Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Blah blah blah fixed stuff blah blah blah

Since I didn't take any pictures while working, here's a summary of the last two weekends working on the car:

- Finished painting the roll cage with a coat of white paint. Looks great from 30+ feet.

- Replaced the destroyed front motor mount with one from last year's donor car (a.k.a. Alan's old daily driver)

- Swapped LX radiator/fan out with ZX2 radiator and fan to accommodate ZX2 wiring harness easily. The quicker fix would have been to just swap fans, but the bolts that hold the ZX2 fan on are stripped or something.

- Tied up the wiring some more inside the cabin. This is clearly a never-ending process.

- Put rotors and mounted pads on the car. Super stopping power again!

- Mounted seat and harness

- Mounted wink mirror higher than last year, improving visibility by probably 10% or so.

- Swapped in new ECU to make a couple more horses at the crank.

- Wired up main brake lights and rear turn signals.


Naturally, in doing these things, we found more things to do/more broken things:

- The ZX2 radiator has an outlet for the heater core that the LX radiator did not have. This hose outlet will have to be stopped up and clamped. We'll have to flush the system of antifreeze and check the water pump before we can fill it with H20 for testing and racing.

- The wiring could be a little tidier, and we still need to find some way to mount the instrument cluster. A 5-inch tachometer and shift light may be in the works.

- We will want to flush the brake system and use DOT 3 & 4 fluid. We'll need to bleed the brakes anyway, so this shouldn't be much more additional work.

- We'll still have to wire up the high-mount brake light. And the brake lights currently stay on when the battery is hooked up. And there's the gauges, which don't work. But hey, who needs them anyway? Oh, right. We're pretty confident these electrical quirks are the product of poorly or completely ungrounded wires.

- What we initially thought might have been a bad front left wheel bearing appears to actually be a blown left front strut mount. We bought a replacement for $32, which is considerably cheaper than a new bearing. Still have to put it on, though, which should be exciting.


There are a handful of other tasks to take care of, but the engine runs and the car could probably move on its own, though we won't try too hard to do that until the radiator is hooked up and fully functional. As a point of reference, the car didn't drive on its own until mid-September last year. Yay us!

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