The slow march to victory continues!
Remember when we said that car shows make it look easy? Well, that’s still true. If you’re noticing they have a small army of guys and do things like ‘here’s Jimmy from Jimmy’s upholstery and Rally Cars and he’s installing naugahyde Sparco’s’ and then Jimmy gets his 15 seconds of advertising – which probably took 3 weeks of prep – then here’s the thing: Rally Sputnik doesn’t do things that way. Not that we would be adverse to that – Jimmy, call me back whenever you get a chance – but it doesn’t seem to be in the cards straight away. We clearly need to be more obnoxious on camera, for a start. Instead we’re doing things like this:
Yeah, we’re still amused by things like that. So we should be perfect for television, right?
That said, we do have some sponsors! Yes, for real. And we’re going to start promoting them more when we start using the cool stuff they’re helping us out with. Except for Ryan at Rally/Race, who we promo pretty well every week. Because we’re there every week. That’s because he’s great to work with and kind enough to give us weekends off by going to Texas so we can fix our daily drivers once in a while. (Oil changes, front struts for a Volvo, rear brakes for a WRX, misc Jeep work…oh, the relaxing weekends we have…).
Besides lamenting our lack of a TV show we did get around to some workthis week. Because *somebody* went to see cool car racing in Texas we only managed to get one day on the car, and we used that to remove the front subframe, remaining heating components, and steering wheel, pedal box, clutch reservoir, and brake master cylinder. Turns out the pedal box is actually quite annoying to remove, which is most of the reason that other stuff came out…although it did need to anyhow. We aren’t going to change that but we did get the final bits of insulation and noise deadening material off the inside of the firewall so we can clean it up and make the wiring etc runs clean. See for yourself!
The subframe was a pain to get out as one of the captive nuts got loose but we need to get the front sway bar off (supposed to help handling), change the motor mounts and bushings as well as clean it up in general, so we thought it was worth it. So we now have a shell (and parts) in Mississauga, a motor in Markham, a wiring harness and front subframe in Schomberg, and misc body parts in Alliston. Perfect!
Oh yes, the motor. Well, they’re pretty busy but apparently started tearing it down on Thursday but that’s the last we heard. By the way, if someone asks you to deliver a motor always ask them how far down they want it stripped. Apparently manifolds and flywheels are not always part of the deal….
Anyhow, theoretically this will all come together in August, although we’re starting to think September is more likely… That way we’d be ready for Pines and able to run a test day and maybe a few RallyX’s along the way to see if it catches fire or anything. We also need to order a ‘big and tall’ sized co-driver seat, so if anyone needs a new Sparco talk to us.
That’s it for this (last) week. We’re tackling seam weld material removal and prep this week plus there’s more cage work planned so it should be photogenic. Plus hopefully there’s an update on the motor!