Back to Road America in April

Thanks to Jeremy's friend Eric Flood for taking these pictures!  He got some great sequences and some other good shots too.  

We did do something besides suspension work

So the SC400 did need a little more work then just a suspension rebuilding.  We were looking for weight savings wherever we could.  In doing some research via the Lextreme forums, I found some guys had success with EGR block off plates.  If we were lucky we might even pick up some midrange power, but as tired as our engine is, I doubt we did.  But it did remove a few pounds from the front of the car, which we desperately needed, and still to find more of.

Much cleaner.  And now we could see how much of rat's nest there was down in the valley.  Gross.  Thanks shopvac, for taking care of that.

And in the sake of weight, Soren took to the wiring harness.  Luxobarges have so many electronics, much of which we already removed.  Unfortunately he also snipped the rear O2 sensors, and a couple wheel speed sensors too.  Luckily they weren't too hard to splice back in.  

 And it was time for brake paint.  We had decided on a new paint scheme this winter too, and we thought some nice 80's Porsche mint green painted calipers would look nice.  Wow are they brighter then we thought.

Some new rotors courtesy of our friends at Frozen Rotors round out the look up front.

And out back.

So pretty without tons of brake dust.  We also replaced some piston seals to rebuild the rear calipers.

And here we started work on removing the old stickers in preparation for the new design.

And we didn't get it done in time for Road America in April.  So we rattle canned it with a rough estimation of what it might look like when we get to it.

And thanks to our friend Dan, we got to play around and weigh the car, in an attempt to see if we had roughly the right springs in the car.  Under 3000lbs isn't bad if you consider where the car started!

Parts get all cleaned up!

Back for another edition.  With essentially all of the suspension out of the car at this point, we now had surprisingly good access to the bolts for the catalysts.  We had been wanting to take a look at it, and make sure they hadn't gotten melted.  After reading on the Lextreme.com forums that with a stock motor, you were actually better off having the catalysts, we just wanted to check their condition, and put them back in.  At the same time, we welded on a new flange for the rest of the exhaust, and went back to 2.5" tubing, rather then 3.0".

At this point my dad had brought back some refreshed, repainted parts and we began assembling the replacement bushings.

Everything looks so much nicer with a fresh coat of paint.  Should be nicer working on a less greasey car too.  Too bad the first race will likely ruin that.

More fresh paint and bushings on the traction arms.  We debated making our own adjustable version of these, but didn't want to use up the AIV dollars.  We needed that to cover our polyurethane bushings, since there was no way I was buying new arms with new ball joints, nor was I going to search long enough to find a fully good set of used ones.  Its worth the AIV for the bushings in our book.  Plus its actually cheaper for our team budget.

Below is the opened up, smelly, overheated rear differential.  Not too bad looking really.

But the "new" differential we got from the junkyard looks WAY better.  Thanks North Imports.

Mmmmm...now doesn't that look nice?  This is prior to adding the control arms, I believe we were missing something.

And BAM, the whole thing goes back up in the car, with are super rusty fuel filter...

Also while we had everything out, we took out the transmission pan and oil pans, to clean them up, and add a new transmission filter.  There wasn't enough time to take either out for inspection or rebuild.  Hopefully we'll do that after this season.

And the fronts suspension is going back in now too.  It also looks nicer, has new bearings, with high temperature grease.  So hopefully we won't have to replace those for a little while again.

The other side.

And we had some stripped out ball joints on the camber arms, so we had to order up some used ones from ebay, my 2nd favorite junkyard.  Didn't bother pulling and swapping the poly bushings on those though.

But after all that, we had the suspension ready for Road America in April.  More on that soon.

Bear Patrol's Blog is back baby!

Well, I've officially put off blogging about the car for long enough. After working on the car tonight, I realized I haven't posted anything about about 2012 build, and worse yet, nothing about our first results. Being that I've been such a slacker, I'm going to group some of the work together, since I can show beginning to end work, rather then just saying we did this on this weekend. First off, thanks to my lovely fiance for being understanding of the time required to build and maintain this car. And also, thanks to all that helped work on the car, you know who you are (yes, I'm too lazy to type them all out). Our big project for this year was refreshing the suspension of our 1992 Lexus SC400. Thankfully some online places like www.lexuspartsnow.com have online diagrams, or at least they used to, and better pricing then dealerships. We were also lucky to find an SC400 in the local u-pull yard, so we got lots of our spare parts for cheap. Lets get started, if this was the good, the bad, and the ugly, we didn't really have any good, except for air tools and WD40.

Needless to say, things weren't as they were supposed to be. We're pretty sure this is residual damage from our Road America 2011 crash. Once we got the bolt out, we quickly figured out why it was so hard to get out of the hole...

Yeah, Jeremy's a little perplexed by the whole thing.

It was also quickly apparent just how far gone our right front wheel bearing was.  Notice the top steering knuckle with the nice shiney gold colored hub nut.  Then compare to the dark, burned looking one on the bottom steering knuckle.  Not good.

Next on the way out was the rear subframe and suspension.  It didn't come out quite as easily as we thought, and it was a big heavy b*tch.  Hence my salutation to it.

As you can see here, we now have more then 2 spindles and hubs.  We got lucky with the junkyard find, so we picked up some extras.  You can also see the beginning of our lower control arm rebuild.  Gotta love integrated ball joints...

The hatred with the rear suspension continues.  When just unbolting stuff isn't good enough, get out the grinders, and make sparks.  We were planning to replace all the hardware, with new, unrusted pieced, that were actually adjustable, so we just went to town on the old ones.

And of course we won.  All the various control arms came off, the rear hubs were disassembled, and the axles were pulled.  

The bare subframe is ready to head down to Northfield.  My dad sand blasted away all the rust, which was much nice to work with.

Before sending it for the sandblasting, we had to weld up some patches for rust spots too.  Next time maybe we won't start with a northern car.

Got the rear differential apart for inspection, and apparently we forgot to change the fluid 2 years ago when we got the car.  Hawhoops.  Man did that stuff smell.  So we went and picked up a "new" one from a local junkyard as well.  It was easier then trying to replace bearings.

And the first parts to get the clean treatment were the aluminum rear upper control arms.  The ball joints tested out fine, so we just cleaned them up with a wire wheel, and preserved the fancy shine with some glossy clearcoat!

After sandblasting the "new" rear differential, we got to painting it as well, in hopes of preventing future rust.

Okay, I lied, this is all I'm writing tonight.  I'll try to get another update with more info some time in the next 6 months.  ;)