Author: chuck goolsbee

Car Photo Of The Day. No mystery here.

Diabolikal!

There is no mystery as to what kind of car this is, so no need for guessing games. But, being black it lends itself to mystery and danger. The ride of choice for the Italian villian Diabolik, and the color that convinced Sir William to build the coupe version of the car. The E-type was originally designed to be an open two seat car, with classic lineage to the D-type and C-type before it. Legend has it that an American panel beater employed at the Coventry factory pleaded to make a coupe, and created the iconic shape you see above. Sir William Lyons had it painted black and the rest is history. Black really lets you see the shape of the car as reflected light. It is sexy as hell if you ask me.

I’m not a fan of the coupe, but if I had one, it would certainly be black.

Last words on the Monte Shelton Rally, and other things…

I like this photo

I’ve been REALLY busy at work the past week and a half, so please accept my apologies for the lack of updates here on the website. You can follow those links and see what has been going on, and to be honest, what you see there is merely the tip of the iceberg in many ways. For one, those articles only capture the actual work of preparing the access and moving the units, but don’t begin to describe the gyrations that went on behind the scenes with engineers, technicians, the property management folks, etc. All for moving some equipment… you would have thought we were building The Pyramids or something! For the other this is the start of a very large project. We’re expanding our capabilities by a factor of 2X… the largest such jump we’ve taken since 2001. I’m ultimately responsible for the largest project, and associated budget, that this organization has ever dealt with. That said, I’m very confident we will succeed because I have an excellent staff, who know what they are doing.

But I digress…

Today I FINALLY exported all my photos from the rally and uploaded them to my server, so now you can sit back and view them all. I usually do this before, and then use HTML links to reference them in my posts, but somehow this time I did it backwards. Want to see them? Here they are!

I hope to get the 65E’s toe-in checked, now that I’ve fixed that loose inner tie-rod end (I also have new gaiters, which arrived today from Terry’s Jaguar) early next week, because the week after next…

I’ll be driving out to Montana to run in the Going To The Sun Rally once again. My dad can’t make it this year (one of the reasons why we did these two short rallys this summer) so my friend an co-presenter at so many Macworld Expo conference sessions, Shaun Redmond will be flying up from Canada* to join me. I’m really looking forward to it and hope to surpise and delight my regular readers with some interesting stuff in conjunction with the event. Stay tuned!

* Yes, “flying UP from Canada” is correct in this context as Shaun lives in Ontario, and due to a geographic irony, is quite a ways SOUTH in relation to my location in Washington. I’ve always been a geography buff and love pointing out stuff like this. 🙂

Steering Rack, Take Two!

OK, so it is a miserable rainy day here, I might as well tackle my steering (again) which has two problems:

1. It was recently rebuilt, but has free play on the inner tire rod end on the driver’s side(?)

2. I could only get 11 of the 12 bolts that mount it to the car installed last time.

I don’t know what caused #1. BUT I just discovered the cause of #2… ME. I am an idiot.

I thought maybe the fresh paint on the rack prevented the bolt from going through the hole, but indeed it was all my fault. Now that the rack in on my workbench it is plainly obvious that the driver’s side MUST be bolted first. The passenger side bolt hole on that particular bolt, is elongated. Guess which one the Moron Mechanic here did first?

That problem sorted (I still removed the paint just for good measure) I’m on to the inner tie rod end.

The free play is hard to describe, so I took some movies. Of course, it takes two hands to show the free play and one to hold the camera. I only have two hands… so the camera was hanging from my neck and wobbles even more than the tie rod. Thankfully there is sound so even if you can SEE it wobble, you certainly can HEAR it. You will need “QuickTime” to view these short movies (made with my still camera).

First, here it is on the car: Inner Tie Rod Wobble on the Car.

Here is another try at an ON-Car look: Inner Tie Rod Wobble On Car.

Here it is off the car and on the workbench (sorry, the camera wobble is REAL bad!) with the tie rod boot removed: Inner Tie Rod Wobble Off The Car.

I THINK I just need to bend back the lock tabs and tighten this puppy up, re-bend and I should be good to go… The problem is, those nuts are HUGE. I have no wrench, even adjustable ones that are this large. 🙁

Update: 2pm I grabbed a kid to hold the camera, so here is a MUCH better, no-wobble movie of the wobbling inner tie rod end.

Update: 5pm I went to a hardware store and bought a GIANT adjustable wrench. It, plus my largest previous adjustable allowed me to get the nuts off and adjust the wobble out of the inner tie rod end. Whoo hoo!

Update: almost midnight!

Rack Mounts

Well… I guess I’m not an Idiot after all. Take a look at that closely. You will note that my new mounts are slightly different than my old ones. What is really odd is that the passenger side one does not have this issue.. It fits fine. Go figure.

Perhaps the old rack mount has been modified? Well so has my new one now! A little time with the Dremel tool and…

It fits!

The rack goes on, and it fits to the mounts, AND the two short bolts go on. Above is the driver’s side bolt. This is the one that would not go on before. Now it fits great. No amount of juggling would allow me to get both a washer and a nut on that bolt, so once I got the nut on, I placed a drop of thread-locker on there for good measure and tightened it up. But of course not before I did this:

Second bolt

That is the passenger side short bolt. I didn’t tighten ANYTHING until after I got both of these damn bolts back on. Then I tightened them, driver’s side first. Then the back long studs got bolted, then the four front short studs, then the four safety bolts. The last one of these, the long one on the driver’s side was a real PITA to get back on, but it eventually went in.

I put the radiator fan back on, the outer tie rod ends on, the wheels back on… then dropped the car back down to earth again. Unfortunately it was very dark and too late for a test drive. Oh well. Maybe later this week.

On the ground again.

I have to order some new outer tie rod end boots, as mine came back from the rebuild all torn up. I also need to call the shop who rebuilt my rack and let them know the gyrations I had to go through to get this sorted out. It seems odd that they’d ship it back to me so loose on one side. :\

Next I have to go back to the alignment shop and have them reset the toe-in.

Just a bit more fettling to do, and the car will be all ready for the Going To The Sun Rally in early September.

My first test batch.

BioDiesel!

Above is my very first batch of actual BioDiesel. It is still settling, and I photographed it at dusk pointing east, so trust me whan I say it looks better than this. Much lighter colored. The gunk at the bottom (fatty acids and lye) is thick and black. Kinda cool.

The purpose of this test batch was to check the recipe for my veggie oil. As soon as I can source some methanol (I’ll need ~6 gallons) I’ll cook up a real batch for the car.

Update: Sunday afternoon. The sun came out for a bit, so I grabbed a better lit photo:

BioDiesel

Monte Shelton Northwest Classic Rally, Wrap Up.

Above: The view from our room’s balcony the morning after the rally completed. Rain. 🙁

They had cold beer waiting at the hotel. After we pulled into the grass and stumbled toward the room (a steep stair climb up the cliff) we stopped for a beer midway. It was nice. Even my dad, who does not drink beer that often, had one.

At dinner we heard the outcome of the TSD segment crash. It was that gorgeous Lancia Aurelia GT:

It slid off the road, into a ditch, and rolled. I do not know what the cause was, nor the final condition of the car. I do know that both driver and navigator came out essentially unharmed. They both attended dinner and the awards brunch the following day. The rallyists awarded the Lancia the “Participant’s Choice” award. The owner got a lot of hugs and sympathy.

At the brunch we listened as they read the results from bottom to top. I fully expected to be right in the middle of the pack. To my surprise the middle came and went, and our name had not been called. We were NOT that close to the top though. In the end we captured 18th Place. Not bad for a VERY competitive rally with 56 entries. We racked up 563 penalty points, 376 on the first day and 187 on the second. It is obvious that my Navigator, Charles Goolsbee did indeed improve dramatically over the course the rally. I can take NO CREDIT whatsoever. I am just the Driver. I do what the Navigator tells me to. 😉

The 1st place car had 186 points, and 2nd & 3rd had 232 & 233 respectively. Twenty one cars had over 1000 points and the last place car had 5400. This was a very tough rally.

Above: The tired rallyists leave on a soggy morning.

We left the Oregon Coast at mid day and toughed out bad traffic, and rain (a low pressure system moved through for ONE day, grrr) all the way home. We even had to get off I-5 at one point midway between Portland and Olympia and take back roads up to Tacoma to avoid stop-and-go traffic… miserable in the rain in the Jaguar with the top up. I dropped off Dad at my little sister’s house in Seattle, and he and mom drove home to Colorado the next day. I brought the Jaguar home and put it back up on the lift. Next weekend I’ll tackle that inner tie rod end.

Thanks for coming along, I hope the story and photos captured the essense of the event for you.

–chuck

Monte Shelton Northwest Classic Rally, Day Two.

Final TSD segment start

If you look at a map of North America or spin your globe to the right from your usual locations of focus and observe our west coast you will note that there is a VAST expanse of water right next to it that literally covers the majority of this big blue planet of ours. In fact I’d wager that it is responsible for the perception of it being blue. We call it, in what can only be ironically amusing to meteorologists, surfers, and the rugged humans who make their living on it, the Pacific Ocean. It is ANYTHING but pacific in its nature. It is a violent, thrashing, deep and cold thing that harbors and takes life in equal measure. While it may be warm and inviting in the middle, it can be cold, distant, and stand-offish around the extreme perimeter. Try dipping your toe into it here in the Pacific Northwest and you will lose all feeling in that toe pretty damn quick. Immerse your self in it and it will kill you even quicker. As malevolent as it seems to be, it also bestows upon this region a generous gift of mild weather… it moderates the natural heat of the continental land mass with cool moist air, which flows in a continuous stream over our region and keeps it within an ideal Goldilocks status… not too cold, not too hot. Now it may be too wet for some, but if you check the relative humidity of say anywhere east of the Mississippi River and that of the pacific Northwest, you will note that we’re quite comfy over here… we just get our sunshine in smaller doses – that is between the clouds. We call them “sun breaks” here. October through May you can bank on a steady drizzle and moderate temps. May through July is on-again, off-again rain and sunshine. July through September is usually a continuous parade of picture postcard blue skies and temps/humidity equivalent to what most HVAC Engineers consider “ideal” for human habitation. An occasional low pressure system moves through to remind us what rain is like, but overall summers here are pleasant beyond description. No sweltering heat, no high humidity… just cool breezes and sunshine. EXCEPT the area right next to the ocean. Right at that edge lies an area subject to fog that will chill you to the bone. The stuff that comes in at night and makes Adrienne Barbeau tell ghost stories on the local radio station.

Continue reading “Monte Shelton Northwest Classic Rally, Day Two.”