After some extra cash came in, I was able to order the external water pump from Summit. This meant that I was gonna have to move the radiator to the rear of the truck. Well, actually, that was the plan all along. There are a few reasons why this was a better option than trying to leave the rad in the engine bay.

1. With the rad in the rear, that takes the heat out of the engine bay, therefore helping to keep the entire bay at a lower temp.

2. There simply is more free airflow in the rear of the truck.

3. The external water pump is electric, meaning that I can run that consistently without running the truck. This way the truck will cool off WWAAAYY faster than if I was to have it on mechanical setup. Plus the mechanical setup doesn’t have enough strength to push that much water.

4. With the rad out of the engine bay and away from the intercooler which it was pressed up against, I will have less heat soaking issues and also creating a little cooler air into the intake.

This is the only picture that I took of the radiator in the rear. I painted it gloss black like everything else before going to the track. I never even got to drive it around before the event. As soon as I got finished I loaded it on the trailer and went to bed because I had to be at Turner the next morning.

This past weekend was much better than my previous event at Turner. We still had a few issues but once those were fixed it was fine for the most part. First, I took the truck out for the first run group and it immediately started spitting as soon as it got into boost. I ran two more laps to see if maybe the truck was not warm enough. Pulled back to the pits. Matt started looking at stuff and found out that the water pump was installed backwards, even though I followed the instructions to the letter. Fixed that by swapping the water lines.

I went out to make some more runs and then the truck wouldn’t start. I figured out that I knocked off the starter relay wire. Easy fix.

Then the day went pretty good until one of the event staff approached me and told me that my fan blades had broken off. Sure enough, I was missing all the blades on one side of my fan! And the fan had somehow come unplugged. Plugged it in, turned on the power and immediately turned it off. The fan was so off balance that it had literally shaken itself unplugged.Will Staab, the staff that informed me about my fan, offered to sell me a nice 16″ for $40.

I was able to make two more passes before the truck was to hot to drive anymore. I just hung out with the guys the rest of the day and smoked a cigar.

Will Staab flaked on the fan as I suspected he would. Delete!

I’m really digging not having a bed on the truck. It has more of a RatRod looks to it.

Here’s a couple of shots from the June 12th event at Turner Field.

And even though the truck was giving me so many issues I was able to make a few passes. It was by far the worst day I’ve ever had in my drifting/track experience. We had multiple issues. The truck was breaking up under boost, cutting out in the turns, and overall running terrible. After changing coilpacks, MAF sensor and realizing that the fuel cell pickup line had moved to the top of the cell the truck was drivable again. But that was cut short too because it was consistently overheating. I would only get about 2 passes before the truck was getting to 100c.

Oh well, back to the drawing board to figure out some coolant issues.

Here’s one of the setup shots from a photo shoot for a magazine.

Here’s another one of Andy Sapp of AndySapp.com driving the Datsun at AMS.

Looks like the Datsun made to both their sites.

I got a new fuel cell from my buddy Matt at Foerst MotorWerks. Took me a couple of days to get it all fabbed in the back and cut the bed up to mate down onto the new cell. I will get a picture up soon of what it looks like with the new cell peeking through the bed. It looks super clean with the cell popping up out of the old dirty bed of that Datsun.

The Soarer even made it in the coverage. I got lucky to have two cars in the show, much more to have both show up on these Top-of-the-FoodChain Sites!

http://speedhunters.com/archive/2010/05/14/gallery-gt-gt-the-fatlace-1-of-1-show-atlanta.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage

http://fatlace.com/hellaflush/car-events/winners-one-of-one-showcase-atl.html

Both sites said that it was their personal favorites of the car show that I was in at Formula Drift.
To answer the question that I’ve already been ask a few times: I did not run at Formula Drift. I love drifting and soon to hopefully be Road Racing in this thing but I’m not really not a competitive person. More competitive with myself than anyone. I have a tendency to get into my own world when I’m playing with the car and forget about hanging out with my friends. I start to get self competitive and start thinking of how I can do better and what I should do to adjust the truck or myself so that I’m that much more efficient when I’m out there.

Anyway, the Datsun is about to be featured in a magazine really soon so be on the look out for updates on that. I’m excited to see my hard work get put in a quality magazine!

Turner Field on Feb. 27th

And then this is from this past weekend. A bunch of the Driftmechaniks got together and were able to use Atlanta Motor Speedway for the day. Great Times!!

Red flag surf alert. Be aware of impending shark attacks if wading to deep in the water.

VooDoo Garage sent me some vinyl to put on side. It turned out great! Thanks Timm!!

I was able to catch up with my buddy Andy Sapp (sorry, I don’t know how to link to his site. http://andysapp.com/2010/02/hes-a-shark ) and he put it on for me. It was three layers and took a little while and he got it perfect! I think the eyes could stand to be a little bigger but overall it turned out awesome!

http://voodoogarageinc.com

I met a guy several months ago when I took my Soarer to a car show. I told him about my Datsun project and he was intrigued. I ran across him again at an Old School meet and he snapped this shot of the truck. One of the best shots yet! He said that he wanted to do a full shoot when I got the new fenders and graphics on.

Apparently someone got a quick shot of the Datsun when I was at the Varsity on the first thursday of December. It was so frikk’n cold!! I don’t think the temp was that bad, it was just the wind chill. It felt like it was around 18 degrees with the wind chill!! I had to get out of there by 8:30 before I turned into a Popsicle.

It’s been a bit since I’ve updated the site. Actually it’s been a while since I’ve updated anything. Chris has been the one that’s been keeping things up to date lately. So here’s some from me.

We got the truck done and on the road. FINALLY! We had quite a few issues including but not limited to the factory actuator on the 20g not holding boost, running out of fuel, freezing to death everywhere I went due to all the holes in the firewall and floor board for the roll cage.

At the Dyno:

We had some issues with making the numbers. We found out that I was running the factory actuator and that it wasn’t holding but only around 5 lbs of boost before it was opening up all the way. I took it to Tiger Racing and Sam was able to figure it out in about 20 seconds. And that is not a joke! 20 seconds and he’d figured it out. He pulled the retainer off and tightened it up and we were able to get quite a bit more boost.

Retuned it again at Top Speed and this time we were having fuel issues and changed out the fuel pump, filters and then came to the conclusion that it had to be the regulator. So on my way to Foerst Motorwerks I ran out of gas. I felt like at idiot for not seeing this one coming. We filled it up, went back to the dyno and it ran like a scolded rat!! Before I left the dyno to head to Matt’s it was putting down 275 rwhp before breaking up. After getting back with a full tank Doug and Matt took it out for a few runs to see how it was holding up under semi-full boost and it was doing great. They figured it was sitting around 300ish rwhp at that point.

So here’s some pictures from the next day in Nashville.

Enough for now.