Buttonwillow Summary

How was Buttonwillow? Great! More details to follow but in a nutshell:

Joe and Randal left the Snowspeeder home for this race and drove V-RAM with me. We were also joined by Dan Barnes, a friend of the Eyesores who we met at Thunderhill last winter.

Overheating was not resolved. The new water pump helped but we were still getting air in the cooling system. Saturday Randal rigged a weed killer spray bottle to our cooling system (little idea we borrowed from Eyesore) and strapped it into the cab. We could pump water into the system while driving down the front straight. It worked GREAT and we didn't overheat once on day two.

We stayed up until 1AM replacing our pogo-sticks with new struts. They were an immense improvement.

I rigged a cardboard radiator scoop that was surprisingly durable.

We melted our ignition coil Sunday afternoon leaving Joe dead on the track right in front of the observation tower.

(That's all I have time for now. Pics and more details to follow.)

Honk If You're Horny

After last week's rather destructive 'test' I borrowed Paul's welder and fabricated a rough but effective radiator mount.

We were at the junk yard for an ignition switch connector and I decide it was past time for a loud horn. We found two resonating pairs. I expected the conch shells from an 80's Saab to be loudest, but the pucks form a giant Mercedes literally rattle the whole car.

Three steps forward, ten steps back.

I had hoped for a successful test last weekend resulting in confirmation that the car is ready to roll. Instead we finished with more problems than we started with.

A subtle buzzing noise was agreed to be nothing to worry about. So I took it out for a spin.

First I drove into some giant ruts.

This bent the radiator mount and a fan shroud. Miraculously the radiator itself was unharmed, until we punctured it with a screwdriver while we tried to fix the shroud.

While assessing the damage I notice the subtle buzz was now quite distinct and smoke was coming from the timing belt cover. We had scored a FAIL on our timing belt job reassembly and part of the tension mechanism had fallen ad wedged between the lower cover and the belt.

FUHHHHHHHG!