We got a lot done in the past few days; sadly some of it we thought was done already, but hey. However, we are making progress, which is important as Pines is only a few sleeps away.
It’s been a week since the last post, which is a while in our hyperspace effect type time these days. In that time we drove, insured, safetied, plated, and e-tested the Talon. We got gas at a real gas station. We got closely inspected by the po-lice. We didn’t get stopped (Win!). We had the Talon break down at the side of the road. (Fail). We had to replace the alternator due to a tiny but very important bolt breaking, which was in no way as straight forward was an alternator change sounds. Thankfully, this happened on the road AFTER we got the clean air. (See picture of bolt).
To deal with this we had to jump the car twice on side of the road to get it back to the ‘Berg, diagnose the issue in a parking lot in the rain, drive it to a friends house and pull the alternator – which we attempted to rebuild ourselves before giving up – so we could then phone around and drive to Markham and get a rebuilt one. $120 later we returned to the garage in Schomberg and installed it. However, because we have relocated the alternator to keep it away from the hot hot turbo we have to grind down the bolt that keeps the pulley on or that bolt rubs against the subframe. We did grind it down enough to fit but not “enough”, so we had to drive it while it ground away gently all the way to the shop in Alliston and pull it AGAIN there to grind the bolt down more. We’re getting pretty good at alternator installs on the Talon, sadly, but we’d like to stop now.
Here’s the new alternator. All clean like.
So happily after spending a day going from below zero to almost back to zero – except now we knew why the gauges were being wonky – we spent today getting to the stage where we are putting door cards on, building guards to keep the electrics away from clumsy driver feet, installing the tool box and mounting the jack (sounds dirty!), installing the navigator light, and tightening the various things that are leaking because they weren’t tightened. Yeah, we know, but seriously – there are a LOT of things to tighten on a car. Some are bound to slip through.
So in the 3 (!) days before Pines we have brought in a sober set of eyes to go through all the ‘stuff’ and also hopefully knock off some of the other items on the list during the day, and then we’ll tackle the other stuff at night. (It helps to have a buddy who works horrible shifts and ends up with free time when everyone else is working!).
We think we’re ready and we’ll keep driving the car as much as possible between now and then, but some things will be seriously Rally Sputnik-ized. Tuning? Yeah, we’ll do some road pulls with the laptop. Testing? We’ll drive it on the gravel roads while we’re tuning. Motor break in? Well, it was completely re-built and we’ve put almost 200 road kilometers on it. That’s good enough, right? We’ll just change all the fluids to Amzoil and give ‘er. We’ve got some stickers now and more on the way. What else could we need?
Check out how stiff the sills are now! Both wheels off the ground, one jack stand, no issues. We really should paint these rims or something, though, huh?