Somewhat recommended

Two-and-a-half out of four munch monkeys

$2.50 USD plus sales tax

It’s good enough to run for this Saturday’s rally. Now I just have to mount the battery and wire it in. I made the hole for the hold down threaded rod a little too close, so I’ll need to do something about that, but it looks like I can take care of this stuff Friday night, just in time! I think the hardest part is going to be finding a good grounding point.

It ain’t the prettiest job around, but I’m confident it’s pretty solid!

It wasnt really super stink, I think a lot of the stink already vanished, though I get the feeling that it can get pretty stink when its ripe.

I found this guy on my last trip to Guam, it really creeped the crap outta me!  We definitely do not want these things in Hawaii!

So, was that not a challenge? Here’s one I decided to take on finally. The battery relocation on the race FX. Scat and I had fabricated a box out of heavy PC case quite a while back. Over the past week I had bought the rest of the parts necessary for this relocation so decided to finally get this done. My plan was to relocate the battery into the spare tire well in the rear. NOT strapped into a thin torn plastic box screwed into the subwoofer board that one of the previous FX’s had. That was a hack job, along with the two pieces of 4 gauge wire screwed together & wrapped up in electrical tape. It would definitely not pass muster for rally!

My intention is to tuck and inset into a corner of the spare tire well. There should be just enough space for the compact spare, I’ll need to relocate the hold down for the spare. The scissors jack mount will also need to be relocated, I think there will be space for that too, hopefully. But to do this will need to cut a hole to set the box down into it. I wanted to do this to retain a close to stock rear hatch cargo area. As a bonus it’ll keep the weight of the battery lower, which is the whole point of relocating a battery to the rear, for better weight distribution.

Drilled out the jack mount and made intial cuts with the demolition saw, there’s no going back now! Cut cut cut! Got a nice big hole now! Chuck goes to town with the hammer & vice-grips and we get the hole sized to fit the box in. The edges that I’d planned for flanges on the box to mount to are not flat so it looks like the box is going to need some further modification. Ckucky’s got other commitments & takes off & I break for dinner.

When I get back to it, I cut into the flanges & rebend them to match the contours on the body better. It finally fits up pretty good. It’s getting on into the night so I just tack it in and run some beads onto the one clean edge. I guess all the practice is actually working, these look solid. This box ain’t going anywhere! I wrap it up for the night, it’s too late to run power tools so I can’t clean up the other edges. I’ll need to make up some patch pieces to fill some spots anyway. Stay tuned!

Recommended

Three out of four mouth-too-full monkeys

$7.95 USD plus sales tax

As the video crew was stowing their gear, I went in to check out the artwork. Yuki’s art has been featured in Aloha Surf Guide magazine and in several surf and surf culture magazines in Japan. The work she was showing was primarily acrylic on wood panels and blocks, although there were some larger format multiple paneled works of acrylic on canvas up on the wall. The wood she paints on is hinoki or sakura. She also had a few prints and postcards and watercolor on paper works. I had the chance to talk to her and her husband. She is from the Yokohama area, and it appears from her blog that she surfs Kamakura/Enoshima. Her husband is a jewelry designer, and they were visiting during Golden Week for their honeymoon (omedetou!). She didn’t go to art school and is self-taught. There was a bit of a language barrier issue (I know I totally confused her when I was trying to talk about “art as therapy”), so I hope I got most of that right! What I found interesting about her work was that although more on the graphic than realistic side, the almost stained-glass-like images were not flat: There was a sense of perspective, view angle, and dimentionality that broke past the outlined panels of color.

I was thinking of buying a print of one of her defining works, but ended up buying an original painting on wood block. Ouch! I slipped out around the time Yumi’s friends who came for the show brought out the birthday cake. Jackie came out when she saw that the car she was checking out in the parking lot was mine. It was good seeing that she, Eric, and little Parker are doing fine.

Check out the show if you’re in Kailua. I’m guessing the show runs to the end of the month.

In addition to the old school auto work, I also did some work on the rally FX. One issue I took care of was the torn intake hose. The previous setup was hacked together and had a super weak strap to attach the filter to the body. That quickly fell off at one race and damaged hose at one end. I replaced that with a less weak strap that was bolted a bit better in, but it proved still weak and this time the silicone hose on the other side failed. I’d been lazy about this as I was addressing other bigger mechanical issues, but finally took care of this. I ordered some less generic silicone hose from, yes,  www.siliconehose.com. Sure I wanted to go brand name snob and get Samco hoses, but it was hard to find a seller in the U.S. that also had the sizes I needed in stock. Flex Technologies Siliconehose.com is a bit unclear whether the hose is manufactured in the U.S.A., which kind of leads me to believe they are not. But they do have a large warehouse in the U.S.A. and had what I needed in stock. The hoses are fiber reinforced and layered, unlike the monolithic generic mystery hose that was there before. What you see in the above picture is actually my cobbed together assembly from bits scavenged to make a working intake. That entire mess was now replaced by this single 45 degree reducer hose. Nice and clean, it doesn’t get any cleaner than that! I’m hoping it helps the flow, and keeps it cooler too. I’ll make a airbox one of these days to enhance that too.

On to the next order of business I wanted to take care of. What you see here is the collector flange of the JDM header that I’m running. It’s a tubular header as opposed to the big heavy cast iron manifold that is stock. The problem is whoever sells these never seem to have associated hardware and so you see is a mounting tab floating unattached there. I’ve been running like this without any major problems, but I did have the flange at the head loosen and start leaking once. I was thinking it would be a good idea to attach this to the block as designed to lessen the vibration & strain.

I mock up the piece in cardboard and then scrounge the garage. I come across a bracket plate from the old FJ-55 that even has one appropriate sized hole already that will serve well as the base. One of the FX transmission mounts looks like it will function perfectly as the connecting piece as it already has a slotted hole. It takes only three cuts and one hole drilled to get the pieces I want, sweet!

I break out the welder. This is big stuff so I crank up the little MIG as high as it goes. Zap up some tacks and fit it up.

Damn, almost perfect! No need for adjustment, time to go for it. Hit it with all the welder’s got, I guess when working with stuff this big you can’t goof it up by burning through. It would have been nicer to lay down a single bead, but it’s easier for me to reposition. I’m not so good that I can lay down a really long bead consistently.

Hey, check it out, not too shabby! I can actually weld something usefull, and it doesn’t look like ass!

Here’s the finished piece, no need grinding, oh yeah! Just under two hours not counting painting to do this. Not going to be doing any 24 hour monster builds, but still not bad considering.

And here we go, fully installed and ready to race!