Tag: Car Stuff

Just an update…

I’ve got everything moved in here at the apartment – just need things like furniture now.

I’ll be at E3 all next week. I’m pondering starting another blog here on LiveJournal specifically for my games industry insider stuff and my thoughts on the genera in general… Could be a lot of fun, then again it could be a lot of work. Dunno yet.

I’ve been driving the WarWagon around Aurora for the last few days and scaring the bajeebus out of the flatlanders. The old Jeep is basically a 6000 pound dragster at this point and I figure I’m turning close to 350 horses now… I’ve completely humiliated a 2009 Dodge Charger, a new Camaro, and a 5.0 Mustang since I got the truck down here – and several ricers – but those don’t really count when it takes more torque to tighten the lugnuts on the Jeep than your average Honda can produce…

I really need to get started on the suspension in the WarWagon. I’m still trying to figure out my ultimate plan – continue fixing up the “Cherk” or buying a mid-70’s CJ5/7 and transplanting everything into it.

I’m a big fan of the FSJ body style, but being able to take the top, doors, windshield, etc off of a CJ during the summer would be awesome.

Just a random WarWagon photo from here in Conifer.

Okay, I went back out and finished up the WarWagon…

It’s amazing how much better it runs with a suitable-sized carburetor on it… It’ll put you back in your seat through third now.

I still have a few tweaks to perform, but it’s driveable.

The heater for my garage arrived today; an 85,000 btu/hr propane powered commercial heater…

I should be able to work on the WarWagon now even in the cold – as soon as I figure out some way to get it from the side of the house to the garage.

See, I had plans to do all of this work I want to do *before* winter hit and I had already taken the old carb off of it and just have a plate sitting over the hole. So it won’t move under its own power right now.

The problem is that the carb that was on it had two different adapters to get it to mostly fit (the guy I bought it from did a lot of strange stuff to the truck) and they won’t go back on without copious amounts of RTV and several days (at the current 20 degrees) to cure enough to work. So I might have to move the 6000 pound monster manually…

I wonder if Zeze’s ’08 Liberty will move it…

The parts I ordered for the WarWagon ‘arrived’ yesterday…

I found the four foot by two foot box lying in the snow under the mailboxes at the end of the road leading to the house. Aparently actually driving the half-mile to the house was too much for FedEx. Then again, it is a dirt road and the truck might have gotten a bit of dirt on it…

So, yeah, FedAxe just shoved the 50 pound box out of the back of the truck at the end of the road – $600 worth of car parts just sitting there.

Fortunately I live up here where folks are of a slightly better cut of cloth and the box was still there 6 hours later.

But, to top off this story FedAxe still managed to mangle the carburetor that was in a box, inside of the box, wrapped in plastic, inside a form fitting plastic shipping mount. The G-forces applied to it were enough to shred the box it came in…

So now I have to decide if I want to send the carb back, where it will probably arrive as powder, or just attmpt to bend all of the linkages back in shape by hand and hope there’s nothing wrong with the internals…

Much to the chagrin of the universe in general – I’m still alive.

My leg is doing much better now and as soon as the infernal itching subsides I’ll be back to normal.

Over the weekend I took the upper half of the engine in the WarWagon apart in preparation for repair, someday when I have money. The fellow who owned the Jeep before me had switched out the stock Motorcraft 4300 4-barrel for a Motorcraft 2100 2-barrel – which is where things get weird…

See, the stock intake on the Jeep’s 360 was made for the 4300, which is a spread-bore design (think 2 2-barrel carbs of different sizes welded together in some unholy machine shop) and therefore will *only* fit the 4300 carb. So, the fellow who owned the Jeep before me used some “engineering” and put a 4-barrel spread-bore to square-bore adapter on the intake, then put a 4-barrel to 2-barrel adapter on top of that, then put a tired 2100D on top of that.

While this in and of itself is asking for trouble, he also used the wrong spread-bore adapter (one for a quadrajet), which in turn had the wrong gasket, and wound up covering half the induction area of the intake with gasket. This in turn caused all sorts of odd, uneven fuel-air mixtures in the cylinders.

But, the 360 is pretty bullet-proof and should be just fine once I put a new Edelbrock intake and 600 CFM 4-barrel on it. This will also have the effect of doubling my performance and dropping my gas mileage into the realm of “special use vehicle”.

Now all I need is the money to buy the parts…

Which segues nicely into part two of this post; how unbelievably expensive life is these days…

I remember back when I was a kid how my mother would buy $100 worth of groceries per month to feed four people… I spent $250 yesterday on about ten plastic bags of groceries, all of which were ingredients for prepared dinners and not box-meals. What makes this worse is, by my calculations this was roughly 7 meals… One *week* of food for four, $250…

Now, things around here are a bit more complex than my family was 30 years ago: Zeze is horribly picky and simply won’t eat what is prepared for dinner 99% of the time so the kitchen runs double duty every night – dinner is made and then Zeze fixes something. Max is about 1/2 as picky as Zeze and if the dinner contains more than black pepper in it (and that has to be pretty minor), he won’t eat it either. Meanwhile Kalira and I will eat anything that holds still long enough to be stuck with a fork… So most of the time food is made for four to keep the per-meal cost down but only 2.5 eat it…

Normally this means that there would be lunches taken care of from this, but Zeze again won’t eat it and therefore eats out at work every day and Max is about 50/50… Which is fine, it’s their money, but I wind up having to cover things that other folks should be at least helping out with because everyone is broke all the time.

So, in an attempt to allieviate this a bit I’ve instituted a new rule around here where every week a different person will buy groceries – hopefully this means that for at least 7 days out of every month folks will at least eat what is prepared.

Then there are the utility costs… When we moved in here the electric was about $80 a month, last month the electric bill was $180.

See, the supplemental heat here at Ravenwood is electric baseboard heat, which is crazy expensive to operate and therefore each room has a thermostat which ranges from “off” to something a bit warmer. The downside to this is that there is only one meter, so if someone turns on the heat somewhere and spins the meter off the wall, we all get to pay for it.

Well, two of us here are from cold climates; I’m from the Rockies and Kalira grew up in Canada so we just grab a blanket and keep on typing or if its realy cold we build a fire. Zeze and Max on the other hand are built from slightly less rugged stock and if it drops into the 40’s here they start to get edgy and reach for the mearest electrical warming device… Well twice now I’ve found the electric heat running and once it was the main bathroom (which only Max and I use) and that bathroom heater had been on all day when I discovered it.

The problem is that I have no way of isolating a particular (ab)user and saying “you’re a wimp, $100 of this electric bill is yours”, so there’s no direct correlation between running the heat and paying for it, which promotes running the heat and we all pay for it.

Then again, Max also runs his computers 24/7 and when he’s not using them they run “folding at home” which runs them at 100%, he also tends to leave his bedroom lights on all the time as well. But again, I have no way of quoting a hard “you used %X of the power and get to pay %X of the bill” so I just keep griping about the rising costs of running this place and hoping someone hears me.

And I’m not even going to get into gas costs… Zeze and I try to split the costs and each spend about $300 a month in gas to get back and forth to work.

But, as always it will work out. Though in this case it might not work out until my lease is up…

I got over to the DMV at precisely 7am this morning, went inside, got ticket number 101, and commenced waiting for a few minutes while they got things together.

Eventually I got to talk to one of the nice people there, showed her the emissions report, the registration, my driver’s license and my insurance card and told her that I needed plates for ye olde WarWagon.

After some discussion she allowed me to get collector plates for the Jeep, which cost five times the going rate for plates but don’t expire until 2013 and I’ll never have to go through the emissions hassle ever again… That air pump will be comming off ASAP! 🙂

But, the story doesnt end there… See, there are very few places left in this world that will actually take a check, and a few places wont take cash any more either, so I never carry my checkbook and rarely carry cash.

Unfortunately, everything dealing with the State is cash or check only, so I had to have Zeze bring my checkbook over to the DMV so that I could pay the $206.31 for my plates.

But, once that was done, I put the stickers on the plates and the plates on the WarWagon…

This is your notice. I can now drive the WarWagon anywhere I want and at any time!

What a battle… I think I’m going to take a few days off before starting on the next phase of WarWagon upgrades.

Charlie down at JeePerformance got the valve seals installed into the WarWagon today and I went down there at about 3:30 to pick it up and have another go at passing the emissions tests.

When I got there I paid the $500 for the valve seals, valve cover gaskets, new spark plugs, an oil change, new filter, and 5 hours of Charlie’s time… Again, not bad concidering Charlie is a specialist in Jeeps and has one of the best reputations in the Midwest for off-road performance work.

So I wander out to the Jeep, hop in, and fire it up – and am immediately met with a slight miss. I figure “new plugs” and let the engine get good and warm before passing judgement. Well, it continues to miss, just slightly, across the entire RPM range so I shut it down and walk back inside to get Charlie…

This is the best part of working with Charlie – he’s all about doing the right thing, whatever it takes, and as such he returns with me to the Jeep and we start figuring out what the new issue is. He pulls vacuum lines, fiddles with the air injector, runs the engine through the RPM range, and comes to the same conclusion I did – timing.

So Charlie pulls the line on the vacuum advance for the distributor and the whole distributor turns… The set bolt has worked loose and as all he did was pull the plug wires off the plugs and lay them over the radiator, he didn’t notice it.

He runs back into the shop and returns with a very cool digital timing light, an old bathmat to drape over the radiator, and pockets full of tools, and right there gives the Jeep a tuneup. While he’s at it he discovers that the vacuum advance was tied into a vacuum switch and is getting full vacuum all the time, so he re-routes that to manifold vacuum, fixes the switch, and plugs a leaky manifold vacuum tap too.

Total cost for this hour of work? Zero… But I’ll buy him a case of whatever he wants next time I’m down there. 😉

With the WarWagon now running the best it probably ever has I bounce over to the emissions station there on Federal, again. This time I get an entirely different lane with new folks who I have to once again train on the WarWagon.

The first lady I see walks around the Jeep, looks at the front wheels, then comes over to tell me “If your wheels touch the doghouse we’ll have to throw you out.”

I blink, “Doghouse?”

“The covers for the rollers where the wheels turn during the test.” she says.

“This is a 1976…”

“Oh!” she says, “Just an idle test then.” And I nod.

She has me shut down, pop the hood, and unlock the gas cap, and I dutifully do so and retreat to the customer holding area.

A few minutes go by as the fellow running the lane looks under the hood, in the fuel filler, and crawls around under the Jeep… This stops all progress on his lane and the lady in the holding area with me starts to get hot under the collar.

He motions me over. “What size engine is this?”

I respond, “It’s a 360… I think thats a 5.9 liter in newspeak.”

He moves his finger over the listings, “I can’t pass this. It needs a catalytic and a fuel restrictor.”

I blink, “What?”

“The book here says this car had an air pump, catalytic converter, and a fuel restrictor for unleaded only.”

I note where he’s looking in his book, “How heavy would you say this Jeep is?”

He looks at the Jeep, “3000 pounds?”

“Try 6000 pounds. You’re in the car section of your book – turn to the back and look under AMC truck.”

He does so, “The only thing listed here under 1976 is a 6.0 liter and a 6.6 liter.”

I roll my eyes, “Trust me, a 6.0 liter engine is also a 360… The other is a 401…”

He shrugs, “I’ll have to call this in…” I nod and return the the holding cell with the now livid lady.

While the nice lady foams at the mouth the guy calls in and they have him verify all sorts of stuff, and after 15 minutes or so he motions me outside again.

“You’re right, it’s a truck and didn’t have a catalytic or a fuel restrictor.”

I nod, “Just to give you a quick pointer; if you don’t see ‘unleaded only’ printed on the gas gauge, it didn’t have a catalytic converter or a fuel restrictor on it.”

I walk back to the holding pen and the lady in there is now approaching homicide as the guy running the lane leaves for a break. She goes out and raises holy hell and they bring this girl over to finish her Honda and do the WarWagon.

The girl gets the Honda out easy enough then stalls the Jeep twice trying to get it into the building… I walk over and explain ‘granny gears’ to her and how she should start off in second. After that she gets the Jeep into the stall just fine.

Now the fun really begins…

She can’t get the hood up and goes back inside the Jeep to look for a release. I wave and point to the front of the hood and make lifting motions. She returns to the hood and once she finds the latch can’t generate the lift required to get the hood up. So I ignore the “employees only” sign and assist her, then return the holding area.

With the hood up she gathers the RPM sensor and clips it onto a random wire under the hood, and walks around the Jeep twice looking for the tail pipe… I wave and point again, this time at the passenger rear wheel which leads her to the object she’s seeking.

Ok, all set, she climbs into the Jeep and fires it up… I note to myself that watching her jump when that big ‘ol 360 wakes up is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. The test wont start though – the monitor that I can just barely see keeps saying it’s waiting for idle RPM.

She tries twice then starts making preparations for the proximity tachometer… I step back out and mention, “I don’t think you’re clipped to a plug wire.”

She double checks and sure enough, she’s clipped to a vacuum line.

Ok, she tries it again and this time the sensor sees 700 RPM at idle and then the test tells her to speed up the engine – she does so and reaches a smooth 2600 RPM before the monitor tells her to once again drop the Jeep to idle… But it won’t go below about 1300 RPM.

She stops the test and comes into he holding cell to tell me that she’s never seen anything like that before and is going to call someone over to look at it.

I ask, “can I look at it?”

She says, “You’re not really supposed to be out here.” I nod, “True, how about I stand over here and just have you start it real quick so I can hear the engine?” She agrees and, yes, the cold idle is engaged.

I brazenly walk over to the Jeep, fiddle with the carb linkage while she reiterates that I’m not supposed to be there, and I discover the problem…

While she was looking for the hood release she had pulled the choke out…

I quickly explain what the choke does as I reach in the Jeep and push the knob back in, opening the choke and releasing the cold start on the carb, and the engine idles down immediately.

With this I return back to the holding cell as she re-runs the test and…

The WarWagon has passed Colorado emissions!

I will be puttng colector plates on it in the morning so that I never have to go through this again!

 As previously posted I had to put a “Thermactor” (smog pump) into the WarWagon to pass the emissions test…

Wednesday that was accomplished by the great guys at JeePerformance but due to to schedules beyond my control I wasn’t able to pick it up till yesterday. So Yesterday at noon I got over to JeePerformance, paid the very reasonable cost for having all that installation and plumbing done ($300 – parts and labor), and immediately drove over to the inspection station on Federal near the shop.

While sitting in line waiting to get ‘hosed’ I noticed that the WarWagon was running funny and in the shadow of the car next to me I could see the exhaust – which unless the vehicle is a diesel should never be visible.

I eventually get to the entrance of the place and the girl comes over to have me shut down and pop the hood, so I turn off the truck and hop out to go stand in the waiting area… A few minutes goes by before she finds me to have me open the hood – it doesnt have an internal hood release and that seems to catch everyone off guard – then I go stand in the waiting area again.

She verifies that there is in fact a working smog pump in the truck (with the aid of a step ladder) and climbs in to move it into the bay – as soon as the engine kicks over a huge blue cloud rolls out from under it…

Well, that fails the test right there.

I drive the Jeep back over to JeePerformance and explain what has happened. Charlie, the owner, starts going over it with a fine tooth comb while I try to express to him that I don’t think it was something he did. You can tell he’s used to bad clients who blame everything on his work… If he replaces a power steering belt and right afterwards the muffler falls off, it must have been his fault right?

Well, knowing a thing or three about cars I start working over the diagnosis with him. I’ve had a rather silly collection of pre-77 cars in the past and I’m fairly familiar with their quirks; the engine in the WarWagon is from 1976, a time when they had lead in the gas to act as a lubricant for things such as valve seals, seats, and guides – but that lead proved to be deadly so they removed it. Well, in all of the older cars I’ve owned I’ve eventually had to *something* with the valve train raging from simply replacing the valve seals to complete valve jobs. This is what I figure happened to the WarWagon – some/all of the valve seals picked now to fail and oil is passing into the combustion chamber by running down the valve stems, past the failed valve seals.

So, long story short, the WarWagon is still at JeePerformance, Charlie is doing whatever needs to be done, and I have 4 days left on the temp tags to get it past emissions.

Old cars can be so much fun. 😉

With the holidays I had to wait until yesterday for an apointment with my prefered garage to have the WarWagon checked out, and after a few hours of poking, proding, and dissassembly the old Jeep passed with flying colors. So, now that I figure it’s ok to spend silly amounts of money on the thing we drew up a battle plan / time line for the more complicated things and I trundled on my way.

The WarWagon is still on the 30 day temporary tags and I’ve put off having the emissions checked until I knew I would be building the Jeep up versus using it for parts on another Jeep – so after the clean bill of health from Charlie at JeePerformance I drove over to the emissions station down the street from the shop to see how bad thigs were going to be…

As Colorado is understandably anal about the air quality, getting these older full size vehicles to pass emissions usually requires some prior planning; a bottle or two of DryGas in the tank, fresh oil in the pan, a high-speed run down the highway to get the engine as hot as possible, and various levels of de-tuning are usually pre-requisites… I opted to skip all of that and just get an honest measurement of my carb-tuning prowess…

Gas	2500 rpm	idle	allowed
HC PPM	338.4	383	600
CO%	0.79	1.47	3.50
CO2%	8.4605	6.6898	N/A

So, wow, it passed the chemistry test with flying colors – too bad it failed the emissions test…

Yep. It took 4 employees and two different emissions manuals to determine that the WarWagon came with an air injection system originally and, due to this, they require it to still be under the hood – regardless of the fact that the original engine isn’t even under the hood.

So, ultimately, it matters not to the air folks that my Jeep is actually fairly eco-friendly as 30 year old trucks go, but what is more important is that there needs to be lots of extra hardware under the hood…

Yeah, I still get confused easy.

So now begins the process of either skirting the law by taking the WarWagon to a ‘mom & pop’ emissions test place where hopefully they won’t notice the missing hardware, or spending a lot of money on parts and labor for equipment I obviously don’t really need.

Well, I knew this was going to be expensive – I was just hoping to get that new Edelbrock intake and four barrel on the Jeep next versus a useless pump and a few miles of vacuum hose.

Oh well. 🙂

As of this morning I am the proud owner of a 1976 Jeep Cherokee Chief which I have affectionately named the “WarWagon” due to it’s appearance – which is something akin to a Road Warrior movie.

This is a 360 cubic inch V8 powered monster with about two feet of ground clearance and about two tons of curb weight. Over the next few months I will carefully craft this beast into what amounts to my “escape pod”.

My goal with this fine example of 30-year old off-road technology is to have a serious vehicle capable of going places mere mortals can’t – then taking lots of pictures of said places, or maybe camping there and hiking around a bit – or simply having an “out of town” adventure.

The down-side to owning what amounts to a full bodied tractor like this is many fold: It gets about 10 miles to the gallon, requires the best gas one can find to keep from self-destructing, and holds about 25 gallons of it… I put $50 in it this morning on empty and that got me a bit less than half a tank.

Eventually the WarWagon will have two 25 gallon tanks for a 500 mile range, plus two 5 gallon jerrycans for those weekend ‘outback’ trips.

Other planned modifications include an on board air system so that the tires can be deflated for better traction on boulders, then re-inflated for better handling on maintained roads. There will be a surplus BLM GPS unit in the vehicle, a full radio bay, about 5000 watts of lights, a 2500 watt inverter for things like camera chargers, a full roll cage, 5 point harnesses, a safari rack on the roof to hold two full spare wheels (and assorted coolers and whatnot), a 9000 pound winch, Iridium phone, and many other items designed to make this the ultimate “way the hell out there” vehicle.

Drive line wise the plan is to replace the 360 with a 401, then add an electronic ignition system, 4-core radiator, oil and transmission coolers, 24V battery system with an alternator from a Kenworth and a 24V to 12V solid state regulator and isolator system. The WarWagon already has a T-18 4 speed with the granny first gear, a Dana 20 transfer case with a 2.72:1 low range, Dana 44 differentials with 3.73:1 gears in front and back, and BF Goodrich 33″ ‘rough terrain’ tires.

All that up there, for the non-initiated, simply means it will *almost* climb the side of a building.

I have some body work to do… Much like the old Wagoneers I’ve had in the past, the WarWagon is no exception in needing the wheel wells replaced. This means buying another wire welder, a lot of sheet tin, and making new wheel tubs. I also need to replace the entire dash – the instrument panel works but the rest of the dash is trashed – I’ll probably craft a new dash by hand. I’ll also have to fab some seat mounts for the back so I can put two more bucket seats in it… These had a bench seat in them when they were made, but it’s missing in the WarWagon and buckets with 5-point harnesses are much, much better than a bench for what I plan to do. That and I plan to have more than one other passenger on occasion.

So, there you have it. This will probably be my new hobby for the foreseeable future and if you need me for something I’ll probably be in the garage tinkering with my personal Frankenstein’s monster. 🙂