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I carry a camera all the time, and whenever I see a weird car, I shoot it.
My advice: read the questions very carefully. Literally observe the illustrations. Take your time.
The terminology with regards to directions is relative to position, so LITERAL observation of the illustrations is required. Don’t overthink them as that is how I screwed up. 😉
Let me know how you do in the comments.
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!
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…
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:
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.
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.
I *hope* this will be a tough one, but goodness knows… maybe Roger and Paul have each owned three.
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.”
I clicked over to the SNG Barratt website this morning to check on something and was confronted by my own car. I grabbed the screenshot above (which required some work as they change the image every X seconds with a script or something) and decided to post it here for posterity. I’ve blurred out the boring stuff around the edges. 😉
I have my fancy air filter setup as “reward” for this work I did for SNG. Not a bad exchange.
The photo was taken on my VERY FIRST DAY of E-type ownership. I had picked up the car in Colorado and was driving it home to Washington with my son Nicholas. You can read the whole story of that wonderful four-day roadtrip on my old website.
Today I ran an errand at lunch, went down to a chemical supply place in Auburn to pick up some KOH for my homebrew fuel. It was a gorgeous summer day here in the Seattle area. On the way I saw a Ferrari, a Model A Ford, A Bentley, a Maserati Quattroporto, a Lotus Elise, a Lotus Esprit, and this car you see above… just sitting on the side of the road with a for-sale sign in the window. I didn’t look that closely at it, but if you want to have a guess at what it is, feel free. I guess I have a way of stumbling into unusual cars for sale on the side of the road!
On my way home i stopped at John’s in Snohomish and grabbed seven 5 gallon buckets of WVO. Last weekend I found myself short of oil just as the time came to calibrate the processor. Go figure. I plan on giving John as much BioDiesel as he wants from my output in exchange for WVO.
I also had a Jaguar XK 140 OTS pass me going southbound on SR9 as I was heading north. The weather is PERFECT for classic car outings and my steering rack is still on its way to Illinois for a rebuild! Sigh. Maybe next weekend.
I’m thinking of putting a set of these on the Jag.
(Warning! Only click “more” if you dare! 😉 )