smooth

sweet, took someone's advice (nastyz28.com) and made my fuel/air mixture a little richer (simple turn of a pair of screws on my carbeurator) to hopefully stop raimi's surging and low rpm's. it seems to have worked : ) we'll see how she runs cold tomorrow morning, though, that's always the test. she runs so hot that she doesn't really cool down 'till sometime way after my bedtime...but i'm hopeful. much smoother acceleration when i floor iot :)

especially without a speedometer, haha. checked the line this evening as well (entailed ripping open the dashboard again) and found nothing wrong with the line so i think the meter is actually dead. makes it interesting since now i have no idea how fast i'm going OR how far i've gone. i don't have a resetable odometer so i always have to subtract to figure out when to change gas....i don't trust my fuel gauge...oh well. i'll just be safe for now. ebay, here i come.

peace

i mean...here's the spindle...with the fun purple lube. at least i got it back together...but takin' 'er out for a test drive initially there was no noise! but right when i pulled on my street i heard a soft squeking again...*grrrrr*....one of two things. one...the grease just has to settle....or two....it's the bakes...which i don't know a whole lot about yet...besides how to remove them and install them...without torquing them. oh well. 

i mean...here's the spindle...with the fun purple lube. at least i got it back together...but takin' 'er out for a test drive initially there was no noise! but right when i pulled on my street i heard a soft squeking again...*grrrrr*....one of two things. one...the grease just has to settle....or two....it's the breaks. 

squeaky bearings are frickin' irritating. so i went to NAPA and got a new set for the front end along with some tools and some advice. here's two pictures of raimi naked and lubed up all up in there with this cool lookin' purple lube. lithium grease. she liked it. didn't smell too good...didn't taste it...but it sure did make everything glide in and out...cool stuff.here's the spindle...lubed. that yellow cord is holding up my brake calipers so i didn't have to disconnect the break hose and worry about all the fluid woes.

mileage

so i thought of something interesting today...or, rather, discovered. i have a problem with my wheel size so i was researching some stuff...and came across a bunch of questions regarding bigger wheels and speedometers/odometers. i have bigass wheels on my rearend...bigger than most people put on camaros, even (i was researching 'cause i have clearance problems). what that means is that the odometer is wrong, and the speedometer is also WRONG. i'll calculate it out later (simple circumference ratio as an estimate) but i think it should be kinda interesting.

for one thing, that means i'm usually driving faster than i think i am :) no wonder i always think everyone's slow as fuck. or...yeah...i just have a heavy foot. also, what that means, is i'm probably getting better mileage than i think i am. i usually fill up at around 200 miles (i have no resetable odometer so i have to keep records in the car and subtract all the time) and it usually comes around 17 gallons...and that comes in under 12 miles/gallon. heh....shitty, i know, but it's fuckin' FUN. so i'm probably getting better mileage than i think....which is cool. a simple test is to drive alongside someone or have them drive at least the same route and compare odometer readings. i could try that i guess...some people change their electronics to compensate...whatever.

i'll think more on it, but i thought that was interesting.

burn.

ouch.

so....rear suspensions are pretty fuckin' sturdy....holy shit. i suspect that my wheels are scraping the wheel well when i go over bumps and such...so i tried to raise the rear end. there's a third set of holes in the rear shackle (it was currently in the middle of the three) so i thought i'd just jack the car by the frame, pop the bolts, lower the axel to the lowest set of holes, and bolt 'em back in....

nope.

turns out rear leaf springs are under pressure even under no weight (three mounting points on the leaf spring...the rear of the three moves (shackle), the front is fixed, and the middle is bolted to the wheel/axel). so what that means is...when i popped the bolt from the rear shackle (which was NOT easy...and here's why), the damn thing popped up and went past even the highest hole. i'd read the directions for REMOVING and replacing the things and thought i could skip some steps...nope. so what i thought would be a half hour job turned into a four hour gruelling fight against gravity and a 3400 pound beast with nothing to rest on....*whew*. i finally gave in to the directions and took EVERYTHING off (except the front fixed eye), lowered the leaf spring the the last set of holes in the shackle, bolted everything back on (got a few blisters doin' it), almost broke my stabilizer bar, and finally got it back together only to find out that 1) it's the same height as far as i can tell, and 2) now my shocks are too short and they're hyperextending...which thinking about it i think was my frist problem from the fuckin' beginning. they are, however, adjustable....and i learned how to adjust them after i'd put everything back on...so it'll have to wait for another day.

'till then i have to drive REAL slow over bumps (even on the road) and be careful 'cause the tail feels like it wants to slide out from under me ;) basically if the shocks extend to their full length...instead of bouncing with the tire and forcing the tire to the ground, it'll end up lifting the tire....makin' a disgusting sound...and probably destroy my shocks...unless they need replacing anyway? shit i dunno. i'm realizing the trials of working on an 'already modified' car. the shocks aren't stock. they're koni shocks. koni shocks are expensive.

for a while there i thought my car was dead....that would've been embarrassing..especially with one wheel off and one side of my axle on the ground with the leaf spring floating in the air...that thing is far too strong to be moved by hand. i had to figure out how to manipulate it using the weight of the car....but i think i got it now. at least now i'll know what to do when i decide to replace bushings!


mmm....class dismissed.

sleep.

time of her life, for real

apparently raimi just has the time of her life at 6 degrees before top dead center (TDC). if you're unfamiliar with 'timing' it has to do with that split second it takes for a gas/air mixture to ignite. your camshaft governs how fast the pistons and valves and all that fun stuff go up and down, or at least something like that (still learning). what the camshaft ALSO does is turn the distributor so that your spark plugs fire sequentially in perfect sync with the up/down motions of the pistons. 0 degrees TDC is where the piston is at its lowest point. if you set your timing at 0, what happens is the piston comes down, the spark plug fires at that instant, and the piston is travelling back up already by the time the explosion reaches full combustion. you're wasting energy. when you set the timing before TDC (BTDC), what happens is the spark plug fires a certain amount of degrees (rotational degrees of the camshaft) before the piston hits bottom so that the explosion reaches full combustion when the piston is at the bottom of it's motion and the entire explosion is utilized in shooting the piston back up.

the previous owner put regular gasoline in her...which i may or may not have mentioned. because of this he retarded the timing two degrees and i think increased the idle speed because lower octane gas ignites a little slower. i started putting 92 octane gas in 'er 'cause she just performs better on it. BUT, the rain seems to have made her unhappy. even though the timing was off, she still ran better on higher octane gas before....but after the rain it threw it all outa' sync. don't know why. so i finally got into it, got a couple tools (borrowed a timing light, too) and set it back to the factory suggestion and BAM. she rocks now. before if you floored it off a stop sign, she'd just start surging (alternately accelerating and deccelerating) which i can't imagine is good for the engine. she'd do it all the way up to third gear.

now....off a stop sign...um....yeah. muahahhaaha.

*screeeeeeeeeeech*

time of her life

not really. raimi apparently doesn't like heavy rain...*sigh*

last weekend i went over to an old friend of my brothers' place early on sunday morning. he builds harley's from scavenged parts...his last (first) one was a fuckin' beast. really hot. either way, he's got lotsa tools and knows how "engines" work and he welds, too, so he said he'd take a jab at my cracked exhaust header. unfortunately cast aluminum doesn't weld very well...and but he did seal it a BIT better than it was before, so that's cool. he also let me borrow his timing light...which brings me to tonight.

didn't wanna get too far into 'cause i got home kinda late, but i suspect that part of the problem is the timing. the last owner ran regular fuel in her (oh the horror) and retarded the timing. i run higher octane...and i think that's putting it outa' sync. it always works a lot better when it warms up...but lately she's been actin' up a lot so i decided to check it out. turns out my timing is indeed about 1.5 degrees retarded (heh, retarded)...unfortunately i don't quite know how to fix that....yet. the directions say to "loosen the base clamp bolt and turn the distributor" or something...sounds scary so i figured i should really know what i'm doing. but yeah, at least i know where one problem is.

also found my idle adjust screw in my carb. one of raimi's previous owners installed an edelbrock carb (among other things) so i have to find a manual or something on it...although the four things i REALLY need are easy enough to find. in time, in time, but timing is first on the schedule. maybe saturday.

oh...and workin' in the garage...running the car....damn...i'm gonna asphyxiate myself on carbon monoxide...or get high and pass out on the fuel vapor. high octane gas smells niiiiiiiiiice.....*kerplunk*. and jess passes out and gets his face scraped off by the fan blades and his ears ripped off by the cam pulley. yay.

raimi love.