Road Trip!

A road trip is all about what you do when you get there!

Like eating BBQ at Rays in Grayling Michigan!

School is out, I'm still retired, so we hit the road!

We drove a lot of miles from home in South Carolina to visit relatives in Michigan, then down to Cincinnati for a family graduation (and some Reds baseball!), and then back home. All in all, we had no car issues, and the 2023 Honda Accord Hybrid cranked out the miles and still got over 40mpg over hill and dale!

Along the way we drove over this cool covered bridge in Ohio. 

Sure, we had to buy gas. $3.99 in Michigan for regular. 

Trip wise, we enjoyed seeing lots of family, enjoyed some great food (yes, Skyline Chili on two occasions) and had fun seeing plenty of countryside. Oh, the baseball game included the Reds winning over the Guardians in the Battle for Ohio. One of my theories that no matter how many ball games you've seen, you generally see something new at each one. In this case, we saw two different runners get picked off of 2nd base, one for each team. This might be one of the rarest plays in baseball, I really don't know for sure, but to have it happen twice was crazy. Base running mistakes like this seem pretty dang embarrassing for professionals, but I guess it happens. 

Along the way we visited two different Buc-ee's stores, so that was crazy too. Nothing like 120 gas pumps and a ridiculous number of snacks and etc. in the store. We probably don't need to go back anytime soon. 

Pictures or it didn't happen. I think this is the one east of Knoxville on I-40. Earlier the same day we visited a Buc-ee's in Kentucky on I-77. 

Without boring you to death with the actual driving details, let's just say that there's still a lot of drivers out there that get a grade of "Needs Improvement" from me. Here's a few tips: 

Julie and I with our nephew Joel Nixon. 2LT Nixon is the one in the middle. 

1: OK, cool, you have a newer car with Daytime Running Lights. Yippee for you! Did you know that a lot of these systems ONLY run the front headlights? What I'm getting at is that as you're driving around with your DRL's on, if it's getting dark, or if it's night, or if you go into a tunnel like in West Virginia or North Carolina, or if it's raining cats and dogs, I CAN'T SEE YOU FROM BEHIND BECAUSE YOUR TAILLIGHTS ARE NOT ON! Please turn your lights on. 

Reds baseball behind 1st base. The Reds defeated the Guardians. 

2: Didja know that your car has turn signals? Didja know that you could use them to indicate a FUTURE lane change?  Based on my analysis of this issue, using your turn signals will COMMUNICATE to other drivers what you're about to do, and makes us all safer! Use your turn signals every time. 

Here we're entering the fun part of I-40 between Knoxville and Asheville NC. This was our first time since the hurricane last fall sent chunks of the Interstate into the Pigeon river and closed the road for months. Currently this stretch of I-40 is open, with one lane in each direction. It's a huge reconstruction job going on that will last a while. 

3: From my ancient driver's education training in high school (and yeah that was a LONG time ago, in the last century!) you should LOOK OUT FOR THE OTHER GUY! This lesson comes to mind thanks to a clueless SUV driver on the Interstate that jumped into my lane really close in front of me just in time for them to BRAKE HARD to avoid hitting the huge semi truck directly in front of me. I'm not sure what this person was doing, but it appeared that my existence and the existence of the 18-wheeler was unknown to them. Look out for the other guy. 

When in Asheville NC, we recommend the Sierra Nevada brewing company taproom. Great food, and as you might imagine, all their beers are nice, but don't drink and drive. 

I'd like to think that someday everyone will be a good driver on the road, so let's just shoot for these top 3 tips. Have a great day, let's be careful out there, and LOOK OUT FOR THE OTHER GUY!

Nissan 350Z Racecar Update

Brembo brake caliper from the 350Z, ready to rebuild. 

Recently the NMS 350Z (the real race car one, not the one that was just sold, or the other one in the driveway at NMS-South, let's keep this organized!) headed up to Virginia International Raceway for Gridlife. Following a lot of work to prepare for going on track, things were going GREAT! I mean REALLY GREAT...right up to the point of finding some problems and having things not going so great! We have to report that there was a problem with an oil temperature sensor that resulted in a leak that made the car undriveable. While that was unfortunate, Brian was still able to hang out and see a lot of cool drifting, cars, and get on track as an instructor with several students. 

(The photos today will show some later work we started on rebuilding the Brembo brakes, so that's kind of a 2nd blog post inside the written blog post. Hey, you're getting 2 for 1 today! At the same price!)

As you might guess, these brakes are what master mechanics call "used."

His students included a first time track driver in a Honda Civic R, and a 13 year old driver in a Miata! If anyone is worried about the future of motorsports, I'd say this is a great example of new people coming into the sport, even if it's just for 20 minutes on a real track with an instructor. This also answers the question, "Do I need a driver's license to drive on a closed race track?" Even for Max Verstappen in Formula 1, the answer was "no" since he was racing at that level before he got is official road license in the Netherlands. 

Here's the two front brake calipers, also "used." These are much larger, and each has two pistons. 

Brian reports that VIR remains an awesome track, and believe it or not I recently read something from Jeremy Clarkson (Top Gear, Clarkson's Farm, The Grand Tour, etc) that listed VIR as one of his favorite tracks. That's not bad coming from a guy that's probably driven just about every kind of car on just about every kind of road and track on the planet. 

The two pins hold the pads in place, and each pin has its own cotter pin. 

Anyway... on a related note...  in other news... and now for something completely different... as scientists say...

Just to really get into this brake job of replacing the seals, we even took apart each caliper. 
Here's one half, you can see the round plastic housing where the pistons live. 

Over in Alabama they've got a track called Barber Motorsports Park, and NMS will be there in July for some track driving. NMS-South lists it as a great place to visit and drive, and since NMS-North has never been there, LET'S GO! You can read all about it at their homepage: BARBER MOTORSPORTS PARK AND MUSEUM

Here are the pistons from the rear brakes. We removed the outer and inner seals on these, and then have to put the new ones on. Once you're taken it apart this far, the seals are easy.  

Besides the track, Barber is the home to maybe the largest motorcycle museum in the country, so we're booking a little extra time there to check out the museum too. Oh, and the Indy Car drivers race there too, so it's a nice track. The Guinness Book of World Records lists their museum as THE LARGEST MOTORCYCLE MUSEUM IN THE WORLD! Shoot, I bet it's the biggest one in the SOLAR SYSTEM TOO! That tiny motorcycle museum on Mars is not worth the visit!

This piston has a new seal on. We learned that the front and rear calipers used three different sizes of inner seals on this set of Brembo brakes. Don't be confused; Brembo is the automotive brake company, and Bimbo is the snack food company!

End of the School Year!

Our shop at school has plenty of lifts, tools, space, etc. 

Mr. Alice Cooper has a little ditty called Schools Out For Summer, and that's our theme song for today! In the Automotive Diagnosis class, we wrapped things up, took a last chapter test, cleaned our tool boxes, and finished working on some cars and trucks. I don't have any classes this summer, so I'll be back in August with my final three automotive classes: manual transmissions, fuel systems, and suspension/alignment. Grades? Yeah, we get grades. Put me down for an A on this one!

The Automotive program only does Air Conditioning and Brake classes in the summer, and I completed those last year. If you're near Rock Hill and need AC or brakes, I know a guy that can help you out. 

BMW Z3

It took a LOT of transmission fluid to fill the 93 Ford F350. Our manual said the total capacity was 15 quarts.  

Overhead engine cradle in action. 

One fun part of the last day is that we also got some Chick-fil-A for the class, provided by the grateful owner of the F350 that my group worked on. His transmission is now working smoothly, all gears are solid, the electrical wires are tight, and life is good after only 380,000 miles! The people that allow us to work on their cars only pay for parts, and they really don't owe us anything, so this was very generous of the truck owner. Sure, he probably got his money's worth out of the transmission job, and we got to learn a lot about the Ford automatic transmission in a 93 Super Duty. 

Our instructor Rob working with students. 

After the transmission work, we did a little work to straighten the steering wheel on the alignment rack. 

I believe this is titled "Student buys $200 VW Beetle, and gets it running!"

Chevy Tahoe transmission parts. And some of the exhaust that was in the way. 
On the left, the transmission pan is sitting on the transmission housing, and of course you noticed that this does NOT have a fluid drain plug. On the right, the green round thing is a torque converter. Apparently this replacement converter was bad, so it was replaced, and then all this stuff went back on the truck. 

More transmission work on a valve body. In this one, the orange plastic is a one piece solenoid pack. Makes replacing them all easy, but if only one of the solenoids was bad, I guess you're buying them all. 

Getting in "gear." OK, I'm not a comedian. 

Just for fun, since I recently posted about the new tool boxes at home, here's a quick look at our tool boxes at school. Each team of students uses one of these Harbor Freight 5 drawer cars, with a Gear Wrench set of tools. York Technical College got these carts and tools in January 2024, and they are holding up well. Besides the drawers, there is some storage on the bottom shelf, so we put parts and bolts taken off down there to get them out of the way. 

Here is the Orange Team's box. We also have blue, red, green, and black carts in this shop. In another building on campus, there are two other shops, and they all have similar boxes and tools. The school has a list of tools you should buy, but that's not required. We're also allowed to use our own tools at school. 

My blue team put the 1/4 inch drive stuff on the top shelf. The black case has other Allen wrench sockets, Torx, etc. 

In the two smaller drawers we put wrenches and pliers. The cheap set of four picks weren't in the set, so I bought this awesome $2 set at Harbor Freight to use at school. They came in handy with removing O rings and seals on transmissions. 

Next drawer down we put the next larger 3/8 socket set and our two hammers. Remember, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail!

Bottom drawer with the largest sockets we have, the 1/2 inch drive, and a screwdriver set. This socket set included some standard wrenches too. 

NMS Does Tool Boxes

Brian hard at work behind the local Harbor Freight!

So, ya wanna work on cars? You're gonna need some tools!

So, ya got some tools? You're gonna need somewhere to put 'em!

Without a race car in the trailer, there's plenty of room for more tool boxes!

Here at NMS-North we take our tools seriously, or at least as seriously as you can if you work on your own cars and don't earn your living in a garage. Anyway, many years ago we started with some good old basic tool storage from the Kobalt brand you can find at Lowe's. With a top and bottom rolling box, we had a pretty nice set up for the average Joe. or Bob. Throw in a Kobalt work bench and things have been great as we continued to gain experience, gather more tools, and hopefully not mess up too many car repairs.

The 56 inch box comes packed on a pallet, and comes with the wheels attached, as well as its own little ramp!

However, inspired by the continuing purchase of more tools, and attending auto technician school (thank you Post 9/11 GI Bill, South Carolina scholarships, and the SC Senior Citizen discount!) the time has come for an upgrade. OK, this was also inspired by the 27 inch rolling cart having it's rubber wheels disintegrate due to old age too! After also getting a super cool Snap-On top box last year (thanks to their student discount!) we upgraded to two shiny brand new RED Harbor Freight US General rolling tool boxes. 

Tool boxes in search of new home!

The new arsenal of tool storage includes a big ol' 56 inch rolling cabinet, plus a 27 inch roller that the Snap-On top box will fit on, thank you very much. My math skills determined that going from 27 inches wide by 19 inches deep drawers, up to 56 inch wide and 22 inch deep drawers should add a  boat load of storage space. Now, if that results in empty drawers that need to be filled up with new tools, so be it!

Out with the old.

Thanks to NMS-South (Brian Nixon) for providing the truck and trailer to haul these boxes up to NMS-North last weekend. Since we opened the boxes at the store in Columbia, we're happy to report that they were 100% undamaged too. As a bonus, the Harbor Freight folks will use their fork lift to help load your large purchases, although due to liability issues they were not allowed to drive ON to the trailer and make our job even easier. Still, we managed to unbox and roll the big box into the trailer, since it came with the wheels attached. 

The smaller 27 inch box did NOT have the wheels attached, so we just shoved that carboard boxed tool box into trailer and put the wheels on at our destination. Above, it's new home with the 26 inch Snap On box on top. 

If you're wondering, yes, they make an even larger 72 inch rolling tool box, but considering it costs basically twice the price of the 56 inch one, I think we got more bang for the buck with the 56 and the 27. Sure, a super groovy name brand Snap On or Matco or Mac or Cornwell tool box would be cool, but those also would have cost a bazillion more dollars. Hey, there's always time to get one of those when I win the lottery!

The old tool boxes? They now have a happy home with one of my Automotive Technician classmates, and it was fun to give them away to a young guy too. 

The boxes don't match the car, maybe I can paint one or the other!