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They wanted someone with automotive experience, was enthusiastic, and had an engineering degree. I just happened to check all those boxes. It helped that the president of the usa branch really liked my car and that I have quite a bit of fabrication experience. I won't be doing any fabrication for them, mainly because the current location isn't licensed for welding or something. But that's probably a good thing in all honesty
You're definitely right about it being a totally different world. I've got a lot to learn, but I'm enjoying it so far!
so you just heard (through the grapevine) they were looking for new people and got in touch? Im really bad at knowing whats rude to ask so if you would rather not publicly announce your new life thats totally understandable.
You're all good man! Actually, I got really lucky on this one and it somewhat fell in my lap. They actually found me through a recruiter, through a guy I was friends with in college, the morning after I was talking to my lemons teammates and telling them I was going to start looking for a different job. Funny how life works like that sometimes.
In a normal situation, yeah, I would have just contacted them if I heard about the job. But in this situation they found me! Which was nice, job applications blow. Still had to go through a bunch of interviews and a test though, definitely wasn't a quick or easy process.
My other job had turned out to be a dead end. While they had said they would have an engineering position for me soon when I started, my idea of soon and my boss' boss' idea of soon were on two very different levels.
It's definitely nice, a lot better than some of the other ones I've used, definitely quicker than by hand. Although some small notches I would still do by hand, or areas that had more than two notches.
I haven't, looks pretty damn useful though. Would definitely help on some of the more complicated ones as far as setting things up. Sometimes it feels more like a guessing game than anything haha
Let me know how they work out if you get a chance to try them out
Side note, most useful non-needed tool on the whole cage project was my digital angle finder. One that has a zero function is a plus, I was using my caster/camber one.
Well, I was supposed to have the car done today. It's 90% buttoned up and I was on track to finish but I hit some bumps in the road and decided to call it yesterday evening and just hang out with Katy. I leave for AU this week and while I want the car finished before I leave, it'd also be nice to spend time with people that are important. That said, I do need to finish it before or directly after I get back cause I'm scheduled for a tuning session with a well known LS tuner in the area on the tuesday after I get back.
The same thing can be achieved with a bunch of filler rod and a rubber band. I haven't tried it, myself, as I haven't found the need for it yet. But having seen it done, it's pretty handy.
No, but seriously. Aidan drove up with spare parts, ideas and towed Hailey's car in case we couldn't get it running and offered to tow my car back to his place where I could come work on it on the weekend. Not many people would offer even half that.
I'll update my thread this week, lot of **** been going on and I've been crazy busy. Also crazy tired
So I know I've been promising updates and not delivering but I've just been really busy.
So I left for Australia after having to cut my door bar on the passenger side out because I fucked up a measurement late at night. It was an inch too tall and therefore not symmetrical which immediately pissed me off. So I cut it out. I knew coming back I'd only have 4 days to get the car done or at the very least, roadworthy because I had a dyno day on the Tuesday after I got back. But it was do-able.
While in Australia I pulled the trigger on about 5 track days and Katy signed up for the first three I signed up for. Now the problem was, Katy had never done a track day before. When I started doing track days I just signed up for one and no one ever questioned me, but they questioned her and said she would have to get her solo sign off before hand . So we signed her up for the only class in between when I got back and when the first two track days were. The problem with that was, it was the Wednesday after I got back, and none of the cars were ready for a track day. Her Mustang was sketch , the seatbelts wouldn't retract on her side and it was overall just kinda janky. She couldn't drive my car, cause well, I don't really let people drive my car, and her nb didn't have a rollbar. On the other hand, I had brad, who is now slightly lowered on budget bilsteins, and I had an extra rollbar laying around. So we decided that the best thing to do was get brad prepped.
So at this point, I was coming home on 16 hours worth of flights and had to get two cars ready in 4-5 days. You can see how things got busy. Got home, fabbed up a new door bar and went to put the passenger seat and that's when I realized that copying the driver's side meant the passenger had to sit just as close as me. Coming in at 5'6", that means passengers would be really un-comfy. So I said **** the passenger side door bar for the dyno day and focused on just getting the car together. I still had to make dash mounts, mount the steering wheel, connect all the wiring...etc. Katy did pretty much all of the work on brad, she actually did a really nice job. She didn't hack the rear shelf up with snips, she used a hole saw and neatly cut the clearances for the rollbar and then painted the cut area. I've seen much worse jobs done by much more experienced people.
Dash mounts in 4 places now, stock center front of the dash. And the 3 other places you can see by the large black rivets. Basically those hold on a small plate with a stud and that stud drops into a mount and then is secured by a nut. Quick to take off, easy to put on. That picture is supposed to be rotated.
Katy and I were running on a couple hours of sleep a night from Friday to Tuesday. People asked me if I got the really nasty jet lag that everyone gets flying back. I didn't. I didn't get enough sleep to have jet lag take effect. The night before the car wouldn't start, no fuel. Turned out to be a fuel pump relay, although now I'm wondering if maybe it was a ground that would later give me trouble. The morning of the dyno we got up nice and early and headed out. I hadn't driven the car at all in about 9 months and didn't even run it the night before because I finally got it to fire at about 11 pm and wasn't going to run it in my driveway. I thought the car had an air bubble in it because my temp gauge reads at about 1:30 when the car is normal but I thought it was closer to 12:30ish so I pulled off the road and made sure there wasn't an air pocket. Other than that the trip went well. The drive was 100+ miles and I must say, the momo needs more lumbar support, I ordered some memory foam to put on my lower back. (It's almost like they didn't design the seat for road trips)
Dyno went well, fixed a lot of my drivability issues and then did some wot. Put down 450@6400 and 420@5500ish. I put down a little less than I was hoping but the internet says mustang dyno's read a little lower than the dynojets that I was basing my predictions off of. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter, but I would have like to see 470whp. That said, not going to try to add anything to hit it, I'm happy with where the car is at right now and I a loooooong time before I'll even be able to use the power it currently makes.
On the way back is when things got fun. I was coming back north of Vancouver, going up a hill when all of a sudden, boom, ******* nothing. All power gone . (no actual noise boom) I coasted off to the side of the road and found a flat spot at the bottom of the hill. Katy circled back around since she was in front and I tried to diagnose it on the side of the road. My first guess was fuel, especially with the relay the night before. We got a new one but no luck. I was tired, didn't have a multimeter, and couldn't think that straight. I did test the fuel rail and saw that it had pressure and at that point, I kinda gave up.
Then Aidan volunteered to come save my ***. He said he could come in a few hours with his/Hailey's green nb and worst case scenario I could take that home and he'd trailer my car to his house where I could come down on the weekend and try to fix it. So I said sure and decided to hang out on the side of the highway. Katy went to the store and got me some snacks and drinks and headed back home in her car to attempt to get brad buttoned up for her track class the next morning. Ended up falling asleep leaned up against the side of my door with my *** on the pavement for about an hour. A couple people stopped, one guy loved the swap which was cheered me up a little.
Then my hero showed up. Equipped with a multimeter and a brain that was functioning we diagnosed it as a bad ground for the fuel pump. Luckily I had some butt connectors and **** with me so we rigged it up and got it started. I was able to drive home the rest of the way.
I got home and Katy and I frantically tried to get her car back together. I wanted her to be able to get a good night's sleep, but instead, we got to bed at about 2. Felt really crappy about that one. But her class went well, aaaaaand she didn't get signed off for solo, because you have to come back a second time to learn how to point by. No offense, but that's ******* stupid. Like seriously. The class was $550, and then the second time out is $375 for a half day, just to learn how to point by. That's ******* dumb. She thought the drills were really good and she learned a lot but apparently, her instructor didn't give her that many tips on track, just kinda blabbed the whole time. Not super useful, but she still got a lot out of it. Anyway, there weren't any other days that were possible so we just hoped for the best at the turn2 event and the revscene the next day.
Brad looking all prepped and ****
Now we had planned on taking the Mustang and Audrey, except Audrey had an unfinished cage and the Mustang, well it was still janky as ****. But of course, we only had like 2 weeks to get everything right. We tried to catch up on a little sleep the first couple days and then hit the ground running after that. This is the first week where I haven't gone to bed at 1-2 and gotten up at 5:45 every morning. To say I was exhausted would be a bit of an understatement. I built a rollbar for Katy's Mustang so that she could put harnesses in and have belts that actually would do something. I'm not a big fan of harnesses on the street, but I'm also not a fan of seat belts that have a couple inches of slack in them. Also, this wasn't a new seat belt issue, we tried two other belts, it was a Katy has to sit too close to the steering wheel issue.
While on the dyno, we didn't realize my exhaust was rubbing on the driveshaft, like really badly. Not the dyno operators fault, I didn't catch it either and we both checked to see if the everything cleared. We noticed it when I was switching exhausts at his place but I didn't think it was that deep. It wasn't until the 27th that I realized how bad it was and immediately ordered a new one and had it express shipped. It showed up on the 3rd, and was a solid 5" too short. ****. I contacted them and they said they'd get one shipped out overnight on Thursday. Well, Thursday rolled around and they got one shipped out...normal freight. Cool. So now I had a car I had been working on for two weeks trying to get prepped for this track day and no ******* driveshaft. Neato. So I decided to take Brad. Except that brad's rear upright bushings were bad. Like really bad. I was actually able to pull them out of the upright by hand, with minimal effort. So I swapped axles and uprights cause I also had a bad cv joint and decided I was just gonna send brad. I also got some vr -1s and 15x8 s1's while I was in Aus, so brad was kinda shaping up to be a fun little street car.
Neither of these driveshafts are useful. (again with the non-rotated pictures...ugh)
We got Katy's car done at 2:30 and had to get up to leave for the track at 4:00. People always recommend you get as little sleep as possible before a track day right? But on the other hand, she had a new massive radiator, a front swaybar that actually had a working mount on the driver side, two Sparco sprints, a pretty sweet rollbar, and harnesses that actually functioned. So basically a working car. We got to the track day and they didn't even blink an eye or ask about Katy's experience so that was a relief. We were both in the novice class. Neither of us had driven our specific cars on track before, but I've been to the ridge a couple times for lemons so I had an idea on the layout.
Saturday actually went really well. I downloaded a decent lap timer and started paying more attention to that. I really started working on my braking points and seeing how far I could extend them, when was best to shift, experimenting with different lines. Felt like stuff was starting to click and I was chipping away at my times each session. Ended up with a 2:14 from a 2:28 at the start of the day. (SM record is like 1:57 for reference) Yes I know that's trash, you don't have to tell me. But I point people by as soon as I see them in my mirrors so at least I'm self-aware trash. There was still plenty of time on the table, even with my little 1.6, I would have really liked to keep pushing it. Buuuuuut I killed it. Early on when I first bought Audrey, (brad has Audrey's engine, remember) the filter wiggled loose after about 3k miles and I lost a bit of oil. When Brad started consuming a lot of oil in the past year, I knew that its days were numbered. In my last session of the day, the engine started knocking pretty good. I limped the car in and sure enough, engine was knocking. I had had a really good day, but Brad was just done.
Katy volunteered to let me drive her car on sunday so I took it out the first session. Now last year, reading on the forums a bit (god mustang forums make me want to shoot myself) we found the biggest tire you could run with stock fenders was a 255/something/17. So that's what we got. Ha, yeah right. Katy had been driving the car pretty easy Saturday and was still getting some rubbing. When I took it out and drove it a little bit harder, I got a ton of rubbing. Also, her rear brake bias was scary. Super unstable through hard braking. Got the car pretttty sideways through 2-3. Came back in after the session and dialed it back a bit. Second session out I did a 2:20 but had about 3 cars come up on me really fast so I pulled off the line and let them all through. Problem was I lost all my momentum and then had to go up a hill. No doubt it would have been more like a 2:16ish if I had a clean lap (I know, still ****) but whatever, speculating is easy. The car had tons of grip through slow speed corners and a little more straight line speed, but the Miata definitely had it in the high-speed corners. Either way, super fun car to drive and I think with some suspension, it'll really fly.
However I was rubbing a lot and was starting to eat into the tire, so I called it after two sessions. Katy went out for a couple more, but as she started to drive harder she hit more rubbing so we called it 2/3 through the day. Would have been great to be out all day, but we were both pretty tired and I still had to get my car towed home. Called AAA (which I got right after the dyno debacle) and go Brad back home. He's now going to be getting an entire nb rollerskate. Ordered an rb header, 1.6 aluminum fw , timing belt, water pump, seals, q-max, and some other **** for the bp4w that I've got in the basement. I'll be switching back and forth between trying to get Audrey done and swapping everything into brad. I have a track night on the 20th that Audrey is technically ready for, but I'd like to get the fastback mounted and some other stuff is done. Also, need to paint the cage and Katy's mustang's interior. But that'll be after the track night.
So yeah. I don't blame you if you didn't read that. **** that was a lot to type. But now you're updated on what's happened since I went to Aus. I think I'm gonna make a separate thread for Brad since he's turning into something kinda fun.
Here's some more pics from along the way.
Katy cleaning off some of the surface rust on Audrey's cage.
Tires!
Random cage shots, taco gusset is a rough draft, still needs some trimming
05-07-2018, 11:42 PM
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