Dad's Visit

My dad and step mom flew in this week to spend three days with us and three days with my sisters family. We we took them around to some of the sites in Indy, and Sunday Dad and I went to the NMCA All American Nationals at Lucas Oil Raceway Park. Sunday was the finals and we got a late start not arriving until 9 am. When we pulled into the lot something was off, there were literally 40 cars and the west side of the track was completely empty. When we got out of the truck I could hear and see the cars making passes so we walked up and bought tickets at $25.00 each and headed to the stands. When we entered the stands thee were literally 20-30 people there, it was just weird. After being there about 15 minutes I realized the class finals hadn't started yet they were still racing out some of the semi-finals. We ended up staying about six hours, I had to make my dad leave he was so burned from the sun, he needed to leave but never gets a chance to see racing like this. We had a really good time and the small crowd was actually nice.

Monday we took them to Parabellum, a shooting range in Avon. My buddy was out of town so we ended up going to an indoor range. My stepmom was very excited about going and had a good time, my dad not so much. We took my 10/22 and 9mm Nano, Matty brought his 9mm Beretta and the SKS. Its just a 25 yard range and no way to bench rest a rifle, but for the most part everyone had a good time. It seemed like we had just got set up and started shooting on the two lanes I rented when we were out of time.

Tuesday we went to the museum at Indianapolis Raceway Park.The first car on display was the ultra rare, ultra expensive Aston Martin Vulcan. It had been featured on the "New" Top Gear just the week before. I learned from the episode it was named after the British Vulcan bomber and only 24 were to be made. It has a naturally aspirated 7.0 liter V12 that produces 820 hp and weighs just under 3,000 lbs. If you want to buy one you only need to currently own an Aston, be one of 24 to get chosen and come up with 2.4 mil. Thats not even the bad news, the car isn't street legal, cannot be registered. Another fun fact from the episode was that the car exceeds all the noise limits of every track in England, so it cannot be legally driven anywhere in the country that designed and built it.

This one was number 11 of 24, it is a dark shade of purple with a lot of exposed carbon fiber.

I found a picture of it online that shows it on the Indy track, here you can see the color better.

P0601 Fixed and a Car Show

The beginning of May I sent my ECU to a repair facility on the east coast. They contacted me a few days later and said the ECU was beyond repair and shipped it back to me. I bought a new one online and reinstalled the old one so I could drive the car to a dealership about three miles from the house. Once I was there I parked just outside the service center pulled the passenger fender loose and installed the new ECU. The following morning they put the factory programming on the ECU which cost just over $100.00. While it was there they also accomplished the low beam headlight recall. The engine fuse box on the right side of the engine bay gets hot enough to stretch a hard wired connection causing it to break over time. This hard wire connection is for the low beam headlights, the repair is to run a jumper.

After the dealership contacted me that the car was done I ran it over to Mike Norris Motorsports and dropped it off. Mike put the dyno tune back on the ECU and charged me nothing, Mike is cool like that. I had $40.00 cash on me, gave him that and I finally had my car back after missing the better part of a month of summer driving. It was neat to feel the factory tune vs dyno tune in that short time span.

While the car was out of action I decided to give it a good paint clean and polish. I spent close to 20 hours cleaning, polishing and buffing the car, partially because it needed it and partially because work was organizing our summer picnic and for the first time in years an associated car show.

Initially I was not going to enter the car show but after talking with the employee organizing it, he said he wasn't getting much response on entries.

The night before the show I decided to make a display poster for the car. I didn't want to spend a lot of money on it so I used Walgreen's photo service to make a poster that is a reusable decal. It was almost 8:30pm when I uploaded the poster and sent it to the store. Generally any prints I have done in the past are finished when I get there, this time was no different it was already wrapped in a tube, so I paid for it and headed home. When I got home I pulled it out of the tube and was unable to remove the backing to see how it worked. After asking Tania to try we realized they had printed it on normal poster paper, so back to the store I went. It took almost an hour to get it reprinted on decal paper an with that I was set for the next day.

Even though I believe around 15 cars registered only 7 showed up. I chose to open the hood of the car and stick the decal to it using just the top three inches or so. If I were to do it again I would just stick the whole thing on as it came off very easily.

 Even though the car show was a bit of a bust, the picnic had a fairly good turnout with bounce houses, corn hole, face painting, fishing and a lot of good food to eat at an excellent venue. I hope more people will take advantage of it next year.

More Target Practice

It was another day with near perfect weather and my buddy contacted me about shooting at his range. Matty and I headed over and shot mostly rifles, he has a friend that lets him borrow his SKS and I shot about 200 rounds through the 10/22.

Later in the afternoon my buddy got out his Windham AR-10 and let me shoot 25 rounds through it. Its a very fun gun to shoot with enough kick that I would loose site of the target at fifty yards after almost every shot. I still managed a nice grouping with a gun I was unfamiliar with.

To top the day off my buddy got out his MRAD .338 Lapua Magnum. Shooting it at 50 yards is and not getting a bulls-eye would almost be hard to do. At around $5.00 a shot we all took just one, below is a short video of Matty taking his turn.

Indy 500 100th Running

I've lived in the Indianapolis area on and off for over 20 years, I've been to numerous local events such as the US Nationals, IROC, Rolex, Brickyard 400, Bush Grand National, SCCA, Silver Crown, Craftsman Super Truck, Super Chevy etc. but never the Indy 500. I never wanted to deal with the crowd to see a race that is better viewed on television.

This year was different, the 100th running, it wasn't the first time I had been offered tickets but this time we went.

The tickets were commemorative made from some clear plastic with the ticket printed on it. The day before the race I was able to get a fourth so Matty's girlfriend could go along with us.

Its just under 13 miles from my house to the track yet we left at 5:45am for a 12:30pm start time, with over 350k people attending traffic and parking would be fun. Having the home field advantage we parked about 2 miles north of the track and hung out in the car for a few hours before walking to the track. Once at the track it was blistering hot, with just a slight breeze from the west. As luck would have it we were sitting just outside of turn 4 which made the stands back up to the west blocking the breeze.

Prior to the race to pass the time the normal group wave and beach balls went around.

Just prior to the race they did a parade lap with former winning Indy Cars. The 100+ year old Marmon Wasp winner of the first Indy 500 was out there running around the track with them.

Promptly at 12:30pm a ZL1 Camaro pace car raced by and the field passed for the start of the race.

The race itself was fairly exciting with multiple passes and the whole fuel thing going on. The icing on the cake was Juan crashing out early on. I'm not sure I would have had the same opinion if we weren't directly across from a large live TV screen.

Afterwards we headed back to the car with our coolers and backpacks, we still had half a cooler of drinks left. The drive home was quite simple, that was the home field advantage I mentioned before. Once we reached the car it only took us 40 minutes to get home, it was very painless. We ended up waiting at one traffic light for two cycles, the rest was like a normal drive in Indy.

Overall I enjoyed the day and was glad I went, I don't know that I will go again, it would probably take turn one suite or pagoda seating to entice me back. Its a great place to enjoy the moment and the crowd its a horrible place to see an oval race.

Fast Friday

Tania and I had the opportunity to attend "Fast Friday" at the Brickyard. We were in a nice suite on garage row, with good food and a lot of my friends.

Pippa Mann stopped by to give autographs and personal tours of her garage.

One of the teams was using these cool fat tired bikes as pit bikes. Notice the 4" wide tires, the disc brakes and bottle opener on the seat tube.

Gas Monkey Garage is the main sponsor on a car this year, their merchandise stand wasnt open yet.

The GM booth had a couple neat items, first was this static display of a Indycar V6. Its amazing the power this little motor puts out reliably..

The last picture is of the new ZL1 Camaro,

The front end reminded me of something, I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

P0601 Updates and Running Boards?

I spent last weekend tracing all the grounds on the Corvette and checking them for resistance. After that and some other small troubleshooting I couldn't find anything wrong with the Corvette. I drove it to Mike Norris Motorsports Friday and he confirmed that the ECU was the problem. I found an online service that repairs ECU's for $125.00 and if it is beyond repair they charge $75.00 for the diagnosis. The advantage to this is confirmation it is the ECU and if it is I wont need to have it reprogrammed with the default parameters and then with the dyno tune.

In researching this I found out I cannot buy a new ECU for the car pre-programmed. It can only be done by the dealer and must be installed in the car to learn the clutch pedal and I believe crank trigger. So today I cleaned up the car  and removed the ECU to send out tomorrow.

Last week I also removed the running boards from the Sierra, I hated how they looked and hated even more all the crap that would end up on top of them. Two weeks ago it rained and the following day there were dead dried worms stuck all over the top of them. The truck is a bit harder to get in and out of now but it looks much better to me. I put them up on Craigslist yesterday and they sold in about an hour for $300.00 which is about what they are each.

I wasn't trying to stage a photo but after working on the Corvette and cleaning out the garage I realized I had them all lined up so I took a quick picture.

P0601

Today when I left work I started the Corvette and drove about 50 yards when it shut off and was completely dead. I waited about 30 seconds and it started right back up normally ran for about 5 minutes and shut off again. I managed to limp it home after two hours of it randomly shutting off after running anywhere from 3 seconds to 5 minutes. When it shut off the DIC would display every imaginable error message and the starter wouldn't crank for 30 seconds.

When I got home and plugged in an OBDII scanner i got the error code P0601.

The scanner indicated: "Internal Control Module Memory Check Sum Malfunction".

This apparently is a generic code that means there is either a problem with the PCM or one of its supporting control modules. I looked on the net to see if there was any history of Corvette owners having this problem, I couldn't find any, yay this will be fun.

New Truck

My Cheyenne had a rough winter, its impeccable reliability has recently been tarnished by it occasionally not wanting to start on wet humid days. I've looked at various things but have no idea what is causing it. With its 23 years really starting to show I had debated tearing it apart this summer to fix some of the items. Without knowing for sure what I would encounter, my work schedule and needing it reliable again for winter I didn't think I would have time to finish it.

I had been looking at trucks for the last couple months, mostly 1-3 year old trucks and I couldn't really find anything I liked. I started looking at new two wheel drive base models, mostly Silverados, I wanted something similar to my old truck only in a extended cab. I quickly found out there was no such thing, its either standard, club or crew cabs. Having owned a standard for 23 years I wanted something bigger and the club cabs are ugly and pointless unless you have kids under 10. That put me into crew cabs and the non-existent world of base two wheel drive. I could get something along those lines if I had them bring one in or drove south 750 miles, neither of which would put me in a position to shop around or bargain.

Yesterday we were on a GMC lot and came across a SLT at a good price. I had narrowed my search to GMCs because as a 4wd I liked the front end, wheels and wheel well molding better than the Silverado. This truck met and exceeded all my requirements but one which was the color. Black wasn't a deal breaker but it also wasn't my first choice.

I took a picture of the green tag, one of the window sticker and another of the vin#. The dealer we were at had a lot of trucks but this one was the only close to what I was looking for. One thing I noticed that while it was a brand new truck it had a decal on the bottom of the tailgate for a different dealership about 25 miles away, so we headed there next.

When we pulled onto the lot of the other dealer this is the first truck we saw, it was actually parked away from all the others along with a beautiful Denali HD with a diesel and an almost 70k window sticker.

This one checked all the boxes in a manner that I didn't even look at any of the other trucks they had on the lot. We took it on a short test drive and went in the office to start my favorite part of buying a car, the liars club otherwise known as negotiation. This one went fairly quick though, I showed them the pictures I had taken of the other truck and told them they could either sell me theirs for that price or I would just drive back and buy the other truck. That led them to explain to me that the price was fake and they wouldn't be able to match it, so I called their bluff and 2 hours later they were within $300.00 of the other truck. I settled on that because this one actually had more options than the other truck.

Today we drove the Cheyenne to a friends house who has two large pole barns one of which is empty, I am not at a point yet that I will willingly sell it, I would like to still tear it down and restore it. I have a lot of history with the truck and being 23 years old it just turned over 130k miles. My current garage is just not the right place to do it, so I'll bide my time on that for now.

Reactive Targets

In anticipation of the weather warming up and a chance to finally shoot my new rifle, I have been saving 2 liter bottles to use as reactive targets.

I purchased 25 tire valve stems off of ebay for $5.00 and installed them in the twist off caps of the 2 liter bottles. A little bit of flower along with 100 psi and they were ready to go.

While not as fun as the Tannerite they still had a pretty good bang.

The rifle itself was only one click out on windage and is a blast to shoot, I think I will have a lot of fun with it.

Corvette Seat Bolster

The leather covering the drivers seat bolster started to crack last summer, so I decided to replace the seat back leather this winter while the car was parked. Its not an uncommon problem with how the seat is shaped and how you enter the car. Its also fairly easy to replace, the seat took about 15 minutes to remove from the car and another 15 minutes to remove the covering. What I didn't count on was the seat back bolster area being broken. The drivers seat always felt different to me than the passenger side. I always put that off to it being adjusted differently or a different amount of air in the bolsters. Seeing how it was broken now explains why it felt so differently.

The structure of the seat is made of some form of  Fiber Reinforced Plastic (FRP). The bolster ear broke off right where the fiber ended. The holes in the material were put there by me as part of my repair. A new seat back structure was close to $300.00 and would have no reason not to break in the same manner. I could not find any conclusive information on repairing the FRP so I decided to sandwich the FRP between two metal plates.

 On the inside I had to sand some of the stiffening ridges smooth, the plate going on this side was thin tool steel to aid with the rigidity without adding a lot of thickness. The plate on the outside was 0.187" thick and I tapped the holes for the fasteners.

This shot shows the stainless fasteners going through the tool steel plate on the inside of the seat. The white piece folded back is some type of mylar that protects the the bolster air bag..

This shot shows the fasteners threaded into the outer plate, because the area is not totally flat I cut the plate bent it as needed and welded it back together. Once everything was clamped together I was able to determine the correct length of fasteners to use, (much shorter than those pictured).

 The foam on the seatback was splitting where it went over the bolster, to help prevent this from happening more I split a piece of clear tubing and routed it over the edge of the seat. I also used some 3M adhesive to repair the areas of foam that did start to split, once that dried I used some old denim to reinforce the opening around the foam.

Strangely enough now the seat feels like the passenger seat. If my repair fails now I probably wont look to replace the seat back, there are a few reasonable aftermarket seats out there with far less problems than these have.