Lots happening these days. We’ve been frantically getting ourselves and the house ready for puppy mania in March. Our new puppy, Walter (Wally, for short), will be arriving home on March 8 and we’re very excited. We’ll have our pick of the two males in our litter and they’re both pretty darn cute.
On the automotive front, the STI is still way, way under the knife. I made 326whp/403ftlb on the dyno in the fall on the VF39 turbo and E85. That kept me satisfied for a couple of months before the car was parked for the winter. Below are just a few photos of things to come. I’m currently waiting on forged internals and race bearings to show up so that the new motor build can begin. My goal for the spring is to make 800hp at the crank (roughly 600whp) at 28psi or so. It’s doable, so we’ll see. Going into the car will be a brand new 2010 STI motor with forged internals, blueprinted and balanced. The entire rotating assembly will be balanced to 9,500rpm and the oil passages in the block will be ported. Plans for the heads are still up in the air, but cams, springs, retainers, valves, etc will go in to support the higher rev limit and port work. To make the power, a twinscroll Borg Warner 83-75 turbo and a massive fuel system are in the works. I’ll spare all of the details, but charge piping has been mocked up, intake manifold is being rotated to shorten the necessary cold side piping.
Once everything is properly mocked up, it’ll all be pulled, including the motor, abs controller, etc. The engine bay will be painted body color and intercooler piping, intake manifold, etc will all be powdercoated. Enough of that, on with the pictures.
In addition to all of that, the car will be getting an SCCA spec half cage in anticipation of heavy track use and a 1/4mi pass or two. I expect the car to be capable of high 10s with a talented driver and low 11s with me behind the wheel. In any case, a roll bar is required. Of course, seats and harnesses will also round out the safety stuff.
Finally, a sneak peak at a project (1984 Porsche 911 Targa) that I’ll be working on more seriously once the STI is on the road. Shhh.
Posted: February 12th, 2012
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It’s been just over a year since I last posted and much has changed! I’ll probably update this more frequently now that things seem to be settling down a bit. Cliff’s notes: Meredith moved here from NY, I quit my first job after two years to pursue a true passion, Mom sold our childhood home over the winter and moved downtown, Joe graduated from the University of Denver and I continued working on small projects around the house. Of course, the car has become more of a handful and I’ll touch on that as well. Back to scrubbing toilets and tidying up around the house for Meredith’s parents to visit for Labor Day!
Spent all day out in the sun, many hours standing around, many more chasing down cones on course only to earn just over 5 minutes behind the wheel. You might notice that instead of piloting the STI, I’m driving a Mini Cooper S. Knowing my tires couldn’t handle another day of autox, Chris Campbell was kind enough to offer his car’s services for the day. It was a real blast to drive the Mini and I think it helped me understand where my faults are as a driver by allowing me to feel out a familiar course in a new car. I managed a 71.1sec run just after lunch and that was enough to secure a second place finish in my class. Friends, Andy Palmer and Tom Darrow also competed in their Miata and Z4, respectively. Videos coming soon.
After weeks of corrupt compact flash cards and firmware errors on my camera, I was able to take a few pictures and manage to get them uploaded without losing them to the nikon gremlins.
I’ve decided to enter a print of a photo that I took in 2009 as a part of a larger project into the Fine Art competition at the state fair. While I’m relatively sure I can’t be competitive, my ego could use the boost of seeing a framed print on the wall for others to enjoy. Anyway, in order to register I need to title the photo. Any ideas?
Well, just this spring I attended a two-day autocross school hosted by the MAC organization. After a day of classroom instruction and a full day of instructed runs, I was hooked. Since then, I’ve been punishing my tires every chance I get.
The MOWOG series is a summer autocross racing series consisting of 9 events across different local locations. The two races that I’ve been able to compete in so far were ‘M1′ at Valley Fair and ‘M3′ at the Dakota County Technical College (DCTC) road course. For the DCTC event, Ben Yates lent me his GoPro Hero HD so I took some pretty great footage. Stay tuned for that.
A typical autocross run is between 30sec and 90sec depending on the course (and the driver). With 36 runs under my belt, my tires (with around 8,000mi on them) are nearly toast. The fronts are sufficiently scrubbed in and nearly to the wear bars. The rears aren’t quite as bad. Time to rotate. If I continue racing, I’ll need to look for a wider, stickier, purpose built set of tires and will likely replace them on a yearly basis. The Falken Azenis Rt-615 in a 245/40R17 would have been my tire of choice but of course, they’re no longer being made.
So here’s the main event, house hunting. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted when I went into things, so it was relatively easy to narrow down what was currently listed. Even so, Jim encouraged me to look at a few other options to make sure that I knew what features, location, etc I was really interested in. As a result, I ended up looking at a few lofts downtown St. Paul and Minneapolis. I posted pictures from the Union Depot Lofts last week. They were pretty awesome with really, really high ceilings and big windows. The obvious drawback to the loft/condo thing for me is the lack of garage, yard, deck, grill, parking, etc, etc.
With that, I met with Jim on a Saturday morning. He had identified 12 or so MLS listings that we’d go take a look at. That day, we were looking at houses in the NE Minneapolis area. We saw a few nice ones and there were a few where we weren’t even there long enough for the door to close behind us. The area was nice, but the houses, yards, garages, etc weren’t quite what I was looking for. They were all definitely ‘projects’.
A few of the main things that we were checking were additional costs associated with moving into the house and making it livable. Many of the older houses would need carpet, paint, fixtures, etc to look decently updated. Even more of them would likely need furnaces, hot water heaters, roofs, etc. It would be all too easy to get into a ‘project’ house and end up way over your head. Jim had a good eye for small details that had greater meaning with respect to how the house had been maintained, used and so on.
The next weekend, Jim had identified 12 or so houses in Blaine to look at. Blaine is a place that was in rougher shape a number of years ago but it’s really on the rebound and there are some pretty great deals to be had. I also able to refine my search to houses newer than 1995 with 3-car garages. Again, we saw some projects, we saw some nice ones and we saw some dumps. One of the big turn-offs was that a few of the houses had neighbors with boats, cars, trash, etc under tarps and things in their side yard. I wanted to be in a place where people took pride in their houses and the area was clean. We found that. It was on this trip that I found the house that I’ll be moving into on Friday.
Over the course of a month or so, Jim and I looked at around 35 houses in the NE Minneapolis, Shoreview, Arden Hills, Vadnais Heights and Blaine areas. I had identified a few that I really liked, met with builders, representatives and made a number of trips back to visit them. Jim had been telling me all along that nothing draws a crowd like a crowd and that when someone makes an offer on a desirable house or lot, it often draws more competing offers.
Coming soon will be Homebuying Chapter 3: The House and the Offer
Since leaving school last June, I’ve been working full time in Minneapolis, MN. I’ve been getting to my desk by 6:30am everyday for the last nine months. That means leaving the house by 6:10am. It was painful at first, but I figured I’d get used to it. I didn’t.
Because there seems to be no good way to wake up and leave the house so early, my morning routine is just whatever gets me out the door. It’s generally not the same from day to day, but this is how I’d best descrie it.
You know how you set an alarm during the week but then maybe on the weekend you need to get up at a different time so you reset the alarm? My phone reflects that. I don’t have a clue where these two alarms started and I don’t have any idea why I haven’t bothered to change them.
The first alarm goes off and I unconciously turn it off. Luckily, I’ve set a second alarm. I usually turn that one off in my sleep too. Nuisance alarms. I figure these get my brain pissed.
Just pissed enough so that when my Sony clock/radio loses it’s mind at 5:58am (seriously), 15ft from my bed, it only takes one crushing blow to get ahold of the snooze button. If I’ve tripped over anything, I’ll sit angrily on the floor for a few mintues before leaving my room. If I do happen to trip over something, it’s usually my alarm clock cord and when that happens I reset my alarm to an arbitrary time before 6am and the entire process evolves.
With closing just under two weeks away, I thought now might be a good time to reflect upon the entire home buying process with a few exceedingly verbose installments describing my own experience. Important to note is that I’ve never been even remotely involved in a similar ordeal and without any knowledge of the necessary procedure, I went ahead and figured it out on my own. What I’m getting at is that if it sounds like I didn’t fully understand a specific part of the process, it’s probably safe to assume that I didn’t.
Twenty three years of living with the same roommates had begun to cramp my style. It’s difficult to convince people that you’re a self-sufficient, independent adult when Oprah occupies 83% of your TiVo and your house smells like steamed mushrooms and spinach. It was time to move out. There are a number of reasons I decided to seriously consider buying a house instead of renting an apartment/loft/town home/etc. My motivation was the allure of having a yard, a deck, a place for campfires, a garage, etc. These are things that I just couldn’t find anywhere else. With that in mind, I went ahead and got in contact with a realtor. Apparently, people will generally meet with a few realtors before choosing one. I guess I got lucky; Jim and I started our search the very next week.
The first step in the process was determining what I could afford. There are a number of things to consider here and among them are monthly principle and interest payment, homeowners insurance and associated taxes. Additionally, the money that you have available for a down payment will determine the size of your monthly payment as well as whether or not you also need to pay for mortgage insurance. After we (my mortgage consultant Chad and I) determined what I could and could not afford, Jim and I started searching.
With a lot of experience with first-time home buyers, Jim made the experience relatively painless and efficient. I started my making a list of things features in a home/property that I was interested in as well as things that I wasn’t so interested in. I found that it was easier to identify what wasn’t important to me and then work backward to determine what was important. Important to me where a yard, location, quality, cleanliness and garage size. Not as critically important to me were school district, bathroom size, finished basement, etc. With that, Jim came up with an initial list of properties currently listed and we made plans to go out looking.
Chapter 2: The Hunt will follow soon, here’s a teaser since I promised pictures.
After a long, relaxing weekend of campfires, drive-in movies, grilling and time spent outside chaos ensues. This week will be spent continuing to pack up 23 years worth of belongings and getting the sti ready for the MAC autocross school next weekend. A full day of classroom on Saturday prepares us for a full day behind the wheel on Sunday. The car will take a pretty serious beating and needs an oil change among other things. That wouldn’t normally be a problem except that all of my tools are in storage in Forest Lake.
Closing in two weeks. Driveway should be poured this week – that’s important. My next update will have pictures, I promise.
