so the "new" head turned out to already have been pretty aggressively decked and even with the thickest (1.8mm) headgasket available the compression ratio would have been at like 10:1. luckily my friend in SoCal had a stock head sitting around that he was willing to let go for cheap. so one of my other friends grabbed it and brought it up for me. i took it to the machine shop and they found one of the cam journals was fucked. would have been about $600 to fix.
so at this point i just said fuck it and pulled my head off the motor, planning just to replace the bent valve(s) and pray i had the right sized shims (too late to order at this point). and wouldn't you know it, there weren't any bent valves. so then we were super confused. we did the leak down 3 times and got the same result every time. soooo????
checked the new crank and bearings since we pulled everything off to check the timing and found one of the bearings was already down to the copper after only like 20-30min of running time. said fuck it and threw everything back together, hoping it would at least last a couple runs at final bout.
back together and "running" a week before fb ssw
got my exhaust did. real dual exhaust for more ricer points
fixed my sexy style front bumper for the 69th time
the squad
then went and did some skids, promptly blowing up the front bumper on the first turn of the first run hahaha
so the motor ended up lasting 15-20 laps before starting to really knock bad, which was way more than i expected.
sr out again!
and taken apart again!
lol rip
rod 1 bearings were totally gone. had to change the rod. good thing at this point i have all the spare parts hahaha
changed the con rod, put in the new bearings and the repaired crank.
got a hot road rep for the time being
drove it home and parked it in my garage for the first time in a couple years. felt nice.
new glare front bumper and canards came in. gonna actually just run the canards on the hot road and gonna try my hand at making a "time attack-style" splitter/canard setup for the glare.
got burrito's with the boys
got invited to a private shakedown day with nakamura and the animal style dudes the wednesday before super d, which was super rad. felt pretty cool parking next to nakamura haha let him borrow one of my coil packs for a little bit because one of his went out and when i put it back on my car i swear it drove better hahaha
gave him a shirt at super d
did some skids with nick saturday (dom was busy doing burnouts at formula d)
was messing around with entering at the start/finish line all day. got a little hairy a couple times hahaha was super fun though
sunday was mayhem. i tried to change my driver side axel in the morning, but the hangover was making it impossible so i gave up. third run in nick spun, dom locked up his brakes, and i smashed his qp. for the first time ever, i think i actually came out with less damage, which is surprising. just gotta glass my bumper back together and get a new bash bar. went out to drive the next session and the car would rev up, but not really move anywhere. pulled back into the pits and was sure my clutch or trans was fried.
wasn't until loading up monday morning, that i realized only one of the rear wheels was getting power. pretty sure it's just a broken axel thank fuck
been working with my buddy to design a splitter/canard setup for the wonder bumper so it'll have a bit more protection in the future. going to mount the splitter to the bash bar so the bumper can just kinda sit on it. it's going to be made out of dibond (aluminum and pvc composite) which supposedly is strong enough to handle a lot of abuse
also picked up a new motor to start working on. going to take a lot of work, but i'm confident it'll be worth it in the end
