metaruss

The stupid radiator core support broke and the engine mount smashed the crap out of the radiator.  Whatever moron at whatever body shop fixed this thing did a really crappy job.  They replaced some of the metal, but didn’t bother to actually weld any of it together.  Instead they put a couple of pop rivits in, used the wrong bolts on the ends, and let the rest of it float around (which is why the hood looks a little unsteady at speed).  The core support itself was not even straightened out.  Instead they welded some angle iron and a piece of a bed frame to it and hoped for the best.  The remaining sheet metal fatigued, cracked, and ripped apart.  I pushed everything back where it is supposed to be, more or less, and welded it together.  It should hold for a while.  Ideally I should cut that whole mess out and weld in a new one, but I can probably do some creative sheet metal bending and make it work too.

My intent was to build-up this motor over the summer, but I simply didn’t have time.  I also wanted to fix the fender and paint the hood, but again no time (house stuff).  I spent most of my free time trying to get the CSX ready for the convention.  So, the Daytona basically sat in the garage all summer while I drove the CSX.

Before putting the CSX away and getting the Daytona back on the road, I did manage to fix a few things.  I went to a local fabric store and purchased new headliner material and finally fixed that stupid thing.  While I had it out, I installed the ’87 overhead console and associated wiring.  While doing that, I also prepared the wiring to accept the early 12-button navigator in the ’91 slot.  This required splicing in about 12″ of wire into the harness so it would reach.  Also fixed a few other electrical gremlins.  The compass in the overhead console has a problem retaining it’s calibration and the thermometer was way out of whack.  I managed to calibrate the thermometer, but I was not able to get the little microcontroller in there to keep its memory.  I’m not sure what causes it to lose its brains, but it is fairly intermittent.  My primary motivation to install it was the compass (I don’t have the best sense of direction), but it will have to wait.

Put the car to rest for the winter.  The inner tripod on the passenger side axle is pretty loose and the car needs tires, but other than that it ran good all summer/fall.  I do need to drop the oil pan and install the crank scraper, oil temp bung, and possibly some baffling.  The one thing that got me at the driving school at SDAC was oil supply problems.  By the end of the session the car was running pretty bad because of collapsed lifters.

cats2procmailrc is a tool written in Perl by Cameron Simpson.  It reads a human friendly mail category description file and emits a matching procmail recipe to implement it. The intent is to have an extremely succinct file of easily editable one line rules, generally of the form:

folder tag pattern

See the man page for more information.

Packages

• cats2procmailrc_1.5-1_all.deb
• cats2procmailrc_1.5-1.diff.gz
• cats2procmailrc_1.5-1.dsc
• man page

Changes from Original Source

• Add missing -T option implementation.
• Disable double quote stripping for maildirs.

09/28/04: Version 1.4 – had some mechanical issues that had me chasing my tail. Ended up undoing a lot of changes and putting them back.  The accumilated changes include an unscaled AISBaroCompensation table, some changes to the AIS off idle position, changed all the boost tables to 21psi, took some fuel out of the fuel baseline, added some fuel to cold start table C, grabbed the non-MP no throttle fuel table and fine-tuned it to reduce exhaust popping and funny behavior in high vacuum, slight tweaks to starting fuel, and kicked the whole PEFTBL up by 10%.

On the road again.  New intermediate shaft, new seals.  Thanks to Dave for the crankshaft seal housing (had to strip the orange paint…sorry :).  I still have a rattle coming from the tranny in neutral.  I noticed that it doesn’t rattle if I release the clutch slowly, so perhaps it has something to do with this 6-puck HD clutch disc.  Nice to have A/C again.

I was doing some post-convention maintenance such as retorquing the head studs (which it didn’t need, BTW), when I had a slight problem.  While trying to track down a fuel leak I dropped one of the fuel rail bolts on the head, which of course went straight down the center oil return passage and into the oil pan.  Grrr.  While pulling the pan, I cracked the front crank seal housing.  Grrr.  I then noticed that the new intermediate shaft seal housing is also leaking.  Grrr.

Well, another year, another convention.  SDAC-14 was a blast as usual.  I went home each night, which made it hard to get up at 5am for the car show and the driving school.  The car show was pretty cool, as we were right along side the classic Mopars from the Chicago Mopar Connection.  My dad had a good time checking out all the classic Mopars.  I didn’t bother showing the CSX because it was…well just ugly.

The performance driving school was awesome.  I liked it even more than SDAC-10 (even though that one had the NASCAR oval).  Blackhawk Farms is a really fun track and the weather was beautiful.  I got a total of 6 sessions in and my instructor was with me the whole time.  He really helped me a lot.  The car was running a little lean at the top end.  Some 100 octane stopped the pinging, but it still broke up on the straights after a couple of laps.  I think I cured it the next day by raising the pumping effeciency table up a bit in the upper RPM range.  Guess I’m flowing a bit better than stock…probably the ported exhaust manifold/bigger exhaust.  By the end my rear brakes were toast.  They sounded horrible, so I just put a new set of pads on since I couldn’t find rotors that night.

The drags were fun, but a little quieter than usual in terms of participation.  There was some scheduling confusion and the bracket races happened while everyone was eating lunch.  I didn’t realize until the end that time trials were still running between events.  I would have run more if I had known.  One thing on the Shelby that I have not been able to fix: the car won’t boost past about 14-15psi, even with the wastegate unplugged.  I made a new BOV flange, swapped Talon BOVs, replaced the ribbed, upper hose, etc.  Nothing helped.  It’s either a boost leak in the intercooler or somewhere that I can’t see or the wastegate actuator is toast.  The turbo is getting rather sloppy on the compressor side and there seems to be some oil in the IC now when there wasn’t before the headgasket change.  I have a feeling that it’s on the way out.  Grrr.

In the staging lanes at Da Grove.  Thanks to Kevin Schellenberg for the pictures.

My best run was the first of the day: 14.737sec @ 96.35mph:

Found a friend for that head.  New Turbos Unleashed S60 unit with an adjustible large can wastegate, stock .48 A/R exhaust housing, clipped turbine, and a 3″ TU swingvalve.

06/29/04: Version 1.3 – added some advance on the in the mid and top end and backed-off on the high-boost advance.  Put a tad more fuel in the PEFTBL.