Rain & Travel

So the Rain this weekend and people traveling keep us from doing any more work on the car. I did take a look at what part of the track we will be racing on and according to the Autobahn's calendar LeMons has rented the north track.

http://www.drivefastbesafe.com/PDFs/northmap.pdf

It is still far enough out that, things may change but that looks like it should be fast & fun.

It looks like we should have some nice weather this coming weekend, and hopefully should be able to get the exhaust figured out, and maybe install the thermostat.

If we are lucky take it for a drive or 2 around the block.

Stripping and other Red Hot things

Yesterday we started stripping out the cars interior. We took out the carpet, the door panels, the front seats(and then put them back in) inside trim and pretty much anything that wasn't metal except the dash. We'll get to that later.

Well here is the piles of stuff we took out.





And this is what we have left







Then today waiting on my doorstep was our Red Hots Glasspack Muffler

The effect of the midwest on an exhaust system

Here is a nice little science project for all you out there

Here are the pics of what remains of the Exhaust system of the Cutlass Ciera



The top side doesn't look to bad, since it was protected by the floor. But when looking at the side that faced the elements you find a lovely hole.



A look at the muffler shows how the midwest eats your car even more.



Of course if you want the exhaust system to stay on it appears the best thing you can do is forgo the use of autopart and just use some good old rj6 coaxial cable.



In Conclusion the Midwest eats your Exhaust system.

Starting To Work On The Car Again

With the weather finally starting to get nice, we decided it was time to start doing some more work on the car.

She started up nice and easy once we reconnected the battery, with that throaty un-muffled roar. Our goal on Sunday was to remove the exhaust system since it was all rusted and had disconnected at the cat. It ended up being easier to remove the I thought since it was held up by coax cable, a wire close hanger and some spring thing.

Bob found more change hiding under the passengers seat.

So now we need to add a new exhaust system, we are looking at a single glass-pack, and need to decide on how to route our exhaust. We have a few options, we can mount the muffler where the cat was and the route the exhaust out the passengers side before the rear tire or we can put the muffler in the original location and get the factory bent pipe that routes around the gas tank. We are going to price out the parts , but any suggestions would be welcome.

After we put the car back on the ground we took a trip to harbor freight, we need a hydraulic jack, the one we bought in the fall can't even lift the car high enough to remove the tires. We need to figure out if we can get away with a jack that has 14 1/2 inch lift or if we need the one that has a 20 inch lift. We left harbor freight with a $.99 roll of electrical tape.

We then stopped at Auto Zone, O'Reilly, and Pep Boys, and looked a exhaust tubing, and discovered we can get the battery cable parts we will need to install the cutoff switch.

After we figure out the exhaust the next thing we will start working on will be the breaks.

Those are some nice curves

Since work is about to start again I think it is time to start petitioning for a bit of a silicon upgrade.

No I'm not trying to get some sandbags put in the trunk. I'm talking about a chip upgrade.

You see there is a company that specializes in the 60 degree V6 like the one we have in the cutlass. And they program a chip specifically for the A-body's. The numbers don't sound all that impressive. 5 hp and 7 ft/lbs of Torque, but raw numbers aren't everything. Instead look at this picture.



The real impressive part is that it hits all the numbers about 1000 rpm sooner. Meaning you will have the power much quicker which is actually better than having twice the power yet have to wait till you almost red line to use it, like aftermarket large turbos do. This will also allow us to get rid of the MAF which tends to be troublesome, and we can set some other parameters like max rpm in park and neutral, max rpm in drive, speed limiter, etc. Plus they can probably tune it a bit more if we tell them we are running without a cat and a straight through muffler and a lower temp thermostat.

Aero Package

When Franz was in he helped me work on this. Still a bit rough since the main part want to fold making it hard to make it look right on the car while out of cardboard, but it gives an idea of how it works. And it would work better made out of something that isn't cardboard, maybe.