[esm@logic.net ~]$ _

After a quick trip to Lowes for a few strips of 1" strap steel, and a bunch of hammering and drilling, the bracket for the Accusump is basically done; I just need to weld in a couple of reinforcement pieces so it doesn't vibrate all over the place. No pictures yet, but it's bolting to the firewall and the back of the passenger side shock tower, right where the battery used to be. (I'm actually reusing the lower two attachment points for the battery support for the lower part of the bracket; the upper part is attached to the firewall on one side, and the left upper control arm bolt on the other, with a welded piece in between the top and bottom for rigidity). I'll need to pick up a 1/2" NPT to -12AN 90-degree hose end for the plumbing on it, plus some -4AN line and a couple of fittings so I can relocate the pressure gauge somewhere useful, and I'll probably want to rubber-mount it to the bracket. It looks like it'll clear the hood without any trouble at all, and there's tons of room all around for everything else. Progress!

Why do I still tend to prefer Python, despite the fact that I see value in and actively use the new hotness? Well, this might give you an idea.

(For the curious, that's Camping, a microframework from _why. Yes, I know it looks like that because _why is insane. And yes, I know there's an unabridged version with documentation. The fact that the abridged nightmare is even possible frightens me. ;-)

A quick update on happenings with the Eclipse; where it's at, what needs to be done, and goals for the season.

If you're reading this, you're reading my blog as hosted on Slicehost. This is the first step of getting my websites and other infrastructure out of the spare bedroom of my home, and onto somewhat more stable hosting.

Well, it took a bit longer than expected, but I've migrated this blog from Pyblosxom to Django. More technical details after the jump.

I've been using PyBlosxom for the last few years for my online presence here, and while it certainly does the job, I have a habit of getting bored with stuff that works after a while. So, I'm in the process of whipping up my own blog using Django, because hey, web frameworks are the new red. Or something. :-)

Actually, real reason is that PyBlosxom is category-centric; there's no real inherent understanding of a post having multiple categories (perhaps tagging/multi-category functionality is there in a newer version, but upgrading has always been difficult because of a few changes I've made). I found most posts I made ended up touching on multiple categories; racing and geek stuff often overlap, for example. So, lacking native tagging of articles, and not wanting to mess with some of the tag add-ons I've seen for PyBlosxom, I figured I'd just write my own.

What's interesting about this move is that the most recent framework I have experience with is Rails, so it's been interesting to see a Pythonista spin on the idea. What's funny is that, from a functionality perspective, they're really quite similar. Scaffolding, database interaction, view and administration generation are all disquietingly similar. Except, you know, that Ruby vs. Python thing. ;-)

As expected, the basic blog application was a snap. I've been spending most of my time on "fit and finish"; putting together template tags for displaying the sidebar calendar, working out a quickie scheme for importing all the old data, and adapting my current "static" content to the flatpages contrib framework. I'm also trying to make sure I don't break the old URLs too badly.

Once I have most of what PyBlosxom does for me today implemented, I'll probably just cut over at that point. Afterward, I'll concentrate more on some of the specialty stuff I'd like to pull in: timeslips, logs from the cars, dive logs, etc. Fun stuff. :-) And at some point, I'll throw the whole project into SVN so others can poke at it. (I might have to post up my calendar template tag on Django Snippets at the very least, since the only other one up there uses datetime instead of the new calendar module.)

Last year, I got a relatively random gift from Erica: a 1/10th scale RC car with a rather extensive aftermarket. This, of course, sent me into a weird modification frenzy, buying custom batteries, electric motors, reinforcements, metal driveline parts, and other totally unnecessary stuff. In short, I had a ball with it, and ended up building not only that one, but a second one too (neither of which run right now, which seems to be a trend for me and anything I own with wheels).

So, continuing the trend this year, she bought me another hobby. ;-) I open the box, and there's a shiny new Canon EOS 40D. No lenses, no memory, just a 40D body. So, I borrowed a memory card from her, and snatched up the old 28-80mm lens from her old film camera, and started snapping pictures.

I now have a Sigma 17-70mm f2.8-4.5 DC Macro lens, along with a 4GB Sandisk Extreme IV CF card (w/firewire reader) and some Cokin filters. I'm also lugging around her Canon Speedlite 580EX II flash, which I've been having a bit of fun with.

I've been putting the pictures I've been taking up on Flickr, if you're curious what I've been able to do with it so far. :-)

I've been too busy to put up a proper write-up of them, but we took two vacations between jobs: one to the Caribean, and the other to visit family up in Canada for Mom's birthday. Pictures are available at those two links. Warning, this is a long post, and if you don't know us, you'll probably be bored to tears reading it.

The trip to the Caribbean was somewhat planned; we knew we'd have a bit of time between jobs, so we made some last-minute reservations for the airfare and cruise, and off we went. First stop was Puerto Rico; we stayed for a couple of days in Old San Juan, while waiting for American Airlines to find find our lost luggage. Sporting some of the finest t-shirt shop fashions, we left port aboard the Royal Caribbean "Adventure of the Seas" without my clothes, which showed up that night, thanks in no small part to some great efforts by Royal Caribbean and the wonderful hotel we stayed at, El Convento.

The next day was at sea, and I was already starting to show signs of some kind of cold or flu. The following day, we pulled into Aruba, and I was well and truly sick. So, of course, we went diving; best dive ever. I paid dearly for it, but I wouldn't have missed that wreck dive for anything. We stumbled around the downtown area a bit afterward (Erica taking pictures, me trying to remain upright), and packed it in for the day.

Day three was Curacao, which is an absolutely gorgeous island. Punto, the downtown area, is incredibly colorful, and the floating market is really something to see; it's a farmer's market, writ huge, with boats. ;-) We spent most of the day snapping pictures and wandering around, and really didn't have anything scheduled for that day other than just relaxing a bit. I'd started feeling a bit better that day too, although Erica was starting to catch whatever I had by this point.

After that we stopped in St. Maarten did a bit of shopping right off the water taxi; Erica practiced her negotiating skills in a camera shop, and we both bought far more chocolate than we should have at the Belgian Chcolate Box.

Our final destination was St. Thomas, and we spent most of the day playing tourist; we took an island tour that took us to a few scenic overlooks, gave us a good amount of time to splash around at Megan's Bay Beach, and then ended up to at Blackbeard's Castle for a historical tour. The next day, we arrived back in Puerto Rico, and had another day of flying back to Chicago.

Our second trip was almost completely unplanned; we grabbed last-minute flights to Saskatchewan to visit Mom for her birthday and Christmas, which ended up getting the whole family together: all of my brothers and my sister were able to be there for Mom's birthday. We spend a week up there doing practically nothing but helping Mom, taking pictures, and eating too much. :-)

Long time, no update; I'll try and catch up on recent events over the next few posts. First up: I'm no longer working at Subscribermail, and instead took an offer extended to me over at Fermilab, known for hosting the world's largest (currently) particle accelerator, amongst other research in the high-energy physics world.

I'm technically in the Finance department, in MIS, doing a lot of the same kind of work I've done in the past, although this time out I'll be working as part of a two-person team, and the support will be much more of an internal nature. At this point, I'm still coming up to speed on the environment and the internal training, but I'm pretty excited about this.

I wish all my coworkers from Subscribermail the best, and I'm sure we'll keep bumping into each other in the future. :-)

So, after a bit of logging, I've finally narrowed down the fueling problem I've been having: my fuel pump. The stock Evo VIII fuel pump comes equipped with a pressure relief valve, which starts dumping fuel right around 65psi; with a stock base fuel pressure of about 43psi, that means you start dumping fuel at right around 22psi, and anything above that is pretty much a lean condition waiting to happen. So, your injector duty cycles spike suddenly, and you start knocking. The fix? A replacement 255lph high-pressure Walbro fuel pump, which turns out to be one of the simplest drop-in replacement items I've ever had the pleasure of installing (at least, as long as you install it when your tank is just about empty). Because of the unique design of the Evo's fuel pump relay circuit, you don't need to upgrade your fuel pressure regulator as part of this exercise, a welcome change from the DSM world. Injector duty cycles now get up as high as 93%, but that's much better than being completely out of fuel. I'll need new injectors before I can turn the boost up much more than a few psi more, though.

Another change I've made is the addition of a JDM MAP sensor (an original Mitsubishi part from the Japanese version of the Evo IX). This rather unremarkable direct replacement for the USDM MAP sensor gives you one very useful thing: the ability to both log boost (up to about 32 psi), and to alter the ECU to target a desired boost level, rather than a desired load. That makes for much more predictable tuning; rather than having boost spike during hot weather (which is exactly the opposite of what you want), it gives a repeatable boost target based on absolute pressure. One oddity to the ECU changes is that, because it's based on absolute pressure (rather than gauge pressure), you have to tell the ECU what your altitude is to get your calculations to work correctly. Where this becomes problematic is when you make a drastic elevation change (say, by going to a track in another state), but don't change the offset: your boost is suddenly lower or higher than before. Right now, I'm running about 21psi (only slightly higher than stock), and I'll probably bump that up a few psi before I'm done mucking with it.

Yet another change was finally getting the AMS downpipe that I picked up a few months ago onto the car. I bought a couple of 3" flanges and gaskets from Performance Autowerks, and using a bit of spare 3" stainless tuning I had lying around, welded up a rather ugly test pipe to connect the downpipe to the AMS catback that came with the car. It worked out pretty well; the car is obviously louder, but I don't appear to have any leaks, and the car pulls noticably harder early in the RPM band. The one downside: I had to remove both lower braces that would normally run underneath the downpipe, because the whole assembly hangs too low for them (for the front bar, there's just no hope of reattaching it; for the rear bar, it fits, but rattles rather distinctively when the car warms up). Small price to pay, and I can probably weld up a replacement frame that's stiffer later anyway.

Coming in a few days is the last piece of the puzzle for a while: an Innovate LC-1 wideband oxygen sensor. This gives me the last piece of information I'm needing to fine-tune the car: my real air/fuel ratio. Hopefully this will give me what I need to bring the injector duty cycles down a bit at the top end (since I'm quite certain the car is running rich now, but leaning it out without some way to measure it is asking for trouble). Once I have A/F dialed in safely, I can play with timing and boost to make more power.

The stock Evo boost control system is actually pretty good; wastegate duty cycles are controlled based on load, which gives a decent approximation to boost if you're smart about it.

The problem is, it can't actually hold boost beyond about 21-22 psi without modification. One popular approach is to remove/resize the restriction "pills" in the stock vaccuum tubing to the wastegate/compressor housing, but that only goes so far.

So, the next big thing (for those unwilling to switch over to a manual boost controller) is a 3-port GM boost control solenoid (AC Delco part number 214-474, or GM part #1997152; the wiring pigtail is AC Delco part number PT-374). You completely replace the stock BCS with the GM unit, which gives you more than enough fine-grained control and higher boost levels than most folks will ever need.

So, of course, I installed one today. ;) The installation went pretty smoothly; you just solder a 10-ohm/1W resistor into one of the pigtail wires, snip the stock BCS plug and solder the pigtail in it's place, find a convenient place to mount it, and the replace all the vaccuum lines from the compressor housing, wastegate, and post-MAF intake pipe to the new solenoid. After that, you start dialing in your wastegate duty cycle, boost error correction, and boost desired load tables. Here's a tip: don't accidently reverse the intake and wastegate lines; you'll find yourself dramatically overshooting whatever boost levels you think you've tried to dial in. ;)

So far, I'm happy, but I'm still running lower boost than I would under normal conditions. Over the next few days, I'll get back up to 22-23 psi, and see if I can get it to hold without tapering off. One interesting thing is that, because you can taper off the boost slowly with RPM if needed, you can pretty much completely eliminate boost spiking. Nifty stuff.

Next up in the area of boost control: adding a JDM MAP sensor, and changing the car over to targetting boost instead of load, which will inevitably make more sense when tuning.

To save someone else the trouble of finding this out the hard way: it seems that FIC manufactures two injector types, one for DSMs, and one for Evos. The difference is subtle: on the Evo injector, the outlet of the injector is a straight tube, which the large lower seals slide onto. On the DSM injectors, there's a flat surface on which the seal rests, and the outlet then dives inward, then expands outward, like a bell outlet. The outermost edge of that outlet is just small enough to fit into the broad opening in a DSM head, but is too large to fit in the slightly smaller Evo opening.

So, I now have a very nice set of DSM 950cc injectors that I'm not sure what to do with. I may hang onto them for initial startup testing with the 2g, since they'll be much easier to dial in initially than the 1600s I already have and plan on running regularly. It was half-tempting to throw the 1600s in the Evo, but they'd be far too much of a hassle to get working properly on something I drive to work every day.

I pulled the shifter base bushings out of the Eclipse and popped them into the Evo today. For anyone thinking this is going to make a huge difference, I submit to you that the entire shifter base is made out of plastic. I wasn't expecting a significant change of behavior, and I got exactly what I expected: a mild improvement in transmission activity transferring to my hand, but that's about it. The Laser and Eclipse both improved dramatically after changing those out, which probably says more about the state of the original bushings in those two cars than the stiffening qualities of the metal bushings.

So, if you're thinking of adding these, do yourself a favor: get a cheap set off of eBay; they're not worth much more than the cost of the metal and the time turning them in a lathe, but they're probably the only thing you can do to stiffen up the shifter.

Man, I'm spoiled by the WRX shifter, after we installed a set of poly bushings on that one...

So, we went to the rain date for the Shootout over the weekend. Despite cold temperatures all weekend, there was still an incredible turnout, which makes one wonder how big the event would have been if it could have been held on the original date.

As usual, I flogged whatever car I happened to drive out there at the track. I made the mistake of entering "Evo Stock Appearing", which turned out to be a pretty big mistake; I was the slowest car there, because I wasn't just stock-appearing, I was stock (sans catback, intake, and flash). As seems to be my style, my best run of the day was my first: 13.353 at 102.77mph, with a lousy 1.843 60' (I later discovered that I was running 40 psi up front and 35 psi in the rear, not exactly condusive to a good launch; at 25psi and a couple of tries, I was at 1.832, so I definitely need to work on getting this car off the line). I've transcribed the full timeslips, if anyone is curious.

Things learned? First, the tires on the Evo suck, but can be made slightly less sucky at lower pressure. Second, the constant 85% injector duty cycle I was seeing is about as high as I want to go; I have a set of 950cc/min injectors ready to go in (as soon as I find a few minutes to dial them in), and I'll get a pump ordered shortly. Third, I really want to run E-85. :D Race gas for the price of regular 93 octane? Yes, please.

Overall, it was a pretty good weekend; we froze our butts off Saturday night after the racing with Shep, Shearer, Yusuf, Mike, Adam, Vernon, Keith, and a bunch of other folks randomly popping in and out, and just generally relaxed (as much as we could in 35F weather, anyway). Good times.

As a friendly word of warning to those who decide to replace their rear differential bushings on a 2g DSM: don't.

Where would you get such an idea anyway, you ask? Well, if you're like a friend of mine, you notice that your rear diff is barely still attached because after enough hard launches, the stock rubber bushings have turned to jelly. So, you get the bright idea of replacing the stock bushings with something a little more sturdy, like solid aluminum. After all, you only want to replace broken parts once, right? (In my case, I opted for a special run of bushings made by Theo Aftonomos, because they had a steel sleeve for the retaining bolt, but the bushings that Dan sells above ought to do the job beautifully too.)

There's three identically-sized bushings fixing the rear differential to the rear subframe: the two obvious rear ones pressed into the subframe itself, and one on the passenger side toward the front of the differential, pressed into a removable bracket that bolts to the differential.

The bushing in the bracket is simple to replace: just unbolt the bracket, unbolt the front of the diff, and put the whole bracket in a press to press the old one out and the new one in. In my case, in true lazy fashion, I pressed the old bushing out with the new bushing. Worked like a champ. :-)

The part of this little exercise that causes problems is the two rear bushings. In my case, working on them in the car was possible because I've removed the trunk floorpan to make room for the fuel cell. If you aren't so lucky, you'll end up having to remove the rear subframe from the car completely: diff, axles, suspension, anything bolted to the rear subframe has to go. Fun stuff, honest.

Next up is actually removing the bushings. After an hour or two with a hammer, I finally came to the conclusion that the bushings just weren't going to move on their own. So, out came the holesaw to cut the rubber portion out. The passenger-side bushing drilled right out (mmm, nothing less pleasant in the world than the smell of burning rubber), but the driver's side bushing was a little bit different: it was filled with some kind of liquid or lubricant. As soon as the holesaw hit that, black steaming tar sprayed everywhere. Listen to Norm, always wear safety glasses, even if you think you're just cutting into rubber. ;-)

Once the rubber was out, the outer metal sleeve had to be extracted. After spending a bit of time with a punch and hammer, I did what I usually do: got frustrated and pulled out the sawzall. After cutting a nice slit in the sleeve, the punch tapped them both right out without any arguing.

Next up: since you can't put the rear subframe in a press (either because it's still on the car, like in my case, or because it's a flimsy piece of junk, if you actually took it off the car), you get out the deadblow hammer and spend the next bit of your life pounding those little bastards in. (Or, rig up a means of using a bolt and washer to press them in.)

Viola, you now have the ability to completely destroy your rear differential on a good launch! :-) There's a few jobs I've done on this car that I've very clearly said "Never again!" after completing, and this is one of them. A smart person would give up on the stock rear subframe entirely, and build their own with rigidity and weight savings in mind, but I thought this would be the easier approach. I'm man enough to admit when I'm wrong, and this is one of those times. ;-)