build diary

April 26, 2006:
The long tow to Texas.
From this vista on Red Mountain pass, I went to the flat scrublands of Texas and New Mexico. Noontime temperatures ranged from 97F to 34F on the way home!
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At the Southwest Se7ens Festival.
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A wide range of cars showed up at the festival.
From left, we have a Caterham, Birkin, Ultralite, some weird orange car, BMW-powered Locost and there's even a Stalker hiding somewhere else.
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Mark Rivera assembles his car at the event.
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Mark's car has a potent turbo Miata engine underhood.
It's a quick little thing. Well, not that little.
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Mark decided to make his own fenders from steel.
They're not too light, but they're solid and look kinda cool.
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Chris' matt black bike-engined car.
This thing is a head-turner.
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The exhaust on Chris's car.
The stainless surround and polished pipes against the matt black paint really stand out.
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Nicely integrated bike instruments on Chris' car.
Note the kart wheel to match the (unseen) kart seats.
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This Birkin has a very well-made wooden dash.
It might not be as sexy as carbon fibre but it's a good material for a little sports car.
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Jon built this nose cone - and all the rest of his bodywork - from scratch.
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Four very different Locosts together.
Mine's hiding in the back because that's where the photographer wanted it.
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A photo session for Kit Car.
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Pretty car.
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A tired tire.
It was worked pretty hard during the "skidpad" session as you can see from the wear, but it also seems to have developed a leak that was later traced to a nail.
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April 27, 2006:
Video update.
Some video and audio of the Car and Driver sessions have been added to the video page.
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Larry Webster, hard at work.
This is one of a bunch of videos I've just added from the Car and Driver test sessions, including some audio files.
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May 1, 2006:
I found out last Thursday that the local Corvette club was holding an autocross.
The first time I took the Seven on an autox course was with this group, almost exactly a year ago. Since then I've done a little work and managed to get a little faster. I also pulled the nail out of the rear tire so it holds air now.

My first run was quick but messy and I proceeded to take big chunks of time out on every following one. I'd been afraid the course would favour 'Vettes as it had a couple of significant straights but it turned out that this wasn't a worry. My first run was 50.060 seconds. My fastest was a 46.620. The fastest Corvette? 51.450. Those straights got me up to 60 mph which is still in my full acceleration range. Now, if we'd been running up to 90 mph it would have been a different story! And a pretty odd autocross. It was a real pleasure running with the club. Despite my being an interloper - one who was rude enough to completely obliterate his hosts - they were very welcoming and ran a smooth event. It's a good group to run with and they now restrict "metal" cars to keep the numbers down. As it turned out, that wasn't a problem as there were only a dozen Corvettes and myself. The cornering ability of the Seven is what really impressed them while I got all excited by the noise of the Z-06 and C6 cars. Video of the fastest run is now online.

The car ran pretty well. I loaded my "high altitude" settings back into the ECU but the Texas gas in the tank still meant I had to pull out a bunch of fuel. Once I burn it off (sigh) I'll have to go back to my crappy Colorado gas setup.
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May 2, 2006:
One of these things is not like the others.
The Seven goes to hang out with the big engine, big tire boys at a Corvette autocross. It's like a "where's Waldo?" puzzle. Hint, look for orange.
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Two distinctly different ways of going fast.
A new C-6 Corvette and the Seven.
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May 8, 2006:
When I was down in Texas, my car was misbehaving.
It was showing signs of a vacuum leak and more embarassingly, it would blow big clouds of smoke when I left from a stop. It was really looking like a car with no valve seals. But I knew that couldn't be it because it had been fine. Given what I was seeing on the O2 sensor, I spent my time trying to fix it with tuning.

Until I got back up to Colorado. Despite tweaking my fuel map to sort out the high-power gasoline, I still had the big cloud of smoke. When pulling the filter off (again) to check to see if there was a problem with the butterfly synchronisation, I noticed that the aft throttles were pretty oily. They get the PCV line so there's always going to be some, but this seemed excessive. I tried removing the line from the PCV valve and boom! No more vacuum leak and no more smoke. There's always going to be some air coming in through a PCV at idle but this certainly indicated a problem. I pulled the valve out and it was hollow! I can't explain that one. Maybe the vibration of the trip to Texas caused the end of the possibly 16-year-old valve to break off. Despite disassembling the baffles in the valve cover, I couldn't find the missing pieces. Reassembling with a good valve showed that all my problems were solved. Sigh. It's always a bit of a hassle when something like this happens, but it's really embarrassing when it happens during a test. The bad idle that Larry commented on wasn't my fault at all and it was just poor timing. Oh well, I guess there's always some sort of regret.
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My hollow PCV valve on the left, a good one on the right.
How did this happen?
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