Friday, June 12, 2009

my god

Look how long it's been since I've updated, isn't that amazing?

I can tell you the following things about the last two or three weeks:

1) I have been trying to take some pictures here and there. I may even get the chance to post them tonight!

2) That said, I lost the directory structure on my boot drive last week and had to order a terabyte hard drive to start doing time machine backups because I got tired of how difficult it is to back up a broken hard drive. The "good news" is that it left my directory structures for my /Users/ folder intact, so I was able to get preferences, bookmarks, email, and whatever else saved. The bad news is that I lost /System, /Library, /Developer, and /Applications, which meant I had to find and reinstall all of the software I run. Truly awesome, and now hopefully a thing of the past.

3) I bought a car. Last Wednesday morning, my Nissan 200SX started making a weird grumbling noise out of the right rear side of the engine. It had been sounding like I was driving a Ford Explorer, or maybe like I was driving around in reverse, for about three months by that time, and I figured that since I can't work on my car myself and am unwilling to dump six times the blue book value of the car on it in engine repairs and STILL have unresolved suspension and brake issues, it was time to move on.

I really liked that car, though. I was sad to see it go. So, to assuage my misery, I did the only logical thing - if a 200SX held up for 180k miles, why wouldn't a Sentra? I e-dated some Sentras around the DC area and found two I would be willing to go look at. One was in Rockville (I think), the other was in Silver Spring, both at dealerships. Being that MileOne is closer to work, and that the Sentra they had was equipped with a sunroof, I thought I'd go check it out first. Good thing, too - it turned out to be a 2005 SE-R Spec V. They only made 3,800 of them that year, which means this car joins the '72 Autostick Super Beetle in the "somewhat rare cars I've owned" club.

Seeing as how I bought the car because I liked driving it, because it's in pretty good condition, and especially because the B15 chassis reminds me a lot of the B14 on which the 200SX was based and I loved driving that car, I have decided the car is a retrofit upgrade of an older chassis design and have named it accordingly - it is to be called the Enterprise-A. Yeah, that means retconning the SX as the NCC-1701 despite the fact that I knowingly acknowledge never having christened it with ANY name, let alone a really nerdy one, but such is life.

This does hold some benefits for the rest of my daily activities, though - the car can carry me places without fear of it falling apart on me, it's insured way better, and it's pretty fast and handles extremely well compared to any car I've driven since my Baja Beetle. I need to do two things to it though - one, install an intake, preferably cold air; and two, install a precat-less exhaust header so I don't run the risk of disintegrating and aspirating shards of cat substrate. I don't plan on driving it hard all the time like everyone else does, but seeing as how a QR25DE engine costs about 2600 dollars by itself, I don't want to have to deal with that outside the warranty period.

Anyway, like I said, I'll have some graphics for you later this evening if all goes according to plan. Sorry for boring you. Oh, and GMT - sorry I didn't buy your go-kart... expediency and all that, but it sounds like the spirits of the two cars are at least related.

5 comments:

  1. tis ok on the go-kart - I generally assume you'd want things like a/c and maybe some power locks/windows/whatever. and really, you've got the soft suspension selection of the two. maybe spirits related, but as far as execution of design purpose, the go-kart was definitely the bully on the block. lotsa rule changes to give everyone else a chance after they came out and killed everyone for a couple years. if you must have a datsun tho, that's one of the best domestically available choices. enjoy?

    -GMT

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  2. A/C has been nice... and you're probably right, it would be the difference in getting a car or not, if only because I have this stupid tendency to drive long distances through the American southeast.

    I've thought (already, i must shamefully admit, and it's only 9 days after I bought the thing) about getting some suspension upgrades done. Sway bars to start, and a replacement strut tower brace would probably be where I start, since they're all bolt-on and cheap-ish. The engine is probably going to be my first concern, though, since that pre-cat thing is particularly nasty and because the car only gets about 19mpg when I drive it to commute and I'm sure the easier breathing would help that out at least a little bit.

    What trim name was it that they used for yours? I'm having a hard time with my Dodge history right now, and parsing wiki is hurting my brain.

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  3. 19mpg? ouch. i got 18.6 in the jeep on my last tank! def gotta work on that.

    it's a first year Neon ACR, from the batch where A/C and radio weren't even optional. the first batch are the lightest by a good bit, as they were basically built on the 'rental car' base platform, plus they skipped the spray-in foam inside the body cavities. it's WAY lighter than stuff people were building in 2005, that's for sure!

    kinda figured you'd like the A/C thing, most people do. i enjoy it on the jeep from time to time (ie, hot rainy weather), but lack of it is a dealbreaker for the Girl, not me.

    -GMT

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  4. wow, not even the insulation, very nice. I guess you could call it purpose driven, then...

    I'm doing a WHOLE lot better this tank than last; I've been sitting at indicated 25.8, but I'm at half a tank and won't get more until sometime later this weekend or early next week, so I won't know "for sure" until then. I am actually keeping a log book with this car - date, odometer reading, trip A, gallons, price per gallon, time in cockpit, indicated MPG, and calculated MPG. Every page or two, I'll probably dump it into Excel and play with the numbers. What I'm interested in seeing is a fuel burn per hour figure, and whether or not that stays relatively constant for me.

    NERRRR pretty much, though.

    At least it's not one of the 07+ Sentras. They are now based on the same platform as whatever Nissan's crossover SUV is made on, and even though it's called B16, it handles a whole lot higher in many ways than the B15s, according to internet lore. Part of me hopes they de-ugly the Versa and start using that as the SE-R, but I doubt that will happen, if only for the fact that I seem to be the only person that wants a smaller car.

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  5. hey - platform sharing isn't always a bad thing, and you can have VERY different vehicles on the same platform. '80s chrysler stuff was pretty much the mother-of-all-shared-platforms, and leads to some very interesting cross-breeding and swaps/mods over the years. and trust me, a dodge daytona does NOT drive like a caravan.

    purpose-driven, that's one way of putting it. i'm quite serious about the street-legal go-kart comments, that really is how it drives. i think i'll bring it to werk tomorrow, or maybe after the lunchtime puppy visit instead of the bike i got here on this morning. if nothing else, the options are nice to have.

    oh yeah - my sister got a 13" macbook pro yesterday. not bad at all, but damn, i still way prefer the screen on the macbook air, silly a selection that would be over tha 13" mbp for so many other reasons.

    -GMT

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