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.

My 24 Hours of LeMons team has officially got ourselves a car! I paid out $350 for a 1986 BMW 325 4-door. The car starts but won’t idle properly (or at all, it just dies) so you have to keep your foot on the gas and the revs up to keep it running. However, we have $150 to get her running initially. Also, as a bonus, the car came with a stereo and an equalizer and some speakers in the rear. We’ll be able to sell that stuff on Craig’s List to get some extra spending room.

The body is in decent condition. It has some pretty bad passenger-side rear-fender damage and the passenger-side front-fender is a little dinged up, but other than that, the paint just looks like shit.

Right now we’re concentrating on fixing it before get the cage built in and add the race seats and other equipment. We think we’ve figured out that it’s a fueling issue as we’ve cleaned the O₂ sensor and tested the AFM unit and are still having the same issues. So, we’re going to check out the fuel pressure regulator and see if that can’t fix our problems.

I’m going to try and keep this page updated with our progress. I’ll try to get some before and after pictures as well.

Right now the technical team consists of the following members (and I think it’s a pretty stacked roster):

• Myself (Software Developer, Decently-Good Driver)
• Nick Smith (Mechanical Engineer, Good Driver)
• David Lucas (Mechanical Engineer, Good Driver w/ some training)
• Chris Schult (Mechanical Engineer, Good Driver)
• Robby Podhola (General Contractor, general bad-ass w/ tons of experience in custom car work)

Of course we also have Jessica and Kate, who’s main job will be to be all sexy and stuff, probably wearing milk-maid outfits and what not. I guess it’ll depend on what theme we go with.

All of our ME members have different specialties that will be able to provide us a lot of smarts for working on different parts of the car and Robby has a lot of pratical car-building experience, so I’m pretty excited about the contest. If we can avoid getting hit and taken out, I like our chances.

Well, I decided to strap on my snowshoes (studded Nokian Hakkapeliitta 2) and head up to Fall City to take advantage of some large parking lots and, well, the snow! We ended up figuring out how drift quite well, though we didn’t quite capture it on the video. Oh well!

The Sports Car Spectacular is the final WWSCC event of the season and it marks the end of my very first autocross season. I definitely improved over the course of the season. The WWSCC organization is a great one and put on some very fun events.

My season began on a high note, winning my first event in the novice afternoon class out of a very large pool of opponents (28 total). It also ended very well this weekend with me doing very well and coming very close to trophying in ST2.

I was hoping to do well enough to move past Mike Perkowitz in the ST2 season standings and finish the season in 5th, but I had really bad showing at the Enduro event earlier this season and I wasn’t able to over come it, despite beating Mike by almost 4 points this event. I also ran the first 2 events in novice, which gave me a smaller pool of scores to choose my good events from. Big props to Mike for keeping consistent throughout the season.

Finally, I’d like to note that my most recent upgrades appear to have moved me closer to the Spore couple, which means they are working (those mods being the camber plates + alignment and Cobb Anti-sway bars). I’m confident with another day or two of autocross and I’ll have new oversteer figured out enough to not spin (see my 3rd run of the SCS event).

Here is the video from my latest Autocross. I placed fifth in ST2, middle of the pack. That isn’t bad considering how underprepped my car is for XSM but the ST3 guys with their coilover setups and a lot more driving experience are still a lot quicker than I am.

I’m getting more consistent with the car and starting recognize the weaknesses in it. I did pretty terrible for the first session (which in this case was the scored session) but didn’t do so bad for the 2nd half of the day running in the TO (time only) group. The results page was reported incorrectly so both my times show up under ST2, which is fine but just know that the bottom time that has a TOPM index was my 2nd half of the day run and was much better than the first. It’s also the run in the video below.