Back to the Barracuda Project, for better or worse

It's a beautiful (even if a little too hot for my personal taste) here on Cape Cod, as summer officially starts. The crowds have arrived for their first big weekend of fun in the sun, to open their summer homes and enjoy a long weekend. After this weekend, we'll get a few more days of moderate traffic while schools finish up the year, then it'll be bumper to bumper for the next 3 months as visitors wait in long lines to get to the beaches we locals won't see until they're gone. September and October are my absolute favorite months here.

But onto my own personal weekend plans!
Of course, it's just another weekend for me: work, work, work. Although, one of my regular days off is Saturday, so I did have today to play.

By 'play' I mean, finally get out and work on the car! It's been rainy and fairly chilly the past few weeks, as warmer weather teases with a few hours of sunshine here and there...not really weather that entices me to go hang out under a rusty old car.
Today, I had it in my mind to go out at 9 and work til noon. At about 9:30 I got to the task of re-cleaning the rusty parts I had saved from the old drum brakes I was restoring. That's pretty close to being on track for the day, for me, so I was pleased.
The full plan for the day was to spend a few hours on assembling the rear drum brakes and then move on to install the new fuel tank. If I made good time one those, I would check the fitment of the exhaust manifolds on the engine.
So I got to it...starting with my bare brakes.

I gathered all my parts and tools and pulled up a YouTube video on assembly and I was ready to conquer these brakes once and for all!

I bought these new brake shoes at least 3 years ago. I keep the big parts at my work bench in the basement,but I have piles of parts under my desk by our side door, too. It's a real issue for Hubby, as he is eager to have me fix the car and get these boxes out of the house. Today was the day I was going to empty two of the biggest boxes in that room.

I was struggling from the start, as one important part in the video looked different from the part I had kept from my original set up. I googled images to see if there was a diagram showing the parts I did have that might help me, but I came up with nothing. How could that be!?
Begin the intense frustration that so often creeps in when I decide to spend a day on the car. I have learned more about myself and problem solving than I have about actually fixing a car!
The morning took another detour when, after deciding I could use the part I had, I'd just have to be more careful about keeping stuff in place (since the issue was that my part had a notch where the part in the video had a hole for the hooks to go into) I realized I was actually missing an important part of the assembly!
NO NO NO!
I saved everything I'd need! In my mind I could see that I had it, I simply could not remember where I stashed it. Heaven forbid I keep it with all the other parts. After searching every bucket of trash in the carport and every other box still under my desk, I finally thought to check the bits and pieces I still had in the shed.

Under gardening knee pad, the folded up tablecloth I used as a drop cloth when cleaning the axle, an old hot tub filter and a pan of residual oil was a cardboard box...with a few random old brake parts, including the two cables I needed!
I thought for sure that was a sign of good things for the rest of the day.
Instead, I continued to struggle. First trying to figure out how to pull back the spring on the brake cable enough to attach the lever (which I finally did after a lot of F-bombs). Then trying to get the springs in place to hold the shoes on.

But this is not right...(though i now know what I did wrong here)

Stuff just wasn't coming together right, and I just couldn't get anything to sit right. What was I missing? I didn't know and at that point I was an hour over my noon cut off and I had nothing to show for it.

I was sad and broken and ready for a shower.

After a little food and a clean up, I decided to enjoy the sun and some real down time.
So here I am, sitting in my hammock, feeling my computer get hot in the sun...guess I'm a little too long-winded again today.
But before I began my little blogging sesh, I decided to give the internet another go at helping me solve my problem.
And it did.
I found the most helpful video yet, where the guy actually explains that once the spring hook is in the hole, it needs to be rotated 90 degrees in order to match up and fit in the opposite hole.
Why oh why did no one else mention this very important detail? The adjuster lever in his video was still not like mine, but I can see how to make it work, now that I know how the springs fit.

What a silly little thing to keep me from finishing my task today.
It is not late, and I could go out and give it another go, with this new information, but I think I would like to just enjoy the cool breeze and birdsongs instead.