In the course of the week, I found some conrete anchors in stainless steel that will work. Drop in style which are shallower, but I needed to go up a size to somewhat match the weight holding capacity. Saturday Derek came over to resume this project and we proceeded to drill out the first hole to the larger size needed. 
And here I am being the epoxy ninja cutting a portion of this epoxy Tootsie roll putty to plug up the bottom of the hole we drilled all the way through. Some tacky and stinky stuff. The first anchor goes in and we pound it home. After this is in we drill the other four holes. Concrete dust makes a very effective clogging agent that quickly plugs up my shop vac, but aside from this things go pretty well. Going with the upsized anchors and bolts, there now is very little room for error, but it looks like we got it right and one pilar is finally secured. Continue reading ‘Root’s Speed Shop-Half Speed’
Monthly Archive for October, 2010
Page 3 of 3
OK, everyone tease me some more, yes I think I now have all the operational Corolla FX’s on Oahu. If not, I have the majority stake. Yes, I bought yet another just a few hours ago. It was actually brought to my attention by more than one person from different forums on the net. I guess in the online world I’m also the FX Guy. It’s a regular FX16, so it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, but mechanically its got everything that counts, so that makes it the race candidate. And that is the plan, to become the rally-x machine! It’s in stock class, but is stripped down so is the lightest version. One of the major selling points on this most recent FX is that it has working A/C, so I think that maybe be stripped out and find its way into my current daily driver FX16 GTS. However I don’t think the newest FX member is not going to be ready for the next rally cross, which is in two weeks. On the drive home I detected some issues. There is a brake pulsation, which the previous owner told me about and included new rotors and pads he had bought but never installed. Aside from that there were some problems that I noticed on the longer drive home. There was an engine stumble that became really noticeable when pressed and the RPMs approached mid-range. There also is some kind of suspension issue, feels like the rear right side. Possibly the strut is blown. In steady state the car feels fine, but when a bump is hit the car wallows and acts odd. I’ll have to take care of these before its race ready. But at least it doesn’t have under dash neon, steering wheel bolted on with wiggly lamp shade spacers, fancy rims held on with two threads, or the various other hacks of the previous two FX16’s.
Update, last Sunday Fabio came over with impact drill and bits and we laid out the lift and started to drill the mounting. There was some delays as we went back and forth to the store to get various bits (literally) that we’d realized we would need. The pilot hole actually went fairly easily, but when suddenly I heard a change in the sound I got a little concerned and started poking around. It turns out that with the short 6″ bit we had already drilled through the conrete slab and hit aggregate. The slab was right at 4″, and looking at the provided anchors and the spec documents, this was not going to work. Calls around to the home improvment stores open on Sunday did not come up with any anchors we could use. 
Denied! So we will have to try again this weekend, with larger but shallower anchors. We’ll see how it goes!