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Walmarts finest $70 battery
It feels really strange hunting down stock parts for this thing, but whatever.
If it works, it works! I am somewhat disappointed this battery does not have proper vent tubes, but I'll take what I can get at the moment.
O sanp we smoggin'
So clean
Cleaner than a diesel VAG anyway 😏
Legal again! It'll be weeks before my sticker shows up, so I look forward to meeting all the LEOs in the area until then. This car with expired registration tag is the definition of rolling probable cause.
I discovered the hard way last night that I had ... "transplanted" the H4 7" sealed beam housings into another project. I should probably do something about that before I get too far along
Seeing as my passenger side popup is completely borked from the rollover and I only have the one headlight anyway... has anyone seen a cheap and easy headlight housing around? I'm thinking like a motorcycle or hot rod type part that I can shove into that void for the time being. It'll be ugly, but I feel like I need something that has at least the barest veneer of legality and functionality. That event ends at 5pm and there is a solid chance I run out of daylight before I get home.
The other option would be a set of SAE road legal "fog lights" that I can chuck in there on the tube bumper. There seem to be a ton of off-road lights and light bars and such, but none of them are actually street/highway legal. Light bar is a non starter as that's the easy button to get pulled over out this way. Some way to legally augment the anemic NA lighting would be good. The Auxbeam LED off-road fog lights I have on the car now are for sure not of the legal variety. They have a real punchy spot beam but the cutoff is somewhere between real bad and non existent. If worst comes to worst I can aim them way down and hope for the best, but its not ideal.
I'm open to suggestions, and it needs to be something I can acquire and install by this weekend
As the first priority is to NOT get pulled up in the first place, lights that look legal would meet that test. However, curiousity meets bored cop, and hey pull you over anyway. The outcome might hang on anything else they can ping you for, rather than a forensic examination of the legality of your lights.
Let's just say I prefer to avoid any imperial entanglements.
The car is 100% legal, I just don't what to have to explain myself. Of course, this isn't the type of thing you drive if you aren't comfortable with drawing at least a bit of attention.
It would also be nice to be able to see if I have to drive home at night in the rain. I've got something on the way, hopefully it'll get here in time
It's starting to look like a real car again. A real dirty car, but still a car. I broke my hook needle so I gave up on the Frankenstein's monster baseball stitch and just tossed some zip ties in there.
I still need a passenger airbag to fill that hole in the dash, a full shifter rebuild bushing kit, upper and lower shifter boots, and maybe if I'm feeling ambitious and interior shift boot. I do like the new $7 aluminum shift ****, but it needs a locking collar of some sort. Maybe I can turn something up on the lathe.
I swear, folks around have been getting away with expired tags for months. You can stay here if you don't want to drive that thing at night G. Only about 45 minutes south of Santa Rosa.
Now I'm not saying I spent 10min in the garage polishing my shaft...
The boot is the cheapest one I could find on eBay that would be delivered before the weekend, turns out it was drop shipped direct from China. Lol tariffs. It's certainly got that new rubber stink! Fitment is fine just fine and should keep the big rocks out of the cabin.
I swear, folks around have been getting away with expired tags for months. v
If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have any
Originally Posted by sonofthehill
You can stay here if you don't want to drive that thing at night G. Only about 45 minutes south of Santa Rosa.
Well, thank you very much for the offer! We've got lodging setup already but its always appreciated!
Originally Posted by sixshooter
I have a passenger headlight assembly in my garage sale for shipping if it would get there in time
I'm actually doing OK for stock headlight hardware, but thanks for thinking of me!
I've got a complete pair of pop-ups
The big problem is that the passenger side one really took a hit
And there is enough damage to the inner fender, outside the frame rail, that a stock headlight popup unit won't mount up anymore.
I've toyed with the idea of harvesting an inner fender from the junkyard, just cutting along the framerail and around the shock tower, and scabbing it, in to resolve this issue. It might be worth doing it just for the experience, but I'm not sure if the juice is worth the squeeze.
I feel a little better about the battery now:
I ended up buying 2x of the Dorman 924-254 battery vent tubes. Much MUCH too expensive for what they are, but they fit perfectly into the holes in the sides of the caps
Knowing what I tend to do with this car, it seemed to be a good idea.
I found a set of Cibie 7" housings in the garage! I didn't even know I had these!
Getting closer!
As you can see, it's been pushed in at the bottom to the left, and it's rotated up and to the right? I can't put the lid on the frame because it won't fit around the hood, and I'll have to build some sort of support structure to hold it up as the motor is gone. Drivers side pops as it should, but this passenger side is going to be permanently up. And I'll need to somewhat aim it. Hopefully. Maybe.
Rallycross was fun, hah!
For those unaware, SCCA Rallycross follows the same basic format and structure as autocross, but on dirt. Or in this case, in the mud. We were in an overflow parking lot at the Santa Rosa fairgrounds, and the event had a rallycross school on Saturday and the timed event Sunday. I was only there for the timed event. They had 60 entries with a surprising number of first timers. They had no rain for the previous 3 days and the folks that did the Saturday school got in a ridiculous number of runs, but Sunday we got a 1/4" of rain overnight and a light drizzle all day Sunday which turned the whole course into a mud bog. Deep, sticky mud with a side of 6"-8" fallow pasture grass. It was pretty intense. As the day went on, it only got worse.
The modifications on the NA put me solidly into the PR class (Prepared, RWD) and while my gearing really sucked, the AT tires were about the only thing that saved me. @gesso was there with his lifted Nissan Leaf wearing a pair of Pirelli pro rally gravel spec tires that he borrowed from work on the front end, putting him into PF (Prepared, FWD) which he team drove with one of his coworkers. @afm brought out his Focus ST with the all-seasons which put him in SF (Stock, FWD).
GambLeaf on the grid, lol
If you've done autocross, you know it's not a thing where you hang out and fingerbang your phone while on course, so I didn't get a lot of pics.
The organizers really had their rears in gear and the event went pretty smoothly, for the most part. They did an actual tech inspection, which is I the first time I've ever seen an event make the effort
Somehow I passed 😛
Format was 1 'parade lap' (untimed) followed by 6 timed runs, final time was all your timed laps added together. The stock cars went out first and then the organizers immediately cut it back to 4 timed laps because there just weren't go to be that many hours in the day. We were working while the stock cars were on course, and we pushed sooooo many cars out of the mud. And it wasn't even that bad yet.
Mugging for the camera while on station, lol
The P cars were in run group 3 of 4 and by that time the mud was deep and nasty. They asked us if we wanted to skip our parade lap and it was about 50/50. I opted to do mine just so I'd know what to expect (more on this later.)
On grid, after parade or maybe run 1 lol
My windshield wiper motor was set on stun and my squirters popped the hose so without rain, I was pretty boned as to visibility. They kept telling me to roll up my window at the start block, but I inevitably kept rolling them down on course so I could see where I was going while entering corners sideways. Apparently this was noticed and commented on by several course workers 😂
The car does... pretty Ok in the mud! The gearing is was less than ideal so I don't think I got out of second the whole time. At some points all I could do was just hammer down and bounce it off the limiter and let the tires dig until the found some sort of grip, and try to keep momentum going. In mud that deep if you stop, you die.
There was some serious communication issues between the volunteer who was running the grid and the timers, so things got pretty screwed up very quickly. I was told that due to time, we'd be doing 3 runs instead of 4, then he asked me about 16 times which run I was on. I found out later he was releasing cars to do 3rd and 4th runs when there were still cars gridded that were on their 1st. Dude had no concept of multiple drivers in one car and changing the numbers between runs. Total chaos.
As it turns out, our group was supposed to be 4 runs. Grid dude didn't communicate that I had opted in for the parade lap so timing dude counted that as my first run, and I got shorted a 4th at-speed run. I'm not super serious about this kind of stuff, but I'm still slightly salty. Deleting my parade lap time and replacing it with an average of my 3 at speed runs in place of a 4th, I was well within reach of the aggregate time of the guy who finished second in my class.
As a result, I finished 3rd.
I'm pretty happy about that, all things considered
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I swear, folks around have been getting away with expired tags for months. You can stay here if you don't want to drive that thing at night G. Only about 45 minutes south of Santa Rosa.
