Interesting Garages

"Raymundo" (raymundo)
09/20/2015 at 18:52 • Filed to: None

Today I feel special. I just bought my first house and finally got the garage situated. Nothing else yet; just the garage. Once I got the garage settled, I had a realization.

This is the new house. After I got the cars in their place I realized, I’m not rich but I’ve always had an interesting driveway. At least I thought so. I’ve owned a handful of cars but once I started renting houses that had driveways or garages, the projects began.

My first project, shown in the first and third picture, was a proper mangled metal masterpiece. I bought a Datsun 280ZX for $1000. This was my first venture into automotive projects. Before this my biggest project was changing the fluids in a car.

The car needed some serious help, so I seriously “helped” it. I rebuilt the engine...

...swapped the head and put a turbo on it...

...and controlled the chaos with Megasquirt. I had literally never done anything like this before but thanks to the internet, knowledge is readily available so it happened relatively quickly, and it was good. Here is a video of me testing the rev limiter settings, that is, before I traded it for a car that I could use as a daily driver.

It was quite a nice rev limiter. Sure it didn’t brabble-pop like gun fire from many popular youtube videos, but it worked surprisingly well.

The reason I wanted a new daily is because I also like to have a nice car that doesn’t see daily abuse. Something that doesn’t stand the abuse of daily start and stops with in and around town driving. The reason for this is because my nice car usually ends up being the weekend car/autocross car while also pulling road trip duties simply because it’s in better shape and has air conditioning. Exhibit blue: my “nice car” 2004 VW R32. Such great autocross memories.

Eventually I sold my R32 and ended up with one of these. I did some work to it and now I absolutely love it. In stock form it’s hard to enjoy an S197 Mustang, but just put a few suspension bits on it, some exhaust, cams, and few other things and it becomes a rolling theater of mechanical anger.

The daily driver became this CRX, which badly needed help. So I quickly got on the internet and began ordering bits to rebuild the engine; although sort of in excess.

I ended up pulling the engine, boring it, building it to support a turbo, swapping the head and ECU... things got out of hand for the new “daily”. But it’s currently in N/A trim and takes me to work until I’m ready to actually put the turbo on it. Then the truck happened.

The truck is (and later will be) a full story in itself. I got it for $300 and the intent is to build a LeMons race truck with a $50 12A rotary engine courtesy !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . The engine will get peripheral ports and I have a $20 eBay turbo in my office. I say again, a turbo peripheral port 12A LeMons race truck. Get ready, LeMons-ers.

So there it is, the garage of turds that I’m in love with. I just wanted to share that with the world. You know, it’s like when people have pictures of their kids and they just have to show you. Well, here are my kids; my legacy.