Seeping Matter

Last Saturday me and my Z went to Roosevelt, Utah, to participate in the annual car show there, because that’s where my family lives, and my dad and my brother and I all thought it would be fun to put our cars in the show together.

It was fun, too, even if none of us won anything.  It was fun just being there with my dad and brother and having people walk by and wonder why I parked my 350Z there.

My 2003 Nissan 350Z, looking her best.

Here’s my car parked in between my brother’s Mustang (background) and my dad’s Econoline (not pictured).  I washed and vacuumed and scrubbed and detailed that car for about three hours before the show, and I must say it looked really fine.  Oddly, right after the show ended, it rained for about 30 seconds, just long enough to get my car dirty again.  Oh well.

My dads 1961 Ford Econoline van

Dad just started working on this 1961 Ford Econoline van. It is pretty sweet. I love the all white paint with the black accents and the very subtle gray pinstripe all around. He’s got a 302 in the doghouse inside the van and plans to redo the interior next.

The story on those wheels is pretty cool. He was looking for those exact wheels by American Racing, Torq Thrust IIs, and looked all over for the sizes he needed (two different sizes, front and rear). The fronts, 14x6s, were nearly impossible to find. Then he called one place who just happened to have two of them left, along with six of the size he needed for the rears. So he took two of each, and the dealer was thrilled to get rid of his two 14x6s and even himself out with four remaining of the other size.

My brothers 2009 Mustang GT, my 350Z, and my dads Econoline

In the foreground is my brother’s 2009 Ford Mustang GT. He’s added a Roush bodykit and Shelby Super Snake wheels and a lowered suspension so far. He wonders if it is weird to have Shelby wheels and a Roush body kit, but I think it is cool to make your own Mustang that has your favorite components from each builder.

Original Roosevelt City Fire Truck

My dad is mayor of Roosevelt, so I went with him to drive this to the show. If you lived more than a half mile from the fire department and had a fire back then, there was really no point in calling the fire department. It’s a neat truck though.

Early 30s Ford Coupe

I want to say this is a ’32 Ford but I’m really not sure. I do know it belongs to my dad’s friend Mike Mahoney, who has like 30 cars.

Another early 30s Ford Coupe

Another Ford coupe, ’31 or ’32 (I really should learn to tell the difference). This one belongs to another of my dad’s friends, Dennis Peterson. Dennis restored this car himself, repairing all the rust and pounding out all the dents and smoothing out the whole body by hand. He is incredibly talented. He also did all the body work on my dad’s Econoline and is currently working on another project which will be pretty awesome when it is done.

Early 70s Dodge Dart

When Dad and I brought the fire truck into the show we followed this ’70 or ’71 (again, can’t remember) Dodge Dart. I wondered to myself if it belonged to my cousin Joe Gardner. I was right. As long as I can remember Joe has restored a number of really cool Mopar cars – Chargers, Challengers, Darts, Superbees, etc.

Award-winner for Best of 80s and Newer

This mostly stock gray 2007 Mustang GT beat my brother’s 2009 Mustang GT somehow, which goes to show that the people who judge the shows don’t always know what they are doing. I mean, it’s a nice looking Mustang, but doesn’t have nearly as much done to it as my brother’s does.

White 3DCarbon Mustang GT

If any Mustang there was better than my brother’s, it was this white 3DCarbon Mustang pictured here.

Award-winning 30s Ford Coupe

This blue ’31 or ’32 Ford coupe won some award, maybe for best 30′s car? Or most unique? Can’t remember. Take a look at this engine though, for a clue as to why:

Now that is a sweet engine.

Flathead Offenhauser

The roadster carrying this sweet litttle Offy won Best In-Progress Car. Which seems kinda like a weird award, since pretty much all the cars there would be considered “in-progress.”

Beautiful 50s Chevy

This is a beautiful car. Look carefully and you can see the well-done ghosted flames along the side. It won Best 50s Car and, since the owner drove it all the way from Riverside, California, it also won an award for furthest distance traveled to attend the show.

Best Of Show 2010 - 1937 Ford Coupe

This 1937 Ford Coupe from Vernal, Utah won Best Of Show and definitely deserved it. Which is much better than the week before, at another car show in Vernal, where this car was beaten for Best Of Show by a bone-stock straight-off-the-showroom-floor 2010 Camaro. This car is a beautiful work of art from every angle and no detail is left undone.

Just check out the beautifully done interior:

1937 Ford Coupe custom interior

1931 Ford Vicky

This beautiful chopped and dropped ’31 Ford Vicky had to sit next to the ’37 Ford above, so it had a rough go. It definitely deserved to win something, so I’m glad my dad chose to give it the Mayor’s Choice award.

As long as I’m doing the post of ten motorcycles I need to be happy, I figure I might as well round that out and post ten cars I need to be happy also. Same situation applies: I can’t definitively say that having these cars will make me happy, but I obviously can’t be happy without them. Necessary but perhaps not sufficient, in other words.

Luckily for me, I already have one of them.

Nissan 350Z (source: seriouswheels.com)

1st Generation COPO Camaro (source: arkansascamaro.com)
This is a Yenko, but I'd also take a Dana, Nickey, or Baldwin Motion

Corvette Z06 (source: wallpaperstock.net)

Lotus Exige (source: nicewallpapers.info)

Ferrari 458 Italia (source: textually.org)

Aston Martin V12 Vantage (source: carclub.ru)

RUF RT12 (source: carsoftheworld.eu)

Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 (source: netcarshow.com)

Ferrari FXX (source: seriouswheels.com)

McLaren F1 LM (source: protopage.com)

I’ve been wondering if the VDC (essentially traction control) on my Z works.  So, since the roads are nice and wet today, I thought I’d test this by turning it off, then putting the hammer down to see what happens.

Well, I’m happy to say it works, really quite well.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Last week we went racing go-karts for work, because, you know, go-kart racing is what makes great software teams great.

We went to FastKarts in Salt Lake City.  Well, West Valley, actually.  When we got there, we sprinted inside the building as fast as possible, because we were in West Valley and didn’t want to get mugged, or killed in a drive-by shooting, or something.  Once we got inside, there it was, hanging from the ceiling:  A sweet 250cc liquid-cooled race-ready shifter kart.  Something that looked like this.  I couldn’t wait to get in.

Race-ready shifter kart. Image courtesy autoblog.com.

Oddly, this was not the kind of kart we were allowed to drive.  Instead, we were allowed to race some little 5 hp jobs.  They’ll do maybe 40 mph if you have enough of a run, but they aren’t exactly fast.

Still, it was a dang good time.  More than that, in fact.  I have wanted to race go-karts for years, so this was literally a dream come true for me.

Some of the rules that I got a kick out of:

• No Bumping. Surely you cannot expect 15 people to hop into a racing kart, even a 5 hp racing kart, for the first time, tell them to race each other, and not have anyone bump into anyone else.  I tried really hard not to hit people, but sometimes I just could not help it.
• Watch for the caution lights. When I am racing down the straightaway trying to outbrake someone into the corner, the last thing on my mind is to look to see if the caution lights are flashing.

Watching the enforcement of these rules was an interesting study in human behavior.  Here you have a bunch of skilled professionals from Microsoft reserving the kart racing facility for 90 minutes.  Running the facility are, um, people with perhaps less education, shall I say.  They sure seemed to enjoy the power trip every time someone would break the rules and they had an opportunity to really yell at the highly skilled white-collar professionals and put us in our place.  Surely they don’t realize how transparent this is.

Despite this it was great fun.  In my first race, I started somewhere around tenth or twelfth.  I got a good jump on everyone when the green flag waved, though, and I passed two cars before the first turn.  By the end of the 20 minute race I had passed all but two people.

Obviously, my excellent racing skill that was manifesting itself was due to countless hours of playing Project Gotham and Forza Motorsport, as well as years and years of detailed study of racing events both live and televised.  I did not have the fastest time, but obviously that was because I was coming through traffic the entire race.

Obviously.

So when it came to my second race, I didn’t worry much about getting the same kart.  They are all pretty much the same anyway.  For some reason, nobody wanted to be in the first kart, so I took that one.  Trying to lap the field would prove to be a good challenge.

At the start I totally set everyone up by bunching them up at the final corner, then speeding away to take the green flag with a clear lead.  This lasted about 1 lap, when people started passing me.

I was simply not going as fast as before.  There wasn’t much I could do about it.  I spent the rest of the race working on my lines, trying to carry more speed through corners and working on higher exit speeds.  This was great fun, but there wasn’t much I could do to keep people from passing.  I ended up about fifth or so.

When I got out of the kart, they showed the fastest lap times.  My lap times were about 2 seconds per lap slower than they had been before.

Obviously, my prior stellar performance pretty much had everything to do with the kart and nothing to do with me.

Still, it was great, fantastic fun.  My arms pumped up, and my mouth was dry from improper mouth-breathing, and I had bruises on my shoulders and ribs where the four-point harness had pulled because I cinched it so tight.

And I haven’t been able to stop thinking of it since.

See, I have this dream of my life as a young, retired multi-millionaire.  In this dream I have a nice sized chunk of land.  And on that land is a well-maintained, awesome shifter kart track.  And next to that track is a little shop where I build and tune shifter karts, just because I can.

And since we went racing for work, this dream has made a major resurgence into my consciousness.  Someday…

Front end alignment is a well-documented problem with 2003 Nissan 350Zs; I knew this when I bought my Z.  This can be slightly exacerbated when you have a lowered suspension, like my Z has.  I knew this too.

I have been intending to have an alignment done for months.  Really.

Last Tuesday I was driving home from work at, uh, 66 miles per hour in that level of traffic that is just before it gets so heavy that it starts to back up.  I had been noticing this slight vibration when driving over the past couple of days, and had been thinking, “I’m going to need to get that looked at pretty soon here.”  I was coming through the chute into East Bay in Provo and this vibration started getting quite a bit worse.  And worse.  And worse.  I had this feeling, “Maybe I’ll just pull off here in East Bay and take it to the Les Schwab dealer to have them take a look at it.”

So I started slowing down and pulling over into the exit lane.  I kinda figured the vibration would mellow out as I slowed down, but it just kept getting worse even as I brought it down below 30 and even 20 miles per hour.

Having already taken the off-ramp and turned onto University Parkway, I felt a pretty solid thump as I crossed a tar strip and decided to just pull over and take a quick look.  When I got out, I immediately noticed my driver’s side front tire was completely flat.

My Z has 19″ custom wheels so I really didn’t want to drive on the rims, even just the ½ mile down to the tire dealer.  Changing the tire was a brutal ordeal, with me having had surgery on my right knee 2 months ago and surgery on my left knee less than two weeks ago.

When I pulled the wheel off, I saw the problem:  Against the inside edge along the rolling surface of the tire, a two-inch-wide wear strip had worn right through the tire and threads around the entire circumference of the tire.  There were several large holes, a half inch wide and up to three or four inches long, along the innermost edge of the tire.

Apparently, that is a large enough hole for the air to escape.

I put the spare on, tried to cram the wheel in the back with the subwoofer box (fail), and set out down the road toward the tire dealer.  I hadn’t gone 100 yards when I heard a loud BOOOOM! in the front right corner.  I pulled over again and took a look:  The passenger side front tire had gone flat also.  This one didn’t go flat gradually, though, like the driver’s side tire, but was a sudden burst.

I don’t carry two spares so I didn’t have much choice other than to limp in to the tire dealer on the flat front.  The new 235/35ZR19 Toyo Proxes 4s will be installed tomorrow, only 220 bones apiece.

Novell Provo is right there in East Bay so I called one of my old Novell buddies who was still at work to give me a ride home.  I’ve been driving the old Grand Prix in the meantime.

I dread to think what might have happened if that right front tire had blown out like that while I was still going 80-er, 66 on the freeway.  With the traffic density I almost certainly would have wrecked into someone else, like the big semi that was riding along my right side at the time.  I’m really grateful I listened to that prompting to slow down and pull off the freeway when I did.  I’m convinced that the Holy Ghost was whispering that thought into my mind to keep me from becoming seriously injured.

Which is how I know that it is not a sin to speed.  Since I was exceeding the posted limit at the time (by one mile per hour), if it were truly a sin there is no way I could have heard that still small voice.

Sweet.

(Warning:  I’ve realized that when I wrote about that Ferrari before, I felt no guilt because it was not my Ferrari.  Now, even though a 350Z is no Ferrari, I feel guilt writing about it because it is mine.  So here’s the deal:  I’m going to write about my 350Z, because this is my blog and I want to.  I’m not boasting about it.  Okay, maybe I am.  I don’t care.  If you don’t like it, don’t read it.)

I said this already, but Project CRX is dead.  Or at least very, very dormant.

I had a CRX before.  I loved it.  Nobody else loved it but me.  The faded, chipping paint with the peeling clearcoat.  The black body with the contrasting white driver’s side door.  The rust spots that marred every body panel, discriminating against none.  The threadbare, torn seats and carpet.  The 200,000+ miles.  Yes, it was a car only it’s owner could love.

One of the best things about my 350Z is that it reminds me of my old CRX.  Or rather, what my old CRX would have been like if it had good paint, no rust, matching body panels, nice interior, and 300 horsepower.  Anyway, now that I have this 350Z, my yearning for a CRX has suddenly disappeared.

Cars are like people:  You love them more when you serve them.  This is why project cars are dangerous.  But I’m a man in touch with my inner feelings, and I’m not afraid to love my car.  So I’ve been doing some work to fix a few minor things here and there.  I’ve put an amplifier and subwoofer in to fix the pathetic lack of bass.  I bought an Escort Passport 8500 x50 and installed it discretely by hiding most of the wiring behind the dash and tapping directly into the stereo wiring for power.  I downloaded PDF copies of the stereo owner’s manual and the 350Z owner’s manual because the car came with neither.  I bought a brand new remote on the Internet to arm and disarm the security system that came with it.  I found an excellent site to help me with my project quest.

But now I have a problem.  My car came with some really sweet 19″ Carré CS-2 wheels, but two of the wheels are missing center caps.  I’ve been looking around trying to figure out where I can get some, but I’m not finding any good leads.  I finally went to a Les Schwab dealer nearby who does not sell them either, but gave me a phone number of a place that carries them.  I contacted this dealer with high hopes, but they were dashed.  Carré is out of business.  He has no extra wheel caps and cannot get them.

So now it is up to you, dear readers.  Find me my two Carré wheel caps.  If you help me, I will reward you greatly by mentioning your name on my blog, which is sure to bring you fame, fortune, and an abundance of babes.

I wrapped up phase two of the second fuel mileage experiment last Friday, anticipating a trip to Roosevelt where I would have to fill with gas and forget the receipt (which I did).  Luckily I ended the experiment ahead of time.  Here’s the results:

• Miles driven:  463
• Fuel used:  17.863
• Average MPG:  25.92

This seemed pretty much the same as the fall-off I’d seen in fuel efficiency the last time I did the experiment, so I looked into it a bit further.  Actually it is amazingly similar.

A funny thing (only sort-of related, but worth discussing):  After I got my 350Z, my director decided to show me up by buying a brand new 370Z.  He even let me drive it, and it is definitely a better car.  But karma is real, and he got his first speeding ticket in his new 370Z only a few days after he bought it.

Anyway, he said that he really wasn’t going that much faster than anyone else on the road, but he was singled out because of his car.  It appears that having a sports car will make you more inclined to get a ticket, not only because it is so easy to speed, but also because our policeman friends are more likely to pull you over in a sports car.  It isn’t that they are discriminating against sports cars so much as that they are choosing to enforce the laws more stringently against sports cars simply because they are sports cars.

Anyway, it appears that in a sad twist of fate, there’s an irony of sports car ownership, which is that I actually have to drive SLOWER than the other people in order to avoid getting ticketed, even though that lifted 4×4 that just blew by me at 85 is definitely much more poorly equipped to negotiate the freeway at those speeds than I am in my 350Z.

No matter.  It’s still a blast to drive it.

Just wrapped up week one today.  Week one was (trying to) drive the normal speed limit everywhere I went.  Here’s the results:

• Miles driven:  453
• Fuel used:  16.62 gallons
• Average MPG:  27.25

Like I expected, not as good as my Grand Prix.  But much better than I thought.  27.25 is not too bad for a 3.5L V6 tuned for performance.

Stay tuned for the results of week two, which is driving like a normal person, i.e. 70-ish in a 65 on the freeway, not 65, etc.

I have a new car so I guess it is time to do the fuel mileage experiment again.  I filled up with gas this morning on my way to work so today is a good day to begin.  I’m going to try to only go the speed limit for a whole week.  I’m not sure if I can do it, but I will try.  Next week I will drive like a normal person.

Mileage to begin:  74055.

It is probably worth noting that I don’t expect the mileage to be as good as in my other car, the 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix.  Mostly what we’re trying to figure out is how much more it costs to drive like a normal person versus driving conservatively everywhere.  And also, if I can even stand to do it.

Stay tuned.

Well, nobody else would save me from myself by buying out from under me, so I had no choice but to buy it myself:

My Sweet New Ride — 2003 Nissan 350Z

I’ve wanted one of these since they first came out.  And, I always wanted (and still want) a 300ZX before these.  When I saw this one for sale on Autotrader for the price it was at, it was more than I could resist.

I drove this about 10 days ago for a few minutes, and then again last week.  I was a nervous wreck for most of last weekend and earlier this week.  Responsible Me and Fun Me were arguing back and forth in my head non-stop and it made it really hard for me to concentrate at work or be a happy daddy at home.

Finally, my friend Andy at work told me what he said was the most important lesson he had learned on finances, when he was in first grade.  The lesson in a nutshell is:  There’s no point in saving your money, so you might as well blow it.

Responsible Me and Fun Me wrote an e-mail to Amber requesting her input.  Responsible Me outlined several key reasons why I should not get the car.  I have to hand it to Fun Me.  He was pretty honest about his reasons.  He told her simply, “I want it.”  That was the best reason he could think of to get it.

I have the world’s coolest wife.  She said, “Honey, either way is fine with me.  You know whether we can afford it.  If you want it, go ahead and get it.”

Well, Fun Me eventually won.

The other day as I was leaving work for the day, I was riding down the elevator when Responsible Me started piping up again.  ”Don’t you think you might have made a mistake?” he said.  ”Don’t you think you should have used that money for something else?”

I pondered this for a bit as I walked outside.  But then I came within eyesight of my new car.  I couldn’t help but smile as I walked toward this sweet machine that now belongs to me.

Nah.  No mistake.

(Oh, by the way:  Project CRX is dead.)