One of the habits that I have been needing to develop is carefully inspecting the car after each event to ensure that there isn’t anything that’s starting to break or otherwise needs attention. Frankly, “carefully” might be a pretty big step, so I’m ready to just settle for driving past the car and making sure it hasn’t been stolen at this point! In an effort to not only give the car an inspection but to do so when there’s time to actually do something about anything I might find I took the car over to the workshop last night to give it a once-over.
To start off with, I was interested to find out if it was possible to get a car off the trailer (and back on again) without using the ramps. Ever since we moved in, I was pretty sure that it could be done but I had never tried it. As it turns out, as long as the angle is right the unloading and reloading can be done very easily with zero ramp!
I had three primary goals: First was to inspect the motor mounts for any sign of breaking, tearing, bending, or other problems; Second was to replace the vacuum cap that disintegrated last month; Third was the adjust the tune to try to get it to idle better without its IAC. The later item wasn’t going to happen because I managed to leave my tuning cable at home, so I jumped right in to inspecting the motor mounts and got the car up in the air.
Well, except once the car was in the air, I got a different idea.
A little bit of masking tape went on, then a little bit of plastic dropcloth, and then four cans of PlastiDip!
When it was all finished, I had this:
The paint had been coming off the roof in sheets and doing something about that had been on my to-do list for a while. I had all these cans of PlastiDip that I got really cheap at Ollies a while back and yellow seemed to be the color that would work the least bad. I’m not sure how much I really like it, but at least the paint is coming off and the roof isn’t rusting.
Anyway, now that I had taken care of I could move on to less-important things like checking the mounts. Turns out they all looked just great.
Sorry for the blurry picture, but everything held together really well.
Once that was taken care of, I decided to break out the new smoke machine and see just how bad my electrical tape vacuum cap leaked.
A lot. It leaked a lot.
I replaced the cap and then decided to go ahead and smoke the vacuum lines to see if I had any other leaks and in the process I found a ton of smoke from under the intake manifold. Turns out that the line from the manifold to the PCV valve catch can was coming apart a bit:
There wasn’t enough hose once I cut off the bad part to reach, so I connected the PCV valve directly to the manifold, bypassing the catch can. Once I have a chance to stop by the store and get some vacuum hose, I’ll reroute it so that it doesn’t have a chance to rub against things and get pulled in the wrong direction anymore.
Since I was on a roll, I decided to put the pressure test cap on the turbo inlet and hook the smoke up to that as well just to see if I had any boost leaks. Right away, I saw some very small wisps of smoke coming from around the intake air temperature sender. It’s not a lot, but I need to find some sort of gasket for that to seal it up better. The real problem was all the smoke coming from under the radiator. Apparently, one of the times that I broke the motor mounts, the engine rocked forward and the A/C bracket pierced the aluminum charge pipe that connects the intercooler to the under-engine pipe.
I had no idea that I was leaking boost – I guess the turbo just makes so much boost that a giant hole like that wasn’t enough to prevent the gauge from climbing past 10 PSI. I didn’t have any of the aluminum piping at the shop, but I’ll grab a section from my stash at home, cut it to fit, and swap it in before the next event. It’s in a very easy to access position so I’m not too concerned about it.
Once all that was complete, I also cleaned up the beads on the front tires, remounted them, and put the car back on the trailer. Without using ramps! All I need to be fully ready to compete on Saturday is that section of pipe and a longer bit of vacuum hose. Since I’m so ready, I fully anticipate that the incoming thunderstorms will cause a cancellation. But I think from now on I’m going to hook my smoke machine up to EVERYTHING. Three leaks that it found that I didn’t even suspect of existing and it only took moments to find them. This is another one of those tools that I’m not sure how I lived without.
