Super Porsche Man!

...flies in to tweak his carburetor!

Really though, he's pointing to something in his engine bay for the other guy standing nearby. I was taking a few photos from this angle, and the car's owner leaned in. This is exactly how the photo came out of the camera. No cropping. This particular car—a 1965 Porsche 356C—will be featured in comparison with a Chevrolet Corvair Monza Spyder (a CMS project car) in the upcoming issue of Classic Motorsports. I shot most of the photos that end up in the story. 

On automotive Luddites

From the April 1968 issue of Road & Track.

Installing cruise control in a throttle-by-wire Toyota

Everyone remembers the uproar over electronic throttles in Toyotas. Everything from floor mats to pedal assemblies to space particles could be causing unintended acceleration. Admittedly, the last bit might just have been the NASA scientists getting bored and trying to find the problem in every last possible place. They did get into the field because they dig space stuff, after all.

At the root of the problem, it turns out, was a lot of fat, stupid feet continuously mashing on the gas pedal instead of the brake. The fact that there's no mechanical cable directly connecting the gas pedal to the throttle body had nothing to do with it, though it did give plenty of automotive Luddites a chance to bitch about technology.

Fact is, drive-by-wire throttles are handy from an engineering standpoint--no need to worry about getting the cable to reach or to work right in a certain orientation, for one. They're also handy in that some cars that don't come with cruise control can be easily retrofitted at minimal cost. Yes, I've finally reached my point.

With Zoe's 2010 Yaris, there's no computer modules to add. No expensive vacuum diaphragms or OEM switches. A trip to Radio Shack, a little time with a screwdriver, soldering iron, drill, and wire splices, and you're good to go. I'll spare you the details of the install; kind enthusiasts figured out how to do this, and posted the information online. That's how I did it. Here's the step-by-step:

http://www.yarisworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17158

More and more cars today are throttle-by-wire, so it stands to reason that methods similar to this are possible on a lot of newer cars. 

I popped off a plastic panel on the dashboard and drilled holes for these switches. After soldering in the appropriate resistor--a 660 ohm one, I think--and extra wiring, it went back into the dash. I didn't photograph it with the stuff soldered up because it's, well, not my finest work. I can solder strong, but it's not necessarily pretty.

There they are. Both are momentary pushbutton switches. Zoe calls them spaceship switches. Sometime soon they'll get labels. The top one will be Warp Drive; the bottom, Shields.

The actual in-car wiring was way easy, with just two wires to splice into.

How can you run cruise control with just two buttons? Well, it's limited in features. The top button toggles the cruise on and off (illuminating the green indicator in the top picture); the bottom one sets the speed and decelerates the car. You can wire in four switches to get full functionality, but two looks nicer and it does the job.

And it works! For less than $10 at Radio Shack, this car has cruise control. Another option for this particular car is just to install the OEM cruise control switch and cut a hole in the steering column cover for it to stick out of, but the switch—a stalk not unlike the turn signal one—is still a little pricey at about eighty bucks.

Why the Fiat 500 will do well (a long ramble)

A hip lady-friend of mine recently blogged about the Fiat 500. She said:

"I have never really been a car person.  My dad picked out both of the cars I’ve driven, and they’ve been good cars in the sense that they get me from point A to point B without any scarring or wreckage. 

But then I saw this little thing.  I want that car.  This is the first time in my life I’ve written that down.  I want that car.  It’s so wee!"

We at the Grassroots Motorsports office have been waiting for one to come through the press fleet. We saw a white one in the parking lot at the office a month or two back, and EVERYONE was talking about it. "Is that our press car?" "It's a stickshift!" "Where did it come from?" "I love the interior." We all fought over who would drive it first. We've been waiting for one to come through the press fleet for some time.

We later found out that it belonged to the meter reader lady from the electric company. It was her personal ride. We all gave her props for driving a stickshift, she enthusiastically proclaimed her love for it, and left.

One showed up at an autocross this summer. It wasn't there to compete; someone just drove it to the event. There were at nearly all times at least four guys gathered around the thing. When the owner was near it, a bigger crowd gathered to ask questions.

All this for a kind of slow, technologically unremarkable, somewhat expensive subcompact car. Why such a fuss? 

It is incredibly cute. Sure, your average Camaro shopper wouldn't be caught dead in one, but I'm sure the reverse is also true. But that's less the point, so much as its whimsy. It's fun just to look at. It makes people smile, stop, and have a closer look. The Mini Cooper and New Beetle did these things, but I hesitate to say that they did it so universally.

I thought at first that it was too expensive. It starts at the same price as the Ford Fiesta ($15,500), a considerably larger car. But, while the Fiesta might be more practical to own and perhaps are more capable as a performance car, its fun really only kicks in once you're whipping it around corners and really making use of its delightful chassis.

With a car like this, the whimsy, the thrill, the joy, comes from the minute you sit in it. You get into it, smile, and ask, "So, what can you do?" The same thing happened with my sister when she bought her (also smaller than a Fiesta but 30% more costly) Mini Cooper several years ago. She wasn't a car person, but she became an enthusiastic driver. She learned to live with its small cargo space. She'd tell stories of playing cat-and-mouse through traffic with other Mini drivers. It also helped that she got a stickshift, I think, but part of it had to be that the car made its existence clear to its owners.

Not many cars do that, or have ever done that terribly often. Even if something is fun to drive, a cheap car will rarely actually say hello. It'll have the same speedometer you see in every other car in the world; the switchgear will look the same; it'll all be in that familiar industrial-plastic black.

Guys are fascinated. Gals think it's adorable. If this car is half as fun to drive as it is to look at (foreign reviews indicate as much), it'll sell as many as Fiat can make. It might even help get more kids interested in cars and driving who previously just thought of it as an expensive mode of transport. I only hope the take rate on stickshifts is high.

Racing Beat knockoff header

I've learned something from my foray into the bottom-of-the-barrel cheap parts: There are two levels of shitty.

Level One: Low price, good build quality, but materials that aren't the most durable perhaps because of lower quality.
Level Zero: Lowest price, terrible build quality, horrendous materials.

My recent reviews of Raceland's header put them squarely into Level One. Their header is well built, looks good out of the box and is well supported. They also have a real company/brand name to uphold, as evidenced by their stickers and catalog included in the order. Their downfall is that their steel isn't pure/robust enough to stand up to the harshest commutes through aggressively salted Chicago interstates. I'm confident that someone living in, say Florida, would be perfectly happy with their product.

This one, on the other hand, is simply not worth a purchase. I don't mean to single out SpeedyRacer--an eBay seller--as there are multiple people peddling this shoddy product. It's the only header that imitates the Racing Beat with a 4-1 design (all the others imitate the 4-2-1 or Tri-Y design of the Jackson Racing); since the Racing Beat is reportedly the best off-the-shelf header out there, it's truly unfortunate that the only imitation is so incredibly awful.

See for yourself in the slideshow. The welds are so awful, I'm surprised I didn't find welding rod sticking out of them. I wonder if they're even airtight. I saw one car with this header at SCCA Solo Nationals (STS class), and wasn't surprised to find it was rusting just like my Raceland unit--though that particular car certainly didn't see the heavy winter commuting duty that mine did.

The final straw--and this really killed me, because I was nearing the end of my engine swap at the time, filled with exhaustion, frustration at already too many broken surprises, and anxious to hit the road--was that it just didn't fit. It hit the flat horizontal part of the body below the brake and clutch master cylinders. I was so goddamn angry when I couldn't get the piece of cockblasting assnugget* to fit that I literally bounced it off the fucking concrete floor and across the garage.

Since I've seen this header fit on other cars and it's gotten some positive eBay responses, I can conclusively say their quality control department and the jig they use to build this header are both not very consistent. And, judging by the fact that a magnet will stick to certain parts of it--most notably the bends, as demonstrated in the slideshow--they clearly use ultra-low quality stainless steel too.

By "they," of course, I mean whoever makes this piece of garbage, not Speedyracer or any other eBay vendor--though they are responsible for selling a shit product. Much to that vendor's credit, they did take a return on the header even though it was past the 30-day return period. So thank you, Speedyracer, for not totally screwing me.

There you have it, friends: real buying advice. Don't buy the absolute cheapest garbage. Pay a little extra instead. I'd buy the Raceland header again. You couldn't pay me to use this one--which is just as well, since it seems to no longer be available on eBay.

*I'm a classy guy.

Chugga chugga Miata speedometer

My Miata's speedometer used to do this. My good friend Eric described the sound as akin to a choo-choo train. My memory is fuzzy, so I'm going to pretend he used those exact words. He's a grown-ass man. I tried replacing the speedometer head before, but that didn't help.

As part of the engine rebuild, I replaced many (many!!) parts. One of them was the speedometer cable, which is easier to replace than I expected. Problem solved! I lived with that annoyance for way too long considering how simple the fix was. With a little dexterity, flexibility and profanity, I was able to replace the cable without removing the instrument cluster.

Wear your safety equipment, kids.

This video is horrifying. Not for weak stomachs.

Killed Myself When I Was Young from The Jalopy Journal on Vimeo.

Via Devour.com. Found on the 24 Hours of LeMons forum.