With my roommate going blind and then selling his truck – I now have the garage to myself. So now I can get around to all the things I wanted to do with the Hellcat.
The problem is that with having to pick up all the rent, and the utilities going up because there’s someone at the house 24/7, I don’t have any spare cash…
It’s always something.
Anyway, today I engaged in some maintenance on the car – the 30,000 mile throttle body and supercharger snout cleaning.
That throttle body is 95mm wide – three and a quarter inches – and the hole into the supercharger is big enough I can get my whole hand in there with a rag and the throttle body cleaner to get it nice and clean.
For the curious, this engine at full throttle can move about 1200 cubic feet per minute through that hole – or all of the air in a 10x12x9 foot room, per minute. To fuel this wide-open insanity it will burn 1.5 gallons of the most expensive gas you can find per minute and exhaust its 17 gallon gas tank in about ten minutes.
It’s a crazy car – and I love it. 🙂
Anyway, I took the cleaner, a toothbrush, and some shop rags to the throttle body and cleaned the 30,000 miles of baked on schmutz off of it… If I had a spare $500 I’d replace it with an aftermarket BBK unit that actuates 50% faster, then I’d put a $700 carbon fiber Corsa Performance intake tube and dry filter on it.
Someday…
Right now I’m doing good to just feed the beast. Speaking of which I hit a new personal record in stacking gas discounts today:
Being as the car is only happy with V-Power NiTRO+ from Shell, I have a Shell account which confers various fuel discounts.
- There’s the standard $0.05 a gallon for having the account
- Another $0.05 a gallon for being a ‘platinum member’, which you get for filling up with the good stuff six times every 90 day period
- I got another $0.25 a gallon for buying two sodas and a bag of chips inside the gas station last fill up
- And another $0.22 a gallon because Shell has a NASCAR car, #22, and today was race-day.
So $0.57 off per gallon… Not bad!
The next major expense on the car will happen on July first – the next six months of insurance – which is a mere $1,698.94…
$283 a month for a 57 year old guy with a perfect driving record and who takes yearly driving courses to keep the skills sharp.
Oh well – every time I get behind the wheel of the thing, press the big red start button, and cruise on down the road in it I get the biggest grin. So I guess it’s worth it.
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