Last night I was looking over everything feeling rather proud of my blog and all the info I've covered about the car in it. Reading through it I found more spelling mistakes then I had expected, that and I noticed I forgot a few things...So here is for those things I forgot.
Lets go back to just after Automass. The local guys put their heads together and setup a plan for our very own drift event here in Iowa. Our state isn't exactly well known for its import scene, and drifting is something that has only recently started to take over Des Moines. Iowa Speedway was chosen and a date was set, along with gaining approval from the SCCA guys to insure the event.
With everything good to go it was time to plan, get the word out, and pray enough people signed up to go so the insurance cost would be covered. Well either none of us were told we needed to have payments submitted 2 weeks in advance or someone had been told and didn't tell everyone else. Payments weren't in by then and the SCCA guys cancelled the event on use do to insurance issues. Thankfully Brett stepped in fronting the entirety of the money needed so the event was back on!
2 weeks go to and that's when I discovered I had a major problem. Back at Automass when we left I noticed a small spot of oil where I had been parking my car in the pits, when I got home I noticed the same size spot in my driveway, at this point I realized this was my car doing this. I looked under her to find my half shaft slipped party out of the diff. This isn't the first time I've had this happened to me. This was the third time, I decided it was time I took care of fixing this, the reason for it popping out could only be one thing, the lock ring or whatever it's called is worn out and not holding the half shaft properly so I ordered a new one.
The new ring showed up a few days before the event, dealing with taking care of other things I didn't have time to replace it until the night before. Thinking this would be an easy pull the half shaft out put the new ring on and put it back in I didn't get to work on it till around 6pm. Boy was I mistaken about this being easy. The ring sits inside the diff and doesn't pop out with the halfshaft, getting that out proved to be the biggest pain in the ass ever. How as I going to somehow grip it and pull it out? Just look at this picture, you can barely even see the damn thing!
I tried screw drivers, allen wrenches, needle nose pliars, needle nose with those angled tips, nothing could get a hold of this thing! That's when I thought maybe something with a point on it could get in between the teeth and manage to slip under/behind the ring pulling it out enough to get some pliars on it. Only issue is I had nothing like that, but thanks to my weird crazy ideas I always come up with I realized I could simply grind down a screw driver to a point. That would require a grinder tho, which was at the storage garage, and the 240 being the only vehicle I have currently not able to be driven. So I hopped on my skateboard went to the top of the hill on my street and road down it while dragging the screw driver on the cement. I don't care how ghetto or ridiculous this sounds, it worked absolutely amazing. I then finalized the point with some sharpening stones I have.
Prison shank tools rock!
Finally got that bastard out of there! Then thinking I would have issues with the new one going in, I prepared for the worse. It was getting close to 9pm! Which meant I wasn't going to be able to take the lady love out for our usually Friday night sushi date, so I had her place an order to go and had her bring the food over to my house...yup, this whole time time I went through figuring out how to grind down a screw driver could have been easily avoided by just having her grab the grinder... Anyway, the amazing Becca went and got sushi for us and didn't complain at all about me causing us to miss out on our normal date night.
After a nice meal I got back to work, just had to throw the half shaft back in, bolt the axle back up, and take her for a spin around the block to make sure everything is solid. Luckly that was a quick process. Afterwards worked on loading up the car with our stuff needed for the event, took a shower, and hit the sack.
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