Ranger

What's a reasonable ft-lbs or in-lbs value for tightening then back up?

My Father had a '66 3/4 ton Chevy pickup in two tone rust & green. One day a rear tire started losing air on the way to work. He pulled over at a gas station and they fixed it. Shortly thereafter he was back on the highway at 70mph. At some point traffic conditions required that he touch the brakes. There was a worrisome pair of big thumps and then suddenly, still at 60mph, a wheel rolled past him. He considered for a moment just how very unusual it was to be passed by a rolling tire at 60mph. Then he checked his sideview mirror and sure enough, saw only brake drum behind him.

Izzy, http://forums.rennlist.com/rennforums/show...eferrerid=47914

The reason Viper made those comments is that you quoted him a paragraph from an "inclusive" warranty. I completely agree with him. Like I said before, you have to get the more expensive "exclusive" warranty. That is the one that covers everything except for what is explicitly excluded. Then you don't end up in the classic aftermarket warranty struggle over what is a "lubricated" part. What you ought to do is PM me for my fax #. Fax me the warranty that you are looking at, and I'll tell you what it's strengths and weakness are. Or if you can email it, do that.

Rumor is that Klasse Sealent Glaze is one of the very few products that can genuinely be applied in multiple coats. Most everything else removes the last coat while putting on a new coat. Great stuff. Yo Izzy, go to Rennlist to see the latest in my alignment saga. Progress is made. Of a sort.

Ultramens, this is my last attempt to help you. 6 months ago I was in exactly your position. Your car, your year, your concern, negotiations with your warranty company. 2 months ago I blew my motor. I now have a new motor. You don't seem to want to go to Rennlist and read the details about the negotiations with Royal Administration. You don't even want to ask questions. The reason I wrote an extensive write-up over at Rennlist was solely to help folks in your position. Royal Admin just paid ~$10.8k towards my motor. After-market warranties can work, but you have to go in carefully.

Ultramens, I'm the world's authority on getting Royal Administration to pay for a blown motor. Ignore the posts at Rennlist at your peril. Do not buy that warranty. It's too inexpensive. It's probably not their "Exclusive" offering. Note that Royal Administration operates warranties under a number of names. Folks think that they're dealing with different warranty companies, but they're not. At least not in any way that matters much.

Do a search on this topic at RennList. Lots of info there. Much of it from me. My new engine has ~700mi on it, thanks for asking <g>.

2 months ago my '99 motor grenaded at 41k mi. Aftermarket warranty covered most of it. Dealer did the work. I was explicitly told that my replacement PCNA refurb motor had all the design improvements ever incorporated into the 996 Mk1 motor. See Rennlist for more details of the adventure, especially if you are interested in aftermarket warranties. Editorial opinion follows: I have a long history of horsepower mods, all the way up to motor swaps. It's a sad history. But it's a history that has taught me a lot. Mostly it taught me not to attempt it.

Judd, this won't answer all your questions, but it might help. I started fighting this battle in the same timeframe, with the same car, and with the same objective. I've done ~25 track days since embarking on this effort to make my car a better track car, while remaining reasonably streetable. Some of my mods have worked, some have not. 1. Suspension. The problem was that the car was understeering like a pig. I went with ROW M030 and stock alignment. That helped. Then I went with GT3 "Street" alignment (-1deg camber F, -1.5deg R). That helped even more. Now I'm about to dremel the front strut mounts to try to get a little more neg camber. My tires are wearing very badly on the outside corners, a good indicator that more neg camber is indicated. If I had to buy a suspension again, I'd buy something that dropped the car more. The would require that I pour some cement so I could get into my garage, but that would be a small price to pay to drop my center mass another 10 or 15mm, and the additional neg camber that would result. When you say M030, it's important to distinguish between US and ROW. I have read postive things about putting monoballs in the shock mounts, but I've heard that it can be tricky. I've read about ball "fit" problems and increases to "height" that were unexpected. I'd certainly buy the monoballs from the same outfit that I got the shock/struts from. If you would like to do any SCCA "Solo" or NASA "Time Trial", be sure to understand the impact of your mods. External reserviours and adjustatibility, for example, can count against you in Time Trial. 2. Seats. I did a lot of research on this. I'm curious as to what you ended up getting and how well it worked. I ended up concerned about the width of the seat narrow enough. I think that the OEM seats were ~18" and most of the seats I found on line were 21 or 22". Note that I had to get seats that folded forward. I ended up with Corbeau A4 "Narrow", w/ anti-sub slot. They worked out ok, but not without warts. They are a very tight fit against the central tunnel, they don't slide far forwards or backwards, and the headrest pushes my helmet forward akwardly. I also had to get the butt and lumbar pads removed and replaced with much softer foam. 3. I ended up putting in a harness bar and 5pt. This was a huge step forward in holding me planted in my seat. But I'm going to be less excited about the 5pt if the car rolls and the roof pushes in and breaks my neck. 4. Tires and wheels. I've spent most of my track days on Yoko AD07's 225/285, but I've just bought an extra set of wheels and put on Yoko AO48's in 235/295. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to go to a wider tire, but in the end I was defeated by the cost of wheels with GT3 offsets and some uncertainty whether or not wider would work. By a narrow margin I found a consensus that GT3 offsets would be necessary to wider. And that consensus was amid a heck of a lot of contradictory or amibiguous info from well informed sources. So in the end I decided that the lower cost (996 offset) and more "sure" solution was the smart way to go. Hence 235/295. 5. Even tho it's easy to drive a street/DE car to a distant track, start thinking about trailering it. I blew my motor 7hrs away and having no way home didn't make things any easier. 6. Is "dual use" the way to go? I'm starting to think that turning my street 996 into a street/track 996 just makes it crappy for both. I'm thinking about getting into Spec E30 and putting the OEM seats back into the 996.

I need more neg camber in my ROW M030 '99. It's a 30% DE car and the front is maxed out at -1deg. My tires are wearing very badly on the outside, and not much on the inside. My assumption is that this non-symmetric tire wear is caused by insufficient neg camber. And before anyone asks, my air pressure isn't a contributor to this. At least I don't think that it is. I arrived at my current 29F, 34R after a lot of monitoring of sidewall abrasion. Tires are Yoko AD07. So if I need more neg camber, what's the smartest way to get it? What's the least cost way to get it? My objective is to be able to get 2deg of neg front camber. Even if I don't end up using all of -2deg, at least that will allow me to experiement that far in the neg camber range. I'm hesitant to lower the car any more. That would just create more problems with driveways and trailers.

Just went thru some "BHP Performance" pads in 6 DE days, which is to say 8 weeks. Is that normal? Recommendations for pads that last longer? My car is ~ 2/3 street, 1/3 DE.

I think that the role that negative camber plays in traction under lateral g's is not a HS physics problem. I mean that in the sense that there are some complex interactions occuring. I'm sure that there are models that predict this behavior well, but they must be complicated. Which is a long winded intro to this idea: "There's a lot more going on then just the role of body roll". Was that a pun? There is a force vector going thru the car's center mass to the center of the traction patch. Under significant lateral g's, there's a hell of a horizontal component to the force vector. If the load is more then a g then there's more horizontal component then vertical. And since the force of friction is a function of the vertical (assuming flat road) force, that means that tires shouldn't be able to hold more then a g of lateral force. Yet we know that they can. Just one example of how tricky the dynamics of suspension is. When talking friction, that vertical force is called the "normal" force. Normal means perpendicular to the surface. Thought experiment: Consider what is happening to a car's traction patches when it travels around a 45deg banked corner and is pulling 1 g. Intuitively we know that the banking provides additional grip. In this case the vertical vector associated with gravity and the lateral vector associated with turning, are both equal at 1g. Since they are equal the sum of the horizontal and vertical acceleration components is a 45deg acceleration vector. Since, in this example, the banking is at 45deg, the sum of the acceleration vectors are exactly perpendicular to the track. Therefore the entire force is pressing down on the track's surface and there's no horizontal component of acceleration left that the tire's traction patch has to fight. Ok, now transition from that thought experiement to the word of camber. I read somewhere the other day that camber can be thought of as a taking turns and bringing your banking with you. There's some weaknesses in that analogy, but it's got some charms too. I'd attempted to wax poetic on the weaknesses of the "bringing your banking with you" idea, but it seems that they've been trumped by 2 beers. Hopefully that made sense. If it didn't, have another beer. Oh, and I'm running AD07's with 30/36. Rear wear looks good, but I think that the fronts can roll over a couple millimeter more. So Fri-Sun I'm going to be experimenting with 29/36.

I have 18" 225 F and 285 R Advan AD07's. I run advanced solo at DE's. I started at 36F/38R and have been reducing pressure every couple of DE's until I started getting near the tire marks that indicate the roll over limit. 36PSI Rear has turned out to be about right. The tire abrasion is about 3mm from the roll over line I was at 30PSI Front for the last DE and the tire abrasion is about 5mm from the roll over line. I figured I'd try 29PSI front next weekend and see what happened.

Thanks a lot Loren. Whatever they're paying you, it ain't enough <g>.

Apparently the airbag adjusts it's deployment force based on the weight it perceives in the seat. So what happens when you install an aftermarket seat like a Recaro or an SPG? If you disconnect all of the wiring to the seat, is it possible that the airbag won't even deploy? I have a '99.

Edit: John Jones pointed out (and diplomatically so I might add) that I left some ambiguity on kid ages. None of the below applies to infants. I'm irritating, but not utterly whacked. I think that there is little question that an infant needs to be faced backwards. The twins didn't go into the 996 for trips to daycare until they were 2, having finally convinced my wife that the nanny for the twins was going to result in debtors prison. The twins were both in the Eddie Bauer seats in the back of the 996 until #2 son's legs got too long for the available space. Edit ends. I have 3 kids in my '99 Coupe a couple times a week, because I pick them up from Daycare. Oldest is 4. I worked this child seat issue really hard and tried a number of products. As the kids have gotten bigger, the solutions have changed. Here's the saga. #1 son started out in a Eddie Bauer seat, exactly as pictured in a previous post. But then he got big enough that he kept pushing on the passenger seatback with his feet. So then I got him a little booster seat at Walmart for ~$20. I cut off it's sides so it would be thinner and fit in the back better. Then the twins came. #1 son went to the passenger seat and took the booster with him. So no airbag deactivation. I did a mess of research on this. Turns out that the whole airbags hurt kids thing is overblown. Heck, the whole child car seat thing is overblown. The '97 NTSA study that looked at airbags harming kids looked at kids that were ENTIRELY UNSECURED. A lot of those kids were in a passenger's lap. The report did not address kids that were properly secured. Then the media reported this as "car bags kill kids". When you think about how violently an airbag would hit an unsecured little kid as he went flying into the exploding dashboard, it's no wonder he'd get hurt. Note that since a booster does not have a back, #1 son is farther away from the airbag too. Of course my wife still gives me grief, but that's what wives are for. In terms of car seats in general...read Freakonomics. They looked at the results of accidents with kids in car seats and kids properly secured in OEM seats. And they found no evidence in the data that car seats were helping. All that car seats did was make it harder for parents to allow their child to be completely unsecured. Freakonomics also made the interesting point that this entire issue was largely invented by child seat manufacturers. Kind of like Valentines day. Heck, when I was a kid we had a milk crate for a passenger's seat. 40 yrs later I'm a BAD PARENT? But I digress. One of the twins is now too big for the Eddie Bauer car seat in the back, for the aforementioned reason. So #2 son is now in this harness sort of thing that I found on the Internet. Look up the Freedom Ride. I had to monkey with the Freedom Ride to make it easier to put on, but it seems to hold #2 pretty securely. Soon #3 will go into a Freedom Ride. And a year from now the twins can probably be trusted to not monkey with the OEM belts, and I'll get plastic boosters, cut off the sides, and use those little padded things that bind the lap and shoulder belt together so the shoulder belt doesn't ride too high. Back to my digression. The laws differ among the states. GA's law says that you have to use a child seat unless for some reason it's not workable. Should I ever get pulled over and the police officer is annoyed with my child seat solution , I'll politely tell the him that I tried a number of child seats in the back and none of them fit well. If he wants to write me a ticket, fine. I'll happily pay the $50 as the fee associated with having an inexpensive entirely workable solution, and standing on principle against the increasingly intrusive "nanny state".

Don't stop at the suspension, start working the alignment variables that the new suspension will better allow. I put in ROW M030 my '99C2 a couple months ago. Had them align it to ROW M030 specs. Spent the following weekend DE parked next to a GT3 guy. It was his daily driver. Talked to him about tire wear on the street. He said he had no issues. Went a couple DE's later and had the shop redo the suspension settings with the "GT3 Street" settings. Back to the track for another couple DE's Had less understeer with the ROW M030 and it's alignment. Had even less understeer with the GT3 Street alignment. But I'm probably going to go back and change it again. Even the GT3 Street alignment has built in understeer. Am going to experiement with F/R both at 1.5deg, then put either front or rear at 2deg. Then swap putting the other end at 2deg. It remains to be seen whether my ROW M030 front can even get to 2deg. The racers are, obviously, playing with a lot more neg camber, but I'm not planning on experimenting in the neg 3-4deg range. Play with tire widths too. I run DE's in advanced solo. I'm almost the only guy on street tires. My learning curve is steep so I certainly wouldn't call myself genuinely skilled. God how those GT3 Cup cars fly past me on corners on open track days. Neither me nor my car will ever hang with a GT3 Cup, but I do hate always being lunchmeat.

Entire problem turned out to be the cap. I'd researched the cap issue but I misunderstood the nature of the problem. It's not that it leaks, it's that it "doesn't leak". That is to say, it doesn't allow pressure release when it should because it's valve gets clogged. So pressure builds up until coolant starts coming out all over the place. Thanks for all the input gents. -Scott

Thanks guys. And Rangers do indeed lead the way. :) -S

test

Not hijacking this thread...and this is sort of relevant to the issue at hand about testing systems...but I have one of those Stant kits for pressure testing cooling systems....but it only has the adapters for American cars. It's the nice chrome kit with the pump and pressure gauge on it. Is there an adapter that would allow me to use the pressure tester on Porsches? I saved the old cap I had when I had to buy the new one due to leakage.....and I was wondering if it would be feasible to make an adapter out of that cap and would that work for pressure testing? What pressure does the 996 run at? How 'bout this for a theory. What if the coolant system pressure is proportional to RPM and fluid level......And I have a weak hose/connection at my F/L radiator, and an even weaker overflow tank cap. Therefore I'd get a radiator leak at high pressure and a overflow leak at medium high pressure. That would fit the symptoms, but is dependent on my assumptions of coolant system variables. Thoughts?

Holy ****, pls tell me I don't have a big problem here! '99 with 32k mi. Spent Fri/Sat at the track for a DE. No overheating problems. Started spewing coolant out of the top of the overflow container after a couple sessions. No sign of container leaking. I interpreted that as it was responding to an overpressure condition and releasing coolant as designed(?). Coolant was at very top of container. While still pretty hot we pulled out some coolant until it was down to min mark. Estimated total coolant removed (spewed and "pulled out") as a liter. Last session of the day my "add coolant" dash light came on. Since temp was still ok, I drove 30 min home. Last night, once the motor was cool I added water/antifreeze up until halfway between min/max level. Added ~3/4 liter. This morning at the track not only was it spewing out of the overflow tank, but it was also leaking out of the F/R radiator. I interpreted that as confirmation of my "overpressure" theory. Dash gauge indicates operating temp remains absolutely normal. I opened the overflow container cap and coolant came out. I figured "ok, that's as much as wanted to come out, so I'm ok". Next session more spewing (but less). No leakage from radiator this time. However the "add coolant" light was back on. Overflow tank was empty at this point. Since I knew that the coolant capacity was high, and the temp guage continued to show no abnormal activity at all, I chose to continue. After each successive session I'd have a little coolant spray around the overflo tank. Each session seemed to have less and coming out. Dash temp indicator remained fine. I know that a very serious indicator is when you temp guage goes high, then falls back down to normal or lower (when your coolant is pretty much gone), but that didn't happen. So I can't understand how I can be a liter low on coolant, have no apparent over heating problems, yet have spewing coolant. And not just from the overflow cap, but also 1 incident of it coming out of the radiator too. I can't seem to make the symptoms fit a "bad cap" explanation. The fact that it leaked out of the radiator too that one time just seems like some kind of "the problem is too much pressure, not just a leak" smoking gun. So I'm worried that cylinder compression is leaking into the coolant. There is no sign of contaminated oil or coolant, but it's not like I drained anything to really look. Oh pls mighty Renntechers, give me good news.

Spend 30min on the track and then check the pressure in your rear tires. You'll never run 44psi again. Note how I craftily stayed out of the Nitrogen issue? -Scott

I want to get a pair of sport seats because in DE's I have to hang on to the steering wheel. But the seats have to be able to pivot forward because I frequently have to pick up the kids in it. Therefore I have to get a "street" type racing seat. I note that most street type racing seats do not have the slot for the anti-sub strap. Is running the anti-sub strap around the front of the seat a reasonable work-around, or is it a nogo? Note that I'm talking strictly a DE environment. I'm not trying to replicate the protections of a prepared car. It just can't be less safe than 3pt. My perception is that the PCA DE rules only say that driver and passenger need equal restraint systems. But I heard a rumor that the rules may be changing.