fiat spider

When we got back from TN last Wednesday, I had a very abused box from IAP waiting for me in the office. My parts arrived. Except for the Sport Air Cleaner. Yay, now I can get to it.


Friday, some friends and I gathered for the mostly weekly Motorsports Lunch. A couple gear-heads and I have been doing this for a while, this time I got a picture of us. On the way home, I stopped by Autotech Motorsports, run by my friend Jeff. It's another auto repair/performance shop but with one key difference. They specialize in rotary engines. We hung out for a while and he showed me a few projects they've been working on. The first is a 3 rotor (Cosmo 20B) twin turbo RX-7, 2 was a 13B-REW transplant into a 1st Gen. He said it pushes about 270hp. Wow. Another was a !!! 4 rotor (2 12A's) 3rd Gen. It may be the first anywhere in the world. It should get them quite a bit of press. I'm stoked to see that beast run. Very cool.

Saturday I milled around reading my manual for a while for the right way to install the Oil Pressure Gauge Sender and Oil Pressure Light Sender. It wasn't really in either of my shop books. Hmm. So I just went to it. Couldn't get a wrench in to get the Gauge sender out so I tried a pipe wrench. Just ended up making it leak. No matter, replacing it. Finally managed to get it off with some leverage from a really long screwdriver. Heh. After it was off, the Light Sender was much easier and at a better angle. So I replaced them both. Maybe if I replace everything on the car, the only thing left that will be dirty is the engine! hehe!

I also slapped on some new spark plug wires. They're blue! The package actually came with 6 wires, 4 for each plug and 2 HT wires, one short, one long. On my 1608cc engine (which is the best engine to have I am told) the distributer is off the exhaust cam (on the passenger side), so it's a lot further away from the coil, which is mounted on the driver side, thus needing a much longer HT wire. So I assume that the shorter one is for all the other twin-cam fiat engines, which have the distributor mounted on the other side.

Then I took the car for a spin, even in the nasty weather. Which was good because I was finally forced to drive the car with the top up. And it was misting which provided a bit of moisture for me to clean the car too. Yay. Now my luggage rack looks better. I also cleaned the fluffy crap off the inside of the hood. It looks much better.

Oh yeah, it drove great and now I have decent oil pressure. Tomorrow I will change the oil and filter, which should make that even better (since I believe my filter is old).