Mikelly

So all this talk of simulators got me all excited because I have an old 500MHz Celeron powered 400+Meg memory machine that has a virus on it. We pulled it off the network, and since it was so slow, we just hadn't touched it. Yesterday evening I took some of my old hard drives (I"ve got four or five from over the years) and I powered the machine up and started slaving drives to try and extract as many files (Mainly family and car project pics!) as possible before I build an ubber machine of some sorts... In the middle of powering the machine down after the second slave drive was stripped of its files, I didn't notice a bare wire off the floper drive power harness... my arm touched it and CRACK!!! BZZZZ... smoke, machine dies, my arm is on fire... Nice... Good thing I had a nice cold beer to put on the contact burn! So I've either killed the motherboard or the power supply... Nice. Here's what I now have: Bunch of memory (PC130 I think), couple of harddrives that need reformatting (Five total), a good CDR, a good DVDplayer, a brand new ATI Radeon 9550AGP graphics card and a decent sound car. Ive also got a couple of network cards. What I want to build is a dual boot standalone machine for JUST Driver Simms... I'll need a new case possibly, and I'll need a motherboard and CPU, maybe some more ram, and a power supply. I've got a good copy of XP but I'm gonna need to get a good copy of win98 because the CD I have looks like it was dropped in gravel! What do you guys recommend?? Mike

I've got a decent force feedback wheel with pedals. I've not played it in the last year, but the last time I downloaded it, it sucked as bad as the time before. I'll have to check it again and see if it has come along.. And I"m with Richard on the GP Legends comment. Mike

I am a HUGE fan of the Kumho Ecsta MX tire. It works well on the street and is very weel suited for track days. The tire is used a lot by guys who combine track and street duty. I'm runnin right at 22Kmiles on the front ppair I've got on the vette and they have track days and some autoX time on them. The rears lasted about 19K miles. I'm running 295-35-18s on the back now, and they simple hook and go! Good in rain to! Mike

The driver of the white Z was driving by mirrors. He was to worried about the pressure being put on him by Jim. He needed to focus on his line and drive the course. We see this a lot at track days... Mike

This machine is stock non-overclocked. COuld be the drivers for my Accelerator, which is some integrated something or other... Frustrating. It is an AMD Athlon XP3000 2.1 GHz machine with 448MB of ram. This thing ran like gangbusters on my old 1.4GHZ machine... And that thing was an EMachine! I'm not a fan of liveforspeed either. Very lowtech, and I just didn't like the feel of it at all. Mike

All this simm talk got me going, so I Dug up SportsCar GT and loaded it onto my new machine... I'm playing it and every five minutes the friggin' thing causes an error and XP stops the application from running. I have to stop the game... This is a game from 2002-2003, so maybe it is an XP problem... Not sure, but this is very frustrating... Might just have to Load up F1 or GranPrix Legends and see if either of those has issues... Mike

You guys really have my head hurting now... I've got to fabricate a craddle for my Q45 Rear anyway, so why not do something similar to the pics ZlalomZ posted? Hmmm, Might have to go fire up the heater and... Oh wait, I've still got about 100Ft. of wire left to terminate in the thing before I can move on to the next phase! Hmmmm.... Mike

Just let us know. I'm free most afternoons... Just give me a couple of dates I can work around. Mike

I had pics, but I can't seem to locate them... Had several hard drives die in the last couple of months and have lost a lot of data... The failures where on the outboard side rear tube that held the bushing and sleeve that the spindlepin bolted through. The torquing against that mount point TORE the metal, not the weld. Initial picures from Steve's car showed what we thought to be weld failure, but once we got a better look at the failure, you could see the welded metal in place and the sleeve just split and let loose. Same thing happend on Mark Icard's car on the same side, and same point. That tells you that the loads are pulling the strut assembly in a front to rear motion, changing toe as John C. suggests and that motion repeated over time (two years hard driving with two drivers in Steve and Ian's case) and using RR slicks and very aggressive alignments in the rear probably contriubuted to the failure. On a street car, you probably wouldn't induce such loads, but I wouldn't want to risk it. Mike M. have you had a chance to give the new rear design a try? I'm probably going to use your design on my personal set of rear arms, in conjunction with some camber plates welded into the rear towers. Mike

You simply can't beat a nice tune. I keep preaching that over on Corvetteforum and the hard core guys know what I"m talking about. The penny loafer, bolt-on idiots who don't want to spend a few bucks on tuning to maximize their parts combo potential just snicker and go "I'm not paying that for a tune! I can get a handheld tuner for that much!" I just roll my eyes and go on about my business. MY vette was a completely different car after the tune... So much more drivable, so much more torque and I picked up 20+ hp over the baseline just tuning in more timing (We've got 28 degrees base) and tuning out the pig rich fuel. Joey, You've got the numbers we were shooting for with our combo... Heads killed it for us. Any of you guys heard about any reports on the new Dart aluminum LS1 heads yet? Mike

Give me the details off line and I'll see what my schedule looks like. I've got a bit of free time between meetings these days, so I could come check one out for you. Mike

I really got side tracked after lunch... I made the mistake of opening the box for the Holley Commander 950 and pulling out the wiring harness for it. It is now in its new home. I also wired in the remote solenoid and 50Amp mega fuse kit that came with the painless harness kit. Tomorrow I'm going to a State Legislatures lunch to discuss business in our city with the Governors office... Oh joy! I'll be lucky if I get back to it by the weekend... Making lots of progress though! Still no pictures yet! Mike

Holy crap... The HT, for sure. That is a decent price shipped... Man-O-Man. Book marked this for sure! Mike

Slow day in the office today so I went out to the shop and routed the wiring harness into place, ran the rear harness and loomed it, mounted the fuse panel to the cage and then drilled the hole and installed the grommet for the firewall and ran the front engine bay harness through. This painless harness is gonna be pretty simple to wire up. I'm impressed with the documentation and how it was wired up. Routing the harness was CAKE. I also mounted the ECU and the MSD box on the custom panel and mounted it. After lunch I'll go out and finish taching in the braces for the dash and drill the holes, mount it and take pics. Next on the list will be epoxy mixing and affixing the brackets for the gages. I have a painless gage harness from previous applications and I'll wire the gages, mount them and run a battery over to test for connections. Moving right along... Mike

You're tops with me Art! MIke

Actually this thread was dug up from over FOUR YEARS ago... He did search... But I agree, probably need to start a new thread for this one... Might be your TV cable detent or a solenoid. Mike

Don't get me wrong... The retro looks of the 05 Mustang GT is simply an amazing car. It "looks" great. However, a good article was written about that retro "trend" a while back in AutoWeek magazine... Now that they have done the "retro" thing, what next? I mean, Ford is gonna do what they did with every other Mustang and have this car in the product line for the next 10 years. Once that train has sailed, what then? How do they top this thing? Sales are through the roof because they did such a good job with the retro styling... And Michael, I agree with you on the whole aerodynamics thing. They are paying a huge price in the name of retro styling. Mike

I"m no engineer, so excuse my crude description of the machine we used to do stress analysis on the arms I built... This contraption was a table base with multiple mounts and pedistals that had hydraulics running to them, so you could move and place the mount against specific areas on a given item like the tubular arms we built. YOu could load them vertically, horizontally, logitudenally, diagonally across the plane of the item being tested. We actually tested the square and round tube designs as well as a front control arm/ TC setup on this table. None of these parts failed at the welds and the force required to sheer the tubing was an amazing amount of pressure (in the hundreds thousands range). The unit was on loan to a friend of mine who owned a machine shop. He did a lot of work for the marines at Quantico and that machine was US Gov't property and had been sourced by the USMC for testing on parts my friend was desinging for some tract vehicles. He offered it up to me for some stress analysis and ran it for me and did the analysis. Did I mention two arms failed over time on the cars? Oh, sorry... I did. (Just scrolled to my previous post!) Fatigue over the life of the part is the big unknown. That Machine I mention above didn't do cyclic load testing, which would have been nice... We could see the tubing flex, under severe loads we assumed the vehicle would never see, but couldn't cycle the part through those ranges repeatedly to see how it delt with that sheer stress load. Now I know... I personally think the rear control arm/strut assembly is the most stressed part on the driveline in a Datsun.... Spooky stuff! Mike

I think I paid $580 for my LIncoln Mig SP125. It is about as small a machine as you want to weld thin to thick metal. I can weld 20gage sheet metal and over 1/4 inch metal. It does good exhaust welds, as well as roll bar tubing and flat stock steel. Of course I use 75/25 Argon and I always keep two bottles on hand. I need to break out my Torch and play with brazing... Not done that in a while... Mike

I like the sounds of all these ideas... Keep them coming... And a get together to meet everyone would be very cool! I'll let you guys know, and I'm trying to get Pete to come out with me for the week, since I'll have lots of time, and he and I have been trying to do this for like 3+ years! DavyZ, I'll let you know when it gets closer... Mike

Couple comments here... BrandonZ, you're wrong BIG TIME on the whole smog issue... Anyone who can tune with a laptop and software can get a chevy to pass smog. I'm pretty sure ford has similar piggyback type software to tune Mustangs... Not sure about dodge, but I bet someone in the Viper/ Hemi community has cracked that code as well... Which means mods can be tuned to be emissions friendly... My New Corvette motor is a prime example. The rest of you guys are thinking like HybridZers... Stop. We're talking about $30-40K worth of car. Most of the people I'm refering to as the chief buyers of these cars aren't gonna strip them down of their creature comforts... No, most of them want all that gadgetry (WHich is another plus in the Vette's box, cause it comes WITH IT at 3200#) and luxury/ convenience. Moridin, I don't care how much HP the thing makes with bolt ons... YOu seen what Muscle Mustang and Fast Ford said about tire clearance on the new Mustang chassis? That behemouth can make 600+HP and torque and it still won't mean squat. No, I think this car is gonna take the place of the old supra jokes... You know, the "What does a 600HP, 700HP and 800HP Supra have in common? TWELVES IN THE QUARTER!" So they built a pig that costs over $44K that you'll have to gut to get the weight down on, and you'll have to tub if you want to put any appreciable tire under... So now the friggin' thing is gonna cost you closer to $60K to get it where it should be... Nice... Real Nice... No, great concept, really! It's so far advanced, it escapes me! Mike

Nope, It is Grand Prix Legends, The simm from the early to late 60s. Amazing game really. Mike

Bingo POP... Tig is not only expensive, but extremely hard to learn, but well worth the final product. I'll stick with MIG for now... I weld quite a bit, but not enough to justify TIG. Mike

The advantages of MIG show through with a good, tunable machine. These "under $500" machines don't allow that tunability. Simply put, the range is so limited, I wouldn't dream of buying one. Mike

What front spoiler is that on the car? I agree with these guys... $1800 is a crying shame... I'd buy it just for snicks if it was close by. Mike