nick's site

4th gear is almost 1:1 and the speedometer lines up with the tachometer

100,000 miles.

greg rode shotgun last saturday as a few drove around washtenaw county.  he managed some nifty shots of my car.  the rest of the set can be found over here…

is it possible to buy a car stereo these days where the display is large enough to read it? where the display isn’t overgrown with bouncy graphics and other annoying useless icons?

volume/tone controls. track/tuning controls. input/source controls. 6 preset buttons along the bottom. a display which can concurrently show track time (or frequency,) earth time, track number. high quality RCA-preouts, the more the better. aux input.

i wish the consumer electronics industry would standardize portable-player connectors and command/control signaling.

nothing is wrong with what i have, but trolling around lead to discovering some bullshit available for us.

it wasn’t the dreamcruse per-say, but the dreamcruise afterbirth. i took more pictures., they’re below the “more/section” as to not take up page space. people on dialup should cry. i also wrote my first photoshop action to save images for the web, but my way. 😈
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here’s some shots i snapped last night while waiting for ‘scripts at wallgreens. my lens doesn’t focus that fast, i’m new to panning, and i’m horrible about holding the camera still after 6 cups of coffee. 😆 some turned out ok though.

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with help and tools from holidave, and a garage, experience, and patience from greg, we did some work to my car this weekend. started out as a saturday event, turned into a weekend event. however, we got many things done:

• lumpy cam is in
• cam gear is in
• head is rebuilt
• long tube header is in
• fluids are new
• 2 motor mounts replaced
• associated timing stuff is replaced

things i learned:

1. 2nd gen neons are much better built than 1st gen neons, in terms of powertrain reinforcement
2. there is no way to get a 1/2″ drive breaker bar on the PS and A/C drive belt tensioner. we used a crowbar to push down on it from the top
3. with the exhaust and “meltables” moved or bent out of the way, it’s not easy to put the alternator belt back on
4. you can scare children when you start an open-header neon. 😆 (quicktime req’d)
5. the header will probably melt the coolant overflow bottle. we relocated mine to the parts box in the trunk and shoved the overflow hose into a 20oz mt dew bottle in the fender until i find a permanent replacement

the pictures start on page 7. i will take more “finished” pictures once it’s all done.

MANY THANKS TO HOLIDAVE, GREG, and DCX for their help and support

for the last two years or so, most of my driving is city. last year, i scored a computer, making my car more fun to drive and enticing to lay into the throttle a bit more. my mileage has typically been about 25mpg. all highway puts me around 33mpg.

i wanted to see how high i can get mileage in my 02 neon, especially with how high gas prices have become.

• shift below 2500rpm.
• decelerate in gear downhill and to red lights. neons cut fuel on deceleration. no fuel is better than a little fuel for idle

i haven’t changed my freeway driving habits.

result: 30mpg. yay!

what a week for hardware carnage:

• oil seepage from the back of the head, near the headgasket (loose headbolts or a headgasket, a compression test will tell for sure)
• right front adjustable strut, $300 new. i blame the 696w->telegraph/lodge/northwestern exit warzone/fiasco
• motherboard’s dead: ALL 5v+ atx connectors are melted.
  

  server is acting up at home. segfaults galore. machine won’t post after a while, so i began to rip it apart and ‘transition’ it to older backup hardware and discover the connector failure. everything is up and running on the old hardware

  ED, server has been up longer now than all night:

  nick@server:~$ uptime
  03:23:50 up 41 min, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00

• atx power supply dead (see above)
• digital camera on the plink.
  

  in an attempt to photograph the carnage above, the camera takes pictures like this (it’s a keyboard)

• xbox: no video.
  ED: Xbox is fine, a disconnected cable that I didn’t see.

👿
either way, it’s just stuff, frustrating that it all died at once.

i got another toy.. a deal i couldn’t pass up, a fast fabs long tube header. it should be here some time soon, then off to the coatings shop for a ceramic coating. i’ll spend an afternoon at the muffler shop extending my O2 wires while they install it, shift the cat down, and trim some stuff out of the midsection to make room for the 4-ft long header.

with the cam/gear and this header, it should be a really fun daily driver! 😈

this is the week that neon junkies from around north america (canada too) congregate in detroit for the annual Neon 2005 event.

today’s event was the car show, held at the walter p chrysler museum. my plans for car-show prepping yesterday didn’t happen, too many other things going on. so i showed my car, dirty. it still looked like i lived in it. i scored a 3rd place 2nd gen stock class trophy. this included a year’s worth of webhosting from wild rose web hosting. with the few cars in the class, it might as well have been a participant trophy.

drag-racing day is tomorrow, i won’t make that. i should be able to show up for part of the bbq and bowling on friday. saturday’s track day. if we’re not house hunting, i’ll attend that.