Monday, July 28, 2008

Dead Smurfs have moved to their new garage

Hi all,

We just rented a shop space at 35th and Magnolia in West Oakland CA. Our blog is relocating there (virtually) at: http://magnoliagarage.com. Please come and visit!

See you at LeMons!

Peter

Thursday, July 24, 2008

5-pt harness, roll-bar padding, sold seat-belts, shop space!

Long time no post, sorry but we all got busy with other pieces of our lives for a little while. In the meantime we ordered up a 5-pt harness and roll-bar padding from Safe Racer which we might get to install this weekend.

We also just sold the seat-belt receivers to Rob whose seat-belt receivers no longer were actually securing the seat-belts. It's great fun to own a crappy car, but even more fun when your friends do too :)

Last, we finally rented some shop space! WOO-HOO! It's cool, 2500 sq-ft inside, 2900 sq-ft outside, heavy power, industrial chic without the chic, and walking distance from Home Depot. Watch out, we may end up fielding yet another LeMons team - "The Red Piglet". Just wait, you'll understand ...

Ok, off to dreams of Miata-engined Bugeye Sprites ...

Sunday, July 6, 2008

Shakedown run for Sunday complete



I took the Smurf out today up in the Berkeley and Oakland Hills for a couple hours to see if I could get it to overheat, break something, or melt something cool. Fortunately (or unfortunately) nothing untoward happened and it was a blast to drive around the twisties. The power is pretty good and comes on strong at about 4200rpm. I have to put some heat shielding around the brake lines as they started to get soft after running hard for a bit. The engine temp never moved off of the center and I listened hard for any sounds of knocks in the engine, but it seemed to go pretty smoothly the whole way.

Next up is to get some monitoring on the engine. We need a boost gauge, maybe a knock sensor, maybe a few more temperature sensors, and probably more things.

Friday, July 4, 2008

Super bad, I mean good, I mean ...



Please excuse me if I revert to my Southern Cal roots, but ...

Duuuude, this Mia-tah is gnarly faaast duuude!

We got the intake all plumbed up today, subjected it to a sophisticated kiddie-pool leakdown test and coupled that with the Flügelhornwasserbruder regimen (I don't recommend looking that up). We then drove the car backwards off the ramps, into the street, and into hyper-space. Maybe I'm just used to it being slow, maybe I've been driving a Vanagon for a bit too long, or maybe the Flügelhorn made me a bit light-headed, but once the Smurf hit 3500rpm I was glad I tightened the seat bolts all the way.

Of course, at the end of the run the throttle got stuck, something made a loud noise, and now there are a bunch of leaks in the exhaust, but hey, that's what weekends are for, right?

More to come I'm sure ...

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Intake madness

Well, though previously we thought the intake was complete, it leaked quite a lot. We received a bunch of interestingly shaped intake parts the other day and after picking through them, we may have found a solution. This probably will involve some cutting, some bead-making, and swearing.

Today we re-installed the oil-line to the turbo, this time complete with crush washers to prevent those unseemly oil leaks. Tomorrow Tim is coming over and hopefully we can put together an interesting intake.

Also, we pulled some nice big brakes off of an ex-race car (thanks Rick!) so we will be installing those sometime soon as well.