This weekend started out on Satuday at 8am when I showed up to Nick’s house and woke his ass up because his cellphone is a piece of shit. We got the car loaded up and warmed up and then we drove 2.5 hours to Copalis Crossing to Robby’s house.

Once there we started talking about the sun roof, so we just sort of spontaneously started taking it apart, right in his drive way. Once we got the sunroof out carefully without damaging it (so we can sell it) we pulled the car into Robby’s shop and busted out the cutting wheel and the acetolyne and oxygen torch.

Now that we had a sizeable hole in the roof (and the car weighed 15lbs less) we needed something to cover it up. So, Robby took us out to an old Buick he has sitting on the back of his property and he litterally ripped the car trunk off the car with this bare hands. We then traced the sun roof onto the top of the trunk added an inch or so to the sides and cut it out. Some grinding, sanding, primer, paint later, we had a ghetto cover which Robby promptly bolted to the roof with self-tapping sheetmetal screws (with gaskets already in them) and then sealed it with some weather sealant caulking. The whole thing looks very Mad-max-esque.

In the middle of all that, we checked to see where the oil leak in the engine was and Robby spotted it coming from the oil drain plug. We then drained the oil so we could see what was causing the slow leak. I turns out the previous owner decided it was a good idea to use an US measurement drain plug in our nice German metric aluminum oil pan drain plug hole. The whole was very stripped. We tried repairing it with some hokey thread repair epoxy shit, but that didn’t work.

So, we put it all back together and put some nice Mobil-1 synthetic oil Robby had in his shop into the car (which is similar to what we’ll be running at the actual race). I think it’ll be good to keep doing oil changes to clean out the engine a bit. The oil was only 250 miles old and was already incredibly black and dirty (probably from the poor running condition it was in).

We also tried to pull the dent out of the rear quater panel. Let’s just say that went really poorly and didn’t work. We have a bunch of little holes in the rear quarter panel. Not that it mattered, it already looked like shit.

After all was said and done, we headed back for Seattle/Renton. We did stop once so Nick could go to the bathroom and I put electrical tape on part of the new roof because it was letting air in and it was kind of loud.

Sunday, some lady came over and bought our seats for $150 and lets us have her old seats (we need them till we get the race seat in). Nick and David swapped the seats in for the lady and collected the $150. That’ll go towards the budget. Nick and David were also nice enough to stop the lady’s leaky power steering fluid hoses and fill up the reservoir with ATF.

Well, we started off Saturday with some tasty waffles and blueberries, but we quickly turned to figuring out why the car still wouldn’t idle properly. We checked the resistance in every conceivable sensor and double checked all our previous work. Then we just decided the hell with it, let’s pull off the intake mainfold.

After a lot of unbolting, we pulled off the intake manifold. The first thing we noticed was that the gaskets on cylinders 1 & 2 were trashed and the area was full of carbon deposits. There was kind of a collective “OMG, that’s OUR problem”. So, we went to work.

Chris, David, and Nick cleaned up the heads and the block (the part we exposed) and prepped the surface. I went to town smoothing out the intake runners with a Dremel. Then, I got the idea to put the intake gaskets on the manifold and heads and see if they matched up right. Sure enough, the intake runners were much smaller than the heads and the gaskets. Nick and I placed the gaskets on the intake manifold and scratched a grind-line into the aluminum. Then I proceeded to port the holes to match the new size, tapering back into the runners very carefully. Finally, I got a nice sanding attachment and smoothed out all my work and additionally smoothed out about 5 to 6 inches inside the runners.

Unforunately without some dyno pulls (or at least some datalogging) we’ll never know how much the porting helped. I can’t imagine it would be all that much, but it would be interesting to see.

Anyway, we get the car all back together and fire it up and fuel starts spraying in the air like a fountain! Weeeeeeeeee! While we were putting the engine back together, I didn’t seat the fuel pressure regulator right. Nick apparently had this problem before last weekend and he re-bent the FPR mounts and we fired the car up. It sounded good! Not great, but good. It definitely sounded like we were down a piston.

We did some diagnostics to figure out which ones, but ultimately we ended disconnecting the injectors to pull them back out. We stopped, decided to put it back together for the night and figure it out later. After putting the injectors back together, we fired it up…. IT SOUNDED GREAT! Apparently one of the injector plugs was loose (that’s my guess). So we took it for a drive and it just drove great.

So, there we are, our car runs. Now we’ll switch gears, get our car bits sold and see what kind of cash we have to work with under the limit.

Well we got to working on the car again this Saturday. We got quite a bit done, but also we were kind of brought down by the fact that car is still running really rough. Here are some before and after shots of the car.

Here is David and Chris working on the car. David is messing with the idle control unit (ICU) and Chris is doing something which I can only assume is important. He may have been removing the air conditioning radiator.

Here are some more pictures of the car’s interior:

And here is the interior after removing pretty much everything from the car:

In other good news, we found a dollar and some change (I think it was a $1.48) in the car so we get to add that to the budget! w00t!

So, last Saturday we had our 2nd official work weekend. I finally got some pictures to post up (taken by Nick).

• Removed AC compressor and AC lines
• Removed wind visor from roof
• Stripped trunk, hammered out rusted panel, cleaned rust, primered
• Installed the intake heatshield and external scoop that was sitting in the trunk
• Removed some the loose wire from old stereo system
• Diagnosed that the idle control valve (ICV) was, in fact, broken (we ordered a new one and Nick installed it early this week, it idles now!)

We have another work day tomorrow. We’re going to start stripping the interior and the cars weight down. We’ll also be working on ideas for the suspension and getting the engine to run a bit smoother.