Monday, April 5, 2010

8 hours of sleep in 3 days

This weekend was nice, warm temps, sunny - and without sleep for me. I pulled an "all-nighter" Friday into Saturday trying to prepare for an alignment at EFI Logics in Bethel, CT. So besides the exhaustion - I made quite a bit of progress on the car.

First and foremost the engine runs! By 4am Saturday morning I was able to modify some Ebay stainless steel headers to extend them past the turbo cross member. The work was a little "rushed" but it came out ok. The headers are very low now so I may end up raising them up another 1/4" to 1/2" but I need to be sure they don't rub on the cross member and cause false knock readings. After cranking the motor for about 20 minutes to lube everything up - I connected the engine electrical and hit the juice - Bam started up within 2 cranks - perfect. Runs good, no weird noises - The car drives - but I still need to do a bit of work on a broken brake line which is 1) a hard line and 2) ABOVE the rear cross member (uggggg....).

Installed some hood pins to eliminate the hood latch and assembly off the nose of the car - Boy was that nerve racking at 6am drilling into my JDM Aluminum v6 hood. Once I figured out where the holes go it was cake from there. the biggest pain in the butt is just getting it all to line up properly.

After all said and done I pulled the car out of the garage and got 50 feet before a maxed out a rear axle and caused the diff to lock up hard. I had to remove the rear axles just to move the car on the trailer. Once loaded we were off to EFI to get the car aligned.

At EFI I noticed a scraping noise coming from the rear which was accompanied by 5 guys saying "Wow this car is hard to push, is the e-brake stuck?" Turns out I grabbed bolts for the rear calipers which were about 1/16" too long... I'll blame it on my delirious, sleep deprived state. Once fixed, we rolled the car up on the lift and Jack proceeded to fix her up. (also had a front windshield installed while I was there).

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