4th of July Festivities

My buddy contacted me last week about coming over for the 4th, to do some shooting, eat some food and blow some stuff up.

We arrived about 11am and started hauling everything from the truck down to his range. He had a 10x20 tent set up over his shooting bench at 50 yards and I set up my tent at 12 yards for us to shoot pistols from.

This arrangement works very good, we just leave the tent at 12 yards in place and shoot through it when we are shooting rifles.

Around 2pm we fired up his charcoal Webber and threw on some teriyaki chicken, garlic chicken and steaks. His neighbors had brought some deserts and the lady clear down the street that was just bored brought by some good salad and spent the entire day there just chatting.

Normally when he contacts me about shooting, its the day of, in this case he contacted me days before so I had some time to plan. I decided my contribution would be 30 1/4lb jars of Tannerite, after all its the 4th!

 These sounded like cannons going off, I think we ended up shooting about 10 of them total, letting everyone there take turns shooting them. They would definitely make you jump at 50 yards.

As the afternoon progressed some more people showed up and at dusk we fired up the grille again and finished off the meat we had not cooked earlier. My buddy had bought a bunch of mortars and we finished off the night with a fireworks display next to his range.

It was one of the best fourth of Julys I have had in years, I hope we can repeat it next year I still have about 20 1/4lb targets to shoot.

Concerts

June 2nd I was in my Boss's office, he was at his computer and asked me "Do you like Keith Urban"? I said hes ok, I'm not a big country music fan, he then asked me "Does your wife like Keith Urban"? I responded "I think so" to which his response was a mouse click and "Good were going to his concert Saturday night".

I didn't care much for the opening acts, I had never heard any of the songs before. Keith Urban though put on a good concert, while I'm not necessarily a fan of his its hard to ignore his talent. It was a bit strange though that two weeks before he had backed out of riding around the Indy 500 with Mario Andretti and was replaced by Lady Gaga /boggle. Now here he was jumping and gyrating like he was in perfect health.

The Klipsch music center is a great venue, other than the drinking rules. You are allowed to bring in one bottled water with a sealed cap. If you buy one inside its $5.00 and you cant keep the cap, they don't want people throwing sealed bottles of water. I bought a can of beer to drink, it was $15.00. I did have an enjoyable evening though and on the drive home Tania and I discussed how long it had been since we had gone to a concert. Before this the last time we went was in 2010, it was a Trans Siberian Orchestra concert in Phoenix that was pretty awesome.

By the time I got home I made up my mind that I didn't want to go another five years with the last concert I went to being a Keith Urban concert. I got online and bought four tickets to Def Leppard with REO Speedwagon and Tesla opening.

Last night we went with Matty and his girlfriend and other than some annoyingly drunk people in front of us had a great time. We arrived a little later than I wanted too and the line to get in was horrible so we completely missed Tesla. About 10 minutes after getting to our seats REO came on. I like REO's hit songs but they really don't do much for me beyond that, they are garage / bar band that are good for background noise. It was more entertaining to watch the drunk people in the VIP box directly in front of us try and sing along to songs they obviously didn't know the words to.

My like for REO must have been shared because once they finished it seemed like the crowd doubled in size just before Def Leppard came on stage, at that point you could really start to smell the weed too.

Def Leppard was very enjoyable, they sounded great and had an impressive stage/light show. The technology today allows for such impressive displays on stage.

We ended up staying right to the last song, and were able to get out quickly while the crowd was calling them back for an encore.

Overall it was a great evening, although not something I would regularly do at $500.00 for tickets. I made up for it though by avoiding the $15.00 beers!

Lump in the lawn

Over the last few weeks the lawn on the west side of the house has been very damp, even soggy. I turned down the timer on that circuit but it didn't help any. Two days ago I noticed a large lump in the lawn and realized I had a leak in the sprinkler system.

I went in the garage and manually turned on that circuit, which made the sod in that area rise up about six inches but the sprinkler never popped up. I dug it out and it had come disconnected from the riser pipe. I reconnected it but it still didn't work, it was physically stuck in its housing. After messing around with it for 10 minutes I was able to break it loose and cycle it in a bucket of water. It was full of dirt and sand that had caused it to stick. I reconnected it again and it started working but the lawn still bulged up around it.

I dug down and found the saddle clamp had twisted on the pipe because the riser pipe between the saddle clamp and the sprinkler head was way too short. This made the sprinkler head sit too high and when the mower ran over it or someone stepped on it, it would twist the saddle clamp on the main line elongating the hole.

I got rid of the saddle clamp and spliced in a t-fitting with a longer riser pipe. Half a day wasted because the guy that put the system in cut the riser line six inches too short.

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.