Rocco's Modern Life by jcpahman77

5 minute(s) of a 96 minute read

I'm back from Ft. Hood! What a waste, it's bad when even your commander says the training was a waste of time. Anyway, I got back to my car and it rewarded my leaving it for a week with a dead battery. I love this car! So much personality (yeah that's it, personality). I know I know, I need to figure out the sub wiring, it started dying right after I added the sub so I'm sure I just got 1 wire wrong. I forgot just how much fun this little car is to drive though. I spent the last 120 or so miles coming home driving a HET carrying another HET. So figure total weight of 150,000 lbs give or take a few thousand. It gets tiring, especially with a top speed of 45 mph.

Anyway, the trip back plus the way my mind works is giving rise to more "you shouldn't do that" kinda ideas. We've beaten to death the idea of using the a/c for cooling the intake but with air temps rarely below 80* it's got my mind reeling. I'm not going to let the cat out of the bag yet suffice it to say I'm not ready to put this one to bed until I waste a little money on the effort. Stay tuned, I'll take lots of pics of the carnage that's bound to ensue.

Picked up the new reverse/upshift sending unit last night. My reverse lights don't work and I guess that's important, I'm just hoping it's the sender and not the linkage, sometimes it falls out of reverse and I can tell from the feel it's a bad bushing. Anyway, while at Autozone I picked up a 40a relay. I'd been asking about making my headlights well, not suck, and about 50% said bad ground and the other 50% said relay the headlights. I tried running a new ground already and didn't notice a difference so today I'm going to install a relay and see if there is an improvement. Depending on how much time I have more air cooling madness may take place, I hate Texas lol.

7/1/07

The self-serve shop closed at 5pm today and I spent the better part of the day there working on my wife's car so today I only had time to work on the reverse lights. I ordered a new sending unit because I know they used to work and suddenly quit. The fuses and bulbs are good so the next step was the sending unit. One look told me I was wrong. I looks like some of the wiring got caught on the driver's side half shaft, what resulted is a rats nest of ripped, stripped wire. Lucky for me I know what it's supposed to look like, too bad every wire I touch there falls apart.

That pissed me off and I was not in the mood so I got it to where I can come back to it tomorrow and moved onto the full throttle switch for fuel enrichment. The MKII throttle body I used so that I'd have the throttle switches for the knock controller didn't allow for the mounting of the original full throttle switch. With limited tools I did mounted the switch in a style that can only be called my own. I went to Lowe's and bought some 2 part epoxy and glued the damn thing to the top of the MKII throttle body's full throttle switch. TADA!! It works. Now the car revs like it doesn't know what the redline is. I also started research on my cooler intake air project. Waiting on funding at this point.

7/4/07

Washed the car again. This time had a friend over who has one of those Coleman power buffer things. We washed the car with Armor All car wash and then used a Meguire's polish. WOW is about the only thing that can be said. I got some progress pics to show how well the buffer works.

The right side has been washed and the left side is with the buffer:

Same thing but the roof this time:

This is the driver's side after being washed:

The rest are some overall shots of the car after it's all done: