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Pastimes : Car Nut Corner: All About Cars -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: WTMHouston who wrote (554)	7/24/2000 12:14:43 AM
From: SI Bob	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 5774

Just got back home from 3 days of fun with the local BMW club at Heartland Park. Wanted to flesh over some of the main things, then maybe do some details, pics, and movie clips from the in-car camera tomorrow. There were some failures this weekend, some of which were caused by SB not being properly supervised when he worked on the car with my son and one of which was either normal wear or a problem caused by the folks who put the exhaust system in. The biggest failure was the latter. We had to replace the whole rear-end Friday night. From control arms to brake drums, inclusive. Stayed up until 2:15 AM that night getting the car rolling again. While the car was running Friday, it did pretty well, except the handling started out a little strange (it was loose when this car has always pushed) and ended up being really dangerous. Control arms bushings. Anyone who's ever replaced these in a Fox Mustang knows the whole sordid tale which I'll probably share along with the pictures later. They may've gotten cooked during welding of the exhaust system by the same mindless idiots who, while "aluminizing" the system with silver spray paint, also spray painted a whole lot of the pristine, non-undercoated undercarriage (complete with all original markings painstakingly preserved for ten years) of my one-owner, low mileage 91 Mustang GT. If they're dumb enough to do that (it was obvious I purposely kept the undercarriage perfect), they're probably dumb enough to cook rubber bushings. To shorten this part of the story, we got it running again and ran the rest of the weekend with it, although the new rear-end (from an 89 GT) was 3.27 with worn out posi clutches (I normally run 3.55's with semi-decent posi). Cost about 6 seconds. Started out doing 2:10's to 2:12's on the 2.5 mile config, but ended up doing mostly 2:16 and 2:17 with the 3.27's. Today we lost a caliper pin (fortunately, not on the track), and did some weird destruction to a rotor (picture later), both on the side of the car that SB was working on, supposedly with my son's competent and close supervision. I can trust my son implicitly when it comes to working on the car -- he knows exactly what he's doing and what the consequences can be if he screws something up. SB apparently doesn't understand such things but will tomorrow. (Note to self: Remember how he greased the backhoe? Never have him grease anything unsupervised again -- especially wheel bearings, even when he's shown exactly how to do it). Anyway, despite having to do far more wrenching on the car than one should have to do, it was definitely a fun weekend. Satch Carlson (editor of the Roundel) was the speaker for the Saturday night dinner, and was hilarious as always. And Excessive Motorsports really came through for us when we thought we needed them (turned out we didn't -- more later), as did the folks pitted behind us who voluntarily (without any hinting or anything) dragged their much-needed generator and lights over to us when it got dark. Both situations were car nuts helping other car nuts. And now I'm exhausted, so it's off to bed. See y'all tomorrow. Bob