strotter

Not true - the Carnegie Mellon University entry travelled 7.4 miles before dying (went off course & snapped an axle). Check out http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040315/ap_on_re_us/robot_race_1. The interesting thing isn't how quickly they died, it was how far some of them got. Remember, these guys were going to have to average about 20 mph to finish the course in time. When it went off the road, the Carnegie Mellon Humvee was doing about 40. It may be funny this year, but the next time they do it (probably in 2006) they'll be better. And the time after that, and the time after that. Make no mistake, we'll see robotically operated automobiles in our lifetime. Heck, there are already a number of systems that can drive on freeways with no external guidance systems at all - I think MIT (correct me?) drove one from Boston to L.A. last year. Also, cars are the last non-robotically controlled form of transportation. Trains, commercial aircraft, commercial boats and shipping, they're all automatic. Human pilots are in commercial aircraft mostly for the peace-of-mind of the passengers. The Air Force has a number of robotic (not tele-operated, robotic) drones, and is working on a robotic fighter capable of delivering ordinance and even engaging in dog-fights. There was a Popular Science article about that one - the prototype is capable of pulling 20 g's if necessary, carries AIM 9's (sidewinder missiles) and may be able to use a 20mm nose cannon in close-on combat. There was a also a robotic device the British were working on a number of years ago called a "Turtle". It was basically a light tank with no gun but carrying a nuclear bomb. It was set up to trigger if molested. You'd broadcast a warning before you sent it on its' way. Shoot a cannon at it, it goes off. Try to break into it, it goes off. Interrupt the signal it's receiving from home base, it goes off. The idea was that you'd send it into the middle of a city where it would just park and wait. It was sort of the ultimate negotiating tool. You could disrupt an entire country without firing a shot, with four of five of them in major cities. Can you imagine the panic as people tried to get 20 miles away from one of these things? I don't know if they're still working on it, but that's one of those things that'll keep you up at night. Also, the Navy is working on these little "crab" looking things that you'd dump into the ocean off a beach you're going to invade. They'd find mines and either mark them, or wait patiently until they got a signal and set them off, just before the Marines came in. They have to be robotic because radio signals don't go through water. There's all kinds of interesting robotic things going on right now. Not all of it's *good*, for sure, but all of it's interesting. As the computer systems get smarter and more reliable we'll be seeing a lot more. Interesting times.

My friend Kathy and her very young son Joshua lived high up in a remote area in the mountains when Josh was born, but had to move down to this area after she divorced. One afternoon she took him to the grocery store with her. He fell asleep in the shopping cart while she shopped. At the checkout line she lifted him out of the cart and hung him on her shoulder, waking him up. He opened his eyes and saw his very first black man, waiting behind Kathy in line. He reached out and touched the man's arm, fascinated and apparently shocked, and said in a loud voice "Mommy! It's a chocolate man!" But it wasn't over. Kathy was embarrassed, but everyone else in line thought this was hilarious, and the man laughed so hard tears came out of his eyes. Josh was confused, told his mother "He's crying, mom!", then turned to the man and told him "It's OK, I *love* chocolate!".

I just left the da*ned stuff off. Doesn't look too bad - the flat black nature of the rubber "hides" the gap.

This is exactly what I did. I had a noise problem with a pair of Borlas on a dual-exhaust smallblock setup. Got a set of the SuperTrapp "tips", did a bit of welding, voila! Now I can adjust my exhaust note from "obnoxious" to "civilized neighbor" in a couple of minutes. Back-pressure is inversely proportional to noise, pick your poison. Note: the SuperTrapp tips are about 4" in diameter; that's a large-diameter exhaust tip. They look big in the back of a Z; I'm not entirely happy with their appearance. Your mileage may vary.

You know why rally is so cool? Two words: Volvo Racecars. It's almost - perverted. Yeeeessssssssss...........

Did I see this one here at Hybrid? "I want to die like my grandfather did, in his sleep - not like his passengers, screaming in terror..."

A followup on the Weir bellhousing - The thing came in Wednesday. Initial inspection showed a pretty well built product - fine sand casting, pretty good machine work, cleanly drilled bolt holes, flash trimmed neatly. There was no identification for the hydraulic throwout bearing, but it looks very similar to those in the 4th generation Camaro/Firebirds. The only part that was even a tiny bit rough was the plate that fits between the bellhousing and the engine - the edges were hand-ground, not machine chamfered. The flywheel needed to be removed to install the plate to the motor. Did that, popped on the plate, it needed a tiny bit of grinding where it interfered with the starter. Pulled the "front" bellhousing off the T56 (there are sort of two), bolted the Weir piece to the car. Damaged my back shoving the tranny onto the bellhousing, noted that I had forgotten to install the hydraulic throwout bearing, removed the tranny, bolted in the bearing, poked the tranny in again. Other than the bit of grinding, no sweat. Getting it back into the car was more complicated than with a T-5. The '56 is heavier, and a bit longer - just long enough that there isn't quite enough room to just tilt the thing back and go. I had to go in at an angle, still managed to scratch both the firewall and the radiator support pretty good. As of this evening, I've got the motor sitting on the mounts, the driveshaft bolted in at the differential and the yoke in the tranny. I stopped at that point because it started raining, so I haven't jacked it up to crawl underneath and look at the tranny mount and the tolerance on the front universal. Just looking down through the shifter hole though, it's looking like the engine is going to have to bolt in 3/4" or so forward of it's original position. This will put the back of the distributor abut 1" clear of the firewall. So far its been pretty straightforward. I'm expecting to have to reposition the tranny mount aft, which may be a problem as it was a tight fit in the driveshaft well even with the T-5. There may be some hammer work in my future.

The March Sport Compact Car magazine (yeah, I know) has an article "Build a WRX in your garage/Swap an EJ20 into any old Subaru".

Very, very nice. Body's sweet. Yellow is pretty on these things, eh?

You know, I have mixed feelings about Chevy coming out with all these cool performance parts and motors. I mean, it's cool that they make the parts and all, and it saves everybody a bunch of money and time (especially the performance crate motors), but I feel like it's kind of stepping on the toes of all the motorheads who have burned zillions of hours learning all the tricks and doing all the research. I don't know how many times I've seen (or heard) a great motor and struck up a conversation with somebody about the work they've done on their car. Just a couple of weeks ago I spent an hour talking to a guy with a blown smallblock pickup in the Pep Boys parking lot. We both had an excellent time. With all the new stuff available from GM Performance, the conversation might have gone like this instead: Me: Wow, that thing sounds sweet! What is it? Him: It's a 383. 425 hp. Me: Cool! What cam is it? What heads? Did you port-match them? And hey, what manifold is that? What's the compression ratio? I mean, dynamic? Him: Uh, I dunno any of that stuff. I bought it from Chevy. It's a crate motor. Me: Oh. Okay. Nice talking to you... I dunno, maybe every time you gain something, you lose something too. Sigh.

I was just *startled* by the mileage test - 38.9 in a Supra, even if it's nearly stock, is impressive, but even the Viper at 28.8 while making 842.5 RWHP .... amazing! Talk about efficiency.

Do those pants make my butt look fat? I think they make my butt look fat. Dan, the thing's in my back yard again, though it's sitting on it's own feet! I've got a semi-long list of things I need to take care of, including: 1. Wait for the Weir part - supposed to be middle of next week. 2a. Install Weir part. 2b. Purchase and install the 1" clutch master cylinder, maybe. 3. Install motor/tranny. 4. Fix all the stuff I damaged in parts 1-3. 5. Fix all the stuff I damaged removing parts subsequently installed in parts 1-3. 6. Possibly get the driveshaft shortened. 7. Sand down and paint the da**ed bondo on the air dam and fender. 8a. Fix the hood dent, or 8b. Paint the 280 hood I got at Pick'n'Pull the same color as the car, so as to take advantage of the cool hood vents that, who is it on the board who makes those cool hood vents? In which case I'll have to... 8c. Paint the cool hood vents. 9. Reinstall the temp sender in the radiator, 'cause I did it wrong the first time. 10. Remove the carpet from the driver's side footwell, 'cause there's a layer of mildew growing in there from the invisible leak that let the water in during the rain; wash the carpet, reinstall. 11. Fix the rack and pinion assembly that I previously fixed, 'cause one of the end bushings is too tight and drags when it's cold. 12. Paint the engine compartment the same color as the rest of the car. 13. Polish the whole car again, but this time put the wax on. Though maybe not in that order.

Weir is at: http://www.weirhotrodproducts.com It's not much of a site; it seems to concentrate mainly on the smallblock conversion kit. There's an 800 number, you might give them a call. I wouldn't imagine it would be *too* expensive to have a plate or adapter of some kind fabricated that would mate the block/bellhousing. I imagine the tolerences would be close, though...

Just wanted to follow up on the Mac OS X thing - it really is Unix, uses the Mach 3.0 kernel, FreeBSD 5, the whole deal. This is kind of weird for me, 'cause I got my start on a Unix back in the '80's at the local J.C. Using emacs in a bash terminal in a window on a Mac is both familiar and strange. Gotta love it, though, set up an Apache server from my house in a few minutes, scripted some code in mySQL, tried to remember pipelining worked, had to look it up in a MAN page, all that. I frequently run X11 rootless (it's X11R6.6) for X apps like Gimp and a couple of others. Believe me, the "power user" Unix thing is cool. I understand that as of a couple of months ago, OS X is the most widely distributed Unix variant. It's true that the *nix's aren't "immune" to viruses, but the security holes have been plugged pretty thoroughly over the years. And they're as vulnerable to DOS (denial of service) attacks as any other system - didn't SCO have some problems last week? I think their servers were shut down for a couple of days?

Sorry my followup has taken so long - it's been a heck of a week. My reasons for using the Weir are similar to demidon, as well as the fact that I have an existing clutch/flywheel I'm pleased with. I *believe* I can get away with my existing driveshaft (as it was a bit short for the T-5's). Keeping fingers crossed. There is a possibility that I'll need to change out the clutch master cylinder - the fellow I talked to indicated that the 7/8's I'm using may be too small. We'll see, but it's something easily remedied (translate: "Don't have to pull the motor out again"). Cost was about $650. Seems steep, but compare that to tracking down/replacing the flywheel, new pressure plate, new clutch, new slave cylinder, etc. Flywheel's the tough one, needs to match a pre-86 two-part rear seal. BTW Topless, it's on a 327 in a '72.

I'm far from an expert, but I've painted three cars with "catalyzed" paints so I'll pipe in. Almost all modern paints use a two or more part mixture. It is an epoxy-like reaction that causes the paint to "kick" in the same way as epoxy. Also like epoxy, the environment makes a difference - higher temperatures = quicker kick, lower temps the reverse. Something to note about all of these paints is that they're *incredibly* toxic - you absolutely cannot even get a whiff of them, your neighbors can't get a whiff of them, your pets can't get a whiff of them. If you smell it through your respirator, you're dosed. There are a number of variations on the theme, but the dangerous chemical is "cyanoacrylate", which can kill you quick. I managed to dose myself a couple of years ago, and it showed up in a standard blood test in a physical. So I went down to Harbor Freight (a cheap yet cool tool place) and got a forced-air respirator system that T-s into your compressed air line. Smells kind of rubbery and nasty, but it works just fine if your compressor is far away from your spray gun. I think it was $40 bux or something.

I painted mine Fly Yellow last year. It was in the PPG catalog under "Ferrari". The counter man told me there was an identical color available for Hummers, of some year or other.

Also, get a Mac.

Well guys, I've got me a T56 out of a Camaro a couple of weeks ago (an ebay thing, and a pretty good price) and I just got off the 'phone with a very nice fellow at Weir Hotrod Products. The bellhousing adapter kit will be here within a week or so. I'll keep you informed as to its' status.

I've got the Kaminari on my '72. I like the look. It was simple to install, pretty well built. Too darned expensive, tho. You can check my album to see the look.

Yep, that's a great feeling. And it doesn't go away, either. I've been driving my conversion (a 327'd '72) on and off for a year now. I remember one morning before dawn I was sitting in the car warming it up to go to work. I was just sitting there, waiting for the gauge to show some heat, looking down the block at all the houses, the motor was just rumbling quietly and smoothly, the car was waxed, the interior cleaned up and nice, and in the back of my mind some part of me was thinking "This car is bad-ass."

Doesn't the new Ford GT (I keep wanting to say "GT-40") have a rear diffuser? There's sure enough some gigantic vents at the rear, between the exhausts. Haven't seen any pics of the underside of the car yet.

Mike (or Dan or anybody in the know), will a T5-sized flywheel will fit the T56? I've been running a T5 on an older (2-piece seal) block. I'm hoping to swap all the associated stuff over, including the flywheel, clutch, clutch slave cylinder, VSS, so on. The only item I *havn't* confirmed is the flywheel itself. The one I have currently is a 153-tooth unit, 10.5" clutch. Thoughts?

Well, just on a whim I went over to Ebay, just to see what's there, some guy had a T-56 with bellhousing for $850 "buy it now". So I bought it now. I actually hear the credit card groan. Seriously, a little "Ohhhhh" as I pressed the button. Well, at least I don't have to worry about more tunnel clearance...

Well, after much sweating and cursing in the rain and the cold and the cat poop, I finally got a *third* WC-T5 installed in my '72, one I picked it up in Hayward in November. Yes, more than the 60-day return policy kind of November. Drove it down to the alignment shop Saturday (after rack & pinion rebuild), smooth and nice in 1st & 2nd, crunch crunch crunch in 3rd, 4th and 5th. Synchros are shot. Did I say this was the third transmission? Hmm? Did I? Lets take a walk down memory lane, shall we? - the first had no synchros at all, bummer. Second one *exploded* on me while easing down the freeway, much excitement. Now this one. I'm 3 for 3. I seem to be working on some kind of curse here. I'm thinking I should opt for a 700-R4, but then I think "Sports cars have manuals"; but then I also think, "Sports cars roll over the ground under their own power". Hmm Hmm Hmm.