Month: August 2008

Ok, i figure that for this update ill document up to the next phase of its life.
When i came back from the Philippines i went to get it engineered in Canberra, but before that Ben told me about a Khana which BMSC was running, i duly entered and this is how it looked:

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3650-2/dsc_0428_sized.jpg[/img]

Thanks to whoever took that pic.

Subsequently i got the car engineered, and it passed over the pits second time (first one was still a touch loud).

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/5188-2/IMG_0566.jpg[/img]

Anyway, i moved to Adelaide to finish off my uni degrees, and left it in my parents garage for 3 months until Easter as i didnt have anywhere to store it down in Adelaide.

Courtesy of Mr 1JZ i was able to store it in his back yard for a while so i had it trucked down (the only transport i actually had to pay for), and it arrived on a Friday. Now i found out that on the Monday of the next week (Anzac Day) there was a drift practice day, and seeing as i really wanted to get track time in the thing i decided to head along.

So off we went out to Mallala, and i found that i had a couple of issues with the clutch heating up along the way, but that was ok, and I got there eventually.
Out i went onto the track and im hammering around for a couple of laps, completely sucking at drifting, until im coming through the kink (driving more like its a Supersprint than a drift day) and the throttle jams wide open going into Northern hairpin. So without being able to use gears to slow im pretty damn screwed so i pulled the electrical kill switch and threw the car around 180deg because i figured that if i was going to hit the wall i would prefer to hit it backwards (or the sand for that matter), but as i rolled to a stop i heard a small pop come from the engine bay, and very quickly found that smoke was pouring out from the drivers side.
Out i hopped damn quickly and peeked in to find fire lapping around.

Now im sure everyone will remember this photo:

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3532-2/DSCF0018_002.jpg[/img]

Which is the fuel surge tank, which i REALLY didnt want to go pop. So i emptied 1kg of dry powder into the bay, half onto that and half onto the quads where the fire was. Soon i also found out the strange fact that drifters dont carry extinguishers, plus i was “around the corner” out of sight of the fire marshalls. Luckily someone alerted them, and one of the local rally drivers was out mucking around in the rally car, and he was able to dump 2kg of AFFF onto it, before the fireys dumped another couple of kg of AFFF onto it.

I cant find the photo which was taken in the pits (Mr1JZ could probably find that, it was on NS somewhere) but here are a few of what it looked like as i started stripping it down:

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/5192-2/IMG_0570.jpg[/img]

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/5194-2/IMG_0572.jpg[/img]

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/5189-2/IMG_0567.jpg[/img]

I’m still grateful that the surge tank didnt go pop.

And that was the end of the first phase of my AE86’s life.

P.s. ill update this again later, this is enough for today.

Right, so where was i?
I think by this time it was about September, and i had put a fair bit of stuff into the car. Managed to source some wheels for it:

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3472-2/DSCF0004_017.jpg[/img]

Which were supposed to be my track wheels

And it was running a Microleb at this stage:

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3498-2/DSCF0010_010.jpg[/img]

Add one reasonably dodgy harness bar too:

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3602-2/DSCF0006_015.jpg[/img]

Anyway, i slapped it all together at this point, as i was moving back up to Canberra for a while.

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3554-2/DSCF0004_019.jpg[/img]

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3560-2/DSCF0006_013.jpg[/img]

And off it went to Canberra courtesy of a mate who worked for TNT and slapped it on his truck for a case.

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3564-2/DSCF0001_014.jpg[/img]

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3578-2/DSCF0008_011.jpg[/img]

Up in Canberra it was stored outside my parents house for a night, before it was going into their garage. Anyway, within a night some prick had knocked off the Microleb. Plus the prick smashed the good sunroof i had in there 🙁 Not happy jan.

Anyway, insurance came to the party and replaced the Microleb with a Haltech E6X and i wasnt too sad about the whole ordeal apart from it taking an extra month of wrangling.

While it was up in Canberra it got “tuned” with the Haltech by some cocksmokers (more on that later), and the neg camber RCAs were added:

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3584-2/Image058.jpg[/img]

Also while it was there i put a freshened head on it (no porting, only smoothing) and the 308* GroupA copy cams, with the TODA cam gears, and unfortunately completely forgot to take any photos (camera batterys were probably flat).

After that it went on another journey back down to Melbourne after the 3 months of contract were up.
Here it is back home:

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3586-2/DSCF0023_003.jpg[/img]

It got new boots:

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3588-2/DSCF0024_003.jpg[/img]

And the now infamous socks:

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3590-2/DSCF0025_001.jpg[/img]

While it was down there it went into Brown Davis for a half cage to be installed as per my original weekend racer intentions.
Upon coming back, the roof and sides were touched up with paint:

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3614-2/DSCF0004_022.jpg[/img]

[img]http://gallery2.plebeians.net/d/3648-2/DSCF0002_021.jpg[/img]

And it looked pretty damn good, if i may say so myself.

This however is where things started on a bit of a downwards spiral.
Firstly i took it back up to Canberra over Christmas (cheers to old mate again) and it started having a few issues with randomly stalling, and not cranking again. So after consulting with Ben Wilson and Mark i took it to Peter (i think its Peter) at AlfaTune in Fyshwick where we started finding a stack of problems. When it was originally tuned they had put the dizzy in 180* out, and had hooked up the signal trigger to the TDC+180 amplifier (which is meant to just amplify the trigger signal).

[img]http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/7029/004ga9.jpg[/img]

So here you can see the CAS within the dizzy, it should have been hooked up to the trigger on the upper right, but instead it was hooked up to the lower left one, which is a much weaker signal. Explained the crappy ignition i was having. Plus they had used scotchlocks to join the ECU wiring to the dizzy wiring, and these kept coming undone.

Anyway, after this i took it out to Wakefield which was great, had three laps pushing 1m14s before disaster struck. On turn 2 i was coming around the outside of a mini, which was doing signficantly lower lap times, anyway as the nose of my car is about in line with the B pillar of the mini, a guy in a 911 decides to try to go around the outside of both of us. Anyway what with the corner tightening, and the mini understeering a bit i got squeezed and the passenger corner of the mini hit one guard and the drivers wheel arch on the 911 hit the other guard… Not happy jan. Was only a light touchup though, and we got on with it. Later on the same lap i put the foot down slightly hard out of Turn 10, and heard a nice clunking and thunking from the rear. Turns out i had cracked one or many of the teeth off the nice 4.3 crownwheel and they had promptly jammed into the LSD center and messed the whole thing up. Flatspotted one of my tyres too when the entire mess locked up.

After a courtesy tow home, i replaced the diff with a 3.9 open center i had lying around and flew off to the Philippines for three weeks to help build a community center there. Thus ended 2004. More in another post. [size=1]too scared about the forums screwing up and losing it all[/size]