Lots of new stuff done to the car lately, but I haven’t had the time to update the site, apparently. I’ll get some horrible camera phone pictures online here shortly. I have been working profusely on plumbing the car, with some disastrous failures. The two different tools I purchased from Summit Racing (a 45 degree double-flare tools, and a 37 degree AN flare tool) were the two biggest pieces of shit I’ve ever purchased. So, if you happen to get the opportunity to buy them from Summit Racing, don’t bother.

So, I dug and dug, and found a real 37 degree flare tool made by Ridgid (It’s model 377 for anyone that needs to buy one for themselves) – This tool does a wonderful job of flaring and burnishing both Aluminum and Mild Steel tubing. It ags behind a bit on flaring stainless tubing, although it allegedly does so (It didn’t do a very good job, and I’ll be trusting my life to these brake lines, so I’m not using the Stainless brake line that I was going to use because I can’t find anything reasonable that will flare it.

The back of the car without a bumper.

The back of the car, complete with DZUS fasteners.

The tin work was deceptive. It took a few months to get done, working on it some nights and on the weekends. I have a few shots of it here, but it was a bit more complicated than two pictures :-)

A box from BHJ

BHJ Damper for the 4g63

I’ve decided to add a bunch of random pictures to the current build diary, so things may not make a whole lot of sense ;-p

09/13/05 – I thought last weekend was hectic, but I was wrong. This past weekend, Mark and I worked a lot on the front subframe, control arms, and tin work in the back of the car. Mark normalized the 4130 subframe, and control arms with a little help from me. I did the tin work with a little help from Mark. Productive, but still a bit of work to do. It’s been slow, in the new shop, because we’re not used to it yet. Every other sentence is “do you know where this is?” because neither of us knows where [u]anything[/u] is ;-) We’re actually finding things, it’s just taking us some time to do it.

The rear bumper has been chopped up a little bit. Thankfully, it’s stock from the outside, but the underside needs some modifications to get the tin work inside of it. The work is slow, still, but it’s moving. We’re focusing a lot on the underside of the car to get some things we think we’ll have issues with squared away. a lot of the work we’re doing it airflow type stuff. We’re not going overboard with airfloils or anything, but we don’t want the bumper flying off the car at 150 mph either ;-) This car is going to be *loud*.

This weekend was quite hectic. Friday night I went out to the old shop in Lansing, and we picked up a LOT of stuff. I took the Talon, finished up the front suspension, and put it on the trailer to bring it out to the new shop. Then, Saturday consisted of building a new workbench, along with some serious shelving to support all the stuff in the shop. It’s crazy. I will have to get some pictures up soon :-)

Wow. I spent the day yesterday moving out of my Apartment, to a new town, and to a new shop. After getting the last of my stuff out of my old apartment, I went over to the shop to clean up a bunch of things, and to move a bunch of stuff over to the new shop. My brother Jake chipped in with his truck, and we moved a lot of the large stuff. I’m happy to say the half the Talon, the turbocharger, is over at the new shop ;-p – along with a bunch of my tools. There will be another load of tools, I’m sure, and a lot of cleanup at both the old shop and the new shop. The old shop needs a good going through, to make sure I’m not leaving anything behind. Then, the new shop needs to ge ORGANIZED. It’s *amazing* to me that the new shop, over twice the size, with *only* my tools and equipment, has less space in it than the old shop. Okay, so I’m taking up some space with the trailer, but still, the new shop seems cozier right now.

We’ve been working on cleaning out the shop lately. My friend Rick Garnaat has been a patient man – my car has been at his house, under construction for over a year. Because I had to move, and am getting sick of driving 100 miles a day in a diesel truck, I’ve decided to move closer to work. So, on 08/02/05 I signed a lease for a decent size shop out here in Howell, MI to work on the Talon. It was a wood shop – dusty, wood-y, filled with sawdust, with broken plumbing and stuff, so Mark and I have been working on cleaning it up. We officially have car stuff in there now, with Jay’s motor coming to rest in the garage :-p So, now all we have to do is get the Talon off Jack stands, and get it out to the new shop. Then, we can really get to work. The new shop space is about twice as large as the space the Talon currently sits it, and it will only be for the Talon, and my tools, so it should really be nice :-) I’m going to have to re-level the tubing bender, though :-o

In other news, I wanted to answer some questions people have been asking search engines to find this site [doc:Search-Engine-Referrals]Search Engine Referrals[/doc]

Well, we went to the shootout, and came back from the shootout. Lots of interesting stuff there. Mark and I have a tendency to check out stuff there, and like to take a lot of pictures of race car type stuff. There aren’t a whole lot of full race cars at the shootout, but the cars that are there are pretty neat. Some noteable things:

-Russ Coxe’s Automatic 2G. He doesn’t leave the line on the convertor, and he’s still having issues with spinning tires all over the first 60′

-That crazy Canadian summit with the fiberglass front clip – That car is very nicely done guys, even if I can’t remember your names :-)

-John Shepherd – busted out a wicked mid 8 second pass. Just plain neat :-) Ron Shearer mentioned how amazing it was that everyone just started clapping and cheering when Shep pulled up to the line. It was extremely entertaining to see him run.

-Dean Bradley, a fellow Michigan DSMer, was running low 10’s in his street driven AWD automatic DSM. Fortified and tuned with bits from Kevin, Deans car is just really fun to watch. Dean typically drives the car to the track, but somehow Kevin talked Dean into trailering his Talon down to Norwalk :-) Dean came in second in the Q16. He’s still using a small turbo, too :-o

The front suspension is almost all assembled. We’ve got a few other things to do to the front brakes, but they’re almost ready to bolt on. The safety-wiring took longer, and was more tedious than I had expected, but it’s all done up front. Sweet. So, this stuff will go together this week, and then we’ll drop it on the ground :-) Then, we’ll have to button up a few things, and move the car.

Site News: Okay, so the site has been updated quite heavily, and I basically added wiki-type content management. This way Mark and I can both update the site whenever we need to, and can easily make changes. I still have to whip up some stuff for photo management and the like, but for now, this works pretty well.

Car News: As I said before, there are a LOT of updates with the car. Over the past few months, Mark and I have been working on getting the front suspension squared away. Stuff that isn’t part of the build yet includes: Tin work, front suspension work, turbocharger stuff.

Tin Work: The tin work on the car is almost complete. There are a few breackets to make here and there, and the tranny tunnel, but the rest of the large pieces are mostly finished. I think I’m going to change two of them, I just don’t like how they look on the car. So, some small changes will happen on those two panels, and then I’ll make the last two small pieces in the back of the car. After that, we’ll work on the under-car tin work to cover up the fuel cell cage, and then work on the transmission tunnel.

Front Suspension: Okay, this is a giant clusterfuck, but we’re looking good with the suspension now. Round 1 of the front suspension involved way too much of the stock setup – we swapped front hub left-to-right, and thought we’d be able to use spacers and stuff, and try to tune out the toe-change through the suspension travel. Unfortunately, that was a big mistake. Thankfully, we were somewhat prepared for that, so we came up with another idea. Round 2 used the stock front hubs, but we welded a new steering arm to the front hubs. This probably would have worked, but we decided to scrap it because we just wanted to revamp the front suspension. The new setup is great. We’re using 1-5/8″ chromoly tubing for the subframe with some 1″ chromoly tubing for the control arms. It’s coming along nicely.