Vroom Noise
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I decided to do a few things to my car for the upcoming race season. Read the rest of this entry »
OffRoadin
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Since it’s finally snowed here, I’ve been going out looking for awesome places to offroad in Fresh Panzer.
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Winter Tyres
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Many people ask me what kind of winter tyres to buy for their cars for the winter. All of this is based on my personal experience buying more sets of tyres than is economically feasible for one person and driving them all in the winter.
Safety Squint
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I had a bit of a mishap with working on the car yesterday. Apparently when people recommend that you wear safety glasses, you fucking should. It’s important, you know, for the seeing.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good safety squint, but if you want to keep on looking at stuff, put some Buddy Holly’s on your face or you’ll go blind.
Changing the axle on the Dirty Pretty yesterday was one of those times where that became quite evident. You see most axles get seized in place and require a sledge hammer to massage out. Unfortunately we didn’t have one at the time, so I was trying to knock the axle out with a framing hammer and another hammer (as a punch). This was working about as well as you’d expect such a shitty setup to work: not at all.
What did happen though is, a few swings in, a chunk of the punch hammer rocketed off and shot directly into my leg. It didn’t hurt all that much, but fuck did it bleed.
I had to throw out my sock :(
I assumed it was just a flesh wound but it occurred to me this morning to check if there was a bit of hammer still in my leg. What is the best way to do that?
SCIENCE!
Using a couple of rare earth magnets, I put them onto my leg over the hammer hole.
A stronger magnet would also solve this problem
Sure enough they stuck in place, even when I turned my leg upside down.
Stay tuned for how I extract it using a Tesla coil and a Juicy Fruit wrapper!
I’d say there is still some hammer in there.
Off to the hospital I go :(
The Dirty Pretty
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The other day I was driving around in my little black e30, der kleinerpanzer, contemplating if it was time for a new nickname for it. I think that depending on the day, and my mood, it shalt be known henceforth as the original: Der Kleinerpanzer or the new hotness: The Dirty Pretty.
Anyway on that day I was just driving around, minding my own business, when all of a sudden from the back of the car there was a super loud…
KA KLUNK!!!
It was so loud I ducked my head instinctivly, like I had learned from growing up in the hood. When bullets be flyin, ninjas be ducking heads. As if the act of me slightly shrugging my shoulders a few seconds after the incredibly loud bang would have been enough to stop an imminent driveshaft spearing through my skull should it fail and be sent slicing through the cabin of my car.
I pulled over to survey the damage, getting down on my knees to peek under the car. Had the diff exploded? Were there bits of driveshaft all over the place? Did I run over a chain link fence, through a playground and subsequently over the impressionable faces of many small children?
Not so far as I could tell. Everything looked completely normal: nothing leaking, nothing bent, nothing smoking, nothing aflame. Certainly there were no small animals clinging for life to my car’s driveline. Puzzled, I furrowed my brow and squinted.
No amount of furrowing, nor mass amounts of squinting, revealed anything new so I continued on my way home and forgot all about it for a couple weeks.
Cut to today. I’m on my way home from an outdoor meeting when I hear this absolutely unholy, screeching wail coming from the back left of my car. It sounds like what it must sound like if you put a rail road track into a blender and then play a Bjork album on 11 for an audience of cats being boiled. The shear volume came at you like an errant javelin poking at your brain as if to say, “hello, I’m here to make you deaf and kill your whole family.”
Having been in this situation before, I knew exactly what to do: I ducked my head and shrugged my shoulders. Caint no body hold me down. Oh no. Got to keep on moving.
I drove like this all the way home, cutting a path in the normally dull noise of traffic with my 200,000,000 dB metal grinding death parade at the achingly slow pace of 50kph. I was so scared my car was going to break in half, explode an axle into the trunk, or seize up and catch fire. I think I only took 5 breaths total in the 40 minutes it took me to get home.
I made it. Barely.
Once the car had cooled down I took off the wheel to see what was up. I had a flashback to my brother telling me a vague recollection of his that the parking brake on the driver’s side (where the banshee scream was coming from) might be broken. When we had the car inspected this was apparently mentioned by the mechanic. I must have shrugged it off. I mean how could a $650 car, that I pieced back together in a single car garage with only hand tools, be anything less than perfect. Impossible.
I guess this is what happens when you ignore the advice of a professional. As soon as I took the brake rotor off to look at the parking brake shoes, metal dust and pieces of metal that vaguely resembled parking brake parts fell to the ground. I sifted through the debris to find that all the pieces that make up the parking brake were mangled, melted, seized or otherwise completely fucked up beyond any and all hope. Well there’s your porblem.
I gathered the whole mess up in a safeway bag and threw it the fuck out. Problem solved. All parking braking for the Dirty Pretty will now happen on the passenger side, which still features a working parking brake. BMW had a good idea with modular design. On another car I’d have no working brakes in the back and serious work ahead of me. The car is now silent, and working fine. Mostly.
80% car!