Geeto67

here is a reman head with a 1 year warranty for $366+core: http://www.ebay.com/itm/88-92-Isuzu-2-6L-2559cc-L4-SOHC-4ZE1-Cylinder-Head-/272325166279?hash=item3f67d844c7:g:NgEAAOSwLpdW9Epu&vxp=mtr as for working on it? well if a high school kid could keep a janky old one running in the days before the internet.....

I had a buddy in high school with one. It was an unkillable engine if it is the 2.6L SOHC FI engine. Head gaskets are a known issue and if I remember correctly there are 3 options: 1) replace the gasket and hope for the best, 2) inspect the head and if not cracked have it decked and hope for the best, 3) if cracked replace the head and hope for the best. The cracking, I think and I could be wrong, comes from overheating the engine after the gasket has let go and people continue to drive on it. The hardest part is going to be paying for a head if you need one. They used that 2.6L as an american market engine in damn near everything so they are easy to find but the bad news is they cost as much as you paid for the truck. A quick scan of ebay shows everything from bare heads to complete rebuilt ready to go heads for around $300-$380. The good news is a quick search of timing belt/head gasket kits are $50-$60. I say save it. those old troopers are quirky old trucks and even if you spring for the full boat $360 rebuilt head you should be able to get more than a few winters out of it.

To be fair if you are obeying traffic laws a cage is not that dangerous. I drove 20 years and had at least one accident where I hit my head in a car that came with a "cage" from the factory (Jeep Wrangler). If you are doing close to 200 mph on the street and get caught I think how dangerous your cage is to your head is the least of your worries. In the vid the castor arm failed which caused the slide. The car almost rolled at two different points but didn't. I haven't seen a rolled high speed GTR yet but I imagine one is out there. My point is - there are some sketchy air port races that will still let you run uncaged.

Hey 2highpsi: http://jalopnik.com/this-is-what-it-looks-like-when-a-1750-horsepower-gt-r-1784524970 I don't really see a roll bar in this car.

I didn't know you could export cars from "Need for Speed: Carbon" into real life?

Dad an I restored a 1963 M20c in the early 1990's. It was our family truckster airplane. Because I was building rc cars at the time he had me do all the interior plastics. I remember when he and his friend Charley had to service the retracts they put the plane in jack stands on the ramp and had me work the Johnson bar to cycle the gear. I learned a lot about about airplanes from that mooney. Dad even had the hot rod pinstriper Alex in Wonderland do some Kafka style lines on the wing tips - it was a real hot rod. It's still flying but the new owner has since repainted it. One year we took dad's friend Frank's staggerwing out to Oshkosh (I think 1998). Frank knew a lot of the warbird guys at the time even though he didn't own one. At Oshkosh we got invited to go to breakfast with a bunch of P51 pilots - mostly guys in their 60s-80's. At one point I leaned over and whispered to frank "all these guys talk like John Wayne" (and they did! They had the cadence and accent down perfectly). He said "that's the kinda man you have to be to fly a mustang". I'm sure all those guys are dead now or in old folks home. Man, how aviation has changed.

It reminds me of the old Parma 1/10 rc car split window body which is why I think favorably on it: http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=1022905&d=1375421660 GM takes the corvette too seriously to ever make it a novelty retro car. When it was new people hated the split window. I don't think GM will ever build a car like that again but it will carry some of the other details. One of the details I love on the "mid year" c2 corvettes is the fact that the door cuts into the roof like an airplane or a gt40. I would love to see that again but the current platform doesn't support it.

I grew up in a money m20c with the Johnson bar retracts (fully manual retracts you raised and lowered with a 3foot stick). Dad was always griping how he never wanted electric retracts because he was afraid he would forget to put the gear down. Then he bought the 1989 205 with the tiny electric knob and never looked back. Dads friend had a 51 out of republic in the 1980s. It was a cavalier conversion two seater from the 60's. He gave me a ride in it once when I was a young kid The thing I remember is the plane went from heavy to twitchy once you accelerated past stall speed, and it accelerated so fast you could hold it on the ground well past 100. It was nothing like the skytyper t-6 A guy named Red used to give me rides in. I can't imagine what it was like for a 20 something kid to fly one for the first time out of a bumpy grass short field in Europe.

http://karlkustomcorvettes.com.siteviz.com/documents/filelibrary/our_cars/our_cars_02_76ABA2E3D141B.jpg

nope. BBD was a private owned plane by the former president of Sikorsky. It was a fairly stock restoration. The CAF p51C was a turttle deck model (no bubble canopy) in Tuskegee airman livery and was also a stock airplane that made the show circuit. P51's however are not "easy" planes to fly in general.

If you are a big enough fan of the vette you can find a lot of "retro" and "traditional" touches in nearly every modern version. C5 convertibles brought back the waterfall between the seats of the original 1953-1962 cars and it continues on the the C7 generation. The side vent behind the front wheels, a corvette tradition since 1958, on the c7 cars the modern vent is reminescent of the C3 corvette vents, and the front chrome grill bar and rear taillight design is similar to the c3 chrome bumper cars and greenwood wide body race cars. The hood vents on the modern C7 are also very greenwood corvette. And if that's not enough for you Karl's Kustom corvettes has a split window conversion that's better looking than the '53 retro car too: http://www.amcarguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/KKC-karl-custom-corvettes-c6-to-c2-conversion-00.jpg http://image.superchevy.com/f/43641332+w640+h426+q80+re0+cr1+ar0+st0/1963-chevy-corvette-front-view-rolling.jpg

I only heard about 2. Big Beautiful Doll and the CAF P51C in dallas. What other ones were there?

I would rather be a P51 pilot today because that would mean nobody was shooting at me and I was rich. I remember national Geographic from when I was a kid that showed F4Us (FG-1s?) and Cavalier P51s still in service in the 1980s in the El Salvador air force. I think they retired the planes sometime around mid 1980's. Forgot that AIRventure was that same week I saw them, yeah they were probably on their way to Oshkosh.

I think we are 90% in agreement, but remember the insurance evaluators who review the risk and determine how to assign a money value to the risk are also numbers people and they way they see it every car from a dragster to a 1970 nova to a brand new GTR is pretty much the same in a 140mph impact and they have to write requirements to fit that based on passed experience. It isn't about whether you get into an accident - it is whether you are likely to survive or avoid serious injury from that accident when it happens and what are the things required to mitigate that risk. They have to write with a broad brush because there are literally thousands of makes and model cars and it isn't feasible to evaluate every one. you still make that choice - but the choice is whether you drive the car on the street or the track. The cars are just moving too fast now to be "street/strip" anymore. If you want the choice to go to the street or the strip you can always go slower as a third option. I do think it will eventually catch up but it takes time and you may not even have the car by the time it catches up. If it makes you feel better a 1970's pro-stock car like the old "grumpy's toy" Camaro wouldn't pass safety tech to run 10's today. more importantly if it weren't for some of these rules there wouldn't be incentive to develop something as technnologically advanced as the GTR. So it is a bit of an Oroborus.

Austin is the man. Just pm him directly.

I don't think people are treating it as such. Still running on a track is private property and the owners of that track don't want to underwrite the risk of having to pay your widow for your death without at least requiring you to take reasonable precautions to prevent it. I am going to say a run at a track with a governing body. NHRA, IHRA, NMCA...etc... Doesn't have to be an event with prizes, etc...just under the auspices of a competition governing body's rules. Its unfortunate that you can't run your car at these tracks without significant safety devices installed but remember every safety rule from these governing bodies is written in blood. I remember my father telling me how Mike Sorokin, who drove the surfer's top fuel dragster, died: In those front engined diggers you sat on the top of the axle and mid run the axle broke loose from the mounts. To avoid being ground up by an axle spinning underneath him he stood up in the cockpit. Then the car rolled. One of my father's flying buddies used to be missing a 3 toes on his right foot because a flywheel let loose at 7000 rpm in his '66 chevy II and cut through the floor board, the gas pedal, and part of the subframe. you aren't allowed to build an un-certified chassis in an outdoor motel parking lot or run faster than a certain speed without a scatter-shield and run at an NHRA track because of events like this. The driver of the track requirements these days are the insurance companies and they are not arbitrary. They look at lots and lots of data and figure out how they are going to insure the track and give them a few options for costs/risks. Most select the lowest premium/most strict requirements because tracks cost a lot to operate. It is evolving however. What they do with stock cars now is testament to that. In 1995 I could not run a 12 second pass at an NHRA track in a stock car without safety upgrades, now I could. So they are recognizing improvements in engineering, maybe they just aren't moving as fast as you would like. If you want to speed the plow in this area, you can help collect data and bring it to the NHRA and IHRA so they push back on the insurance companies to recognize the rule without a significant increase in cost.

I think the the thing you are struggling with is that not all risks are equal. Sure the outcome, death, may be the same but the risks of motorcycle racing are not the same risks as racing a car on the track without a cage. Risk is the likelihood of the outcome, not the outcome itself - if you think every fall off a bike results in serious injury or death then 1) you would be mistaken, 2) I can see why you would be angry why a "riskier sport" would be held to a different standard. The greatest risk of death in motorcycle racing is collision with a stationary object (that is not the ground), but that is not the greatest risk in car racing. When it comes to "street" cars - well I don't think anyone imagined street cars would ever go as fast as they currently do. I don't think there is a law against street cars having X amount of power without safety gear, just as some states helmets are optional. If you don't think there is a Safety crusader movement, similar to people saying cars like this should have good safety equipment, in other areas like motorcycles then maybe you haven't me the AGATT people (All Gear All The Time). Again there is no law saying your 1000hp street car needs a cage if it is only driven on the street - it's just people bitching about your death wish to operate it that way instead of exercising your self preservation instincts. The moment you enter a car in competition it is a race car. If you want to use it on the street fine, but it's doesn't make it not a race car. Because of the power outputs of modern cars the "street/strip" car is going away. And while crash protection of cars has improved light years since the 1960's the moment you mod the car beyond it's intended parameters, the inherent engineering of the structure no longer applies. Are the current rules antiquated? sure, but they work. The days of a competitive competition ready street car being a daily driver are almost gone.

You keep talking about Hans devices and neck collar, and while I agree with you I actually think this is the 1 in a million case where not having one worked in their favor because of that shitty roll bar. Sure whiplash sucks but the way that roof caved, having the extra room to move the helmet (and the padding in the stock seats) may have kept them from a more serious injury when the roof impacted the tops of their helmets. Those dudes need to send the crash engineering team at GM a really good Xmas gift. That car looked like a crumpled beer can but except for the roof there wasn't much intrusion into the passenger cabin.

That event looks like it was run at an airport runway, not an actual track so maybe that's why the lax rules? When I used to run at E-town and westhampton (RIP) they both had a no-passengers rule and were zealous about roll bar and harness certification I've been around drag racing my whole life and I've never seen a rollbar hoop crush like that. hey Wagner, do you think something like that would pass real NHRA tech? I'm thinking it wouldn't. Holee shit!

Be careful about Tuttle. I live there now and recently the Hilliard and Dublin neighborhoods had the school districts redrawn to exclude a large number of the apartment complexes here because people in apts don't pay property taxes. So some apartments are still Dublin or Hilliard schools and some are back to Cbus schools. Other than that we love the area. Wife and I both have reverse commutes so never any traffic (she works downtown and I work at Easton).

I have seen at least 2 where guys used the JK8 kit plus an 8' stepside box to make a full size bed pickup. the overhang is massive in the rear (looks goofy) but they did it haul sheet rock and motorcycles plus gear so no real heavy hauling. Looked on the interwebs for pics and didn't see any, but saw this guy who did a stepside TJ with bed from a '40s pickup (8 foot bed): http://i213.photobucket.com/albums/cc163/jscherb/retro/RetroWranglerHT2.jpg AEV brute cab close out metal and he used a wrecked LJ frame to add 22" to the stock LJ frame to support the bed. It's simple enough that probably anybody with basic welding skills could do. except for the jeep and the manual trans part isn't that just a new F-150 2wd longbed? they are like $26K for a 2wd base model with a 3.5 v6. Also how is cleetus unreliable? the only things that seem to be failing are the aftermarket stuff on it (wheel spacers, floor shifter, and trans bearing because lowered to the ground).

Doesn't stop the Toyota Tacoma guys from off roading with a useable bed. The thing a jeep pickup would NEED to be able to do is carry a motorcycle. Not a full dress HD but at least a fullsize dirt bike. That's the real value of a wrangler pickup over a regular wrangler with the back seat taken out and a shorty hard top and partition. If it can't do that, might as well buy an unlimited, a shorty top, and save the pickup premium - that way at least it could be converted back to a 4 seater.

You can get that now, it's called the JK8 kit and you buy it through Chrysler. It's like $6k for the kit and not an 8ft bed, but there are guts using unlimited chassis and stretching the bed to make it longer. There have been rumors of a jeep pickup for a long time now, to replace the missing Dakota in mopars lineup. No matter if ram gets a derivative or not I think the goal is to release a wrangler pickup. I have been secretly lusting for a quad cab frontier pro-4x pickup because I believe it to be the last midsized truck with off road cred you can get in a stick and a quad cab - if this comes out I may have to change my tastes.

Was out walking the corporate walking path half an hour ago when I heard two Merlins at climb out power. Got to the back fence to see two 51's about 2500 feet and climbing. Looked like they had just taken off from somewhere (CMH?) but were already clean (gear and flaps up) and climbing out. Looks like they took off formation but one put about 1/4 mile lead on the other. Moving too fast and too far for me to get shitty cell phone pics. Anybody know what's going on? airshow? traveling joy rides?

I lol'ed. Fiji, If you are going to go forward, just remember at all times to "remain calm". No yelling, no screaming. Write out a one sentence position, rehearse it and when things break down, just calmly repeat it no matter what he says. Nothing drives a bully more bat shit than knowing he isn't getting to you. The calmer you are the better off you are.