caffeineslug.com

Update bonanza

This is exactly the problem with a website, the further behind I get, the less motivated I am to make a post, since each passing day means I have more to add. At some point my brain hits a limit though, and anything new I want to add means something else gets left behind. Or to paraphrase Homer, "Remember when we went to that wine tasting and I forgot how to drive?"

I think the last post I made was just before the Tucson autocross, where I planned to drive Dave's car. I had all sorts of problems with that. It was a really fast course, requiring a shift to third on two occasions. Rarely could I get the car from third into second gear cleanly, and on the last couple runs I even had trouble upshifting to third...I just couldn't find it. On top of that, a cone was called on my fastest run (I have no idea where), so I had to stand on a slow run. It really wasn't a good course to exhibit all of the car's abilities, which was unfortunate.

Car issues aside, the course design resulted in some..."event management" issues I guess. Due to the loop and crossover, launch intervals were in the neighborhood of 40 seconds, and even that often put two cars close to each other on course, where one car could easily spin out into another. On top of that we got 4 runs, and that made for a pretty long day.

This is where I totally forget everything that happened last week. I think I probably played some video games. A bit of GT4, some Halo 2. It's good to know that an entire week of my life can be boiled down to "I played video games."

Over this past weekend I noticed an odd noise on deceleration from around my front right wheel. When I finally went to check it out, I first noticed that I was missing a lugnut. Wait...that's not right. The other 3 were "fairly tight," in the same way that I was feeling "fairly stupid." As I'm mourning the loss of the poor lugnut, I notice something shiny on the back side of the wheel. Grease, and lots of it. That's rarely a good thing. Off comes the wheel, and the cv boot is torn all the way around the joint, tossing grease everywhere. Sweet.

My first trip to the dealer for the week, and I'm buying nothing but a lugnut, as I don't have any spares, and I'd rather not (knowingly) drive on three. The boot kit comes from BAP, and I drive up to Clint's place for yet another fine boot installation, which generally went well, except for some additional pain caused by my poly bushings in the LCA, and a broken cotter pin.

Second trip to the dealer for the week, this time to get some spare cotter pins. They don't have the exact one I'm looking for in saleable form, but the guy is nice enough to grab a handful of pins from some bins and just give them to me, saying "one of these should fit." Hooray.

I did in fact carve a pumpkin this year, and I finally tried using a stencil. I did The Cheat from homestarrunner.com, as it looked easy and recognizeable (well, if you know the site).

So that's about it, I think I'm caught up now.

Posted by Ben at November 3, 2005 12:16 PM