Spent the day at Prawns working on cars.
Started off by trying to gauge what my new wheel was going to look like -
My car was feeling a little slow on the way there, and I was just generally f**ked off because I thought "great, it's been f**king perfect for ages and it's choosing to have it's odd bad day when I am at Prawns having banged on about how rapid it was for ages...Guh!"
The job for the day was to sort out the knocking from the rear, straighten the exhaust and fit a new clamp and look at the front hub which was knocking about.
Went to undo the rear top mount, and the bottom bolt was MILES too long and took literally half my life to undo, which was a bit gimp. Then trying to undo the two top mounts they were ROCK SOLID and wouldn't move, which was well annoying. Having bought a new top mount and done half the work as well as driven an hour I wasn't going to get to do it today. Rubbish!
Did the monster bolt back up and it bottomed out, so it wasn't the top mount at all it was the HUGE bolts solder being a mm too short. So off it came again (literally, the other half of my life undoing it) and then we couldn't find any suitable washers so we used an old nylock ball joint nut to space it out. Another million hours of crawling about on the floor later it was all back together and looking swish.
So then we jacked it up to fix the exhaust...
Old manky wonky look -
New nice and straight look -
I have some crazy screaming noise coming from my car, and it goes away when it's SUPER hot. Turns out it's the 1/42 scale Grand Canyon model set that's been built into my 250 quid THS Hi-Flow exhaust manifold, a tidy install if I may say so myself -
At this point I was ready to kill anybody within a 5 mile radius. So I went inside and Prawns mum made us some amazing buffet lunch with awesome roast potatoes, she is awesome.
We were getting pretty f****d off with working on my piece of ****, so we jacked it up to look at the wobble in the front hub which was the final job. Nick tried tightening up the hub nut which was already FT. Turns out I've got a wheel bearing gone AND a shagged track control arm too. YEY!
We got bored and wrote badges on the back of our cars -
We went out for a hoon in my car, and got a couple of videos but it was all a bit too windy. Sounded good though and was really strange but nice to see somebody else driving my car hard.
So we went out in Prawns car, which was cool. Got a mile down the road and head a massive clunking and then what sounded like a huge stone smashing under the car and going down the road. Stopped at the side of the road to check it all out, couldn't see or feel anything so carried on back down the road to see what it was. Nick was convinced it was a metallic sound and it felt like something dropped from the engine bay. Couldn't see anything in the road so we went for a hoon. The way that thing can go round corners is incredible, the brakes hurt my face and the platform is just SO tight. It's amazing, honestly you wouldn't ever believe it unless you went in it. Shame it's slow as f**k (comparatively speaking to what it was) and the turbo is full of holes, but on the plus side you never have to brake for anything!
Got a mile further down the road and I heard a ticking noise, we were all a bit confused and nothing apparent would make it stop. Turns out this was the problem -
A driveshaft bolt had come loose, the locking tab had flipped round and was smashing up the gearbox. Oh noes! I robbed a pair of bolts and a locking tab off Nicks mums A3 and we cracked on with it, finding a loose steering rack along the way.
Ghetto ramps made of chopped up boat masts!
We bolted it all back together, and I cleaned a quarter of one wheel and the odd spoke then off we went for a bit of a hoon.
Prawns car is fun, I can't wait for our drive to Barnstaple on Saturday!
The twins together -
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So, my new plan is take the car home in Jan when I WAS going to be doing Brands Hatch and throw it on the ramp and do EVERYTHING. In the mean time I'll buy an AGU manifold and port it myself.