Thousand Dollar Supercar

Now that IS cheating! Luckily for you (but not very luckily for me) I need to work out whether the new car has cooling and/or lubrication system issues before I drive it too much. I drove it to work yesterday - you picked the wrong day to stalk me!

It's in this section purely because other people are allowed to post in my thread here. Might be an old car. Might be new. Here's a clue that might put Escorta out of his misery: Or it might not, because nobody takes photos of armrests!

As undetecible says, there are cars with petrol flaps on horizontal surfaces.. No. Hondas are gay. Nice CSI sleuthing, Ladaspeed, but nobody with a specific guess has got it yet. What say you now?

Euro trash? I'm not going to give hints because I figure there are some very knowledgeable train spotters on here. For example if I'd bought a Mitsubishi, you'd have picked it already! I want more specific guesses, and I'm gonna keep silent till the next clue. They'll get easier.

Okay, so I've bought another vehicle, and before the moderators shut me down I thought I'd run a guessing game. I'll post up a new picture every day or so, and y'all have gotta guess what I bought. One guess per picture, and I'll check if anyone's right before I post the next shot. I'm (hopefully) starting off with a photo that's not easy, yet has some clues..

You are entirely to blame for all the empty seats at our table! I will, however, allow Ned's excuse of bankruptcy by Alfa.

I can pick you up in the rickety Alfa.. That evening I should get it back from having cracks around the door catch welded , and I'll just need to re-fit the door trim. Barring any disasters there'll be plenty of time. Where do you live? (send PM if you want) I'm in Hillcrest.

Page 18 of that engine manual shows the camshaft, and the intake and exhaust lobes for each cylinder aren't lined up with eachother. It must be as Fuel theorised (cos he does kinda know everything..) - a wasted spark system where the cylinders move together but are in opposite phase. Still idles at 800rpm though!

How many cylinder firings per turn of the crankshaft in a normal 4-cylinder engine? Two? Say such an engine idles at 800rpm. This Subaru 700 could only fire its two cylinders simultaneously every second crank rotation, i.e. 0.5 firings per turn of the crankshaft. Does that mean it idles at 3200rpm to compensate? Or does it just idle slowly making distinct sput...sput...sput...sput noises? Imagine the puffs of steam from the exhaust on cold mornings. You so need a loud exhaust on this car!

What a weird little thing! It's obvious from that engine diagram that the two pistons move up and down simultaneously, but do the cylinders really fire simultaneously too? Surely they'd be on different strokes, e.g. one on compression while the other's on exhaust? But if they can build a 700cc manual car without a rev counter, who knows..

I'll be there. Classy pizzas is what us Alfa drivers do, don't you know. It's because we're all cultural and stuff. I believe I shall order the Pinot Noir Champagne.

I've also been to the electric karts, twice in the last few months. They understeer more than they drift, and they're not the typical rattly rickety fixed-with-a-four-metre-crowbar karts that every other dirty old kart track has. The guys at the electric karts place remind me of OSH, but apparently it's OSH who won't let them increase the speed of their karts - at best the karts are pegged at under half their maximum power. So due to the OSH-ness of the guys and the value of their karts, there's strictly no nudging, and because of this plus the still-not-that-fast speeds and too-short races you can guarantee there'll be no passing without the guy infront screwing up badly. But I'll still go if enough other people are. The Alfa club scored the rounds at this track based on fastest lap time rather than finishing position, which is much better given the difficulty of passing anyone.

The Alfa club meet is the exact same time as the oldschool meet each month. I might swing by there to find out whether I won the go-kart championship or not, then turn up late to Burgerfuel and find you guys are all gone.

I was exaggerating slightly, but I couldn't think of anyone who would really want to come and help lift oily engine parts. Most people have better things to do, and accordingly they'd probably want a share of the liquid payments, meaning less for me..

I'm a bit limited this weekend cos I'm flying to Christchurch midday Saturday, coming back 3pm Sunday. Saturday morning could work but only if it's early enough. You don't know when collection is required / would suit, Testament?

I live on the shore and have access to a ute, but I have no mates. Are there people at each end who could help me lift stuff?

I pulled the air intake elbow thingies off the black car and compared them to the ones I was going to replace them with. The existing ones didn't look that much smaller than their replacements, plus Weber Specialties had done a nice job on them so I wanted to prove that changing them was justified. I found that this casino chip would not fit into the existing enlarged 36mm intakes: I was able to pass the chip through the 40mm intakes with no trouble. So the 40s went on. I also took some tiny nibbles at the gaskets between the intakes and the carbs cos they looked like they might be acting as restrictors. New intakes fitted - they look.. just the same I noticed the enlarged 36mm intakes had been made very smooth and the intake ends had been flared as much as possible. There's not much flaring on the new 40mm intakes, and I just attacked the casting marks with a wonky drill-mounted grinding stone before sanding the insides with coarse sandpaper. I vaguely remember reading that intakes don't want to be perfectly smooth for some reason to do with swirl or turbulence. Shall I adjust my design? (I rather suspect it will make no difference and I should go fix real problems..) Next induction point to look at is the flexible cold air pickup pipe, which is smaller than the decayed factory one it replaced.

Black car: Failed WOF, got new brake cylinders to finally cure rear brake imbalance, passed WOF. Backlighting in LCD clock failed again, so I replaced the bulb with a red LED, for extra satanic-ness. Found some proper 40mm carb-to-airbox air intake elbow thingies, which I'll use to replace the undersize-but-bored-out 36mm ones the car currently has. Grey car: Broke the electric window mechanism on the passenger side this time, but that's not my problem cos the car is.. SOLD! The first non-crashed car of mine I've ever sold in my life. My cousin bought it as a runabout because his car's transmission died. He is a bit of a mechanic and has worked as a panelbeater, so I think he's up to the task. He's slowly restoring an MGB too. While organising all my service history receipts for this car, I made the mistake of totalling them up out of interest. Never do this! At least having this car gone will give me more free time and money and allow me to focus more on the black car. Company car: Panelbeating completed. Has more grip with the new tires so is less frustrating in the wet. The transmission and I are getting to know eachother better. Another tech at work is hunting for an identical Atenza. I pointed out the 4-speed auto is gay and he pointed out the later models with an extra gear are too expensive, and he's too wussy for manual. Toyota drivers. *sigh*

Here's that article I mentioned to you at the meet on Tuesday: http://www.autospeed.com.au/cms/A_107768/article.html I wonder if it allows remote linking of images?

That must have been one of the best turnouts we've had in a while. =) To anyone who wasn't there, this was because thminiman actually showed up in a mini ( ) but it had big carb intake trumpets sticking through the firewall into the passenger compartment.

Yeah, those teledial alloys are still on my grey car. The steel wheels that came on that car went to the scrapyard on the silver demolition derby car. Don't you powdercoat your wheels that yellow, that looks awful. I reckon the tire bulges (there were two) can't really be blamed on the accident, even though they were on the wheel from the area which got hit by the other car. That tire had been requiring weekly inflation over the past month and it was feeling slightly square on the trip down to Hamilton, before the crash. The bulges developed gradually on the motorway on the inner shoulder of the tire, where you don't think to check. =|

Black car: Failed its WOF again for the same reason both 33s keep failing - right drum brake weaker than left. I stalled it in busy traffic in the middle of a main road in the Albany Mega Centre area today, and it decided to do its slow cranking thing so I couldn't get it restarted. I spent a minute or so cranking it over in the hopes that the intermittent fault would go away again, but it didn't. So I pushed it off into a parking lot where I picked up enough speed that I could roll start it. And later, when I opened the bonnet to stare angrily at nothing, I found something! Big surprise, a bad electrical connection. (where the cable is crimped into the battery terminal connector) This would only play up sometimes, but this time me cranking the engine for ages got it hot enough to melt insulation and give itself away. Death. Ripped out the battery ground wire. Ripped out the engine earth strap. Ripped out the positive lead from the battery to the starter motor. Threw them all in the bin. Bought new battery terminal connectors. Put in shorter runs of fresh and thicker cable. Chopped off and replaced every other ring terminal which used these same grounding points. The wires I threw in the bin vanished in smoke and the electrical gremlins scattered to the darkest reaches of the wiring loom. (You thought they were dead? Dead? No, you cannot kill them. No.) Grey car: Was painting roof and hatch (above), now finished. Looks like rubbish but is still the best painting I've done so far. One day I'll bother to get the proper gear and do a good job! (yeah right..) Car passed its WOF, got a wheel alignment and torn steering arm ball joint boots replaced. Still keeps blocking a carby jet despite new fuel filter and rubber fuel hose. Company car: No longer having trouble starting. Someone else crashed into it though - she thought she could turn right from the outside lane of a roundabout, while I was in the inner lane trying to exit. And on the way back from Hamilton that same day, one of the tires did this: All the tires had been dodgy since we got the car, but now I had proof. Car got a new set of tires and is going in for panelwork for 5 working days (hooray!)

Yay the Cordia! 1985 would probably be an AB model, from memory. They were the fastest but I don't think they had the vented front discs of the later models? You might want to deal with the cause of the white smoke first and then reassess the misfire situation afterward. The trusty Cordia GSR seems to have a hundred different common faults, like cracked exhaust manifolds or air leaks or bad vacuum lines or leaky injectors or dodgy sensors etc, so I'd assume nothing and start eliminating the easiest possibilities first. Spark plugs? There's still some Cordia gurus who hang around at the cordiapower.com forums - give them a try too.

Looks very tidy. Before you lower it or change the wheels etc, you could see if it could earn you a bit of extra cash as a wedding car. Might have to be bogan weddings though...

If I understood you guys right, I should be able to use the Link to dial out my cam lobe wear, recalibrate my suspension and upload a new fuel map to the carbs. The turbo boost should help crank my engine over faster on startup, and excess can be plumbed into my ventilation system so it finally blows a decent volume of air. Sorted. I took the source files for this image at 640*480 by mistake. If I rub the Link on my camera's memory stick, perhaps I can get it to increase their resolution...