Winter Wrenching

Starting my 2015 season prep a little early.

 

Picked up a new Cam seal and a Vtec Solenoid Gasket to fix a couple of oil leaks my engine was having. Things were going smooth until I was replacing my cam cover haha. Snapped a 12mm bolt trying to torque it correctly, gonna take the car into the shop on Tuesday to get it fixed. Oh well, hopefully my oil leaks are done haha.

I made a video too!

Before I started filming, I wasn’t aware that my camera has a 4gb video file limit, so this is only 12 minutes condensed into 1 minute.  I’ll be sure to stay on top of this next time I make a wrenching video.

Hair Post

Just made my very first video with my T2i!!!!

I’ve had a few people ask me to show them how I do my hair, so I did!

Equipped

This news isn’t anywhere as important to next car season as the RAMBLERS news is. BUT, it is very important to me personally.

I finally got a DSLR! It’s not the most ridiculous rig, but It’s at the right level I need it to be seeing as it’s just going to be used to take pictures of leaves, my car, and candid photos of the people in my life.

Picked this T2i up from a homie for a steal with an aftermarket flash, and a tripod that he still has to find haha. But now that I have a camera I can dedicate to creating content for this site, I feel like I will actually be motivated to create content for this site. Not that my phone’s camera isn’t good enough for my needs, but I don’t like  using my phone too much at car events that usually take all day. I like conserving my phone’s battery for actual smartphone related use haha. Going to start looking into Minolta to Cannon adapters so I don’t have to invest in new lenses just yet seeing as I have quite a few rad old Minolta lenses. But yeah, don’t expect any shots just yet. I have to wait for my memory cards to come in. But once that happens, I plan on doing a lot of shooting haha.

RAMBLERS

Last year, the only event I was able to drive was GRIDLIFE, but it was the most fun event I’ve ever taken part in. A full weekend of driving, hanging with friends, becoming a better driver, a party, and a competitive time attack event. Last year’s event was a real eye opener in showing me how much I need to improve as a driver. But with this next year’s event already having been announced, I’m already very ready for it mentally.

This year’s GRIDLIFE offers a new twist to their time attack event; a team battle. Before I found out about the team battle, I was going back and forth about competing in the time attack at all. But I decided it would be a good way to benchmark my progress as a driver at Gingerman. But then I saw how the team battle would work, and it really is right up my alley.

The team battle will be judged as followed: “The team title will be comprised of 2 parts. Collective time & Group theme and concourse. The timed portion will be based on the average of the finishing positions of each team member within their class. Concourse will be judged by a team of 2 Non competing staff members and 2 guest judges. We will be looking at consistency of team liveries, vehicular thematics & overall build and prep.” A perfect way to drive and show my style. But I didn’t have a team. So I started to look around at my friend lists. I have a lot of friends that understand car style really well, and I have a lot of friends that are very talented drivers, and I have a lot of friends that are good at both, but most of them are drifters haha. But my biggest problem was that most of my track friends that do understand style, I would assume are already part of teams, or wouldn’t be interested haha.

Luckily, two friends that I drove at GRIDLIFE with last year were totally down with my idea. And to add more to my luck, not only are they both better drivers than I am, but they definitely don’t come up short in style. The first person I asked was my old friend Mikey. We used to talk about stuff like this years ago, so he was the first person I even thought of when I saw the team battle existed. Our third member is our friend Chris. I’ve only really started talking to Chris this past year, but he’s one of a few folks that are truly like minded with me when it comes to cars locally; so we’ve become good friends since we’ve met.

So now we’ve got a team, and we’ve got a date to shoot for, but we needed a name. I had a few names lined up, but one that really resonated with me was RAMBLERS. Some might remember my RAMBLERS stickers from a year or two ago, nothing really came of that, I really only made it for the CREWS car show so we’d have a name to use, but I really liked the sticker, and kinda just put the concept away until now. Now that the name has a use, I redesigned it, and have a pretty big plan for it in the coming season. I’ll be posting updates about it all closer to the spring, but I’m very excited about it all.

But yeah, that’s us. We are the RAMBLERS Racing Team. I changed the GeekyLURV facebook page into our official page for now, and we’ll be updating that more often once we all start actually prepping for GRIDLIFE.

Me

Mikey

Chris

I have a little more news to tell you all, but that will have to wait until after a few things come into my possession. It’s not as big news as RAMBLERS is, but it’s still a big deal to me haha.

Announcements!

I have some big news coming up, I’m not going to say anything just yet about it until more things are set in stone, but I should be able to say more in about two weeks. I can say though, that I will definitely have more content uploaded more frequently for you in the coming year.

Also, as a small update, I changed the look of the blog, I was looking for more simplicity, something really subtle and easy to look at, so here we are! I’ll see ya when I see ya!

Closing

The weather is getting pretty cold, and the car season is coming to a close. I have quite a few updates for you.

I’d like to open by saying I got a new job! It’s a patient care technician position at a local hospital. I’m going to be making considerably more money now than I ever have, so this opens up quite a bit of space for me to mod the car for next season, and actually start putting money away for a daily driver. I have my eyes set on something, and I should be able to afford it after winter. With this new job and the prospect of actually being able to put money away and what not, It’s really dawning on me now that I need to fucking buckle down and get my shit together. I’m going to be applying to Nursing schools really soon, and next car season is actually probably going to be my last for a while. Once I get a daily, I’m planning on putting the Civic away for a couple of years, and focus only on work and school. This site is probably going to end up being more of a personal outlet again, and I’ll probably be posting less than I already do.

But on to other news, we’re bringing Scrape Artist back! There will be more news on that when we get a little closer to completion. We’re planning on relaunching at the beginning of next car season, and we’ll be stock piling content until then.

Also, I’ve already budgeted out what next season is going to look like for me in car terms at least. I’m keeping it simple, to make sure I get as much drive time as possible next summer. Essentially I’m just collecting consumables and things of that nature. I like to make lists, it keeps me on track, and lets me know when I’m nearing completion, and also feels good when I get through everything. I tend to make a list every year for things that need to get done on the car, or things I want to do to the car. These lists are always living documents, so I’m sure things will definitely be added to this list later on. There are other inconveniences on the car I would like to fix that I’ve never been able to afford, but I may be able to now. So we’ll see. That’s all I’ve really got to say haha, but yeah, here’s my list.

On Queue

Been on a huge country music kick as of late. Zac Brown Band is my favorite.

Tradition

Something that’s always fascinated me was when skills and arts get passed down among generations. Especially skills and arts of dying breeds. I saw this video a few years ago on facebook, I really enjoyed it. That’s all I really have to say about it haha.

Inspiration From Weird Places

As of late, I’ve had a lot of different plans of what I’ve wanted this Civic to become. All that noise is gone, and I’m definitely just going to keep it a simple street car until I’m in a different point in my life, not going to struggle and stress so hard just so it will be a tiny bit different for the next summer. From now on, it’s just going to be consumable items, and maintenance for this guy.

With it’s recent rise in popularity, I’ve noticed a lot of hate on Kanjo and it’s culture, specifically from track guys. I understand why they dislike it, they track to keep it off the streets. But to me, when it comes to FF Hondas, Kanjo is what makes the most sense. It’s where my roots are, and those roots are deep, with the release of that Kanjozoku video, I’ve even confirmed that the way I think about cars is the same way real Kanjo racers think about cars. So that is the direction this car will keep moving. Light aero, light tune B-series motors, loud exhaust, small wheels, weight savings, dangerous cage setups, and sticky tires. Bare minimum, all out driving fun. At the end of the day, Kanjo is about driving, and to me, improving my driving is most important.

But back to the reason for this post. For a little while, I was shooting for big aero and shit. I’ve wanted it for years, ever since the first time I saw the Garage Work EK on a Crazu Knights post. I bought those Dmax canards, I had plans and some materials to build a splitter and diffuser, and I was in the process of buying a wing. I’ve also even had plans for making my own widebody. But after driving for a few months with front aero, I found that it’s not as fun. At least not on the street, that and my fuel consumption had risen quite substantially haha. Plus in order for me to do it exactly how I would want it, it would cost a lot of money that I definitely don’t have. ANYWAY, I’ve found a few guys on various forms of social media that have done similar setups to what I wanted. But pretty much all of them were done poorly, and anyone that did it well, didn’t really have any style, they looked too much like track cars. I’m into that, but the car has to look good yaknow? (I’m not going to name names, but quite a few of them were weirdos with huge aero that don’t track, don’t have any plans to track, or only autox. Like, seriously? Who needs a GT wing to autocross an FF Honda?).  But in a way, they have done well to inspire me, or at least reaffirm what my thoughts were on how I was going about my plans.  They showed me how to not do things, and how awkward things could look if I did it wrong. I guess this is me talking shit, but if you think I’m talking about you, I’m sorry haha. Oh well, all these plans aren’t completely dead, but are definitely put on hold for the long haul.

This is pretty much what the car’s going to look like for the remainder of this stage in my life. I need to work on me, this thing’s gotten enough attention haha.

Adventure!

I had quite the weekend last weekend. A good friend of mine from the Canada hit me up telling me to go with him to Showano for DDAY49, and it was a fucking BLAST. I got to drive a JZX100 MarkII to and from USAIR, and I got hella fucking ridealongs. Thank you many times Dylan! Then the next day was iLL Fest, as of late, I’ve usually super not been into meets and shows and such. But iLL Fest felt damn good. Might have been just me coming off the high of DDAY, but I haven’t been so excited to look at parked cars in a long time. I didn’t take many photos over the weekend, but here are a few.

 

This is my boy Danny’s beautiful 510 Wagon. I need to get into an older car soon. Probably an older Toyota.

 

This is Dylan’s MarkII at Daikoku Futo

AND, not only did I finally get to see LongGrain’s car, I got a lengthy ridealong. This shit’s been like 3 or 4 years in the making haha. Sound and feels fucking BONKERS with the BEAMS motor in it. Final Bout is about to be the jams!

I can safely say I re fell in love with cars this weekend. It feels good to have something truly rekindle your passion.