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.