I AM SO EXCITED!!!!!

Thank you for your readers' rides submission.
We will try to include it in the mag asap, but please be aware there's a bit of a backlog we're trying to clear. However, we will be able to post it on the website within three or four weeks.

regards

¶ 8:50 PM //

Alright, i finally decided to take the plunge and send this pic of my car into euro tuner to get my ride featured....im crossing my fingers so tight i hope they don't break...i know now that i forgot to mention the kamei grille...and i know that my hood is slightly ajar but this is the best pic i have of my car yet and i dont think i have an opportunity to take a better one anytime soon. Hopefully they don't reject it because the picture is too small.. anyway wish me luck!

¶ 10:24 PM //

Ok so my roomie (in detroit) has this friend called deanna. She's not really very pretty to begin with...ok probably the only thing she has going for her is that shes blonde but thats bout it really. Bear with me now..at this point you are probably askin what does this have to do with cars? Well she used to have this old rusty buick that was a piece of shit really. But today, she seems a whole lot more attractive to me...hehe..its called a chrysler crossfire and as paris hilton says, 'Thats Hot!' Man, nothing is a sexier accessory for girls than a kick ass car. Girls who actually read this, I will let you in on a secret. Girl + Good Clothes = Interested , Girl + Gadgets + Sweet car = OMFG YOU ARE A GODDESS! I'm telling you ladies, accessorizing is not only stuff you wear but also the stuff you bring around wit you. Nice clothes wit like lets say a shitty phone...not hot yo. Thousand apologies....i digress.

So i personally am open to all kinds of cars...be it american or german or japanese. I really think that the american cars are gettin the good deal out of the Daimler Chrysler union. With the exception of the PT Cruiser, affectionately known as "The hearst", Chrysler is really coming out with nice cars. Again i digress

The base model , comes with a 3.2L V6 with 215hp and 229 ft-lb torque. However it only comes in black...theone that deanna has is no different just that you pay an extra 4k for a different colour. That is just sweet man. These days, new cars are coming out so cheap and they're base horsepower is already so high that it doesnt make sense to go buy an older car and zheng the shit out of it. But i dunno...older cars have more 'feel' to me as the driver. And to make this car better, this car has a porsche inspired speed sensitive wing that comes up when you reach a certain speed to improve stability and better aerodynamics.

Now, the one that really makes your hair stand and foam at the mouth is the SRT6 coupe... this puppy has the same 3.2 L V6 BUT with the supercharger which puts out 330hp and 310ft-lb of torque. The speedometer goes all the way up to 200mph or 320 kph!!!! how nuts is that! Alright...obviously to rich people, they're sayin i also got...in fact i got more than that. But the beauty is that all this comes for under US$45k....that my friend.....is hot!

*sidenote*
i will address the issue of the classic question. What is the difference between a turbo and a supercharger? But this will be done at a later time.
*sidenote*

Ok enough for now, i leave you wit some photos of this baby beast.

¶ 7:57 PM //

Alrighty then...so here you can see that we've just started getting the engine all unhooked. the intake manifold was taken off and all the connections disconnected....all..meaning the plug wires, engine sensors, vacuum hoses.. wiring harnesses the works.

here is a better pic of the engine disassembled wit the valve cover off. The oil had to obviously be drained so that it wouldnt be all over the place. Low and behold, the engine was probably the only part of the car that the previous owner didnt get into. All the bolts and screws were tight as hell and hard to get out...which although is a pain, is also a good sign. The engine was well taken care off though, no sediments in the engine watsoever and everything looked good. on the right you can see the timing chains. engines either run on timing belts or timing chains. Belts are waaay easier to change, they are on the outside of the engine and its almost just a matter of loosening a bolt and slipping it off. Chains on the other hand are a bitch...you have to open the engine and take out the transmission to loosen the tensioners which keep the chains taut and in place.

here is yours truly acting like he's doing something....nooo i did alot ok! i messed up the whole garage wit oil cos the oil drain plug plugged up the oil pan and it overflowed. heh ooops! so anyways, coolant was all over the place too with the transmission coming out. which by the way is pictured on the right of the picture. we used a whole bottle of engine cleaner just to clean some of the sludge off of the tranny...even then, not all of it came off.

it honestly is a bitch doing stuff without the right tools. This install would have definitely gone a whole lot better if we had a car lift... which after telling one of my purdue buddies about our escapades, i found out that he actually had one and wasnt too far away either. oh well, live and learn. Back to the picture...this was the only way to get to the tranny without a lift. had to take off the driver side axle , unbolt all the bolts that connects the tranny to the engine. and out dropped the tranny...technically...we spent half an hr on figuring out why it wouldnt drop out but we just forgot one bolt...so when it was finally ready to drop out, CJ had to lie underneath and we slowly dropped it on him so to speak. you can see the pressure plate and under which lies the clutch. should have also bought a clutch and done a clutch job at the same time since it was coming out anyway. 10 bolts secure the pressure plate down. Using an air tool, we somehow manage to strip some of the bolts which proved to be costly. at this point, its almost 2 in the morning and we're all tired. So we wait till the next day to get the bolts off. Long story short, this was the biggest part of the delay in the installation. again, we didnt have the right tool to align the clutch and just had to hit and hope that it ran. so in the end CJ finally managed to put the clutch back on and pull some spare bolts off of his other car. then put the tranny back on after applying some grease then put the axle back on. fast forward a couple of months and im just driving back to work from lunch and all of a sudden klunk klunk klunk klunk and i cant move. A nice cop stopped by and pushed my car to the nearest gas station and i look under and i see my axle jus popped off. Again, because of not having the right tool, the bolts slowly unbolted themselves and finally the whole thing dropped off. $120 later and this put an end to the whole episode....i hope.
In total, i probably spent the same amount tryin to fix wat we screwed up as i would have if it were done by a shop from the beginning.

Do you know the moral of the story? USE THE RIGHT TOOLS! Do not cut corner with tools and you will save yourself a whole ton of trouble. Thats why im tryin to save up and buy tools to bring home to singapore cos we all know that you cant get proper tools in singapore for a decent price. :)

¶ 8:27 PM //

i was working on the car for a bit and saw this reflective ball in my neighbours yard.... moment of photographic genius i tell you.

this was the final time goin back to west lafayette from terre haute and this just cracked me up. white trash is as white trash does. for those who are clueless...that red van is chopped in half and a metal plate welded and attached to a hitch to use as an extra storage trailer. I had to double take and go off an exit and come back onto the highway again just to take a pic of it...just HAD to. i was laughing so hard!

this is my roomate lionel's car.... its a civic si.. similar to the sir in singapore i think but obviously you don't get two door ones in sg. In total, me and lionel clocked close to 1500 over miles in a week from all the driving up and down from terre haute because of my timing chain fiasco.

as you can tell, i am a fcukin awesome photographer....this was on one of those seemlingly countless trips to and from terre haute....i was so scared my camera was going to drop man. anyway, i understand this was a pretty pointless/unorganized/random post.... but just to keep those fans who are still wit me 'entertained'. will get into the details of our escapades asap

¶ 9:51 PM //

I am finally back from my long exodus! Just a quick update on my life since the last post. I basically struggled through the last couple weeks of the semester, bummed around for a little bit and fixed up my car then moved up here to detroit where i'm working for a plastics mold making company. So me and my friend CJ down in terre haute decided to undergo the task of changing the timing chains on my car. Call it a mistake on my part or whatever but it certainly turned out to be a HUGE fiasco. I have a ton of pics and stuff from when we did the timing chains and after that. So we'll spread this out over a couple of days or so. At the same time, im going to see if i can change the layout of this blog to be a little more to my liking. Forgive me if it goes wonky for a couple days or so.

This is where all the 'magic' happens. pretty cramp space to work in but it was alright. My roomate lionel decided to follow me to see what we were going to do and it was a good thing too cos he was alot of help. The car on the left is CJ's old car. Its originally from Germany that he shipped back to the US. For all those that don't know, all newer VWs are made in Mexico now...so def a differnt quality as opposed to german made. His car was initally a 2.0 liter which he bored out to a 2.1 and put a beast of a turbo on it. Recently he was going to make it a VR6 with an engine swap but he has since decided that he was tired of the car. And is going to move on to bigger and better things


On the left of this pic is my left driver side wheel...and to the right are the wheels CJ was planning to put on his white jetta. He has since put them on his other car which is supposed to be his wife's car but he dries it most of the time now. Its a 95 GTI as well but its black in colour. Anyway, you couldnt really compare it in the picture but the size of my tires are 205/40/17. Quick tutorial, 205 represents the width of the tread, or the wheel base measure in mm, i.e the part of the wheel that is in contact with the ground. 40 is a little fuzzy to me but my understanding is its aspect ratio which is the percentage of tread width that equals the sidewall height. In csimpler terms, if you look at the wheel from the front, its how thick the tire is from the wheel itself represented as a percentage of the wheel base. 17 is the rim/wheel diameter. As it is, my tires are cutting it close to scraping the inner walls of my car. CJ's wheels are 235/30/16 or something to that effect. that is a HUGE difference from mine and when you install them, they stick out and give the car a nice fatty widebody look. However, in order for the tires not to constantly rub against the inner wheel well, spacers have to be installed on the spindle to so called push the wheel outwards. Only thing is that now its rubbing the outside fender but that is still tolerable. One of the things you could do to overcome that is to 'roll' or 'pull' the fenders. A special tool is used to stretch the fenders outwards to make space for the wheels. anyway, the main point i was trying to get to is that that set of 4 wheels and tires costs more than my car in its entirety. They are worth close to $5k! Bloody expensive i tell you.

Here's a pretty shot of my baby, i just wished i closed the hood properly before i took the pictures. I think I'm going to try my luck and send this into eurotuner....cross my fingers and hope they like it as much as i do!

This is CJ's 95 GTI, Schnell means faster in german for those who were wondering. He has one of those eurolips that i have yet to put on the car. Just looks so sexy i say. He did a jetta front end swap which means that he switched out the headlights and the hood. His car is slammed to the ground with his coilovers. Just look at how much the back wheel is tucking into the wheel well! Those wheels are Audi TT polished wheels and he's already sold them off for close to 700.. by the way this car is fast as hell, it has a vortech v1 supercharger in it and it can absolutely throw you back in your seat. One thing i din like was the fact that he had a TON of scratches on the body...but recently he sent his car in for detailing and it looks good as new now. It really was a night and day difference. OK so more to come in the next couple days. Will be showing pics of the engine and all that good stuff. peace out!

¶ 12:40 AM //