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When people ask me what I do for a living there's a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is that I'm a mechanic. This is a simple answer and immediately puts an image of a greasy lube tech at a dealership or a tire throwing monkey at a wheel shop into the person's head. I usually leave it at that if they don't have any follow up questions and they usually don't unless they're "car people". For those that are, the inevitable long answer is that I'm a professional exotic automobile restorer and independent Bavarian sports car specialist. In Layman's terms this means that I get to wrench on some of the fastest, most expensive, most exclusive, and poorest engineered cars in the world. Lets have a look at my bay.  This is a Manta Mirage. It is (for better or worse) a near exact reproduction of a McLaren M8, one of the most successful cars in one of the most balls to the wall unlimited racing series the world has ever seen, the Canadian-American Challenge Cup or Can-Am.   It is a testament to how exquisite form can arrive out of calculated function. My pulse raced the first time I saw it and I felt a long absent sensation in my loins when I first turned the throaty Detroit V8 over after spraying a liberal amount of high octane gasoline into the eight individual throttle bodies. Did I mention that it's road legal?  That said, it is built with an almost stubborn appreciation for 1960/70s era British racing engineering. Coolant runs from the radiator to the small block V8 in the back by flowing through the car's 4"x2" square box steel main frame rails. From best as we can tell the manufacturer took no care to seal the interior of the frame from corrosion, nor did McLaren with the M8. Why should they? The cars only ran a few races before being completely broken down and rebuilt. I'm currently in the process of rewiring the bulk of the 12V harness to get this car road legal and ready for a buyer at the consignment shop I work for. Once that is done I'll move on to resealing the Corvair trans-axle that is fitted to this monstrosity so I can take it for a lengthy test drive to ensure all systems are functioning correctly. This is just what I do for my day job. I have a shop of my own where I have a bunch of goofy projects I know you'll enjoy but I'll get to that later. For now I'll post a few pictures of some of the cars I've been wrenching on at work lately.  This is a 1956 Bentley S1. These cars were sold almost exclusively to the house of Windsor and they're cricket partners. They are elegant, they are timeless, they are made of wood and measured in inches at best and hectares at worst. Do you know why the British drink they're beer warm? Because Lucas makes refrigerators too. This is a 1997 Lamborghini Diablo and it is quite yellow.  It even has a big yellow Italian engine.  It also has a leaky head gasket and likes to shook a plasma cutter like jet of fire through a hairline crack in it's hard cast aluminum headers. This is just a Corvette C6.   With more horsepower than a Bugatti Veyron. All of these and many more amazing and bizarre vehicles will require my mechanical attention in the weeks and months to come. I'll try and dump a bunch of pictures of some of the more interesting pieces in our shop tomorrow. For now I need some sleep. I do battle with another pesky Corvette and an Alpina B7 in the morning James Woods fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Dec 11, 2013 |
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Dec 11, 2013 10:55
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At the risk of sounding pretentious, I sometimes feel at this job like more of a curator than a mechanic. While the eventual fate of most cars these days is to be bound for the crusher shortly after their warranties expire, these cars are cradled through history by a never ending series of jackasses like myself. They are Rosetta Stones to a bygone era of engineering when cars were thought up in bars and not marketing board rooms. And then there's this loving thing.  Don't get me wrong, I love Vettes. I have a C3 myself and consider the Corvette to be the ultimate expression of the American sports car. This one however has become the boomerang from hell over the silliest of all things. When we did our initial inspection on this car it only had two major issues that needed to be addressed. First off it had a lip on it's rotors almost as long as my dick is wide as well as being below spec to be machined. Second there was a DTC saying "SERVICE ACTIVE HANDLING SYSTEM". This is a system that works in conjunction with traction control to make slight adjustments to wheel speed to assist in high speed turns. I figure that this is a code that can probably be cleared with a Tech II and decide to research it later. Well we do a complete brake job and when we take it for a test drive we don't get two blocks before both calipers start throwing smoke. Well poo poo. Many hours later we get it home and up on the rack to investigate our work. Much to our surprise we find that we did everything right so we set our sights on the parts guy thinking that he'd ordered the wrong pads/calipers. Just as we're ready to strangle each other I get the idea to check the GM tech bulletins and find our answer. It turns out that there is an active recall out on cars in this range for the active handling system that can cause one or more of the calipers to suddenly lock up during normal operation. Which part of the car was the culprit? The loving telescoping steering column. It seems that the module that controls AHS is in the steering column and after a few years of going in and out it will wear out one of the connectors on the solid state control unit causing a short and then ending your life. I checked the manufacturing range and found that this car was in fact covered by the recall but GM is busting my balls every inch of the way not to fix it themselves. They claim that while it was build within the time for the recall that the VIN doesn't match up in their system. The lady at GM customer service then says that it may have come from another plant. I then inform her that this and every Corvette are all made in the same plant in Bowling loving Green Kentucky but even over the phone I can see her eyes glaze over so I eventually just hang up. PhotoKirk posted:More details on the Vette, please. PLEASE...........  1,032 hp and 965 tq or a power to weight ratio of .32. The Veyron only has a .22 although this is on paper.    In reality the car is almost completely undrivable. It's drat near impossible to keep it in a straight line.  This thing eats expensive tires the way I eat Korean BBQ. Elsewhere in the shop...  This thing used to be a rusted out 49' Cadillac before ZZ Top showed up one day with a bunch of girls and transformed the heap into what you see before you with the power of rock. I still have an awesome bolo tie from the makeovers the other mechanic Don and I got that day.  We take this thing to car shows to promote the shop and I'll tell you it's as fun to drive on California freeways as it looks. It has a 47' buddy here too that we're putting the finishing touches on now. I've also been spending a lot of time lately restoring old Mercs.  I just want to put this thing in a stroller and take it to the zoo.  This is a near perfect 230SL we just finished.  Here is one that has a lot of work to do yet. Speaking of Mercedes. I think something is wrong with the doors on this one. 
James Woods fucked around with this message at 12:01 on Dec 24, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 01:16
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Left Ventricle posted:Buddha on a bicycle, a thousand horsepower C6?! That's at the wheels too, isn't it. Yes. Yes it is. DrPain posted:I could have sworn I thought you were a bartender. Fun fact, I started posting The Bartender Journals here just about ten years ago. Believe it or not I only started receiving any professional mechanic's training within the last five years. Before that I was the GM of a bar in San Francisco making quite a bit more than I do now. After I left that job I decided to start all over and began simultaneously attending two automotive schools. I did this to ensure I'd get into all the classes for both my Automotive Technology degree and all the supporting skills I wanted to learn like welding, metal fabrication and automotive painting. I decided to get a leg up on my competition in the job market who had a lot more experience than I did and focused a lot of my study on next generation technology like hybrids and EV conversion. This combined with a lot of luck eventually led me here. rear end in a top hat Bicycle posted:Yup, starting to seriously question major decisions in my life. CommieGIR posted:drat it if I didn't like science so much.... It's never too late. Tomorrow I will introduce you to my menagerie of 911s and explain why you should never get one in a convertible. James Woods fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 05:53
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VikingSkull posted:I get to play with exotics at work sometimes too, and I hate my job. I told Don the other day that for my next job I want to be a stunt driver. I want to get paid to break them for a change. Speaking of which. My new 911 never came in today so my primer on German hydraulics will have to wait. Meanwhile...  Work continues on rewiring the Manta.  Daddy needs a drink.
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Dec 13, 2013 02:59
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Nothing cures a hangover like power sliding a 911.  I love the 911 for the same reason I love the Corvette and that is the sheer stubbornness of the loving thing. Now between you and I, putting the engine mass of a car behind the rear wheels isn't the best idea ever. But Porsche has been sticking to their guns and overcoming this problem with brilliant loving engineering. The best thing about a 911 is that for everyday driving it's just a normal car and feels like one too. When power is applied it accelerates like no other despite it's small displacement. Unlike a Ferrari it isn't in danger of exploding every time you turn the windshield wipers on. It has a fair amount of over the range power but that's not what sets it apart from other cars. It's when you first throw it into a turn at high speed and that rear weight just points your cock directly into the apex weather you like it or not that you realize you're behind the wheel of a 911. Sadly the only thing more stubborn than a Porsche designer is a Porsche owner. Got forbid you try and improve a fifty year old design by I don't know, cooling the engine with water and the Porsche purists freak the gently caress out. Unfortunately this one has a inoperable convertible top. I was about to whip out by big mechanic dick and show you how to service the hydraulic system on one of these fuckers which was the issue with both of these.  However it seems that the issue this time is electrical so I'm waiting to get some work hours approved before I start tearing it apart. By the way, if your 996 ever has a dead battery here's how to jumper it. The 911 is one of an alarming number of cars these days that has an electronically actuated bonnet release which is incidentally where the battery is. To remedy this you go to the fuse box.  Then you attach the ground of your jumper to the door hinge and the positive to this little pull out red tab here.  I showed the sales manager this trick today when he was trying to show the car to a customer and he looked at me like I was loving Einstein. Maker Of Shoes posted:James Woods, that's some powerful writing in the tumblr you linked in your profile. Yours? Yes it is. Totally forgot about that. James Woods fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Dec 24, 2013 |
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Dec 14, 2013 02:18
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So I came in early today to have a meeting with a customer but he never showed. Still feeling a little raw from the night before I decided to take a nap in a half million dollar car.    Those carbon fiber buckets are more comfortable than they look. Some pornography.    Safety tips for putting a baby seat in your McLaren SLR. 
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Dec 14, 2013 21:49
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Bugdrvr posted:We're waiting on our 918 now. I should just post the pictures in here since this seems to be the awesome cars thread. Holy gently caress now I'm the jealous one. That car excites me in ways I thought no hybrid could.
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Dec 15, 2013 20:41
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HotCanadianChick posted:I'm seeing a lot of cars from Stuttgart, but I've yet to see a single Bavarian car in this thread, mister. Well I'm yet to show you my independent Bavarian auto shop which I haven't visited in a week much to my Foreman's consternation. I won't likely be over there again until Tuesday but in the meantime I do have pictures of my favorite car in the shop. Is this Bavarian enough for you? A BMW 7 Series.  Designed by madmen.  Based on the E65/66 745i this unobtrusive German sedan has a roughly 500hp/550tq supercharged M62 based 4.4L V8 and will do a 12 second quarter mile with a family of five inside.  It and it's buddy the significantly slower (and somewhat donked) 6.0L V-12 760Li have both torn their control arm bushings to pieces as is typical to most full sized BMWs built in the 21st century. The reason for this is not a design fault by BMW but rather that the science of materials technology has yet to develop a form of polyurethane than can withstand the might of Bavarian suspension geometry. Speaking of overpowered BMW sleeper sedans, we have my daily driver a 1999 M62TUB44 4.4L V8 powered 540i M-SportWagon.  It has been my go to junkyard run, daily commuter, road trip, and fun weekend mountain car for the last two years. It likes to haul engines while running down 911s but sadly fraulein is dying of a broken heart. Luckily we have a suitable but much larger replacement that we're prepping for surgery. Expect updates on that project soon. In the meantime I need to prep my tertiary daily driver for the swap, incidentally one of my favorite little project cars in the world which some of you are already familiar with from an old thread. 
James Woods fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Dec 16, 2013 |
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Dec 16, 2013 03:20
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leica posted:This is interesting because I have toyed with getting a E39 (non M) wagon DD for a long time. Oh God yes, it's really my favorite car I've ever owned. It's very well built and I would trust it's reliability over a Mazda any day. Part of the reason I fell in love with BMWs in the first place is because they are easy to work on. The E39 is no exception you just have to keep your eye out for the usual BMW cooling issues like blown radiator necks and water pump impellers. Get a used one, roll up your sleeves and dive right in. It ain't rocket surgery. I can't speak highly enough about the 540i but if you are worried about gas the 528i and much rarer 530i are alternatives that won't leave you disappointed with power delivery, it just won't be a sleeper rocket wagon like a 540i which will realistically only get you about 15-20 miles per gallon. Whatever you do go for one with the sport steering rack. You can tell the difference by the three rather than four spoke steering wheel with the M flag usually on the bottom spoke. The difference in drive feel between the two is night and day. There's actually no such thing as an E39 M5 Touring. Well, not yet that is. Bugdrvr posted:I'm right there with you. I can't wait to ride in an overgrown Prius that makes a GT2 feel slow (the 997 GT2 scares me). I'll buy the first round. James Woods fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Dec 16, 2013 |
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Dec 16, 2013 04:24
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It's been a boring couple of days for the most part. As you can see my desk is covered in science. I'm on the home stretch with the Manta electrics, our last hang up is getting a working starboard headlight actuator out of a Miata. We've sent both our shop assistant and parts guy out for a used one five times so far and each time they returned with a blown part. To alleviate this confusion I have constructed what I call The Device.  The Device is a simple 9V power supply with to modes of actuation to test 12V car parts. It has three 9V batteries wired in parallel with a three position switch going two two positive test leads as well as a third ground lead.  It's a simple and rugged design and will accompany me on junkyard trips. In it's current configuration it puts out about 3-3.5 Amps but I intend to put a potentiometer in it to regulate the current manually along with some LEDs to indicate various functions.  Here is the simple circuit should you want to make your own. It cost me about $10 in parts including the enclosure.  Speaking of which... I was about to head out to another yard looking for another regulator when a familiar car entered my bay. Lets have a look under the hood.  Whats that now? Lets check the boot.  Hmm... What kind of car is this?  Only the fastest loving thing I've ever driven.  I'd driven one of these once before back in college and even wrenched on one a little to get my EV safety certification but that was all under the mindful eye of a Tesla rep. Today is the first time I've ever driven one of these beasts and my heart was barely up to the task. Don and I took the thing on a two hour safety inspection this afternoon that was basically just 120 minutes of us screaming at the top of our lungs between giggling like schoolchildren and trying to catch our breaths at lights.  I could quote horsepower and torque statistics but that would be utterly moot due to the nature of electric motors. What makes this thing so crazy is that is has it's full power band all the time at any speed. Once you get over 20mph the speed controller lets the exponential go to full and it's warp speed. Both of us agree that it is faster than the McLaren SLR and Don who recently drove a Gumpert is convinced that it's faster than that as well. This isn't even the Sport model. That said it is a complete deathtrap. Due to the way the car is laid out it understeers drastically if you apply any significant power in a turn. It's like it's magnetically attracted to the outside guardrail and combined with the power I'm surprised I haven't heard of more of these things wrapped around trees. http://youtu.be/o5SCxkSeDoU James Woods fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Dec 18, 2013 |
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Dec 18, 2013 02:26
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VelociBacon posted:Is that the same model that Clarkson had on the track (with a couple failures)? I had no idea it was actually as fast as Ford is saying. They had an early prototype. This is a 2009 year model, after they'd worked out a few kinks with the cooling system and controllers. Tomorrow I'm shopping for lineman's gloves and high voltage tools so I can service this thing. When I do I'll show some more detail of the interior and go through some of the crazy safety procedures you need to observe around EVs. ultimateforce posted:I hate the Tesla so much in Forza. No engine braking is just too weird for me. In reality if you give it a quick tap of the brake the engine braking, i.e. regenerative braking, kicks in long before the calipers engage. This can help you through a turn but it's certainly a disconcerting feeling. The regenerative braking works so well in fact that after all our flogging you could immediately not only touch but leave your finger tip on the surface of the brake rotor. It's squirrely as all hell but when you're driving it you don't care because it's so much loving fun. I have never had a vehicle whether car or motorcycle that can frighten and excite me the way this machine does. There were a few naysayers at work as well. That was until we took turns taking them around the block.
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Dec 18, 2013 05:05
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TheFonz posted:Ugh, I loving hate when people put music over the engine noise in videos. So do I but what engine noise? The GoPro was mounted to the windshield so all it recorded was a lot of wind. I even tried recording the motor sound with a second camera in the cabin but you still couldn't hear it clearly. That said expect a big update soon. The tale of the four day brake job.
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Dec 23, 2013 05:11
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If you two loving comedians are done sucking each others dicks I have an update.McMadCow posted:Hah! Given all that thing has put us through I'm surprised you're still so charitable towards it 3 years on. Hey McMadCow, while you're still in London I need you to do me a favor. See if you can make it down to Jaguar Corporate Headquarters located at Abbey Road, Whitley, Coventry CV3 4LF and pretty please with sugar on top throw a brick through the loving window.  gently caress this thing.  Welcome to my home away from home, my bat cave, my tree house, a place where dreams take flight and wrenches get thrown in anger. Here you will see my menagerie of uncompleted vehicles.    My 81' C3 is waiting to get it's 350 resealed and interior swapped before I sell it and move on to a new restoration project. I will miss this car if for no other reason than that is was fitted from the factory with one of the biggest on board pussy magnets ever to come out of Detroit.    Hey we all know this little guy. It is having a surging issue with the throttle of the fuel injected M42 that we swapped into it that neither myself or any other mechanic I've put it in front of can figure out. Next step is a brand new MAF and failing that ECU. Don is convinced that the issue is related to exhaust back pressure and O2 sensors but then again he also eats racoons that he shoots in his back yard with a crossbow, so the jury's still out.     This is our NASA Spec E30 car waiting for paint and McMadCow to get back to the states so we can propperly break it on the track. If the 2002 doesn't get sorted out by the time my soccer mom wagon goes under the knife or if the swap takes longer than planned this will be my daily driver for a bit.  This we affectionately call the "Little Vato". It is a 79' 911 Targa P3 car that raced down in the Mexican leagues. I got it for a steal minus the drive train a couple years back from this shifty Korean broad down in LA who had a warehouse full of random car poo poo and 1990's video game consoles, cartridges, and accessories.   The original plan was to put a DC Electric drive train in it and race it in SCCA against internal combustion cars but the project got shelved when the hippies up in Marin county I was going to contract to source the motor and batteries flaked on me. Don has a line on both a 996 GT3 power plant as well as two Tesla Roadster drive trains so I'm up in the air at the moment as to where I'm going to take this thing.    The place could use a woman's touch but we only just moved into here from our old warehouse a few months ago and are still settling in.   Sadly this loving thing has been darkening my lift for the last couple weeks waiting for Don and I to embark on the most hosed up bullshit wrenching job of both our careers.  It's an 89' Jaguar XJS V12. It is designed by Formula 1 engineers and built by imbeciles. This is a contract job from the consignment shop I work at and was brought here to make use of our two post lift and fabrication equipment. I did the safety inspection on this thing a few weeks ago and despite being the best restored and maintained example I've seen outside of a museum in the last decade it had a few little quirks that needed to be attended to. This included new brake rotors and pads front and rear as well as a re seal of the differential. Unfortunately this car has the dreaded Jaguar in board brakes like on an E-Type. A car I once had a great desire to restore, that was until last Friday.  The first step was dropping the rear sub frame assembly. This necessitated the purchase of a table jack, something I've been wanting for a while anyway since it will be necessary for upcoming jobs like the Diablo head gasket and any number of other rear or mid engined cars we have in the pipe.   Day one was just supposed to consist of dropping the sub frame but already we hit a snag. Both of the trailing arm bolts were corroded to all hell and sheared faster than a hairdresser on Benzedrine. We knew immediately that this combined with the myriad of other obstacles we saw on the horizon once we got underneath it would at least double the time required for this job. What we didn't know at the time was that instead of the eighteen man hours initially quoted we wound up doing nearly sixty in the next four days.     This car was built with absolutely no regard for service. In fact, if I didn't know better I'd say that it was intentionally designed to make money in the service department but that would be a wise business decision. This is something British car companies were incapable of in the 80's.  You have to remove the loving hubs to service the front brake rotors. The car uses an esoteric combination of SAE, Metric, and Imperial fasteners, half of which are bound in place by bailing wire which doesn't exactly inspire confidence about build quality.  Day two we serviced the front end and diff while my Foreman Park, a former JAG in the USMC who litigates almost as well as he rebuilds engines, worked his magic at extracting and re tapping the trailing arm bolts with Grade 8 Metric hardware.  Once we'd undone the damage we did we began tearing the rear sub frame apart to service the calipers. This included long hours of sadness and pain as more bolts sheared, tools got stuck, fingers bled, and hearts were broken. In the end we got the rear end reassembled and called it a night. We could tell that re mounting the sub frame was going to be a bitch.   Day three consisted of Don and I contemplating leaving our families and joining the Foreign Legion as we did battle with the sub frame mounting. Twelve hours of prying, drilling, wrenching and swearing later and the fucker is attached and ready for the trailing arms to be connected and have the brake lines hooked up and bled. We were on the home stretch and called it a day since the showroom was closed Sunday and we wouldn't be returning the car until the next day anyway. Day four and Don and I both have murder in our eyes. We want this fucker out of here because not only are we at our wits end but we've essentially been working for free for the last two days due to under bidding the project from the beginning. Welcome to the wonderful world of Flat Rate ladies and gentlemen.  Re seating the trailing arms goes surprisingly smoothly despite having to re tap one of the holes again. Once attached we begin going over the car checking torque specs on everything we've wrenched and bleed the brakes.  As soon as this bitch was off the lift I told Don to sit shotgun and hold on to his dick. I'm going to take this fucker for a test drive and set in the brakes. Luckily the huge parking lot of the software company across the street was empty because people with white collar jobs are essentially attending adult day care and can't be bothered to come in to work within a fortnight of a holiday.  Like most British luxury cars first gear in the Jag is set higher than your narrator is now. Which is to say that it isn't exactly easy to do a burnout in one of these things. Though once I got it into second and gave it the beans at three thousand RPM the car came alive and the rear end made a wonderful amount of noise as I pulled it through my makeshift autocross course.  At the end of the day this car did the impossible and made me fall if not in love at least in lust with it again. It's an incredibly posh car with one of the best interiors I've seem come out of England. It's a pleasure to drive and despite the fact that it won't win any drag races it owns the highways as a grand tourer. I never really liked this body style when it was new or coming into adolescence, but now that the car has matured it is a striking example of British design. I just wish they'd put half as much thought into the serviceability of the car as they did in the brass and oak inlay in the steering wheel.  Don and I drove the Jag back to the showroom and promptly went into our boss' office and demanded raises along with more autonomy to run our department the way we see fit lest we gently caress off back to my shop to work for ourselves. He acquiesced to all our demands and we left with a cash Christmas bonus and parted ways for more that twelve hours for the first time in ten days. And now if you'll excuse me I need to conclude this jolly holiday tale and get myself to the bottom of a bottle of wine. James Woods fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Dec 25, 2013 |
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Dec 24, 2013 09:05
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jamal posted:Sounds more like a vacuum leak to me. Sadly no. We not only did a vacuum leak test with starter fluid but a month ago I also replaced every vacuum hose on the drat thing. My money is still on the MAF which I will be purchasing new shortly. Meanwhile..... There comes a time where you must walk a path and there comes a time where you must open a door. Change is abound and has invaded my life in more ways than one. Not in the least of which that the consignment shop I work for is moving locations to a new airplane hangar sized facility that we hope to pack to the gills with more of these exotic monstrosities. This means Don and I are up to our elbows in poo poo as we tend to what we've dubbed our problem children. This is a gnarly bunch of cars that have been giving us trouble and won't move under their own power or are otherwise unsafe to drive on public roads. You see, since the move is just a few miles down the expressway the boss doesn't want to waste money flatbedding everything over to the new shop. This means we have to drive as many of these fuckers as possible over to the new facility over the next two days.   Don got stuck down in LA for a couple days so I'm here tending over the kids, namely a 1956 Bentley S1 and a 1997 Benteley Azure.  The big job ahead of me is the Azure which needs new pads and rotors all around before it can drive over. Yes a simple brake job on a British luxury car, how hard could that be?  Well what the gently caress is this poo poo? Two goddamned calipers per front wheel? Each one is a single piston with a pad surface area less than half of what you'd get on a Vette or 911 or even a loving Chevy Silverado these days. Why? I utter this phrase constantly while underneath these English cocksuckers. I swear to God the men who designed these cars must have been molested by a mechanic at an early age because they build these things as if their number one objective was to hamper it's serviceability.   I've gotten to the point that it doesn't even phase me to find out that you have to completely remove the hub assembly to replace a simple wear item like the rotors nor does it surprise me that they're attached to the hub by seventeen pounds of fasteners where most manufacturers use a single hex screw or nothing at all for the same job.  Good gently caress gentlemen, if you lads could build a caliper worth a drat you wouldn't need a rotor that weighed seventy five pounds. Lets have a look at the back.  Hey, that almost looks like a proper brake caliper. Too bad that hub assembly you see in front of the rotor isn't a hub assembly at all but rather part of the brake rotor itself. That and it's held on by the same bolts used on the prop shaft on the QE2.  This picture is of the back of the caliper and shows three of the five hard brake lines that go into each rear caliper. Yes I know WHY? This is backed up by a mechanical linkage to the parking brake in case you're thinking that all that plumbing was there for that reason.  Why does a two door convertible need such an overly elaborate brake system anyway?  Oh. That's why.  These official Bentley stainless steel cotter pins were hand made by the original Cotter family of Chester England. They cost $95 a piece.   After much bending, flaring, swearing and crying the Azure is back on it's feet next to another problem child waiting for some LMF-11 Mineral Oil, a substance I've come to find is scarcer than Kryptonite. Now on to the real doozy the S1  It's not turning over so I begin a series of electrical tests that conclude nothing other than that I have a high tolerance for electrical shock. I'm reminded the hard way that this car is wired in reverse polarity with a shower of sparks and a $10 fuse burnt in my FLUKE. I make note of my error and am then greeted with more sparks and smoke when I find that certain aftermarket add-ons like the electric fuel pump are wired in straight polarity. The car then fries my dick off as the deaf as poo poo 65 year old HA sales manager decides to crank the engine while I'm resetting the ignition wire after a spark test.   After all my fiddling with this contraption Don turns up and shows me the correct procedure on how to manually prime the carburetors which springs the thing to life like a shot of adrenaline to the heart. That hillbilly has more than a few tricks up his sleeve.  This inspired us to take the S1 on a test drive in the neighborhood to see how it would fare on the trip to the new shop. Driving this thing is less like driving a car a more like operating a nineteenth century locomotive.  The dash is festooned with esoteric knobs and switches most of which aren't labeled in the slightest. Despite this it is an absolute pleasure to drive in or more to the point be driven in. It's like being driven around in a well appointed den rather than being in a car.  The bartender at the local watering hole we get lunch at liked the car very much and insisted being photographed in it. With our flock attended to and ready to embark on our journey we call it a night and get some much needed rest. The next day we begin driving entire fleet over to the new facility and we will need all the wits and testicular fortitude we can muster.
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Jan 3, 2014 09:28
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Well I'm back and just as many of you had suspected, I was in fact crushed to death underneath a poorly maintained Jaguar XK-R. The Ferryman pulled what was left of my soul down to the gates of Hades where Vulcan himself manifested within in the Reaper's path slamming his mighty hammer into the fine pile of bones that laid the floor. He ordered Death to relinquish my spirit for there was work of his yet to be done. Back at the consignment shop it was moving day. When last we left our hero was repairing a haggard fleet of exotics in preparation for the big move over to a new warehouse in Silicon Valley. Just before we drive the fleet over to the new location Don and I have to take a field trip a couple towns over for some of the dreaded Mineral Oil that Bentleys and Rolls Royce's demand. We'd sent both the shop assistant and the sales manager out for the stuff and they'd come back with CHF-11 and DOT-4 respectively so we decided to take things into our own hands. We were greeted with the same kind of envy that dealership mechanics get when they see our place.  You can't fart in this lot without fogging up the rearview mirror of an Aston Martin.   What's this now?    I found this car in person to be surprisingly small and equally quiet considering it's godlike reputation.  There were these boring things.   Here is a hatchling fresh of the truck and still warm from Queen Elizabeth's embryotic hatching pod.  As well as what Leonardo DiCaprio dumped his money from Inception into.  Then there was this behind a thick sheet of glass in the back of the shop.   Mother of gently caress.   This gentlemen is a car. I could think of nothing sweeter than killing myself on the Nordschleife in this demonspawn of engineering madness.  Alas we had to bid goodbye to fantasy shop and head back to our own to wrangle the heard. Don and I chose a very Democratic method of choosing one at a time of what cars we want to drive the ten mile hike down the expressway to the warehouse. My first pick was the McLaren SLR and Don Chose the Tesla Roadster.   I have to say after having some time driving both that these cars are about equally matched for speed although with Mercedes VooDoo magic traction control I'm sure I could put a much better time down on a road course with the McLaren but it wouldn't be half as fun as the old school supercar insanity of the Tesla.   We begin fill in the space.  My next pick is this little darlin right here.  Ferrari F355. The rest of the office has taken to calling this car my girlfriend because I've been spending a lot of time with it trying to resolve a issue with the parking brake I can't seem to figure out. Don chose the Audi S5 which he is equally infatuated with and for good reason. It's one of the fastest cars in our shop and is as easy to drive as an arcade game and feels like one too. I'll take my manual Ferrari, however slower it may be on paper any day. I drew some mundane stuff as well like the venerable 996 Carerra 4.  I love this car the more I drive it. If you have twenty grand burning a hole in your pocket and you like to drive you have to consider one of these. This however was a case of never meet your heroes.  BMW M6 a car that I as a BMW fanatic had longed to drive for some time. Alas this car is nearly ruined by it's clutchless manual transmission that stalls the power delivery of that beautiful V10 to the point that it feels like a 630i. A manual transmission may save this car but for Christ's sake it weighs over five hundred pounds more than my station wagon. Why anyone would buy this over an M5 is beyond me. If you must buy a car in this layout just get a Corvette and quit wasting your time with 6 Series, Jaguars X types, and SLs. The HillBillies got it right a long time ago. Speaking of which Don pulled the 1,032 hp Corvette.  He looked like he had seen a ghost when he unstrapped himself from the carbon fiber racing buckets. I had followed behind him in the Alpina B7 and watched in horror as the car violently torque steered despite Don doing his best to short shift his way through the gears. He later described the experience of driving the machine as "pleasantly terrifying.".    Home sweet home.   I have to get the other Caddy up and running for show season to take with the 49' I showed you earlier. This one is a 40 but borrows heavily from period Lincoln and Chevy body parts.   In the next installment I cover the First Annual Hangover Rally as well as a heartwarming tale about a young girl and her dog. James Woods fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Jan 25, 2014 |
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Jan 24, 2014 08:56
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HotCanadianChick posted:There's always the possibility he's thinking of the new F13-chassis M6, but that pic looks like an E63 soooooo... You're totally right, sorry I missed that. And looking at it I think I have my answer as to the car's lackluster acceleration. The S85 V10 while producing 500hp only made 384lb-ft just 15 more than the previous generation M5's S62 V8. I would have expected them to squeeze more juice out of the old BMW F1 parts bin. James Woods fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Jan 25, 2014 |
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Jan 25, 2014 21:50
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