countdown

Last few days of countdown towards the race. We've been working pretty much flat out for the past week, getting the van ready.

To keep track of work items, we've been using the Laz Method of writing things on blue tape on the windshield. After a solid week of work, here was the list as of Sunday night:


Last week we fitted new front shocks, fixed some leaks, and... honestly, I don't remember. Stuff. We did stuff. The new shocks made the van not heave like a boat on heavy swell when you jump on the bumper, so that's a plus. We re-replaced a leaking hose, stripped some bolts, mostly wired in a new radiator fan, and tried to make the temp gauge work and generally finish some stuff up before Jdh left town on Thursday.

Over the weekend, it went kind of like this (from my email, Sunday night):

--------------
Things we actually got done are:
- transponder
- 3rd brake light
- tried and failed to get the bracket needed to mount all the brake
parts we have; ordered new brake pads instead. Rotors come off the
list.
- tied up all the dash wiring
- promptly shorted out the headlight switch
- wrapped the headlight switch in electrical tape, replaced several
fuses, and re-zip-tied it (headlights work again)
- installed a front grill (pick n pull consolation prize)
- put a solid dent in the oil pan which you will never notice because
I am going to plaster it up with jb weld when we also seal the
dipstick tube

We now have parts for:
- wheel stud & cv boot (if we get time)
- brake pads

When we were tying up the dash wires we noticed that the coolant temp
gauge goes straight to hot when you turn on the headlights. I haven't
checked its behavior again since fixing the short.

...

-----------------------------

...etc. Monday night:

-----------------------------

Okay! Today was nearly an improvement. :-)

Taped tasks removed:
- oil change (my first! alas, the drain plug still seems to leak a
bit. also, I don't think those guys really changed the oil, it was kind
of cruddy.)
- coil
- jb weld filler tube and plate on the oil pan (I lied; you'll totally
notice. But laz spackled it with jb weld and hopefully made it a lot
stronger)
- tires (tires and wheels now piled in front of van, falken ziex 912)
- spare wheels (jen got 2 spares from pick n pull for $5 each)
- brake pads (extra quiet! you would not want the pads on a racing
minivan to be noisy.)
- transmission fluid & filter

While we were cleaning up, laz was all like, "Hey Astrid, did you see
this?" and when I turned around he was waving a bit of rubber at me...
which was the inner gasket for the trans filter. Which I had not
realized existed until that moment. After I had already reassembled
and refilled the whole transmission pan with five quarts of shiny new
fluid and approximately one hundred small bolts.

Pieces of tape added:
- power steering belt (needs doing at the same time as the alternator
belt, something damaged the belt cover which has in turn chewed the
belts up good)
- coolant flush (optional but would also let us fix the leak in the
lower coolant line)
- transmission fluid & filter. D'oh.

----------------------------

This is a high-precision operation.

Score card currently stands at:
# times transmission fluid was changed: 2
# types of fluid dumped in Astrid's eyes: 2 (coolant and atf, for anyone who's counting)
# front brake pad changes: 4
# sets of pads accidentally or intentionally acquired for van: 5
# important bolts stripped: 2
# times we've replaced that hose that inexplicably sends coolant to the turbo: 2
# hours at pick n pull over the past four days: 8

We tow out on Thursday night. I should probably add a piece of tape for "put wheels back on van".

the most important part of a race car is obviously its paint job

The turbo minivan's transformation from junkyard reject to Probably Quite Stoppable Racing Mystery Machine is now, mostly*, complete.

Here she is, in all her exterior high-gloss enamelled glory:

From mystery machine

*except for the seat. We'll probably need a seat.

Also we'll eventually need to attach the newly-created exhaust system with something other than zip ties.

It took all weekend to finish the paint job - green on saturday, orange on sunday. (It took me about five hours per side to lay down the initial coat on the lettering.) We originally had fancy plans of using a projector to get the initial shape, but I was too impatient to wait until it got dark, so I ended up free-handing most of it.

Rob doing the final outlining:

From mystery machine

Laz rollering a second coat with a sawed-off 1-inch roller:

From mystery machine

From mystery machine

From mystery machine

From mystery machine

Meanwhile, Rob worked on fabricating an exhaust system, the vehicle's original sawzalled-off-at-the-header exhaust system not really passing muster under the new Rule 3.24:

• 3.24: Exhaust System: A professional-quality exhaust system is required. Exhaust outlets and tubing must be designed, routed, and maintained to avoid heating the fuel tank(s) and/or fuel-system components. Fuel heating is extremely dangerous and must be avoided at all times.
• 3.24.1: Exhaust system may not dump ahead of the driver, and must not allow undue levels of exhaust to reach the driver's compartment.

After we installed a real exhaust with a muffler and everything, it no longer sounds nearly as bad-assed. However, it now LOOKS AWESOME, which is not something I ever thought I'd say.

relative merit

Quick shot of the finished base coat from jdh's camera phone. A satisfying cartoony blue - the camera phone hides all ills.



House paint was the best idea ever.

the lulz live on in spirit

Today was painting day for the minivan. No more EPIC LULZ, no more perversely charming smiley and frowny faces eying you from the rear.

We begin with sanding:


Meanwhile, JDH worked on stripping the dash. Later on I discovered, by pouring it all over myself, that the heater hoses from this removed A/C unit are actually still full of coolant.





I honestly wouldn't have thought it possible, but the partially-sanded minivan hit such new lows of disreputability that we scratched our plans of driving it to a nearby spray-n-wash (especially since we could actually hear cops driving all around our semi-industrial suburban neighborhood, occasionally hitting a siren and laying on the megaphone.) There was no hose in the parking lot we were using, so we had to rig something up:



Somewhere around the time when we were scoping the parking lot to try to figure out the hose situation, I remembered the freshwater pump still sitting in its box in the ambulance. I bought it months ago, intending to rig up a sink for the ambulance, but never got around to using it. It takes 12v dc and I also already had the water bladder and some basic fittings. Jdh took one look, ran out to Orchard, and came back with all the necessary parts to hook up two bladder tanks in parallel, with a real hose attached. Go team!



This came in handy, since being able to rig a hose meant that we could work in the nice spacious parking lot, rather than invading Laz's driveway (especially classy with him being away for the weekend at a NASA race) and imposing on his long-suffering wife.

Meanwhile, Rob rigged an awesome fix to our how-are-we-going-to-paint-the-windows? problem, with sheet aluminum and pop rivets. Instant minivan-to-panel-van conversion.



When we planned out how to handle the painting, we contemplated a lot of options. Last time around we had pretty good luck with Sears appliance enamel, but they don't really make appliance enamel in Mystery Machine Blue. We thought about Rustoleum, which comes in lots of colors, but it lacked a certain visceral appeal. Eventually, we collectively worked our way around to realizing how awesome it would be to paint our van with house paint.

House paint on a car works both better and worse than you might suppose. For example, the orange peel sponge texture that you get from roller sponges works better on walls than it does on cars. On the other hand, it went on nicely, and after a few beers or about thirty feet of distance, it actually looks a whole lot better than the original battered burgundy.



And here she is, with the blue base coat nearly finished:


Still remaining:
- cage (happens this week)
- fit a seat (requires fabricating a base)
- front brakes, etc
- wheels and tires
- harness, cutoff switch, fire extinguisher
- find and tape up that one loose wire
- add the temp sensor to go with the nice new(ish) temp gauge (or "gage", as Plymouth spelled it)
- paint the green and orange bits

mystery machine pics

A photographic tour of the Mystery Machine, in all her current glory:


The lulz are, in fact, epic:




We swapped on some cheap KYB-2 rear shocks and some ridiculous helper springs for the saggy rear leaf springs, and swapped out the rear brake shoes.


I learn why working on drum brakes is awesome:


Engine compartment, with some additions and subtractions:


Interior, as we strip the remainder of what was left:




The suspension work raised the rear a tiny bit:

spark test

Plan for today was to paint. Minivan had other plans - it was once again doing a solid impression of a heavily-graffitied rock, and we discovered that the ignition problems really are a lot more serious than a dead battery. (First bad sign: JDH put the suspect battery into the other junker minivan, his Town & Country which sounds like there is an angry man inside the engine with a baseball bat, and it fired right up.)

So we went back around with the usual round of troubleshooting: battery is sending voltage? Check. Coil is getting voltage? Nope. Spark plugs are sparking? Nope.

Excellent, replace coil. Reassemble.

No spark. This is a massive sad.

For the historical record, and mostly as a note-to-self, here's the rough order of things tried:

1. Car does not start. Massive sad. Starter cranks, slowly.
2. Jump battery. Starter cranks much faster. Car does not start. Last time we waited a while and tried again, and it worked, so we were like OMG YAY!!!!11!! and burned rubber around the parking lot and celebrated victory and then called it a night.
3. Test current to positive side of ignition coil. Intermittent before, now zero.
4. Look up wiring. Discover that current in to coil is controlled by a relay, the Automatic Shutdown Relay, or ASD. It shuts off current to the ignition coil, the fuel pump, and the injectors when the key is on but the engine isn't running.
5. Look up ASD on internet. Discover that it basically connects red wire (J2) coming from battery, to green-and-black wire (Z1) which powers the rest of the motor.
6. Hard-wire red wire to green-and-black wire. Fuel pump now audibly runs whenever the key is on! We now get 12V to the coil while cranking the starter! Car still does not start.
7. Grrr.
8. Test spark plugs (again) to see if they are making sparks. They are not making sparks.
9. Pull ECU, which in this car is amusingly called the SMEC. Stare at it dubiously.
10. Try all of those previous things again, in lots of different orders. Halfheartedly price replacement SMEC.
    
11. Go back to reading about computer, and start testing wires. The negative side of the coil connects back to the SMEC as well. The computer provides ground to the circuit, and sometimes suddenly removes the ground, which causes the coil to dump all of its accumulated charge onward, thus powering the distributor. The moral to this story is that even without the ASD, the SMEC needs to be happy in order for the whole thing to work.
12. Figure out how to make the check engine light blink out the numeric codes which indicate why it's firing. Look these up. Discover it's complaining about several things, including the ASD relay. Yeah yeah, we know.
13. Following instructions from the internet, we hard-wire pin 10 on the SMEC to the output of the ASD, which happens to be the positive wire to the coil, thus bypassing the ignition part of the ASD cutoff entirely. Heh heh. 12V to the coil all the time now, bitches. How you like me now?
    (Secondarily: JDH notices that the ASD is clicking on at startup, then immediately off again. This seems suspicious, like the cpu is seeing something it hates, and getting angry.)
14. Car does not start.
    
15. After some research, discover that there's another sensor, a really important sensor, called a Hall Effect sensor, which lives inside the distributor. Its job is to detect the distributor firing off spark plugs, and send this back to the SMEC, which uses it to get timing information. (Newer vehicles just use crank or cam position sensors.) If this sensor is not working, the cpu will stop the engine from firing. Remove sensor, clean it, try to test. Perfect continuity on the wires to the sensor. The sensor itself starts to fragment during cleaning. Bad sign? Maybe. It's just a little plastic UFO with lots of fragile wires in it.
16. Discover that the guy at Kragen has never heard of a "hall effect sensor", nor of an ignition reference sensor or distributor sensor (its pseudonyms), nor can he look one up, or order one. Same for Autozone, and, disturbingly, the same is apparently true for parts stores on the internets. Pick-n-pull it is, then.
17. Sad!
    
18. Clean up. Try to start the van a few more times, just for the hell of it. Sadly this does not work. How cool would it have been if it did, though?
    
19. Beer and tacos.

Some links which turned out to be incredibly useful in this process (the heavily-tabbed Haynes manual that we inherited from the previous owners being largely useless):

• Understanding the Chrysler ECU
• 1988-89 Turbo I SMEC (same site)
  
• How to wire an 89 tbi body for turbo smec
• ASD troubleshooting

Update: Yep, totally the HEP sensor. Jdh installed a pick n pull special, and she fired right up. :-D

chequered past

The minivan came to us with what we assumed to be a rich and varied history. For example, between the graffiti tagging and the stripped interior, it kind of looks like it might have been abandoned in Oakland. (I'm pretty sure this contributed to the amount of unhappiness displayed by the local security force when, in a temporary lapse of judgement, we left it up on blocks in a public area overnight.)

Most of this is explainable by its recent ownership history, which is probably better linked to than described: forum post by previous owners

Ooh, plus: If you're bored on weekends, you can help us out... it can be a community project!

All of which makes me super glad we only paid $100 for it.

When we got it, the van's previous owners had managed to render it completely inoperable, apparently through systematic application of cheap kragen performance parts. After some investigation, and a small but surprisingly effective quantity of caffienated malt liquor, this turned out to be caused by an extremely dead battery, which was vampirically sucking the life not only from the poor mystery machine, but also from the car we were trying to jump it from.

The thread has some speculation on the van's legal status, so I ran a carfax report. Let's see:

• 1992 - passed smog. Exciting!
  
• 04/09/1997 - SALVAGE TITLE/CERTIFICATE ISSUED
  JUNK TITLE/CERTIFICATE ISSUED. (No surprise: its salvage status is clearly marked on the title.)
  
• 05/10/1997 - Passed emissions inspection. Phew.
  
• 06/28/1997 - JUNK TITLE/CERTIFICATE ISSUED. Again?
  
• 07/08/1999 - New owner reported. JUNK TITLE/CERTIFICATE ISSUED
  
• ...etc...
  
• 08/23/2007 - Automotive Recycler. Vehicle at automotive recycler facility.
  VEHICLE SCRAPPED. Vehicle reported as crushed and should not be on the road. (Awesome!)
  
• 09/11/2007 - New owner reported. JUNK TITLE/CERTIFICATE ISSUED
  

I have to say, 25 entries is the most I've ever seen on a carfax report. But nice to see it's not stolen.

Now that Reno's getting closer, we've been shopping for parts. All this week, assorted brake parts have been showing up in the mail. Pads, rotors ($10 on closeout), rear shocks (KYB-2, bitches!), shoes for the rear drums, etc. This weekend we get with the installation.