have and I'm not sure Toyota even makes any longer, along with springs that want to fly out during disassembly only to disappear into the æther, so I'm not doing that. If I had the rubber boots I had ordered an hour prior to this photo I'd have also filled them with grease and installed them as extra insurance, but I didn't, so I didn't.

While you're at the front suspension look around for what you can do while waiting for grease boots to arrive and other things (more on this later) to be possible. Control arm being the one thing you can do, so grab those, make sure you have the right correct side for where you are, reference the photos you took before disassembly just in case, and then install in the reverse of disassembly, by shoving it in place and driving the one long bolt into the captive nut inside the frame rail. As you're torqueing it to spec, say a little prayer to whatever elder eldritch god you prefer that it doesn't do the dreaded tight-tighter-loose process, because if it does that means the captured nut inside the frame rail is no longer captured and you need to cut into the frame rail to get to it. Who ever said your hobbies should be stress-free?

The relatively recent decision to just replace everything means that the rear brakes need tending to. Disc brakes were developed before drum brakes, but various issues (primarily metallurgy and road conditions) prevented large scale adoption for several decades and by that time drum brake manufacturing was so widespread and commonplace (read: cheap) that unless absolutely needed/the customer was willing to pay for the upgrade most cars by the 80's still had rear drum brakes. Thanks to physics, when you brake the weight of the vehicle shifts forward onto the front suspension, so most of the braking effort is done by the front brakes, so the rears aren't as important/doing as much work/need the more expensive upgrade of disc brakes. As a result on just about any vehicle the rear brakes last significantly longer than the fronts and this is even more true of drum brakes as the brake bias tends to be even more heavily weighted toward the front.
Over the 300,000-ish mile lifespan of the Tercel so far the rear brakes have probably been serviced/replaced once. I can tell because the parts aren't original Toyota, but also have wear to show they hadn't been replaced for several years prior to my ownership. Either way, it's all going to be new now and decades of brake dust, rust, and grease needs to go. Disc brakes are pretty simple; a hydraulic piston pushes a pad against a rotating disc all in an open environment where the stuff that causes problems can just go away. Comparatively, drum brakes are an enclosed hellscape where nearly everything remains trapped inside a dirty jungle of levers, springs, brackets, ratchet mechanisms, shoes, and a hydraulic cylinder. And this is the simplest version of a "modern" drum brake. Remove it all, clean it up, take a photo, and clean it some more because it's still crusty as hell. Replace the parts, reassemble, realize you still did it wrong, disassemble, reassemble again. These photos are a little truncated because servicing drum brakes requires, at a minimum, three hands at all times, and four when reassembling. Thankfully, I'm secretly Goro and got it all done.

Now that hardware has come in, it's time to enlarge the lower strut mount to fit the new bolts for the new struts. When attempting this realize that the tiny this-will-hold-me-over-until-the-shop-is-ready drill press you have can only accommodate 1/2" (13mm) drill bits and you need to make a 14.5mm hole. And even if it could fit the drill bit, the drill press isn't tall enough for the hub anyway.
So call it a day on the Tercel, go to your garage, and figure out how to rewire the VFD on the back of the CNC milling machine you purchased and didn't intend on learning how to use until it was in the workshop, so that it no longer requires a computer interface to operate. Be stressed during this process because it's your first time, you don't fully understand all of the terms in the manual, and anything that could possibly break while you're attempting to figure this out has a price tag that starts in the four figure range. Realize that you're only stressed because it was the first time, you actually know more than you let yourself believe, and by being methodical you succeeded.
You can now drill holes in the hub.
Or you could if the drill chuck you have for the mill didn't also max out at 1/2".
Go inside, take a shower, order a 5/8" drill chuck for the mill, have some whiskey.