Can you borrow one from other corners to keep moving?
Pete
Can you borrow one from other corners to keep moving?
Pete
NOHOME said:Can you borrow one from other corners to keep moving?
Pete
Maybe, I'm hoping for new studs though. I'm a little worried why this happened so I want to set myself up for as much success as I can
New studs are being installed now, hopefully we are back on the road shortly
In reply to Antihero :
Unfortunately you’re pretty much in the middle of nowhere. I’m not sure you’ll even find a parts store until you hit Mt. Vernon.
Pete Gossett said:In reply to Antihero :
Unfortunately you’re pretty much in the middle of nowhere. I’m not sure you’ll even find a parts store until you hit Mt. Vernon.
You are right, technically I'm in Ina now.
Wanna here something funny though? When I pulled over my grandma called as soon as I stopped for no reason, I haven't talked to her in months.
Her name is Ina
Ok! It's been an eventful day but I'm in a comfortable hotel room with all the a/c on now.
Started off and really......this thing is just a stupid amount of fun, everyone waves at me as I drive it, people ask me about it constantly and I got to drive it thru a tunnel quite fast. No one drives the speed limit on these highways and holding 70 isnt always easy. I punched it and got around a slow moving convoy, looked down and I was doing 91. It was handling great.....and then 2 people actually passed me at that speed lol
Car died on me while we were sitting in traffic by an accidental. Pulled over to the side and had no power whatsoever. Rummaged around I the engine compartment and saw an inline fuse. Pulled the 20 amp and look and behold it was blown. So I'm sitting here for about 30 seconds realizing that the one thing I didn't have was fuses and that I was stupid and a car pulls up . Guy gets out and tells me how much he loves rampages and how happy he was to see one. Asked him if he had a fuse and he gave me one right away. Started replacing it while bullE36 M3ting with him ( he was working for a carnival and they stiffed him on money. True story) and he sees an exhaust tip Ashyukun gave me and said it would look cool on the Rampage and he was gonna get one for his truck soon. I handed it to him and thanked him for stopping. Ashyukun said the tip would come in handy even though I didn't really want it, you were right Robert!
Got power.....and it died again. The switch wired for the ignition was cutting out. The carnival guy stopped again and checked on me again. Wiggled some wires and it worked well. It did die again and did come back after wiggling but it almost seems heat related. I did do a half ass job hot wiring it with some E36 M3ty duct tape that sort of worked at the end of the day but I'm exhausted and didn't do anything after we hit the hotel.
75 miles later , I got vibration. Pull over thinking it was a tire and saw sheared lugnuts. Called AAA and they were sort of helpful. They sent 3 tow trucks, 2 of which got to me. We sat for 2 hours in 100ish degree heat until I decided to tighten the screaming berkeleyballs out of the remaining 5 lugnuts on the front and we idled to gas station 4 miles away on the shoulder so the wife could use the bathroom and we could get out of the heat. The 2nd tow truck driver got to us and couldn't go to Chesterfield....bummer. But...1st tow truck driver calls me and says I found you a shop that can get you in now, have the driver take you there.
Continued in a second post....
So I get to the wonderful town of Ida and the Dynamite Service Center(I think that was the name). Tow truck guy pulls up, drops the Rampage off and the guy starts working on it. He doesn't have the exact studs I need on hand but he will send a guy to go to the AutoZone in the next town with one and he can make something work as the AutoZone guy doesn't even believe rampages exist or something. He opens up his break room and tells me he will have me on the road very shortly. He tells me it'll be.....$50 to $100 depending how many studs we can get. I tell him to charge me a $100, that's fine. He tells me that whatever extra I want to pay is on me and he will do it as fast and as cheap as possible for me.
He sends his guy in twice 15 miles away and back, replaces all the front studs and does it in under 2 hours. He hands me a bill for 71.95. I gave him a hundred and told him to keep the change.
I ended up deciding that driving thru St Louis at night was stupid, cancelled my hotel and told them I knew I wasn't fast enough for free cancellation but I couldn't make it today. They gave me my money back anyway. So here I am at the lovely SureStay hotel in Whittington eating a dinner of delicious whatever food I got at the hotel and watching Suicide Squad.
I'll have to look at the the toggle/ignition switch. It really seemed way more bitchy when it was hot as hell but I'm not sure that is a symptom yet. My half assed job of hot wiring sort of worked but I was tired, people were noticing me hot wiring the car and the tape was stupid so I re hooked up the switch, and it worked for the 5 miles to the hotel. Ideas otherwise?
Damn... sorry, I've been running around all day and just now got the chance to check in on this thread. O_O
I'm sure you've largely figured this out by now, but the switch can be bypassed by hooking the two non-ground wires together. That's obviously not an ideal situation for a normal vehicle since it leaves it powered on at all times (in the equivalent of modern-day 'Accessory' on the ignition, thankfully not 'Run' though) unless you unhook the battery- but as I'm guessing you're unhooking the ground on the battery whenever you stop anyway, it works in a pinch (and I imagine that's what you did). Ironically that switch is essentially new- I had noticed that the light on the tip of the old one wasn't coming on (resulting in my forgetting to flip the switch off and draining the battery faster than usual). I'm wondering if those switches just can't take the load of the ignition going through them and a heftier switch is needed. :/
I've never had the car blow that inline fuse- it was one that I put in as a precaution after the shorting issue at the last Challenge that melted one of the wires, I figured it was better to have a fuse to blow than to have more wires melt and possibly ignite something. You may be right about it being heat-related as I haven't ever had it out for extended drives in the heat.
I can't tell from the picture- what wheel were the sheared lug nuts on? I am relieved that it appears it wasn't a result of the lug nuts not being tightened as I'd feel like crap were it to have happened because I hadn't tightened them enough after swapping the wheels to where the good tires were on the front. Crap, just realized that with the lug nuts sheared off that you were down two and would have had to track down replacement ones, and that was something that I didn't track down to send along (the splined lug nuts came in packs for cars with up to 5 lugs per wheel, so that other 4 are sitting in a box somewhere in the garage). :( The good news is that they just came from your neighborhood O'AutoVance parts store.
Hopefully the rest of the day's story improves...
In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :
The rest if the lugnuts seemed tight, but all 3 that broke were in the fronts. Maybe the ones that snapped were slightly loose and I was a dumbass for not checking them but I'm not sure. It could be that they were just old and the wide Hoosiers stressed them before hand. I don't think it's that there's too much power in the front though I could be wrong I guess.
In reply to Antihero :
So, that switch essentially provides the main power to the computer that's just outboard of the battery under the hood. Normally the ignition switch handles that job, but for some reason it stopped working properly (and I had to rewire the brake switch and take some of the things like the light timer out of the equation because I couldn't find a truly detailed circuit diagram). I'm going from memory here, but I BELIEVE that the switch is connecting the battery to a dark blue (at least they're not all that color... :P) wire that runs to the ECU and several other things under the hood. That's the wire that was shorting at the Challenge (when I reinstalled the battery tray I'd managed to sandwich it between the tray and the frame... -_-; ). Once we figured out what was happening and elminated that problem things behaved- but I didn't have a spare switch (the short had killed the original, even less-hefty one...) so we used the test plug connection for that wire- the test plug should be just aft of the battery, it's got like 4-5 receptacles on the plug but perhaps not as many wires- and one of the wires is wrapped in electrical tape. One thing I would check is that wire is still wrapped properly in tape- when the wire shorted at the Challenge it melted all the insulation off of it so we wrapped it in tape. IF my memory holds right- you can eliminate the need for the switch by connecting a jumper from the battery positive terminal to the terminal on the test plug that the wrapped wire goes to- that does the same thing as the switch without running the power up into the cabin and then back again.
Again... that is all from memory, so I can't say I'm 100% certain that I've got all of that right, you should verify with a multimeter (checking that the test plug wire and the one that the switch powers on have continuity would be a good test).
The lugs shearing off is a bit of a mystery- which wheel was it? I would have been less surprised at it being a rear wheel simply because the front wheels both have new hubs on them vs. the rears still being the original studs (I didn't want to deal with the drum brakes if I didn't have to).
In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :
Lol, I have experience in all blue wires .
I'll check some stuff tomorrow, thanks for the tips!
Any chance at all that the wheel center is a smidgen too small for the hub and not seating flush.
Pete
NOHOME said:Any chance at all that the wheel center is a smidgen too small for the hub and not seating flush.
Pete
I didn't check that but it's a good point. When the studs snapped though the bolt holes seemed perfectly centered though.
Ok, so I got around to checking on the ignition switch and found the problem, a joint isn't doing great and the solder holding it isn't working well but I crimped it, and taped it favorably and tests show it's gonna work so soon we are leaving the hotel
In reply to Antihero :
Not thinking centered, thinking that if it were a mm too small, it would go over the hub center and look flush against the hub but not be seated at the radius at the bottom of the hub center.
Those studs broke for a reason. My mechanic preaches the importance of cleaning the matting surfaces every time I do my winter/summer tire change, so maybe it was just debris between the two surfaces.
Pete
NOHOME said:In reply to Antihero :
Not thinking centered, thinking that if it were a mm too small, it would go over the hub center and look flush against the hub but not be seated at the radius at the bottom of the hub center.
Those studs broke for a reason. My mechanic preaches the importance of cleaning the matting surfaces every time I do my winter/summer tire change, so maybe it was just debris between the two surfaces.
Pete
You are definitely not wrong, I hate it when I can't figure out WHY it happened but so far I have lugnuts and they are not loose .
We made it to our next stop of Chesterfield. The wife was looking forward to the Butterfly House here and we got a nice hotel very close by to rest in for the night. It is hot as berkeley here now, so ac sounds wonderful
Apparently im famous now . That guy gave me a fuse and got me going again
Outstanding! Looks like you're famous now!
Antihero, you have DM with my contact info.
Darnit, this is a section of the board I never visit so I missed you coming to town (you were here during Pridefest BTW).
Fun trivial, those Vision wheels were mine several years ago. A buddy of mine had them in his tire shop but they didn't fit his ancient Civic so I traded him some 15" Honda Si wheels for them. I used them on my CSP Miata driving to and from events and when I sold it two years ago they went with the car. The guy who bought said Miata was looking to recoup some cash and resold the wheels to Robert and when Robert came by one day in the Rampage I saw them on it. I think they looked better on the trucklet than they ever did on the roadster.
Good luck out there, it sounds like you have some decent skills for sorting out any future gremlins that pop up.
What’s the latest? Are you making decent progress?
JohnInKansas said:Antihero, you have DM with my contact info.
I didn't get it but if you'd like to email it to me directly you can hit me up at antiheroeric83@gmail.com
Cotton said:What’s the latest? Are you making decent progress?
We have landed in Springfield MO and are currently eating at the lovely Hemingway inside Bass Pro Shops, this place is incredible!
The day started off with driving to Walmart for new rear tires, the ones on there Robert warned me didn't have a lot of life left so I decided to replace them once they started falling apart. I parked and had a starting issue, which I decided was terrible but Robert pointed out I should start with the neutral safety switch and he was right, jiggled the shifter and all was good.
Got Walmart to realize that this wasn't a standard car and I should pull it into their bay to prevent....stupid. They had a slightly bigger size than I wanted but they were $48 so I didnt really care much....but then they dropped the info on me that they wouldn't put tires on except the "stock" size. So I ended up pulling the rears off and they would swap the tires as long as I put them on the car. We got a slightly later start than I wanted but it was ok.
We get about halfway thru the journey and I notice I'm losing oil pressure. berkeley. I pull over and pull the dipstick and.....nothing. I pour in a quart and a half to get it into safe. I see a little drip but it's not bad.
I drive 30 miles and I'm losing oil pressure again. Pull over and find out I now have a catastrophic leak, probably a half a quart on the ground and I've been there a few minutes. berkeley!
I pull it into a parking spot and think a bit....it's at the front of the engineand I can't really see much thru the fog of oil everywhere. Do a bit of research and the valve cover gasket is a big leak spot on this engine.....it can't be that simple.....right?
Continued
So, I pull out my tool kit again and try a 10mm deep socket. I think it's not the right size because I don't feel any resistance....but I realize that the bolt is literally that loose, like.....less than hand tight.
So I tighten them to resistance and tell my wife that I'm filling it up with oil again and we will stop at the town 5 miles away if the oil pressure drops at all. The first time it went from the 40 it usually runs at to 20 in about a mile. This time it holds 40 for 75 miles. I pull over for gas and check the oil again, it's about a quart low ( I'm only getting into safe since I assume there's a lot of drip down ). So I'm assuming it's all the valve cover gasket now. We are gonna stop in Springfield for another day or so to get parts and check out the cool as hell Bass pro shop
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