Sunday, May 20, 2012

The Fat Lady Sings

I borrowed a set of LongAcre cornerweight scales and went to weigh the unmodified Z.  Nic and Grayson were gone for the weekend, and nobody else showed up to help me except for Max.  Max's initial observations of Mr. Nic's garage:
1) Wow that's messy daddy.  Are there spiders in there?
2) Mr. Nic drinks out of Wolfpack cups? (One rolled out of the garage when I opened the door)
Max thinks all it needs is a good driver
Maybe I'm spoiled, but I'm used to having at least the bare minimum tools around.  Mr. Nic appears to be missing metric tools, which those smart Japanese didn't think of back in 1987.  I managed to find an oversized SAE socket that I could use to get the 8 lugnuts on with, but no ratchet or adapter that would fit it.  So, like a real tough guy, I used my hands.  And got a blister.  This ain't spreadsheets, yo.
Blister #1 Brad suffers for the Z car cause
The flat tires made it hard to get the correct chassis height or weight distribution.  I was not able to tweak the front/rear height to get a calculated CG.
LongAcre scales setup
 2926 lbs total, with 1548 front and 1378 rear.  That's 52% on the front, but the RF tire was completely flat, so let's ignore the distribution for now.
My prediction - the 1st 200 lbs will come off easily.  The next 200 lbs will be difficult.  The 200 lbs after that... very painful.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Work Day #1

Let's see here, what did we get done on our first work day?  We pulled the horribly old, dry-rotted tires/wheels off.  We changed the oil and filter.  We determined the last time any lubricant was in the valve covers, Carter was president.  We ensured no bugs were stuck to the air filterless MAF.  We started her up and made sure the valve cover gasket leaked enough oil to form a james bond smokescreen.

Travis, Duncan, Grayson, Sam, Nic - the 5 best looking of our 8 person crew
As you can see from the photo above, a tiny amount of beer was consumed to make sure we didn't panic when we found the black widow spiders.

Travis: hey ya'll, them wires don't look factory, anybody worried?
The master technician who saved our beast from the clutches of the scrapyard did a mighty fine job repairing the wiring hacks and getting it running.  It revs (almost) and belches like an old dog.  Also, there was a screeching noise coming from the front.  Duncan was in the process of spraying all the moving parts up there with some WD40 and/or windex when he caught his whiskers and nearly got whisked away like Mary Poppins.

Yearning for wheel-to-wheel inasniteee
She has nearly shiny paint, the odor of a fine racing heritage, and a stance that says "160 hp of fury."

I have another photo I took through the open hatch, but I have apparently managed to break blogger's upload tool.  Plus, it shows a little rust and we're shy about the very few imperfections this beauty has.