Ah, my good friends at the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), especially my extra extra good friends on Fell St in San Francisco, how I’ve missed you! It’s been way too long. I really should have come earlier. Maybe we should hang out more often!?
Yes, maybe we should – so I can explain your own processes, regulations and laws to you since you don’t seem to get them. Perhaps I can give you a lesson in customer service too, expert that I am at that (as in been subjected to shitty customer service many times there.) Admittedly, the SB-100 registration is not a common one to be processed, probably even more so in the middle of San Francisco. I guess there are just not as many crazy guys like me building cars in the city.
And so here’s how I got to spend almost four hours there, missing a few work meetings as a consequence.
It ain’t a real race car without lots of buttons on the steering wheel to do cool stuff, right?
I guess, sorta. While coolness is an added bonus, that’s not really what I was trying to do here. Having the Motec C125 dash set up to read data from the Link G4+ Thunder ECU, I needed to find a way to move the screens on the dash. The dash only displays so much at one time and so you have the ability to scroll within a screen, as well as set up multiple screens to toggle between – as long as you can tell the dash to do the scrolling somehow. Here’s the final product:
One way to do this is to buy the ~$450 I/O module for the dash and wire a few switches directly into the dash. But why take the easy route when you think you still got the skillz to code and could learn a new environment in the process? Hey, here’s another project, because I need more.
At the CHP in San Francisco
Well, step 2 was easy. A few years ago, step 1 to get an SB-100 sequence number at the DMV was pretty easy too. The second step, after finally getting the car roadworthy, is to go to the local CHP station to get a VIN assigned.
I had called a few weeks prior and was told to show up at 10 am on a Wednesday. It’s close by in my case, not even a 15 minute drive to get down to 8th and Bryant. Appointments are required btw – don’t just show up.
The drive down was uneventful, though admittedly I was a bit apprehensive about potentially being in rush hour traffic and simply for the fact that I was further from home than ever with the car. I had asked my wife to be on standby to give me a tow, just in case. So I fill out my 1-day pass from the DMV, drive down, pull in right on time, walk in the door and I get a friendly greeting with a quip of “getting a VIN, huh?”
Yessir! That’s what I’m looking for. Two minutes later another friendly officer calls me up and I hand him my full stack of papers. I show him the ones I knew he’ll really care about, which is the sequence number from the DMV and the receipt with VIN of the car the engine and transmission came from. After not even a minute, we walk to the parking lot together and he starts checking out the car.
This was not a cop checking your car out. It was a knowledgeable car guy asking car guy questions. We joked about the folks trying to pull a fast one with Ariel Atoms or BAC Monos. The CHP is way too smart for that. Don’t even bother. I obviously had my s*#& together and had built this myself. It was obvious from my receipts and the chatter we had as car guys.
Back in, some back office paper work and after 25 minutes total I was out the door, CHP legal with a VIN. Easy and totally painless. Great process. Thank you CHP.
For anyone else looking to do this, here are my groundbreaking tips:
Be organized, have all your papers. Show everything.
Be friendly, they’re good guys and want to help you.
But use the process for what it is: self constructed vehicles, nothing else.
Also, by finally doing a real drive, there were some obvious things I need to work on with the car:
The engine tick is still there.
The shifter throw is too far, so I need to shorten the handle.
The idle is too low. Due to the lightweight Cup flywheel, the engine spins down too fast. The Link ECU can’t seem to catch this fast enough with either proportional gain table without causing a super bumpy idle instead – that’s the trade off there. However, if I set the idle target to 1300 instead of 1200 it has 100 more RPM when spinning down in order to react. I think this will work.
Newly discovered issues aside, step 2 is done and now it’s onward to the Smog Referee for a brake and light inspection. Again, super close for me – either across the Bay Bridge to Alameda or down to Skyline College.
I’m getting ready to take the car to the CHP this week for its VIN and the engine just developed a little tick. It seems to come from the 1-2-3 bank and perhaps is near the front (chain side) of the engine. A few different people have listened to it and we generally think that’s where it’s from, but we aren’t 100% sure either. I have no clue what it is, but here are a few thoughts:
If you watch the attached video, it is 21 seconds long and there are 36 or 37 ticks in it.
36 or 37 ticks in the video means 103-105 per minute
The engine idles around 1250 RPM. I know it’s bouncing a bit in the video – the idle hasn’t been tuned to dead perfect yet.
1250 RPM means around 208 strokes per minute per cylinder, specifically 104 strokes of each type per cylinder per minute
So the strokes per type per cylinder lines up with the tick frequency. I don’t know if that’s by chance, but it seems oddly related. Any thoughts on what this could be?
I’ve talked to a few folks about this since it happened, read lots of posts on it and started to form my own opinion. Here’s a recap of what happened, as factual and non-presumptuous as possible:
Tony Stewart raced in an amateur Sprint Car dirt track race in the evening Saturday August 9th at Canandaigua Motorsports Park, NY. He was set to race a NASCAR race the next day at Watkins Glen, about 50 miles away.
There was an on-track incident between the cars driven by Tony Stewart and 20-year-old Kevin Ward Jr. As a result Kevin Ward Jr. spun and crashed with his car apparently non-operable on the track. Yellow flags come out, which means caution, no overtaking.
Kevin Ward Jr. gets out of his car with cars still on track, apparently in an attempt to confront Tony Stewart the next time he comes around.
Many cars drive by Kevin Ward Jr. and when Tony Stewart comes around, Kevin is hit by Tony’s car and injured seriously enough to die shortly thereafter.
This is an extremely sad circumstance. I feel extremely sorry for the Ward family’s loss, particularly since they were in the stands to see it. I have personally not watched a video of the incident, because I don’t feel the need to watch someone die. I’ve read enough to still make some statements about this as an avid racing fan, an attendee of racing schools and a sometimes-driver at amateur races and track days. Continue reading →
The engine fired for the first time yesterday… whoohoo!
Unfortunately, while it runs very well, it also is good at spitting coolant out the exhaust, which is less than good. Big sad face.
The likely issue is that the engine overheated in the car it came from and damaged the head gaskets which will cause coolant to leak into the cylinders. This unfortunately means pulling the engine and taking the heads off. On a GT3 motor, only the heads are cooled, so hopefully I don’t need to tare it apart further than that, but I plan to do any sensible maintenance that I can while the motor is apart.
Although this is a big setback, I’m still pretty happy that I was able to get it running. All the wiring and setup was very complex and time consuming, so I’m pretty proud to have been able to accomplish it with zero prior experience. Now it’s on to the next learning-by-doing: rebuilding a GT3 motor.
Anyone wanna learn how to rebuild a Porsche GT3/Turbo engine with me?
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Installing the tail lights at first feels a bit like “square peg in round hole”. Indeed, you do have to trim some stuff to make the light fit in the opening and then you have to figure out how to mount it. I thought about this a lot and looked at various other builders’ solutions. In the end, it’s an amalgamation of those or unique – the same thing in this case. So below is the step-by-step of what I did.
My drivetrain is from a 2004 Porsche 911 GT3. It’s a 996 Porsche in Porsche-speak, a naturally aspirated engine which can be traced back to the LeMans-winning GT1 Porsche and beyond. The block is known as the “Mezger” engine and it’s proven so durable that it’s even being deployed in the new 991 GT3 coming out this year. It’s also used on the 996 and 997 Turbo or GT2 (also a turbo) models. For this project, you likely can’t do a turbo engine though, because the exhaust routing will be very hard without major chassis modifications. But I wanted a high-revving naturally aspirated engine anyway. Redline should safely be in the low 9k.
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