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I feel that people should be free to do as they want when inside their cars, barring it’s not unsafe. If they want to pick their teeth or check for an errant nose hair while at a stoplight, sure, go for it.
On the way home yesterday I was stopped next to an average guy driving an average green Lexus—and he was obviously rocking out. No, he wasn’t bobbing his head like Cliff Burton, but obviously the guy was digging his tunes. Good for him.
Tonight I tackled the garage. One set of tires is going to a good home, some stuff went up in the attic, and now there’s room for Michele’s new bike. Not sure if it’s sad or not, but she got a new bike last weekend—and there was no place for it in the garage. Between three cars, tons of tires, a tool box, 42 lawn implements, shelves and a workbench it’s a full place. We have one bike hanging from the ceiling and I park my upside-down between two of the cars. Three others are in the attic. Anyway, her new Specialized now has a parking place.
We took Project Spec E30 down the road to the Dynojet dyno at Projekt7 on Tuesday, and our suspicion that we were down on horsepower a bit at the HyperFest was confirmed.
From what we’ve seen, most healthy Spec E30s make in the low to mid 150-horsepower range, and those on the low end find themselves in the mid 140s. Our baseline was 134-135 horsepower, and after switching out the stock MAF and filter box with a different MAF and an aftermarket cone filter, we saw a peak of 136 horses.
The tailpipe sniffer told the real story, as our car is going Bill Gates rich at 5000 rpm. The car is leaving for the NASA Championships soon, so we’re going to do some last-minute diagnosing with Rennie Bryant of Redline BMW on Saturday in the hopes of getting the most out of the car at Mid-Ohio.
We’ll be competing in few tarmac rallies, and possibly an autocross or two in the next year, so we needed a more appropriate wheel for the Saab. We chose the Superlite 15x7 wheel in an anthracite finish, in a 30et offset. The wheel weighs in at 17 pounds and is said to be very strong, something that’ll be pretty important for rally use. You can order the wheels for $175 a piece from Pack Racing Products.
The Saab 99 uses a 4x114.3 pattern.
The UPS guy also dropped off our new brake pads, Porterfield’s R4 compound.
We’re just about done installing the hydraulic hand brake from K Turn Rally. We’re going to rerun one line and install some rebuilt front calipers and we should be good to go. We mean stop.
We had a hiccup in service that made the Web site go down this morning. Sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused.
Our sound deadening experiments are over and we are now running brake lines to reroute our braking circuit in the Saab.
The Saab 99, like many cars, has a diagonal brake circuit, where the left front wheel and right rear wheel are on the same circuit, as are the right front and left rear. This allows the brakes to still slow the car in the case where a brake line is punctured.
We are replacing the cable operated emergency brake (which operates on the front wheels of a Saab) with a hydraulic version from K Turn Rally Products that operates on the rear wheels. While we could simply tee’d off the two lines going to the rear so that they could go into the hydraulic handbrake unit and then re-tee’d it to go to both rear wheels, if we punctured a brake line, we’d have no brakes whatsoever. That’s bad.
So, our solution is to plumb the two front wheels on one circuit of the master cylinder and the two rear wheels on the other circuit, which will flow through our hydraulic handbrake that is being mounted between the seats.
Here you can see the basic mounting of the handbrake’s master cylinder. The rear of the car looks pretty clean after all of that scraping.
We now have just one rear flex line that is tee’d off on the rear axle, with a line going to each of the rear wheels. We reused the factory 6-way junction block by cutting it in half to make two 3-way junction blocks. This one is mounted on the rear axle, the one for the front wheels is mounted on the firewall near the master cylinder.
Club editor, Scott R. Lear, is taking the NASA Spec E30 over to the dyno today in an effort to eek out more horsepower. In the first race out on track Scott found out the car was a little down on power. Hopefully he finds some on the dyno.
Click here for the project car page to get caught up. We even have video of the car on track there.
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