The past week I’ve been working on moving stuff back to Royal Oak, since I took a job in Auburn Hills, and I’m not driving back and forth from A2 every day from there, it’s way too far of a drive even if there were never any traffic. My truck has thrown two codes this week, as well as informed me that I need to replace the wiring that goes to the rear lights on the truck. It started off with one side intermittently losing the parking lights, which is the side that the trailer is also fed off of. I managed to work the problem down to knowing for sure that it has to be some sort of a break or point of corrosion in the wire itself, based on how it was acting when I was testing it. I did try to rinse out the frame rails earlier in the week, so it seems like that exposed, or perhaps irritated an already existing problem.

At some point in the near future, I’m going to replace the entire wiring from the fuse distribution block back, and convert it over to a 7 wire system while I’m at it, so I can install a trailer brake controller if I ever need to pull a trailer that needs it.

Meanwhile, the car’s been disassembled for a few months. I’ve spent some time trying to design a new intake system to incorporate the box style intercooler plates rather than the laminova cores. I’m also attempting to get rid of the rather nasty air path that the current system has to push air into the cylinders more freely. There’s not a whole lot of room up front of the engine for this, but I’m not afraid of doing a little re-fabrication, whereas the factory attempts to keep as many common components as possible. I may have to consider doing something with how the oil filter is in a plated device that’s cast right into the engine block. I’d like to, at the very least, relocate the filter so I don’t have to burn up my hand every time I need to change the oil.

Mockup of the intake manifold plate

I’ve also tossed around the idea of strengthening and narrowing the engine cradle in order to be able to stuff some wider tires in up front. I took all the measurements I need, but I haven’t had a chance to put them into CAD and mock something up. My goal is to try to keep the suspension geometry as close to stock as I can, but there will have to be some rather obvious changes to get it done right.

The good part about doing the disassembly: I did discover that one of the connecting rods was bent pretty badly. This image doesn’t really portray it all that well because of the lensing effect of the camera that I used. So I either need to order an entire set of performance rods, or just replace the one and have the others tested.

So, here’s where we’ve been at for the last few months, lots of work to go.