Forgot to finish this. After cutting pieces to fabricate the missing intake stays, next day broke out the welder and welded on the tabs and bolts where the wiring harness will mount. Grabbed can of engine paint had left over from previous engine clean up. Continue reading ‘Should I Stay Or Go’
Archive for the 'car' Category
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Was busy with the major work on the car, but finally got around to some of the other little things I got for it. There’s these new lug nuts. Main thing I was looking for was nice lugs in 3/4″-19mm socket size that matches my lock lug key. Found these from Gorilla. They look like those pimp tuner lugs, but they’re not quite. Most of those pretty colored ones are aluminum. I was not confident in the use of that for rallycross. We’ve seen bent and torn steel rims, pulled out studs. These are advertised as forged steel. So these with the extended length ARP studs should be plenty strong. The extended length nuts with the knurled end make installing them quite convenient too.
If I were a religious person I’d be praising God right now. Got home, plugged in the ECU, connected up the battery, hopped in, hit the starter and the FX fired right up, faster than the FR-S actually! No error light, good idle. Too late for a test drive. I might actually have time to wash the car before the event!
Parts arrived, the shipping cost ten times more than the caps from DigiKey. At least they don’t have a minimum order, don’t know what I’d do with a 1,000 roll of 15microF caps. Prepped the board by desoldering and removing the bad caps, cleaning off the green gudis gunk, and scraping off the laquer on oxidized traces. Luckily they didn’t corrode badly and the traces were intact. I then ran it through the ultrasonic cleaner. Continue reading ‘Bad Caps’
Damn. I really should have caught this sooner. I thought everything was good by the end of Sunday. I had the last remaining wires connected in the FX and it started running ok. Prior to that it was running really off and I attributed it to those last wires, even though I could have sworn they were just for instrumentation and wouldn’t effect the engine. Anyway, it seemed to be running alright for the 30 minutes I left it idling to run the radiator flush. Meanwhile I put the dash back together and I was getting a pretty positive feeling about things. Turns out that was premature.
xNext big step with the rally FX is to get the wiring in. I fixed and retaped where I had pulled a wire out for starter and put the harness in rough position. A major section was encased in a ridged plastic housing that runs below the intake you can see in the picture here. The housing has two holes which must mount it somewhere. Of course none of this was used in the previous install. I think I spent the better part of an hour crawling around the engine bay trying to find where it goes. There were a couple of bolts holes that almost but not quite match. The heck? Continue reading ‘Mystery Mount’
With the engine physically in place I now needed to go about hooking everything up. Unfortunately all the mods that were done to the FX that this came out of were hack jobs. The short shift cut shift shaft held together with hose clamps, the Momo steering wheel spaced with lamp tubing. The wiring harness was pretty hacked that I’d already fixed a while back. What I’m addressing this time is the fuel supplu line. What had been done was they crammed in the stock 16V line in and bent it. You can’t really see it in this mess of lines, but it was not very clean and it bothered me that it did not seem all that safely routed being in contact with all kinds of parts. Continue reading ‘Pimp My Ride’
contrary to what you might gather from the blog, I have been doing things other than drink beer, those are just easy to post. The past weeks I’ve been working on the rallycross FX. We’ve been approved for 4 additional events at Kualoa this year so that gave me incentive.
First off, I discovered at last event that one of my Maxsport German retread rally tires developed a crack down to the steel belt. To be fair, as you can see, I’ve used them close to the end of their life anyway. We rallycrossers tend to run tires until they are seriously used up. Those who are fortunate to have access to pro rally teams will buy their cast of race tires as they have plenty of tread for us! So this time I ordered a new set of tires from Demontweaks in UK. They arrived at my door in less than a week, the wonders of the Net! Continue reading ‘More to Life than Beer?’
I’m sure Risu has ranted about this Toyota part years ago. This is from the rally FX, which I’m sure is the same part # as Risu’s LandCruiser and every other Toyota in creation. Continue reading ‘$3 costs $500’
Another selection from the Guinness variety pack, this pours a deep red brown with strong head that quickly subsides. A touch of peaty aroma and taste of a red beer. The subtle smoke lingers throughout. This may be dark, it’s actually quite low in bitterness. Not much of a hop note. There isn’t actually a whole lot going on with flavors. It’s probably a good introduction, a gateway dark red beer if you will, but on the flip side it’s not a complex beer. It’s also a low ABV at 4.something.
I’m not sure how many monkeys to give this, I don’t think it quite rates a 3, but it’s better than a 2 monkey.