13 hours in, only 35 to go

I've been told I have a talent for identifying the worst potential outcome in a situation, as well as a problem with always voicing it.  That's fine by me, at least most of the time. Though sometimes it can be a little bit of a burden.

Take yesterday, for instance: all it took to send me fleeing the shop was a little bit of zinc residue.  See, I was tack welding the fuel sender together.  I inspected one of the points I had hit and saw a canary yellow residue I'd not encountered before.  My train of thought was pretty much,

"Huh.  Interesting.  I haven't seen that before.  I wonder what I just made.

WAIT. 

I HAVEN'T SEEN THAT BEFORE.

I WONDER WHAT THE HELL ELSE I JUST MADE."

At that point, I flew out of the shop like a hurricane while holding my breath (after fumbling with the hook latch that secures the doors, of course).

Now, I was pretty confident I was fine, and nothing dangerous was released.  I thought, "The bad shit gets made when chlorinated hydrocarbons are hit with high current/heat/UV.  You're fine."  Then I thought about the flux I had used to desolder the sender parts and realized that I may have had a weld point that was contaminated (despite cleaning the hell out of everything.  In my experience, once flux heats up, it's like trans fluid and goes wherever it wants).

Hoping to convince myself that all was well, I looked up the MSDS for the flux I used.

"Oh, okay.  Zinc chloride.  Yellow, zinc.  No prob.  

WAIT.

ZINC. 

CHLORIDE.

WHERE THE HELL DID THE CHLORINE GO, AND WHAT DID IT DO WHEN IT TOOK OFF FROM THE ZINC?!?!"

Panicked research ensued for the next 45 minutes or so, while I desperately tried to find something that would explain whether or not I was about to die a horrible death.  Being far from even a remedial level study of chemistry, I looked in the hopes of finding something that would confirm or deny my fears being warranted.  I found nothing.

Eventually, I decided there were two ways to take that lack of discovery: 'yes, you're doomed.  You're not finding anything because nobody has been dumb enough to put themselves in the situation where the question had to be asked', or 'nah, you're good.  You're not finding anything because there's nothing to find'.

I decided to go with the latter, partly because it made me feel better, and partly because it doesn't really matter.  I mean, even if I did get my trench warfare on, what the hell is anyone gonna do about it anyway?  It's not like there's an antidote or anything.

I feel fine, not even any freak out "are you sure this feeling is normal?" kind of stuff.  While that's generally all I'd need to put any concerns to rest, thing about that kind of poisoning is that it can take 48 hours for symptoms to manifest (or longer, sometimes).  I'll start to worry if I start coughing up strawberry yogurt, but for now I have work to do.

Enough about my neurosis, though.  Let's take a look at the sender!  Here's the sender components, ready for desoldering:

And here's everything all reassembled and tacked together.  I realize the welds look like total garbage, but give me a break.  I was wearing a mask with a lense so dark that I literally could not see my hand in front of my face.  I think I did pretty good, considering I was shooting blind.

Oh, I have the radiator in place, too.  It's not final, since a hole needs to be realigned and the brackets painted to keep them from rusting off, but I'm doing that when I paint the exhaust.

Okay.  Got to get this sender done before I hit my deadline.