In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :
I'll have to remember to lock the hubs on the truck when I get there!
From your in car video it looks like a wild time. If I had planned a little better I would have had time to get a couple new tires for the RV and seen about coming in on Friday instead of having to get up at 3am.
In reply to wae :
During the morning test laps (aka "seeing if it's too muddy to be passable while waiting for the safety steward to show up so we can start the event) I was told that I was faster than the side by side race the weekend before, when it was dry. The metrics data got garbled, but it did show that I was hitting 60 before the tabletop jump. That I didn't realize was a jump until the first time I hit it.
And that is why there was a mandatory stop between laps 
The event was run as, go out and do three runs and come in. There's really no room to have a traditional grid, so this made for the best run processing.
In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :
Ooh. I'm suddenly frightened for my motor mounts....
In reply to wae :
You'll be fine... It's really REALLY smooth. Can get all kinds of sideways and crossed up without having to worry about hitting a bump that will break something.
We were running the start as right before the tabletop, and the finish was before the exit ramp, which is right at the start of the big downhill sweeper where I was shifting to 3rd in the morning fun runs. (As in, I was shifting to 3rd near the eventual finish line, and then accelerating) Err, not fun runs, it was testing. yes, that's it, testing...
The interior door handle linkage is reattached so at least the car is now legal. USPS also thinks that my helmet will be here today, so that will take care of that.
Since I have the old Formica panel that I was using to cover the door off anyway, let's put the real door panels back on. Before I do that, though, I'd like to have the window guide fixed up. I don't think this is actually going to work, but I put a couple bits of steel in there for reinforcement along with some JB Weld. I have a good passenger one here somewhere so that will go in. On Thursday I should have some new clips for the door panel - all the original ones are broken or missing.
The wiring for the temp gauge is beyond repair, so that's going to have to be replaced. Rather than get another sender for the Glowshift gauge, I'm going to see about getting the spare analog one from the RV and try hooking that up. I also need to get the metal tubing for the oil pressure gauge.
The other thing I worked on was the vacuum line - just need to pick up some 5/16th line and get it in place to connect the PCV to the catch can and the can to the intake manifold.
That window guide should hold together for a while like that. Before folks where 3d printing them that's how they where fixed.
Yay!
Couldn't leave well enough alone.... In trying to troubleshoot the non functional speedometer, I went to pull the vss. Apparently it's a common thing that the gear.... swells? And of course in trying to remove it, it slid down and pulled an Ever Given in the Suez Canal that is the transmission case.
I should be able to extract it but it is requiring an excessive amount of fiddling.
As it turns out, it didn't take much more fiddling. The VSS is back in and it has power and ground. I don't have a scope to check the signal, but the wiring looks to be intact. Hopefully reflowing the solder on the cluster will square that away.
I was able to take a basically ready to go car and completely disable it, though. After draining the oil, I pulled the sandwich adapter on the filter and removed the old oil pressure sender. I think this is why it was somewhat intermittent:
I'm not sure what I did there. Because I was tired and not paying attention, I put the compression sleeve on the new oil pressure gauge line backwards so I mangled the threads on the adapter. Once I track down a replacement I can get the copper hard line attached to the sandwich adapter, reinstall the adapter, put a filter on, put the boost piping back on, and fill it with fresh oil. Then the hard line will need a hole drilled and grommetted and the gauge needs to be wired up.
For coolant temp, the new sender is in place and all the existing wiring should work.
While the car was up in the air I gave it a good looking-over and everything is looking pretty good.
If the vss is still out, look at the plastic trans side gear. They fall off. Ive had it happen in two different neon trans now. Note, this is forst gen. Dunno if you're running a second gen or not, and know Jack about them.
In reply to Dusterbd13-michael (Forum Supporter) :
Yeah, I'm running a regular 1gn trans. The whole reason I wanted to pull the vss was to check that ring, actually. A side effect of the vss gear going sideways (literally) on me was that I had plenty of access to check and it's still in place. When I put the OBX LSD in back in nineteen dickity two or whenever it was, I put a new ring on the diff so I wasn't 100% confident in my ability to secure it properly.
Electrical seems more likely, though, because it worked, then it sort of worked, then it didn't work, then it worked again, and then it stopped working. Also my fuel gauge is useless (which I think I caused when I replaced the pump) and the tach bounces around like it's on amphetamines. Plus, usually once the ring goes, it's just gone and doesn't come back, but I figured it would be simple enough to check. Ha!
Wrapping up for the day since I have a miniature catapult to build tonight. Oil's drained, filter's on, boost pipes re-attached. I put a new connector on the wiring for the oil temp gauge since I broke the old one. The copper hardline for the oil pressure gauge is run through a grommet in the firewall and ziptied on the engine side. Still need to secure it under the dash as well as cut it to fit.
Since the display for the oil temp gauge was broken, I'm going to try to use the old water temp gauge. I think they use the same sender parameters, but if not it's not a big deal. The main stopping point that I reached was that the lighting wiring for the new gauges needs to have some sort of connector and I don't really want to use the big weather pack ones. I don't have anything else floating around here so I'm going to need to go get something. Although I did just have the idea to just wire both gauges to a single connector since it's just the lighting.... Maybe I'll do that.
...and event is postponed.
wae said:...and event is postponed.
Rain?
eastsideTim said:wae said:...and event is postponed.
Rain?
Apparently there's a full day of it in the forecast
Eek, should I check and see if the scrapper can take the truck on Saturday morning?
In reply to eastsideTim :
I'm game!
Since I have everything apart and there are a million little things that the car needs, I decided that the deck chairs really needed to be rearranged! I'm putting in two new cheap gauges - one for water temp and one for oil pressure. They're analog and backlit with a regular bulb:
I happen to have a bunch of LEDs that are prewired with resistors. So now the gauge can look like:
I tried a bunch of colors but finally settled on the white.
Since I had the cluster out to reflow the solder joints anyway, I am also going to replace the illumination bulbs with white LEDs in that as well.
That's a lot of work for a car I don't really drive at night, but if this works out I can leverage this experience for the truck.
Over lunch today I'm going to try to get the cluster and gauges installed, put some oil in the car, and see if I fixed anything. Then I may try to get the driver door back together.
It was way more annoying than it had any right to be, but gauges are installed.
Speedometer still doesn't work though. Hrm.
Items remaining on The List (although, since there's no race Saturday, it's not that pressing):
Late last night I decided to use the non-functioning speedometer as an excuse to buy a cheap USB 8-channel oscilloscope off of Amazon. I have absolutely no idea how to actually use a tool like that, but I'm sure it can make me super dangerous.
In reply to wae :
Tools are good karma!
I have a $200 2-channel Pico scope. And $500 in test leads and clamps and stuff, it's all the accessories that get ya
One of these days I'll get around to finding out why my tach goes wiggy over 6000rpm, if it's the tach or the signal generation device or the OE tach or something.
It's kind of weird to have the door close and make a sort of solid "thunk" noise instead of "clang, rattle rattle rattle".
Some of that interior looks familiar!
In reply to Dusterbd13-michael (Forum Supporter) :
Yeah, you just have to close your eyes and think way way way back! It's taken me way too long to get around to this.
Funny story... I had a couple more minutes so I went ahead to start on putting the skin back on the passenger door. A while back I was in a junkyard that had a 2-door Neon and the passenger side window guide was intact so I snagged it since both of mine were broken. I never did find a good one for the driver's side, but at least I could get the passenger one fixed. When I stuck my head in there, though, imagine my surprise when I found an absolutely pristine and intact guide already on the car! I'm honestly not sure why I didn't bolt it up in the first place, but I now have two windows that roll up and down properly and don't bang around!
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