August 2005
08302K5
My tires were being shipped out from Tire Rack's Lousiana warehouse. D'oh.
08282K5
Got a new 3" aluminum up pipe on my car, replaced some old, cruddy rubber hoses with new silocone hoses and secured some of the smaller boost lines with zip ties so they'll stop blowing off. It gets boost very quickly (even quicker than the smaller stock turbo, but they may be because I had a few vacuum leaks), but all the power is up top. Pushing 17 PSI the car wants to go sideways. I think Heath described it best as being "ass-clinching fast." It'll be even better once we do the fuel pressure regulator, chip, and then later the downpipe, cut out, injectors, alcohol and exhaust, and eventually a new intercooler. Should be 12s on street tires easily, and 11s on slicks.
Speaking of tires, I used my bonus to buy Goodyear Eagle F1 GS-D3s -- 255/45/17s in the front and 275/40/17s in the rear -- and 17" chrome IROC wheels. Should have them on by next weekend. For the track and weekend rice hunting I'll get a pair of Nitto 275/50/15 drag radials for the rear and some cheap 215/65s up front on my stock wheels. That will have to wait until my wallet recovers.
08232K5
Didn't get anything done to the car over the weekend because of a mind-numbingly boring work project, but I did get my up pipe and hoses/clamps in. Once I get that on maybe I can take it to 15 lbs without hearing a loud *BOOMFSH* noise under my hood.
Yesterday I got to drive my mother out to the backwoods of Hicktown, FL -- about 32 mile NNE of the center of Nowheresville -- so she could get some pictures of her wrecked explorer and get some things out of it. The day before her boyfriend blew two tires at the same time and clipped a Jeep. He then kept driving for about 2.5 miles and got out of the explorer to elude the cops in the woods. Running from the cops doesn't work out all too well when you can barely walk, so they got him for driving without a license, leaving the scene of an accident and fleeing and eluding. Add on habitual offender felony DUI, habitual driving with a suspended license and petty theft in Sumter County (not sure what that's for) and it's pretty safe to say he'll be in jail for a while, leaving my mother with no source of income and unable to work because of various medical conditions, and not collecting disability. Quite a messed-up situation.
Meanwhile my dad is still having to borrow money because he apparently feels he's above working. He got a job working in an air-conditioned machine shop, making decent pay and not doing any back-breaking labor. He quit after two or three days because it was boring. He's 48-years-old, has a bad back, has no certifications or proof of any real education beyond his G.E.D., has mostly worked tree jobs and such where he's outside in the sun all day doing heavy lifting and bitches about it every chance he gets, has probably never held down a job for more than a year in his life because he gets fired a lot because of his temper, and he quits an easy job with decent pay because it's boring. I guess he'd rather be broke than be bored. Of course his retarded wife is too good to work, too.
But he can tell me I'm not good at managing money, because I never seem to have much cash on me when he wants to borrow some. :D I tell him I spend it all on my car, so he told me to sell it and "get something you like, like a good van." I honestly don't know how to respond to that.
08142K5
We managed to get some work done on the Buick yesterday, with me supervising and Heath doing most of the labor. We got a bit of a late start and decided to get the quick jobs out of the way - the first of which being the turbo. Unfortunately it started raining, and then I fell asleep.
Today we managed to get the turbo on and get the wastegate actuator adjusted properly. We also got the new MAF pipe on, along with the oversized K&N filter.
Heath sitting on the ground cleaning the up pipe when there's a perfectly good chair behind him.
A moment of struggle.
Anyone want to buy a turbo?
If you've ever wondered what a turbo regal engine bay looks like without the turbo.
Here's the CPTA-49 in its new home.
3" MAF pipe, 4"x9" K&N filter.
Here's Heath looking nervously relieved. After we installed the turbo and let it cook for a while (you'll notice the blue color of the exhaust side of the turbo) we took it for a test run, and the up pipe blew off at 15 lbs. Heath screamed and wimpered like a dog all the way home, fearing that something major had broke.
Proof that I helped..a little.
We don't have the chip or fuel pressure regulator installed yet, but so far I'm liking it.
08102K5
Heath has moved back to Florida, and since he's never seen my car we went for a drive last night.
Some old guy in a new Thunderbird took off on me, so I let him go and caught him at the next light. I spooled a tiny bit on the launch and he caught up about a minute later. At the light after that he took off again. I don't know why.
At Steak n' Shake we picked up some hats and embellished them with Type-R and GT-R logos, just so people know w'sup.
At 7-11 a couple of guys were asking about my car after I started it up. I told them it was just a V6 with about 200 horses. I don't think they believed me. I don't think they believed that my "3 inch pipes" are only two inches at the most, and my "digital tach" is a scan tool to tell me what's going wrong on my car, either. Not like they would have ran me in their busted Sundance, anyway. At least they didn't call it a Monte.
Now that Heath is back I'm hoping for some free mechanic labor. Parts in my trunk/house:
Ceramic brake pads
Brake shoes
Slotted brake rotors
Stainless steel braided brake lines
Light-weight mini starter (I bought the very last one from Mike Savino at turbobuicks.com and no more are going to be made, ever)
Adjustable fuel pressure regulator
Mechanical fuel pressure gauge
CPTA-49 turbo
Turbo oil line
Adjustable wastegate actuator
Boost gauge
Turbotweak 93 octane chip
Window lift motors
And possibly more things that I'm forgetting.
In closing, I'd like to add that the only reason I posted something up today is because certain people have complained that I don't update enough, and they're bored at work and need something to read.
I put extra line breaks between paragraphs that shouldn't be paragraphs so it looks longer.
Bye.
08042K5
Added my cDeath member update post from cdeath.net to the miscellaneous texts section of the text archives, by request.
08032K5
Last night lightning hit somewhere in my yard or close to it, and I got to see my brother's motherboard literally explode. Shortly after my grandmother came in the room. "Did you guys hear that?!" Naaahhhhh, we had our headphones on so we didn't hear the HOUSE-SHAKING THUNDER BOOMING LIKE A DOZEN CANNONS IN MY RINGING EARS WHEN THE WINDOWS LIT UP LIKE THE FREAKING SUN. "That must have been a huge lightning bolt because it was so loud." Yeah...
After learning of the death of my brother's motherboard and our cable modem, she ordered that all computers, TVs and other semi-expensive appliances be unplugged whenever it starts thundering. Since it is almost always thundering in the evenings, I'm going to be very bored while at home. Fortunately I'll still have my flash light to occupy myself with for hours. Seriously, my flash light is awesome. You'd think 10,000,000 candle power could only provide a very limited amount of entertainment, and you'd be wrong.
Here at work, however, my new workstation system remains unexploded and nearly smudge-free. Dual Opteron 246s and 2 gigs of DDR400 on a Tyan board, 120gb main drive and two 250gb storage drives in raid-0, dual Neovo 19" hard glass LCD screens, DVD-R and DVD-RW, Radeon 9600 Pro and a Pinnacle breakout box for Liquid Edition 6 Pro, for slapping movies together. I think.
The cause for the lightning that killed Josh's computer and our internet connection is obvious: God didn't want Josh to go to Molten Core last night. Maybe he would have wiped too many times, inducing a crazed, rage-and-caffeine-fueled rampage, blinding many innocent civilians in our unsuspecting neighborhood with a ten-million candle power cannon of unyielding justice. Instead, he wanders around the room, pondering what life was like for everyone before the Internet, and slowly languishes, reverting to a slightly less civilized state of being.
Please remember us in your prayers.
08012K5
Added irene.htm to the messenger archives.
A cop flew up on my ass today and followed me to work. I was going roughly 55 in a 25 at the time, and figured, since he'd already got me going that fast, there was no point in slowing down to the speed limit. I kept at about 45, and he just kept following me. When I got out of my car he asked what year my car was, what mods it had, if I had taken it to the track and that he used to have one and wished he still had it. This makes up for the highway patrolman.