Oh, Wikipedia, you seldom fail to disappoint

The World Cup in South Africa has spurred my interest to learn a little about the continent-that-white-people-forgot. While at work today, I read some interesting stuff on Wikipedia about Nigeria before opening the Cameroon page.

In a paragraph about Cameroon's liberation from British rule, I came across this nugget of wisdom¹:

"In British Cameroons, the question was whether to miss avery fucks! me up reunify with French Cameroun or join Nigeria." [My italics.]

Of course, the real tragedy here is that this contributor split an infinitive. And that fucks! me up.<sup>2


1</sup>: If you'd like to find it, go here. The paragraph in question is just above the photo of Ahmadou Ahidjo arriving in Washington.
² It's not surprising that this happens, I suppose. But it is funny when you find it. After all, people have a hard time handling responsibility.

Here's a Random Picture I Took 2

Here a couple of giraffes doin' hard time.
I took this picture at Brookfield Zoo. Because I knew a zookeeper, I was able to hand feed the giraffes.

Escort Service: Driving the Train

Some readers may notice I haven't posted in quite some time. Those same readers may also feel that I have slacked or perhaps been lazy. But I assure you, since April 27, I have been on the go. You see my country recently came calling, asking for a super-smart, super-sexy spy to serve this country on super-secret subversive missions. While I can't divulge much, I will say that delivering healthy portions of assonance to consonant-rich, vowel-hungry cities in the Balkan States was the EASY part of my mission¹.

Between forays to Sarajevo, Zagreb, and other, more linguistically challenged cities in the region, my racing partner Alan and I decided that our stubborn ol' Ford Escort needed a new heart.

Last last weekend², we finally embarked on our two-day quest to drop the drivetrain from Alan's brother's wrecked ZX2 into our 1991 Escort LX, thereby creating a Ford Escort ZLX2.³

It was to be a simple task: just pull some crap off the ZX2 engine, remove the motor mounts, lift it out using a borrowed hoist, tear down the transmission, rebuild the transmission, replace the valve cover on the engine, remove the wiring harnesses from the ZX2, disconnect the LX engine from everything, dismount it, lift the LX engine and transmission out of the car, drop the ZX2 drivetrain into the LX engine bay, replace the wiring in the LX with that of the ZX2, depower the LX power steering, reroute the serpentine belt, hook up the rest of the hoses and whatnot to the engine, and then test drive it to mind-numbing speeds.

What could possibly go wrong?

Plucking the engine from the ZX2 went smoothly enough. After that, things sucked. As we disconnected hoses from the ZX2 engine, we began to notice that the car's impact had damaged or broken a significant amount of parts. This included (but is likely not limited to): the valve cover, thermostat housing, oil pan, alternator mounting bracket, dipstick, and some other crap that I can't at the moment remember. We had a replacement valve cover, which I replaced first thing Sunday morning. We put some JB weld on the oil pan leaks and on the alternator mounting bracket. The bracket didn't set strongly enough, but the alternator will still mount without the third bolt, which is where the bracket snapped. The oil pan leaks sealed perfectly and the JB weld looks extra sloppy, as a real LeMon should⁴.

On Sunday, we went to the junkyard to pick up some random replacement parts, including the thermostat housing and dipstick. Again, we figured in a 50% success rate, as the dipstick worked and the thermostat housing didn't. The housing was from a different year, one where Ford had inexplicably changed the design. Screw you, Gerald Ford! And your Motor Company.

Hmm...where was I? Oh yeah. The important thing: we rebuilt the transmission, as the ZX2's third gear had been failing before the rest of the car's demise. As someone who had never seen the inside of a transmission case, I was amazed at how absolutely pristine it was. It looked as though it had been sealed⁵. Anyway, we adequately tore down the transmission and swapped shifting forks with a beefier pair of them.

However, whilst tearing the mother down, we noticed that the shift rod was completely bent. This was a 3/4" solid steel shaft⁶ that had been knocked at least 5 degrees from straight by the impact. Ouch. We discovered this late on Saturday, and a feeling of utter stomach illness overcame us. We quickly ran down our options, in order of preference:

1) Find someone with a machine shop to bend the shaft back straight.
2) Tear down the LX transmission and hope that the shift rods are the same diameter, length, and machined with the same notches.
3) Mate the ZX2 engine to the LX transmission.
4) Send the car off with a hero's welcome.

We started off Sunday morning with a light breakfast, while Alan called machine shops in the area. We knew full-well that nobody would be running a machine shop on a Sunday, but we had little to lose. Fifteen minutes after a round of answering machines⁷, Alan's phone rang from an unknown number. It turned out to be a guy who rented part of a machine shop from an older gentleman in Ridgefield, Illinois. He said he'd be able to help us out if we could be at the shop around 3 in the afternoon.

We spent the most of the day at the aforementioned junkyard and replacing the aforementioned valve cover. With little else to do after 2, we headed over the machine shop a little early. We got out of the car to look around a bit, and we were greeted by the shop's owner. We told him what we were there for, and he said he'd help us out since he didn't have much to do. The shop didn't appear to be used very much, and the H-frame press he wanted to use actually didn't have any parallels anymore. So he sorted around through some scrap piles and came up with two pieces of scrap steel onto which he'd put the shaft. After donning a pair of coke-bottle bifocals, he undertook to press the shaft until it looked straighter. He took it off the press, squinted at it for a bit, then plopped it back on the press. He did this twice before he held it up to the light and said he thought it looked alright. We liked the way it looked, and we handed him a little cash for his troubles.

It was about this time that the machinist we'd set the appointment with showed up. He seemed a little disappointed that the older fellow had already fixed our problem, but he got out his instruments anyway to see how good it was. His instruments indicated that the shaft was .003" from being perfectly straight. In other words, this amazing old man⁸ eyeballed this press to what was essentially perfection. See below (photos courtesy of Alan):

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Despite this success, we were unable to reassemble the transmission correctly. With defeat looming, we decided to just pack up and call it a weekend.

Over the course of the next week Alan's dad tinkered with the transmission and figured out where we'd made our mistake. Yesterday, Alan and I set out to swap fuel pumps and pull the ZX2 wiring harnesses. That was difficult and sucked, so we instead just reassembled the transmission and sealed the case. We decided that was a perfectly good stopping place, so we called it a day.

To recap: Our engine/transmission swap is essentially (about 30%) done.

Read Alan's account of it here and here.

Muchas gracias to Alan's friends Brad and Rob, who showed up to help out last last Saturday.


¹ I did have a fun time; I found a nice opskrbljivanje. I was sorry to have to rename Skopska Crna Gora as Mount Vowels Are Our Friends. The natives caught on quick, though I may have to teach the Macedonians about acronyms next. A recent voting ballot revealed not only blood stains, but also that those fools have a political party called the VMRO-DPMNE. This is an acronym for "Forget the bad times, friends, for we are done firing rockets into Serbia, provided of course they stop deserving it." Their chief objective, I gathered, was finding vowels to put into their acronym to make it pronouncable.
² Some languages demonstrate superlatives and such by the repetition of the word. Most of you are familiar with this, as in this example: "Michael Bay is a really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really shitty filmmaker." In my example above, I am simply saying "two weekends ago." So why not say that, you ask? Because it's my damn blog, and I wanted to put in a linguistics-related footnote. That's why.
³ We may borrow some consonants from the VMRO-DPMNE¹ to throw in there as well.
⁴ Having the oil pan off at least allowed us to clean it, too. I think that's like polishing turds or something. I don't really know what that means, but I heard it once and "turd" is a funny word. "Turd, turd, turd, turd is the word..."
⁵ You know...because it had. This is an example of me mocking my own writing. I could very easily just edit it so it didn't exist, but then you wouldn't have anything entertaining to read.
⁶ Please contain your shaft (jokes).
⁷ Is it weird that I still say "answering machine" even though nobody actually has an answering machine anymore. Do you have an answering machine?
⁸ It's worth noting that this fellow seemed genuinely interested in us after he found out we were building a race car. After fixing the shift rod, he talked at length about building old race cars and modifying hot rods. He also swore like a sailor and entertained the holy hell out of Alan and me.

Here's a Random Picture I Took 1

Behold! An easy blog post from a lazy poster. For this one, I basically look through my pictures on the ol' hard drive and chuck one up for you peoples to see. This is one I took at NIU of Faraday Hall:

American Irony - Pt. 3

Here are just a couple more pics of the LeMons race at Gingerman Raceway in South Haven.

Four-cylinder engines are a popular choice. In order, they are: #0 Toyota Celica, #61 Honda CR-X , #71 Dodge Neon, #138 Toyota MR2, #42 Honda Civic, #7 Mazda Miata (partially obscured), #35 Dodge Neon, and the #112 Dodge Neon. This was in the middle of the #61/#71's epic 10-lap (estimated) duel. The #35 Neon finished sixth while running a pretty quiet and unassuming race. This is our strategy for our race in October, because Ford Escorts ain't fast.

#2 Topless Asset Racing Toyota MR2. This car demonstrated that LeMons is seldom about looks. The butchered nature of this car led Alan and I to believe we were looking at a mutilated and tragic Triumph or something "exotic" along those lines. But it was one of three MR2s in the field; this one finished second-highest among them with 354 laps, good for 19th place overall.

#95 C.A.R.T. Chicago Area Racing Team BMW E30. Here's a view of this E30's lap just before the checkered flag. The smell was delicious, just like a melting engine should smell. I believe this car died on its victory lap. It missed a Top 10 finish by two laps with 379, just behind the VolOwned Ecto1 wagon.


#46 Wisconsin Crap Racers Nissan Maxima. Well, this car lived up to its team name. Decked out in a Days Asunder livery, this car limped around the track all Sunday. With about an hour left, it came around turn 1 smoking like a bandit (or something) and rolled to a stop on the grass inside of turn 2. It was toast.

#323 Spec Junk Racing Mazda MX-3. I'm including this for my friend Todd, who loved his MX-3. This noble little guy finished in fifth place by running a solid, (mostly) mistake-free race. It racked up 391 laps and was quick in the corners. The tire affixed to the roof is one of the 24 Hours of LeMons' penalties.

I could post pictures and pontificate about this all day, but you get the point. If you can't get enough, follow the links:

Pictures of all the LeMons competitors at American Irony
My racing partner Alan's write-up of LeMons with pictures
Video of #138 MR2 getting a penalty welded to its roof
Video of a fast lap in the #56 Dodge Neon from Skid Marks Racing
Time lapse of BS inspections
Jalopnik coverage of Heroic Fix competitors

American Irony - Pt. 2

Here's where I include some of the cars that didn't win anything, except a place in my heart. And then some pics of some of the winners, because they were awesome¹.

#86 - VolvOwned Volvo Wagon. Clearly, this is a take on the Ghostbuster's Ecto1. This was one of Jenny's favorites, and it was incredibly slow. It's best lap time came in a shade under two minutes. But who cares? This theme kicked ass, and the car ran consistently enough to garner a tenth-place finish with 381 laps. During Friday Tech/BS inspection, the team dressed as the Ghostbusters. Enjoy a gratuitous shot of Ecto1 and the Snoopy van entering Turn 11:

#7 Pink Ladies Mazda Miata. I'm including this one for Alan, who is a Miata guy. This team was 3 or 4 women and 1 man driving a smooth Miata that was pretty quick and sounded good. It was also plastered with pictures of women cut out from glamour magazines. It's hard to tell from this picture, but pink racing stripes featured glitter. This little go-getter finished 37th with 232 laps completed.

#38 Team Sucker Punch Chevy Camaro. As you can tell, this is a pretty good theme for a Camaro. It's not hard to imagine a mulleted stud blasting "Runnin' With the Devil" while flying through a residential zone at 110 in this baby. And the team knew that. When we left Saturday, the team's pit board sat next to the car in their paddock area. It read "Wanted: New Tranny." The next day, they were up and running having apparently fetched either a transexual or a new transmission from nearby Grand Rapids. Either way, the car ran for a bit on Sunday. We talked briefly to a couple of the fellas on the team, and they are apparently going to be at Autobahn in October, where Alan and I will make our LeMons debut. The #38 Camaro finished 39th with 176 laps. You can watch some of it here.

#64 Team Lebowski Dodge Neon. This is a natural theme for anyone to pick. Who wouldn't love this theme? They also get a million points for keeping Donny affixed to the car's rear wing for the duration of the race. Unfortunately, they lose 750,000 of those points for not racing a rusted-out Gran Torino with CCR blasting from the stereo. We did discover that Neons run well at LeMons and are a popular option; we saw at least four of them, and the #2 and #6 finishers were both Neons. This Neon finished 22nd with 344 laps completed.

#97 Breaking Dawn Toyota MR2. This mid-engine car was pretty quick and tore through the corners. And it finished dead last. Why?, you may ask. It turns out that the race judges awarded them 500 BS laps during tech inspection for overspending. On an engine. Apparently, the team had grenaded their engine in a previous race. In their quest for a replacement, they happened upon a totaled 2010 Toyota Camry. A few hundred dollars and several custom fabrications later, this car was powered by an engine with fewer than 10,000 miles on it. The engine wasn't even really broken in yet. In reality, the car ran 337 laps, which would have garnered a finish in the middle of the field, around 25th or so.

#411 Speed Fixx Chevy S10. I include this not because it's one of my favorite. In fact, the LeMons forums seem to indicate that this was actually a relatively unpopular car. But when Alan and I first walked through the pits, this truck was having some serious brake cooling issues. As in, their rear drums were on fire. Their solution for the front brakes was to create some last minute ducting Sunday morning, with some helpful signage:

#710 Team S-Audi Audi (Model I don't know or care to look up). This team nailed their theme about as well as anyone else could. For those who've never been 10 and had a calculator, "710" is "OIL" upside-down². The car was also adorned with badges from every oil company and adorned with the finest gold paint Ace Hardware's spray cans has to offer. The team also dressed up for tech inspection and bribed the judges properly. The car itself had a pretty bouncy suspension. So much so, in fact, that it became a three-wheeler in Turn 11:
The #710 car finished 30th with 324 laps.


#308 Corsa Nostra Alfa Romeo (Model unknown/too lazy to look). This was hands-down my favorite car of the weekend. Alan and I decided that we needed this car or at least its engine, which produces the sound of the earth splitting open and releasing eagle-sized bees that will sting your children, carry them off to the nest, cover them in honey, and then drop them off in Montana bear country just for chuckles. Then they'll descend upon you and make fun of your stupid haircut. In other words, this car sounds like evil. And awesomeness. As it accelerated hard between turns 2 and 3, all other cars seemed to get silent because of the noise's intensity. Then it downshifted. And it maybe got Alan's hormones excited and maybe it found the Brown Note³ for me. And the car ran fast. Real fast. It clocked the third-fastest lap of the weekend (1:47.324), though it finished a disappointing 15th.

Hmm...that's a long post. I guess I'll throw some more photos/descriptions up tomorrow night after I'm done with work.


¹ A track map might be handy. We watched most of the race from the short straight between turns 1 and 2. We also started Saturday watching from Turn 11 right by the pit entrance, and we started Saturday watching from the midfield spectator area, which offered an excellent view of the entire track.
² Get out scientific calculator and type in "7108008." Then hold it upside-down. hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe
³ Actually, the car's engine noise wasn't of low enough frequency to cause that. I just have "control" issues.

American Irony - A Beautiful Thing Pt. 1

Last weekend, my co-conspirator Alan and myself, with Jenny along, headed to Gingerman Raceway in South Haven, Michigan, to witness American Irony, one of the many races in the 24 Hours of LeMons series. We left shaking our heads in awe and extremely excited to be entering the Rod Blagojevich Never Say Die 500 in October. Rather than give you a long, boring, text-heavy rant, I'll give you pictures of the award winners. And I may post more pictures in multiple parts.

Winner on Laps: #61 Clueless Racing CR-X. This car was fast; I think it must have had an engine swap or some kind of tuning, because it booked. In addition to running 417 laps, it also ripped out the top time for the weekend with a 1:46.547 lap.

Index of Effluency¹: #87 Chicken and Waffles VW Quantum Syncro Wagon. This make/model was apparently THE lemon of its time with a mushy, die-y all-wheel drive system. The team had previously run Fieros at LeMons races, but they ran a slow, steady race at Gingerman with this sweet wagon, racking up 384 laps for a 9th Place finish.

Winner, Class 1 (THE GOOD) and I Got Screwed Award: #71 Latch-Key Kids Plymouth Neon. You wouldn't know it looking at this car, but this was a monster on the track, racking up 415 Laps. It actually held the lead for a good part of Sunday, but the #61 CRX had a 22-gallon fuel tank installed, which allowed it to fend off the Neon. For a solid 7 or 8 laps, this Neon duked it out with CRX, trading leads every time they came around to where we were sitting at Turn 1. Alan and I were rooting for this pugnacious little Neon and were glad to see it walk away with hardware.


Winner, Class 2 (THE BAD) and Least Horrible Yank Tank: #777 Joe Dirt Mullet Rockers Sponsored by Aquanet Chevy Caprice. This was as fast as anything else on the straights, and its V8 sounded like American muscle with the exhaust pipes blowing out the side. There was no mistaking the growl of this monster on the track. This car finished fourth overall with 394 laps.


Winner, Class 3 (THE UGLY) and Grassroots Motorsports Most from the Least Award: #187 The Tools Merkur XR4Ti. This car ran a smooth race, was fast, and hit every corner just about perfectly, clocking 394 laps for a third-place finish. It also ran the second-fastest lap of the weekend, a 1:46.998 trip around the circuit. If you don't know about Merkurs, they were a failure. A big one. And that's why LeMons loves them.
















Organizer's Choice: Morrow's Auto #3 Snoopy Van and #111 Woodstock Grand Prix. These cars, from the same team, epitomize what LeMons is all about. In addition to an amazing and well-executed theme, these cars are ridiculous. The Grand Prix rumbled like an earthquake (when it was on the track), but the Snoopy Van is the real deal. After running it in a previous race with the same appearance, the team decided to make it a MID-ENGINE, TWIN-TURBO. That's right, this iss a racing van. Unfortunately, the driver's side turbo apparently caught on fire during the race, but it didn't keep the van off the track.

Most Heroic Fix: #200 Double Jeopardy Pontiac Fiero. When we walked through the pits on Saturday, we saw this pit crew feverishly working on what appeared to be the engine. We didn't know what the problem was, but it really looked like they were tearing the entire engine apart. As it turns out, they were tearing the entire engine apart. By the time they returned to the track on Sunday, smoke poured out of the back of this car while it limped around the outside of the track like it was VW Bus at a Grateful Dead show in 1970. The story later came out that the crew had simply removed all of the non-functioning parts from the cylinders, leaving exactly 1 cylinder that worked. Needless to say, it was not a fast car with only a few CCs of engine, but it was a gutsy one. For the exclamation point, the team fastened the busted pistons onto the hood of their rolling wreck.

Judges' Choise: #9 Midwest Engine Destroyers 1988 Pontiac Fiero. The judges liked this because the team had somehow wedged a 3.8L V6² into the engine compartment of a Fiero. It didn't fit all that well, judging from some of the pictures I've seen, but it had them running in the top 10 for a while, even though it eventually finished 33rd in the field with 274 laps.


Epic Repair Failure³: #132 Police Brutality Ford Thunderbird. Sure this car looks nice and shiny, but a close inspection of the finish reveals that it's just bright red paint over rust. Lots and lots of rust. And the whitewalls are also painted. The team who brought this beast didn't even know if it really ran before driving from Maryland. And it really didn't. The Police Brutality squad ran it for a while on Saturday before the transmission asploded. These guys put in countless hours of work overnight Saturday and into Sunday. When we arrived just before the "Gentleman, try to start your engines" call, the car appeared above. Yep, that's the transmission on the ground next to it. We walked past it a couple more times later, and it was still on jack stands. Jenny later noticed the team pushing the car up pit road. I later found out the car was just welded into drive, basically, and that the team needed to push-start it. But that they did, and with the Team Captain behind the wheel, it pulled out of the pits to the loudest cheers all weekend with less than an hour of race time remaining:


As the Chief Perpetrator Lamm later noted, 15 laps or so would have cinched up the Heroic Fix award. Five laps into its return, I thought I noticed a trace of smoke behind the car as it entered Turn 2. By the time it was clearing Turn 3, it had started to billow smoke. Before it even sniffed Turn 4, flames had made the Thunderturd a Firebird:

So it goes at LeMons. The car was definitely the crowd favorite, and the Police Brutality team is apparently going to show up at their next race with a BMW V12 shoehorned into an old Cadillac.

**Edit: On the LeMons board, the Police Brutality team captain noted that the car was only a few laps short of the Index of Effluency trophy, rather than the Heroic Fix. I apologize for this misquote. Additionally, he said the Bimmer V12 will likely go into this Thunderbid.**

Suffice to say, I am excited.

(Look for more photos/narration in later posts).


¹ The Index of Effluency, basically, is an award that is handed out to the car that does the most with the least. This is somehow different from the Most from the Least award, but really it's a no-brainer that a serious crapcan wagon gets this one. As defined by the Greek God Wikipedeus, the Index of Effluency is "presented to a car considered unlikely to finish the race at all, let alone finish with a respectable number of laps completed." Well said, Gentleman Philosopher Wikipedeus.
² This would be the same V6 found in common GM vehicles like the Pontiac Grand Prix, Buick LeSabre, or, you know, this Fiero.
³ This award was actually made up over the course of the weekend by the #142 Adopted by Jets Saab. Their car spent a similar amount of time in the pits, as apparently they were the sufferers of Murphy's Law for the weekend.