Farewell trusty little Toyota Prerunner, hello big Ford F-150. Having driven the Ford for just a while, there’s a learning curve to get used to its size, but the rear sensors help a lot. Then there’s having literally twice the power. I’m truly impressed; it’s faster in a straight line than many sports compacts. It’ll have no problem towing the car.
Between shopping, checking on the parents, and yard work, didn’t accomplished much in the car department. Did swap in the new wastegate springs, and got a surprise. Not sure what happened; I was sure that 3.6 lb springs had been swapped in, and it was mentioned a while back that I couldn’t find the original 5.8 psi springs… guess where they were? Yup, in the wastegates. Hmmm, interesting, because boost was reading “0.3 bar.” However, depending how the dash software rounds the value, it’s somewhere between 4.4 and 5.7 lbs, probably the latter. The image at right is what it indicated when run on the dyno back in 2010 – note the break at 5.8 psi – but also note how it creeps higher. That’s because at the time, only one wastegate was working. With both working there didn’t seem to be any creep (or the dash sw may have been truncating the number.) So for now the wastegates contain 0.6 bar (8.7 psi) springs, and they’ll be left in order to establish how much creep there is (there has to be some just by the nature of gas dynamics.)
The clutch is scheduled to arrive Tuesday so there’ll be at least a week of putting the car back together.
Oh, and one of the light fixtures in the garage failed so I figured that would be easy – to quote Jeremy Clarkson, “how hard can it be.” Three trips to Home Depot later, it’s fixed. Over the years, fluorescent lighting has gone through three different pin configurations: two separate pins at each end, a simi-integrated “single” pin, which was/is still two pins, and the latest that has one large pin at each end. I got a strong feeling that a lot of people are experiencing the same as me, because of the 8-ft lights on the rack at HD, a whole lot of them had obviously been opened and returned, no doubt right after finding that they didn’t fit the fixture. I had originally had been using 110 W units, which are now going away; not only the bulbs but the fixtures as well. After wasting a lot of time on what to do I finally embraced the future and replaced the lamps and fixtures with the single-pin style to be done with it. To make up for the lower power 75 W bulbs, another fixture was added across the end of the garage toward the door. It’s always been a pain working on the engine back there due to the shadows, so it’ll be very welcome during the engine install 🙂