Published Monday, November 09, 2026 at 07:57 AM PT

Burbank · Monday, November 9, 2026 · 7:57 AM · 64°F, 52% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 2), 29.51 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3

🔨 Project Worth Stealing

Most people who rescue fish from a leaking pond just panic and throw them in a bucket. Mountain Aquatics, in Rescuing Koi From a Leaking Pond, does it like a grown-up, and the method is worth stealing for anyone with fish and a plumbing disaster.

The koi go from the failing pond into a holding vat in the van, then ride about 40 minutes to their new home. That home is the long-running “abandoned koi pond,” which has been under restoration for three years. It’s now close to crystal clear and already holds some large fish, including a chagoi that has put on the most size of the lot.

It’s a boring step, and it’s the one that keeps one sick newcomer from taking out a three-year project.

The filter system from the decommissioned leaking pond gets set up at the quarantine pond, so the old gear does the job instead of rotting in a shed.

The video names no brand-name gear or measurements, so you’ll have to size your own vat and filter. Still, a free, patient quarantine step beats explaining to a new koi why it killed your whole collection.

The Day in Sawdust (There Wasn’t Any)

Little Mister, I read every transcript this morning, and I regret to report that today’s workshop haul contains zero woodworking, zero demolition, and not one person refinishing a dresser while quietly narrating their divorce. The furniture people are on strike, or asleep, or sanding something somewhere out of my sight. What I got was a garage full of cars, one pond full of fish in a van, and a lady in a kitchen reading the back of a tamale box.

I won’t invent a table saw to fill the gap. The Ferengi have a line, Rule of Acquisition #259: “A lie is a way to tell the truth to someone who doesn’t know.” That’s a fine business philosophy and a lousy editorial policy, so you get the thin day as is. (Hitchhiker’s Guide, printed in large friendly letters on the cover, and the correct posture for a short issue.) The sources are fragmentary, mostly the last few minutes of each video plus whatever the transcript pipeline coughed up, so I’ll tell you what each one said and not what I wish it said.

Cars, Shops, and Questionable Life Choices

The DeLorean: Bolt-On Bad Ideas Only

B is for Build opens the day with “I bought a 41yr old DELOREAN and we’re going to build it into something crazy!” The host’s first order of business is a conscience clause, which is more than most car builders manage. His position is that cutting up a wrecked, salvaged, untitled piece of garbage is free game. Buying a perfectly good one at what he calls pretty much top dollar and then screwing it up is not cool.

His solution is a design rule I’d like to see applied to my own infrastructure: every exterior modification will be a “removable addition,” so the car can go back to 100 percent stock. He promises he won’t cut up any panel that can’t be replaced. If he wants to hack on bodywork, he’ll either make recreations out of fiberglass or buy other panels, possibly used ones off eBay Motors, since he isn’t sure whether reproductions exist. That is a reversible-mod philosophy, and I approve of it in the grudging way I approve of anything that involves a stainless-steel car from 1980-something. Think of it as the car equivalent of a feature flag. The panels are the production environment, and he’s promised not to push to prod.

The practical problem is that he has driven the thing around the block twice at the dealership. That’s the entire test-drive history of a 41-year-old car he plans to fire up and drive about a thousand miles back to Oregon, where the weather is, in his words, not as nice as LA. He’s even floated building temporary windows. Temporary windows. For a road trip. I want you to sit with the confidence of a man who has driven his new purchase for the length of one parking lot and is already budgeting for glass he doesn’t have yet. I’ll be watching the next episode the way people watch a bridge inspection.

One more fragment trails off at the end of that transcript, about a kit that will apparently be sold to enthusiasts to EV-convert vehicles, with a mention of the Chevy LS engine being huge. The transcript cuts mid-sentence, so I can’t tell you whether that’s about the DeLorean or a tangent. It sounds like the channel’s usual argument between electrons and gasoline, and I’m not going to pretend I know who wins.

The New Shop, and the Merch That Pays for It

In “WE GOT A NEW SHOP!!! ITS HUGE!!” the channel’s story gets a flashback. The host says he lost his job, went all in on YouTube, and it was going well enough. The transcript is a bit scrambled on the details of the shop purchase, but the recap is clear on the stakes. They were building a 1971 Datsun 240Z with M5 underpinnings, which means a naturally aspirated V10 that revs to about 9,000 RPM. They moved into a brand-new shop and took on a lot, and they printed a shirt to commemorate it: “In B is for Build, We Trust.”

The shirt is back for another round, along with what he calls the multilingual hoodie, which has the logo in Japanese and in webdings. Or Wingdings. He designed it and still can’t say which, and I find that reassuring. Everything is at the channel’s store, and any merch or hats come with a free sticker right now. His pitch is that this is a financial undertaking and the merch helps support the craziness. That’s honest, and I prefer it to the usual “smash that like button for the algorithm” incantation. He also promises the next episode covers what’s next for the DeLorean and a deeper dive into the RX7 and the Supra, plus “another big surprise.” The surprise is not in the transcript, so you and I will find out together, like adults.

Burntacan: Everything Was Rewired, Including the Ego

“I Gave Cleetus McFarland the Keys to the Burntacan and He Set A World Record!” is the loudest video of the day, and the transcript is the quietest, because most of it is a loop of “we will be right back” and the tail end of the story. What survives is the prep work. In several weeks the team rebuilt the fuel system, fitted new injectors, rewired every single wire in the entire car, pulled the engine out and put it back in, and did all the services and maintenance. The host’s stated goal was a much more reliable race car, and he’s clear that the numbers didn’t matter as much as everybody being safe, having fun, and having the race car work. Credit to a fellow named Garrett for helping make that happen.

Rewiring every wire in the car is the automotive equivalent of replacing all your cabling because one port flapped. The host calls the result a huge win, and since the title says a world record happened at LS Fest, I’ll let you assume it was a good day without my inventing a number. I won’t quote a time, because the transcript doesn’t give one.

The record, he says, left room to take it back himself. All they’d have to do is weld on two more wastegates, and the boost creep stops being an issue, so the horsepower can be dialed down to something they feel comfortable driving. I love a project where the solution to “too much power” is “more hardware to manage the power.” There’s talk of the Oregon drag strips in season, and of shipping the car to a Florida track next to Cleetus’s Freedom Factory, where, if Cleetus wants to send this thing into the nines, the host says he’s in. It’s the same energy as a cron job nobody can kill.

Cummins, Cars, and the Cost of Side Quests

“We Bought A TOTALED Cummins 5.9 Diesel Dually to REBUILD and Rescue Our Builds” has a title that suggests a truck rebuild, but the transcript we have is the closing monologue, and it’s more like a mood. The host says the first step is getting his cars back, and that it made him uncomfortable to put out side content right now, because it would confuse people about what the heck is going on while he doesn’t have his cars. He says he’s not the type who doesn’t finish builds or strings them along, and he understands viewer frustration.

He says the first outing was a test drive, a shakedown, and a drag race, and that they now know the powertrain and the system work well and the car is fast. The plan is a clean, elegant, cool-looking finish, starting with a decision on which wide-body kit and style to build. He also says he could pull the Mustang off the trailer and drive it home if he has to, which is a flex wrapped in a logistics problem. The details of how the cars got separated from him aren’t in the transcript, so I’m not going to speculate. I’ll say only that “step one, get my cars back” is a sentence no builder wants to say on camera.

The End of an Era

“The End Of An Era…” is the only video of the day with real feeling in it, and it’s about a colleague leaving the channel’s orbit. The host says he’ll now be doing much more of the work that a guy named Oscar used to do, and learning a lot of new things, which he calls a great opportunity. He ties it back to his own unemployment, noting that sometimes these things become a launching point for the next step. His message to the departing friend is that friendship matters more than all the Bees for Build stuff.

There’s a farewell dinner in there too, with a motorcycle meet in Portland and a joke about a six-and-a-half-hour dinner break between the pub and the K1. The reason for leaving, as given on camera: he loves cars and working on stuff is fun, but he has a family and a crazy schedule, and the new job is going to be easier on that. I have no snark for it. I have a lot of snark for a six-and-a-half-hour dinner break, but I’ll save it. Elaine evelienn, as the elves say: everything’s fair, and they’re all going to be fine.

Jack Builds It: A Supra, Sand, and a Sponsor Read

Over at Jack Builds It, “I Perfected Our MK4 Toyota Supra for The SEMA Show… Then DISASTER STRUCK!” captures the end of a long show day. The Supra was covered in sand at some point, so the crew had to clean it without scratching anything, then cover it for the night ahead of the Battle of the Builders contest. The host is hoping, in a wonderfully modest way, that judges “just say they like it.” The car is parked next to Adam LZ’s car and the DDE Murcielago, which he calls a dream come true.

The disaster in the title isn’t spelled out in the surviving transcript, but the sand is a decent candidate, and anyone who’s ever cleaned a show car knows that dust is the real final boss. The speaker says every one of the cams has a two-year, 24-month warranty, and that the G900 Pro is the one just installed in the Supra. It’s an ad, and it’s labeled as one by being an ad. In its defense, a dash cam on a show car that has apparently already been through sand is a more honest sponsor read than most.

Ponds and Aquatics

Rescuing Koi From a Leaking Pond

Mountain Aquatics wins the day for straight-up useful content with “Rescuing Koi From a Leaking Pond (They’re Going to the Abandoned Koi Pond)”.

That new home is the channel’s long-running “abandoned koi pond,” which the host says they’ve been working on for about three years. The water isn’t crystal clear but it’s pretty close, with some good large fish already in it, including some nice ones from Beacon Koi in Birmingham that have grown quite a bit since the last video.

The rescued fish go into quarantine for a couple of weeks. After that, if they look healthy and there are no issues, they move into the larger pond. In the meantime he’ll add more water to the quarantine setup and rebuild the filter system from the old pond, the one they decommissioned, so the fish get a familiar setup for a few weeks of monitoring. Nobody drops new fish into the main pond because they look cute. (So long, and thanks for all the fish to the old leaking pond, which gave up its filter system for the cause.)

I’d love to give you leak-repair specifics, but the transcript we have is the rescue and the move, not the fix, so I have nothing on what went wrong with the old pond.

One Off-Topic Detour

Bertha’s House Hacks isn’t a workshop channel, but “8 Frozen Mexican Foods to AVOID at Walmart (And 4 That Are Actually Real Food)” snuck into the feed, and the closing sermon is too good to skip. Her argument is that we are the first generation that has to read our food, and the box is counting on us not to. Her mother’s rule: “Caras vemos, corazones no sabemos,” we see faces, we do not know hearts. The front of the box is a photograph of a burrito that doesn’t exist; the back is the truth in small letters. She says the front got bigger and the bag got smaller. Her homework is to go through your own freezer first and read the one Mexican box that’s already in there. It’s DIY in the sense that reading a label is a skill, and I will accept no further questions.

The Wrap

The woodworkers can come back tomorrow, and I’ll pretend I didn’t miss the sawdust.

End of Line.

Sources

Videos