Happy New Year 2025!

What is Brian doing now?

Everyone at NMS hopes your 2024 ended on a high note, and that 2025 is off to a good start. For a lot of people, both years might include spending time with family and friends, and of course, working on cars in the garage! (or the driveway...or the side of the road if need be!) If you're lucky like the NMS team, you can work on your car in the garage WITH your family! Hey, it's bonding time. It's fun! You're building memories! And most importantly, your family probably works for FREE!

Wheel change day is easier with a bigger jack, a 1/2 inch impact wrench, and a new 1/2 inch split-beam torque wrench. 

Up at NMS-North, New Year's Day was partly spent in the garage, throwing the wintery tires on the Cayman, and adding a bit of power steering fluid. In your average front engine car the fluid thing wouldn't be a big deal, because odds are the power steering fluid reservoir is easy to get to right under the hood. If you're in Great Britain, sure, it's under the bonnet. You say Potatoe- and I say Potatoe! With the Cayman however, it means a couple of extra steps to take off the carpeted engine cover and the aluminum engine cover. Oh well, I'm getting pretty good at it, since the car seems to have a very small leak of fluid and I've done this a few times.

In the red circle you can see where I wrote on my Porsche engine cover with a permanent Sharpie to remind me of what size Torx bit to use. 

One fun bit of trivia, I took a Sharpie permanent marker and wrote on the Porsche, just to remind myself that the metal engine cover takes a T30 Torx bit. Plus, I always wanted to write a sentence that included "wrote on a Porsche with a Sharpie permanent marker" in it. 

Aftermarket rear spoiler kind of blocks the driver's view from the rear view mirror, so let's take this thing off! You don't really need to look behind you in autocross or rallycross, but it comes in handy the rest of the time.

Rear spoiler now deleted, and that's when we saw a total of 6 holes in the rear hatch. Our best guess is that this car wore at least 2 if not 3 different spoilers since it was new in 2004. Hmm,  now how in the world do you patch these holes on a beater race car?

Down at NMS-South, we did some work on the white 350Z, and I'm glad Brian was able to get it into the garage, because it was a bit chilly in South Carolina! If you live farther north than us, you can laugh at 22 degrees being "chilly" but I said what I said!

Voila! Grab some stickers laying around and cover up those holes!
Ask us about the yellow Chevy Aveo!

We started with some basic stuff to fix on the 350Z, keeping in mind that right now our plan is just to Rallycross this thing on dirt, so we're not exactly prepping for the Indianapolis 500 or a fancy car show here. Odds are pretty good it's going to blow up, so we plan to tow it to a rallycross weekend in North Carolina and see what happens. As seen above, we removed an aftermarket spoiler that had just been screwed into the rear hatch, and revealed other holes from other spoilers in the past! Hey wait a minute, with no spoiler and a few holes in it, the car weighs less and therefore must be FASTER!

Next easy fix, we addressed a rubbing sound in the front left wheel area. Turns out that the splash shield had worked loose and was rubbing on the tire. In fact the shield had a hole in it from a LOT of rubbing (in the yellow circle above.) For now we just fastened the shield with 3 missing pins, and that should take care of this problem. 

While we had the wheel off, we checked the brake pads in front and back, and the front looks OK. Rear pads need replacing, so we'll order some that are "good enough for rallycross" (translation: cheapest available on planet Earth) and install those later. Lots of rust on this rotor and wheel since it hasn't been used much lately, but that's no big deal. 

Next came some general inspection, and the end result is that we have some trouble codes relating to the engine, a seat belt light is on, there are multiple transmission codes, and a CAN bus communication error code U1000. On top of just the trouble codes from the scanner, we also know that there is an oil leak possibly from the main crank seal and/or rear main seal, and something is draining the battery. The NMS-South scan tool gave us the trouble codes for most of this stuff, so we'll have to dig a lot deeper to see what's what. I'm hopeful that the communication code is related to most of the others (transmission codes, speed sensor, etc) and if we're lucky it's an easy fix to get all these components and modules talking to each other again. Maybe the speed sensor is just a loose or bad connection and not a bad sensor. Let's take a look at the airbag sensor issue next. 

Brian knew about the front air bag sensor issue, so here's a look at that. The sensor is circled in green, and the yellow stuff in the red circle is the connection to the sensor. We had another airbag sensor from the other 350Z and plugged that in, but the trouble code came right back. So, not fixed yet. 

Just for fun, I circled the front hood latch in yellow, so you can kind of tell we're looking straight down in front of the radiator. 

One more fun thing! We took out a bunch of wires that used to be connected to an aftermarket stereo and/or subwoofer system. This picture is just part of what we took out, so if nothing else we're claiming a big weight savings, which of course makes the car faster!

We're not sure where we'll end up going with this car beyond a Rallycross weekend, but we'll keep you updated as things go along. Looking at these various issues on a 21 year old car with 180,000 miles, you can only do so much! At this point it drives OK, and we fixed a few things like a big overheating problem, as well as these minor things in today's blog. Oh yeah, and the driver's seat doesn't really work like it should, so we'll likely replace the two seats, put on some stock rear brake pads, and that should get us through a Rallycross in March!

Brian erases our time travel into Ghosts of Rear Spoilers Past by covering up the holes on the rear hatch!

Now that I think about this project, I have a new theory that car repair (or home repair) is like time travelling. By seeing what weird stuff someone else did in the past, you can trace history back through time. Maybe Neil DeGrasse Tyson has some thoughts about real space time travel, but this is what I came up with today! You can just see the former spoilers, stereo system, and little bits of damage on this car! If anyone knows how to really time travel, I'd suggest going into the future and getting that Sports Almanac so you can win some big bets like in the movie Back to the Future!