12/15/11

So I obviously took the last few days off from work. Well, I suppose it might not be obvious, but I did. John and I got a few things done over the weekend and early part of this week. We started out Saturday without any plans to go to the shop. I picked him up after checking to make sure the phone in the War Room worked and we had breakfast at a little “Mom & Pop” place by his house. I said I needed to swing by the shop and make sure Gregg locked up the trailer properly so we headed that way. There we locked up the trailer, taking his lock off and putting mine on, then went inside to look at stuff. We finished building the fuel filter mount I was working on when Gregg showed up to borrow the trailer last Saturday. I'm not sure we did much of anything else though. Neither one of us was all that interested in working there so we headed out to see Steve/John, our muffler shop guy. Yeah, I know, don’t fuck with your daily driver. Shut up. He wasn’t too busy so I drove Fiona onto the lift and we hoisted her up. We had a good look around underneath and held up a Flowmaster one-in/two-out muffler under the stock muffler. It looked like it would work with a little trimming on one of the tail pipes. I decided to gopher it. The old muffler was removed and the new one zooked to the intermediate pipe. The old tailpipes were cut off and zooked to the muffler outlets. When all the aligning was done, the muffler was set on the table for finish welding. It came out really nice. Unfortunately, as is usually the case, it was a bit too “boomy” in the cockpit. John asked if a “hot dog” could be added and Steve/John said yes. I said I'd live with it for a bit and see what I thought. I let John drive back towards his house. With him driving it wasn’t too bad. We went to a little Thai restaurant by his house and it was some of that good! When I hopped in the driver’s seat at his house, I immediately knew it was going to be too loud for mom. Sure, she could have lived with it. Sure, it really wasn’t “too loud.” But she would have given me a parcel of shit over changing the muffler. I needed to change the sound. Sunday I managed to deflect it by driving her car to lunch. Monday John and I met at the shop and got to work on our cars. I piddled with Lil' Wiggly until John was ready to weld in his rear cross member mounts. I hauled the gas welding kit over to his car and watched as he tacked them in place. Mostly I was watching to make sure he didn’t light anything on fire… like the rags on the jack stands. He did. I got some water and he doused them real good. He got the driver’s side tacked and moved to the passenger side. He got it tacked, or so we thought, and put out the rag fire on that side. Once he was done with the pyrotechnics, I went back to Lil' Wiggly. He took out the part and discovered that the passenger side was not as well tacked as he thought. We chucked the thing in the vice and I zooked the driver’s side on then moved to the table where I could get in and really weld the hell out of it. I got all the way around 100% of the contact areas. I don’t think it is going anywhere. We set the passenger side bracket on there and fingered out where it had been when he tried to tack it in place. He took a measurement and proclaimed it in position. I zooked it up. Again, I got 100% coverage and doubt it is ever going to fall off. He hung it in the painting area, otherwise known as those wires hanging from the ceiling next to the main door, and covered it in a nice thick coating of rust converting paint stuff. While it dried, we went to lunch. It was Mexican Inn on 8^th Avenue this day. After that we went our separate ways. At the house, I found that my springs had arrived. I texted John to see if we were going to try and do them at the shop or if I should call Kevin to see if they had a bay free on Tuesday. It was decided that we’d try to do them at the shop and I'd go to the Boys of Pep or Firestone or some place for an alignment if necessary. Tuesday morning I met John at the shop and we pushed Lil' Wiggly outside. I backed Fiona in and we got to work on the springs. And by “we” I of course mean John. It wasn’t so much that he took the tools out of my hand, as I am wont to accuse, but more a case of… um, him just jumping in and doing it, I guess. Anyhoo, “we” got the ass end up in the air, the wheels off, and then dug into the bolts. Oh, John “made me” buy a bunch of proper air fittings on Saturday, I forgot about that. We hooked up several air tools which I've owned for years but never used. John used them to make quick work of the job at hand. Once he knew to take the shock completely out in the rear, the old springs came right out and the new ones plopped right in. We dropped the ass and I took the car around the building to settle the suspension. I totally felt like I was “dragging ass” the whole time. It was probably psychological, but it felt like a tail dragger. I pulled the nose in and “we” jacked the car onto stands. Wheels off, John yanked the first strut. He handed it to me and asked if I'd swap the spring while he removed the other side. I couldn’t think of any reason why I shouldn’t do a little work on my own car and agreed. I did actually use a spring compressor to remove the stock springs. John only had to push down on the top to compress the new spring while I started the nut though. I started the nuts on the top of the strut tower, once the whole strut was reassembled of course, and moved on to the other strut while he buttoned up this side. He compressed the new spring and I put the second strut together. I started nuts on the tower and hunkered down on them while he assembled the rest of the suspension. We decided against using the crash bolts at this time and set all the negative camber we could into the stock bolts. With the tires on and the car settled, I stood back to have a look. It looks really nice, but the wheels need to come a little bit out toward the fender to finish filling the gaps. We took measurements so I could shop for spacers. We checked the alignment and found we had 2.5° negative camber in the rear and 1.5° negative in the front. One of the intergoogle pundits claimed that was the setting he uses for autocross or something so I'm going to live with it for a while. Of course another keyboard racing engineer said he runs just the opposite (1.5° rear and 2.5° front) on his track car. Again, I'm going to run what’s set and see what happens. We cleaned up and went to… no, we did more work. Hmm, I've gotten a bit long winded so I think I'm going to save the rest of Tuesday and all of Wednesday for tomorrow’s rant. Same Bat time, same Bat channel!