It’s fall. I missed the last weekend of driving by blowing a hard coolant line on a night run. I guess my soldering skills weren’t up to task, but I’m pretty confident that my ability to gob on JB-Weld is. I am now completely leak free and driving dry for the first time all year. I guess it was a crack in the soldered joint that had been leaking before, and not a hardline deformed by a cheap hoseclamp. Works for me.
But now what? I’ve actually had the car listed for sale, and have had a fair bit of interest… from FLAKES. I was thinking about buying a STI or EVO or something with four doors and 4WD that could serve me everyday. The AE86 cannot, although it does so many other things for me that I consider transforming it into something that I could at least drive to and from work any season, if not the children to the mall. That set up would be based on long travel Bilstein HD dampers and some softer springs, but when I think of all the peripheral requirements (heater, washer reservoir and pump, fender liners, brake shields etc etc) it starts to look like a pretty big expense/project, and I lose interest.
And I guess that’s probably why everyone who looks closely at the car flakes.
So I’ll just continue down the road I’m on. Upgrades for 2012 will be few, but hopefully I’ll get out to the track a lot more to fine tune what I’ve got. In the background, I hope to be figuring out some close ratio gears for my T50, and maybe assembling a new cylinder head with a rally type camset, and exhaust ports that match my massive stepped primaries. Bigger wheels would be nice. Probably something 15x8ish.
I realized recently, that because of my interest in not being sunken, every wheel/tire set up I run must be at least as large as the one that came before it. Last year was 185/60, this year is 195/60… next year I’ll run 225/50 14 race rubber, or maybe some 205/50 15 streets… and 5 years from now I’ll be on 18’s at least.