Man, it's been forever since I posted here. No, I haven't messed with the downpipe.
The FD has started leaking oil again from somewhere. Not sure exactly what's going on, I think it might be the oil filter tower O-ring again. I replaced that once already, but it's pretty wet over there and leaving some spots on the garage floor. The motor on my lift broke while I was investigating and I just barely managed to get it to go up high enough to clear the safety catches so I could lower it to the ground. Lift is fixed now, but I haven't gotten around to looking for the leak again yet.
It also started the "low coolant" light on fairly frequently, and sometimes puking coolant after I filled it up. This turned out to just be a failed vent on the radiator cap (well, air separator tank cap, since the FD radiator is mounted very low), it wasn't opening under vacuum, so the car would just push coolant out to the overflow tank when running and then never take it back in. Cheap/easy repair.
One other thing it's started doing is bouncing the tach needle around. This is a fairly common FD electronic failure, the fix is to reflow the solder on a chip in the tach, the problem is that it requires a pretty delicate touch to get the faceplate off so access the screws necessary to access the back side of that PCB. A friend and I tore it down to that point, but then chickened out on the faceplate -- could not figure out how to do it without risking cosmetic damage that I don't want staring me in the face from the dash every time I drive the car. So we settled for cleaning all of the contacts and putting it back together to see if that helped (it didn't). There's a local shop that has experience in repairing these things, one of these days I'll pull the cluster out again and take it over there.
A local car group held a sunset photo meet this week, so I grabbed the SLR and headed over. A few shots:
(The NSX isn't mine, but seemed a good photo partner :) )
