{"id":146,"date":"2012-05-15T16:57:49","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T00:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.destinationssm.com\/?p=146"},"modified":"2012-05-15T16:57:49","modified_gmt":"2012-05-16T00:57:49","slug":"ups-and-downs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.directedconsulting.com\/destinationssm\/?p=146","title":{"rendered":"Ups and Downs"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been an interesting month. \u00a0Soon after the last post, I decided that nothing was coming in soon enough and that I should just bring the car in to get painted. \u00a0I had Showcase Auto<\/a>\u00a0do it, and it came out great (for a racecar — painting carbon fiber body parts is never fantastic unless you put 20 pounds of paint and bondo on it, hence removing the point.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>I got the car back a week and a half ago, just in time to try to put all the new parts that arrived on it. \u00a0The Ciro Designs wing came in, and we fabbed up a splitter (currently in revision 1, there’ll be canards and paint later). \u00a0The control arms and delrin finally came in, and we spent days assembling the car and finally, this past weekend, had a chance to bring the car down to Packwood for what was supposed to be a 2 day event, getting a ton of runs on the car in preparation for the Lincoln mini-nationals in 2 weekends.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, that was not to be the case. \u00a0We took a couple runs in the car, which were pretty good, but quickly started getting some nasty rubbing making the sharp turn to get to the start line from grid. \u00a0We ignored it, planning to look into it at lunch. \u00a0A couple runs later, we started getting something acting like the car being out of gas in the middle of my dad’s run, and then shortly thereafter it gave out entirely and refused to run any more. \u00a0Some quick diagnosing led me to find that the ignition lead was shorted to an always-on battery line somewhere, and it wasn’t obvious where. \u00a0In addition, when you shorted the fuel pump on with the diagnostic connector, the circuit main relay under the dash started buzzing heavily, and was rapidly heating up (to the point that the wire insulation was melting). \u00a0So, after spending a while with it, we decided to bail and head home to diagnose with more tools and time.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>Monday, my dad and I converged on the car and pulled the front wheel off, only to discover something really unfortunate. \u00a0The rubbing apparently was caused by the new front control arms pretzeling themselves under the stress of the Packwood bumps, or somethingorother. \u00a0I’m working with the EPMiata folks to try to figure out if we have a good answer, or if their arms are just not strong enough for SSM autocross duty. \u00a0However, that give us a bit of a major problem. \u00a0There’s one more weekend of events (19\/20th) and then we have to hit the road Tuesday to get to the Lincoln events in time, which means we only have one more shot to test this stuff out, and it needs to be ready for this weekend.<\/p>\n

As a result, just to have a prayer of making it to Lincoln, I’m enacting a fallback plan of using stock front UCAs. \u00a0AWR is overnighting me some delrin bushings for them, which come in Wednesday, and I’m putting the V8Roadster ball joints into them. \u00a0We’re going to bend them in a press a little bit to get the camber level we need, and run it as is for now to hopefully get some events under it before going with another custom solution of some sort.<\/p>\n

I also pulled apart most of the electrics in the car today (pulled the dash, fuseboxes, and relay blocks) to try to figure out the problem. \u00a0The only issue I can find so far is that two of the wires in the main fusebox had melted together, which shorted the ignition (white\/red) line to another fused always-on line (white\/green). \u00a0I re-insulated them and separated them, and I will be moving the fusebox to somewhere with more airflow to keep it cool (the event this weekend was quite warm, and I think the splitter was keeping underhood temps higher than usual). \u00a0In addition, I should probably add some vents to the hood to let some of the air out, which will likely assist with front downforce as well. \u00a0I’m replacing the main circuit opening relay with another I had kicking around from a lower mileage car, and hoping for the best this weekend.<\/p>\n

With any luck, I’ll have better news to relay soon. \u00a0Tomorrow I get a different used front subframe to swap mine out with (we had to drill the front UCA sleeve out to 5\/8″ to use the EPMiata control arms) so I need to get another stock one to put the stock arms back onto, and the delrin bushings come in to reassemble everything. \u00a0The real DA shocks come in from Shaikh either late\u00a0Thursday\u00a0or early\u00a0Friday, leaving me a few hours to get the car aligned for the weekend. \u00a0From there, hopefully our last minute changes here will keep it running long enough to abuse it all weekend, then head east to Lincoln a few days after that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been an interesting month. \u00a0Soon after the last post, I decided that nothing was coming in soon enough and that I should just bring the car in to get painted. \u00a0I had Showcase Auto\u00a0do it, and it came out great (for a racecar — painting carbon fiber body parts is never fantastic unless you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,12,18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.directedconsulting.com\/destinationssm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.directedconsulting.com\/destinationssm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.directedconsulting.com\/destinationssm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.directedconsulting.com\/destinationssm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.directedconsulting.com\/destinationssm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.directedconsulting.com\/destinationssm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152,"href":"https:\/\/www.directedconsulting.com\/destinationssm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions\/152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.directedconsulting.com\/destinationssm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.directedconsulting.com\/destinationssm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.directedconsulting.com\/destinationssm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}