Wow so what is up?
Lots, actually I have been very busy with my regular job so I haven’t had time to post the progress I got. I am working on things here and there trying to plan out what I need next or how something is going to work out. I have decided to give this Holset H1C a fair chance on the Corrado, before moving into the VGT Holset. We’ll get more into that later on in the post, I have been working on a bunch of other little things so lets take a look at that first..
A friend of mine broke her temp adjustable hair straightener. I guess it was over $100 new and the electronics inside show it. Fully adjustable temp control and two heating elements with ceramic pads. I am going to make this a “wand” for circuit board transfers, I figure I can put them end to end for big boards or I can make them clamp together for double sided boards. Not sure how I want to build it yet, but at least I have the main components..
I have even thought about using just one and building it into a wand style tool, I am not sure how this would work in comparison to the toner fuser assembly. Maybe the fuser assembly is still a better idea..
Side work has been slowly coming in, I haven’t had too much in the way of car stuff yet but thats okay, because I have had computer stuff to keep me busy. One guy brought over is G4 Mac tower because he couldn’t get it to boot up, about 5 minutes later he was all setup. I ran updates on the machine after getting it to boot and sent it on it’s way. It was a master / slave jumper configuration issue for the set of hard drives that were on the primary ATA channel.
I had someone else approach me asking if I would build them a new computer for them, they wanted something that was flexible upgrade wise, but not overpowering since he didn’t plan on playing games on it. It’s intended use is for business tasks, displaying things on dual monitors. I had spent a couple of weeks bouncing ideas back and fowarth before we landed on a plan and a budget that would work. The day came and we ordered up from newegg.com, a little over a thousand bucks later the dream machine was on its way in separate pieces to his house. Once everything arrived I spent an afternoon I had off putting everything together. Since he didn’t know too much about the inner workings to computers I let him stay and watch me build it, I explained every component and how it works in the computer, as well as answered a new questions. It was a really fun experience I would like to offer that up to anyone interested, once the services page launches there will be more in depth details. Lets take a look at the computer:
The case was really nice, the motherboard tray flipped down which allowed for very nice access. I saw issues with the atx power cable length so that will need to be plugged in as it’s being flipped up. The CD and HDs aren’t really on rails, but they do have these screw-less clips which are very interesting and odd. I definitely liked them in comparison to the old rail setups that were popular in older cases:
This side shot shows the motherboard tray flipped down:
I usually start mainboard first, but since access was incredibly easy I decided to attack the stuff inside the chasses first, which included all the drives. Here are a pair of SATA dvd burners made by ASUS:
The ASUS LGA1355 motherboard with intel’s new X58 chipset:
Motherboard and CPU installed into chassis, it fits really well:
Closed up the motherboard side, starting to plug things in. Since this case came with a cheapie power supply things look a bit spaghetti in there, but nothing a few zip ties couldn’t handle:
Once the computer was completed I was impressed with overall setup (minus the not so modular power supply creating the spaghetti mess)
The green theme carried well throughout this case, it looks sharp sitting on the desk. It has lots of fans in it, but they all spin at low revs so its whisper quiet.
A peek into the window, man that DDR3 ram looks mean sitting in there:
This system turned out nice, the specs are as follows:
ASUS LGA 1366 motherboard
ASUS Radeon 1GB+ Video card
6GB Triple Channel DDR3 1600 Ram
Core i-7 930? (can’t remember, but its over 3Ghz and with hyper-threading shows 8 cores)
2gb 6GB/s Sata disk
Dual ASUS DVD burners
With the upgradability of this computer it should last for years, once this thing slows down just toss in another 6GB of memory and a six core processor and then you have something that’s really flyin! If you are looking into building a custom computer and you need help picking out rock solid parts and making the most of your budget bump me a message and let me know.
I also managed to get out and get a few photos of the Corrado all cleaned up while its been nice here. I try to drive her everyday, and its a blast every time I do.
It’s incredibly weird being raised back to stock height, its not going to last long, I like it MUCH better slammed to the ground.
I think these angles looked much nicer with the spoiler up instead of tucked away:
I actually have started to collect turbo goodies for it, I have secured a new TIAL BOV, as well as a 38mm TIAL wastegate both in matching red. I have almost everything I need to start the turbo kit for the Corrado. I am still looking at upgrading the air to water intercooler and going with the he351ve turbo. If I can sell this H1C I will upgrade. I am back and fowarth because this turbo really is a perfect size for a mild setup, to maintain reliability a mild setup will be key in obtaining that goal, not just only using strong parts. The intercooler and turbocharger are a good match for each other at this point but since I want to go with the he351 I want to run a larger air to water intercooler also.
This turbo is twin scroll and everything, but I am not sure if 500hp is an obtainable number for this turbocharger. I think that its a little on the high side for this particular turbocharger.
The tial BOV in all of its glory, so nice to have:
I finally got to finish taking the head of my $100 parts engine, the head is actually in seemingly good shape. I haven’t decided whether or not I’m going to use it so for the time being I’ll just list it for sale:
I’m considering refurbishing the head and selling it rebuilt, would I get more money?
I have also been considering building my own turbo manifold for the Corrado, utilizing the stock manifolds.
The eBay solutions actually look decent, but since I am trying to use the he351 which uses its own flange, this suddenly doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, other than my lack of creativity in bringing two pipes together lol!
I am unsure about fitment once the he351 is sitting there, I held up my H1-C and took measurements, as is this thing would barely fit so the other turbo is going to make this tough, I bet the H1-c will touch the firewall.
I am looking for input and feedback on this, if you find your way over and want to check it out, let me know I want to hear some good ideas. I am also considering mounting the turbo at an angle.
So stuff is moving along with the Corrado, what about the Van?
Well, actually for the first time since installing the engine and finishing the van I have had my first real issues with it. I noticed a slight temperature fluctuation on the gauge, it went upto 210 which it has never done. Siting the anomaly I checked everything at the next stop I made and while the coolant seemed low in the system the overflow tank was full. As it turned out, I had a faulty coolant cap, and it wasn’t allowing pressure to build in the cooling system. Instead when there was pressure it would push coolant into the overflow tank until the tank got full then it pushed it out of the van. When the van would cool and pull the liquid back in it gave the appearance nothing was wrong until the fluctuation happened caused by an air bubble.
After replacing the gap and burping the system about a week later I had my second issue, a heater hose blew apart! Initially one would think that it just a stroke of bad luck but there is actually a cause / effect relationship going on here. When putting the cooling system together I didn’t use the new included cap I instead used the old one. Figuring it was good at the time I tossed it on because it was black and better matched. I wasn’t aware that this cap had always been bad, and once replaced and the system actually built pressure it revealed a weakness. There were some cheapie hose clamps used on the heater hoses. They were out of a set that my family picked up for me as a birthday or Christmas present. Turns out, they were from harbor freight, and they weren’t good at all. I didn’t want to use them at the time but it was all I had left, and they held up until last week.
The reservoir that should be all the way full at all times:
I promptly bought out the auto parts store on all the good clamps they had, all 12 of them, then replaced all the heater hose clamps that weren’t up to par. After replacing the clamps and refilling the system everything is working as it should once again. Actually the cooling system seems to work better than it ever has, probably because there’s pressure now lol.
Other than the cars I went back to my parents and stole my 4 tube fluro light and hung it in the garage, its nice to actually be able to see what I’m working in now. I cannot believe the difference it made:
I also finished my party stereo system. After getting the receiver finished up I enjoyed using it, however I quickly grew tried of tethering my laptop to the speakers when I wanted to hear music. I wanted something more, something with all my music and something controllable from anywhere. I didn’t have to look far before I found the perfect solution. I had a 2U rack mount server I have had for a long time. It used to host my website and everything up until I moved into a Xeon desktop. Its a dual PIII 1.1Ghz and has 5Gb of ram (yes 32bit only sees 3.75gb of the ram, but its redundancy since the ram slots are hot swappable) with the front loaded with SCSI hard drives. I regularly used it as a file server so it was time to give it something a little more CPU intensive.
There was minor initial concern about the speaker sitting on top the server, the magnetic field, 15″ woofer vibrations on hard drives, then I started thinking about the Xbox in the Corrado. That car pounds, should be over 150 SPL and it doesn’t bother the 120gb hard drive less than 10 inches from it sitting on the speaker box. I should be fine, I loaded the server up with a sound card, and winamp. I then imported my music collection and was ready to test drive. It actually works great, and the best part, I setup server2003 terminal services so I can remotely control the server from any computer or phone in the house. When I need to change the music the RDP session is open on my laptop and I just click what buttons I need. These results are far easier to obtain using windows XP but server 2003 is quite the workhorse. It didn’t make sense reinstalling a whole OS over some config tweaks. Whats nice about XP is you can set it up to automatically take control of the main session, in server 2003 you login to your own desktop session its not shared with anyone else. You have to setup the local computer policy to allow it, but as an admin you can issue a “shadow” command to console 0, which is the one that the keyboard, monitor and mouse are connected to. The reason why I did it this way and not just running everything in a remote session window is because interestingly enough I couldn’t get sound to come out of the card on the server, no matter what I did it always forwarded the sound. (or error out because it tried to when I disabled the stuff and told it sound card) It was a really odd an interesting problem and it took a couple of hours to sidestep, but the results are way cool.
Its nice to have the camera system display as well, being able to keep tabs on things anywhere in the house now including when playing beerpong! The mouse is a wireless off table mouse so no mousepad is needed.
I plan on changing from winamp at the time it was quick and easy, maybe moving to something like XBMC, not sure yet but I will have more on this for sure when I decide to update it. If you have a good media solution idea let me know!
This was soooo much to post, I need to change my posting habits and start posting multiple times a week, short posts are less time consuming than long ones and that makes it hard because I like to be thorough. Stay tuned more to come shortly!
