Geeto67

holy shit, with the front sheetmetal on you'd never know this was a wild animal if you saw it on the street.

This year. Got kicked in the teeth (again) with my bonus but not as bad as last year, and the ducks are lining up. If something I got cooking in NY goes through this month, I might even do it for my birthday next month. Although my eye has been wandering to a new challenger and a used GT500. So do I, so do most people. I am just trying to enable your happiness, LOL. You should at least get a test drive, I mean there is no harm in a test drive, right?

Live a little, buy the car, enjoy it. Life is short. I've been scanning 270 on my commute hoping to see one in the flesh and so far no joy. I might just drive over to the dealer to see one.

I dunno, the neighbors have been bitching for 20+ years, it’s never made a difference. They shouldn’t have built houses next to what used to be a rural NJ dragstrip. Plus they are keeping motocross, drifting, auto-x, monster trucks, water skiiing and the airport alive and all that generates as much noise as the drag racing. E-town has been struggling with the new safety stuff for a while because it is such an old track. It’s because of Scott Kalitta’s death there that top classes run 1000 feet instead of a full 1/4. They probably got their insurance bill for 2018, saw it was significantly higher and not going to be profitable, and took the better offer of parking cars.

http://www.etownraceway.com/ http://www.etownraceway.com/mydocuments/nappfamilyrestructure.pdf This makes me really sad, E-town was my home track after Westhampton closed, and was a real first class facility. As a kid, dad took me to the summernationals and supernationals here every year till I was 17. This breaks my heart.

I'm just saying maybe instead of working against emissions regulations, we should....I dunno....be working with them? It all starts with attitude. fighting against the environment seems like a loosing battle all around. Also, I think this shitting on California bullshit is getting old, Like Ohio has so much going for it....LOL.

Base engine was a 1.1 liter that made 60-something hp. The Optional engine was 1.9L and made about 100hp. Most US cars have the 1.9L engine. The 1.9 engine is really interesting because it is a "cam in head" design but not an "overhead cam". The cam runs along side the valve train and actuates the valves through a tappet and a rocker arm. This was an exclusive opel design and was on a lot of their 4cyl and 6cyl engines. It has a surprisingly long competition history in Rally racing and Lotus once made a 3.6L version that was twin turbo.

proof that the drugs were good in the 1980's: https://indianapolis.craigslist.org/cto/d/opel-gt/6440445774.html

It sounds perfect, the only thing I wonder about is the size of the engine. Coyote swaps haven't really caught on with the 60's ford crowd because it requires massive front end surgery (removing the shock towers and re-engineering the front suspension), is it the same kind of challenge in a fox body?

That's your definition of "Hell on Earth"? what a wuss. Also, California is not a "Liberal" as everyone makes it out to be. Sure LA and San Fransisco are pretty blue, and those are the largest meto areas in the state, but there are plenty of counties in califorina that trend red. Orange County, West San Bernardino, North San Diego, Tulare, Shasta, Mariposa are all deep red locally. Yes the state trends blue on national elections but that's kind of incentive for more conservatives to move there to case shift if you care for such things. It is expensive when compared to the midwest, even in the cheaper rural areas, but then again the weather makes it kinda worth it. So...about all this hate for "emissions" parts. I have to say, what's wrong with being a gearhead and being environmentally responsible? I hate that the narrative, esp the automotive journalism narrative (which you are now a part of Wagner) sets it up that if you are a gearhead you are automatically against emissions regulations. It's bullshit. If the last 30 years of automotive evolution has taught us anything it is that we can have massive performance and still be environmentally conscious. We have 700+ hp factory cars now that pollute less than 1970's honda civics - it's kind of awesome and it is that way because of emissions regulations and states like California leading the charge on forcing tech development through legislation. I don't know about you guys but I like to breathe. When I was a kid in NYC in the 80's, the smog was terrible. Seriously, all those 70's carb'ed cars that were mostly poorly maintained stunk. Now? it's a fraction of how bad it used to be. People just weren't responsible when it came to their environment, but now - legislation holds them accountable and we all enjoy the benefit. The Environment is not your enemy, and there are plenty of aftermarket companies that make CARB legal speed parts, so you can still mod your car and environmentally conscious. Honestly, I wish people would use CARB certified parts outside California because you still make power and you aren't being a dirtbag about the environment. All those old carb'ed cars are grandfathered in and don't have to meet emissions so if that's what you want to play with you can just go buy one of those. Just to keep this conversation relevant: You know what would be really interesting, at least to me from a reader perspective? upgrading emissions parts from newer vehicles to help older LS cars pass while making more power. I'm sure the cats and stuff used on the LS3 are way more efficient than what was put on an LS firebird in 1999. Nobody ever talks about what equipment keeps these cars running clean, how it works, or how the mfg has improved it so something like the new camaro SS can make twice the power than what a 4th gen camaro made with the same engine series and less pollution. There has to be more than a few guys in emissions regulated states with 4th gens that are impacted by this - There's an opportunity here, you have to see it.

eh...I dunno. a Z32 twin turbo is a commitment to own, or so I have been told. Everything is so packed tight in that engine bay that even basic service and repair sometimes needs the bumper and headlights off. Still 1996 is the rarest year with only 577 TT's produced That car has more than just a bunch of bolt ons and it has upgraded turbos, but still 148K miles is hard to look past. The ebay listing has a lot more of the upgrades listed and there are a lot: https://www.ebay.com/itm/1996-Nissan-300ZX/232627318067?hash=item3629ab2d33:g:GIUAAOSwAWlaV3p7&vxp=mtr To a 300zx z32 fanboi, I could see this being a "nice price" market price car, but for me crack pipe because $20K can by some way cooler stuff.

That's a cool little sleeper. nice score. Just curious, why a coyote swap and not an LS?

Is "replacing" even a viable option? It's a 2011 impala fleet car with 170k miles - it's like a $3k car on it's best day. Assuming Austin's 15-17 hour labor quote is accurate (I believe it is) that's almost $1500 in labor before you even get to the cost of the engine which could be anywhere from $400-$800. I mean it sucks that it's your friend and they are in this position and all, but I would get a soup to nuts quote on price before considering anything going forward.

they used to use gilmer belts for that job, so serpentine is more robust than most think - still, I hear plenty of cars on the road all the time with slipping belts, so it's mileage and service interval that concern me most - not whether it is up to the job when new. Remember, Americans don't maintain their cars for the most part and hate spending money to do so. If you suddenly told them their "100K" belts now have a 20-30K service interval, how many are actually going to get that service?

eh...I dunno. First off, if you aren't looking for more than 300-330hp out of the engine, and don't want to spend any money making it go faster, I think the LT1 is cheaper out of the box. Think about it - pulled from a vette it's a reverse flow, alloy headed, roller cammed, engine that will clear most low hood heights. Sure you can pull 400+ hp out of an old school 350 or an LS, but you have to spend for heads, and a cam, and an intake, and all these other things to make it work and that's a lot of money. If I was going to run a carb, then all day every day take the old school SBC because there is $1000 I don't need on an FI system - but I feel like if hood clearance is an issue, and FI is preferred, and you don't need more than 330hp, it's hard to beat a sub $1000 complete soup to nuts LT1. From my perspective, the advantage of the 944 is the light weight of the platform as compared to something like a 3rd gen camaro, so if you don't want to make a 400+hp drag car, how much hp do you really need? That being said, the LT1 has a pretty big weight penalty still being an iron block and all. my father always said: "Do it right and do it once" so if you want to turn it up later on or preserve some semblance of the car's balance a 5.3 alloy block LS engine makes more sense all day every day.

Just because everyone is doing it doesn't make it a good idea. I am not even sure how this works other than the electric motor just pulling the crank along via the serpentine belt. I get that engineers are way smarter than me on this and probably know what they are doing, but I don't know what it will take for me to get comfortable with this piece of tech. Wasn't that the original intent of the "Express" and "Rebel" models when they first came out? 2wd, hemi, standard cab, short bed?

Hey Mallard, Is there a level of the truck that doesn't come with that massive screen? or are all RAM pickups moving toward the "tesla model" of everything on a center touch screen? also am I reading this right? They mean the accessory serpentine drive belts?!?!?! how is this not a recipe for snapped serpentine belts as the trucks age? New fullsize trucks are kind of pointless to me. None have manual transmissions anymore, You can't really get "Big engines" and no options in the base models (not that you need them as ford's ecotec has proven), they aren't really good for offroad, they aren't good for car towing more than once or twice, and they are getting impossible to park. Looks? the new RAM is handsome. I like it better than the ford or chevy but none of them are ugly. I wish they had more colors available than seven shades of silver, a black, a white, and the token blue or red. I will say everyone I have ever known to have bought a dodge truck loved that dodge truck. I have never heard an actual owner say they regretted their purchase. Rust issues? toyota had way worse rust issues and I don't hear anybody here calling toyota owners "overextended 84 month finance holders". I am more excited about the midsize trucks these days because they filled the niche that the old 1990's Chevy 1500s and Ford 150s used to fill really well. To that end I am kinda excited to see what ford is bringing to the party with the ranger. I feel kind of let down that Chevy didn't see fit to make a special edition ZR2 Colorado with a manual trans (considering both the Pro-4x and TRD Taco have it as an option), but there is hope for ford with the ranger and whatever special edition off-roader they will put at the top of the ranger options pyramid.

What’s really funny is that the same year camaro is probably the worst offender when it came to chrome 5mph bumpers. 74 and 75 camaros are despises for their bumpers. Just goes to show GM can get it both right and wrong on the same car. That bumper has to be fiberglass. In one pic you can see the bottom held to the rad support with squeeze clips and it bows out over something hanging down. Also those flat plate bumper supports under the hood...yeesh.

I dunno clay, that looks like photoshop. assuming it is not however, the 1974 firebird had probably the least offensive 5mph bumpers and I don't remember them being chrome either. The rear looks like a stock bumper where the black strip was painted silver and the whole unit integrated into the rear valance. here is a stock one for comparison: http://www.american-muscle-cars.net/images/74Pontiac-FireirdFormula400-red-LR1.jpg The front end would have to be a custom piece. Not hard to do if it was made in fiberglass. The Trans Am's that year had a plastic bumper cover instead of the black rubber strip but it wasn't that smooth. The lower valance looks like a stock esprit/formula one. just for fun: http://tran-zam.com/Spotters_Guide/74to76/SecondDesignDetail.jpg

These are neat cars. my wife and I were considering one as a replacement for the audi but she wants the alltrek version. Finding stick ones has not been hard at all so I am surprised you went with the DSG.

It could be anything, but if I were asked to speculate I would put it at: - Domestic Military stealth aircraft being ferried from one location to another and did not have the distance to clear commercial aviation traffic by more than a few thousand feet. - foreign military stealth aircraft that for some reason was below the normal altitude where stealth aircraft operate The west coast is home to many aerospace defense contractors like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, and it is unusual but not out of the realm of possibility to spot unusual aircraft in the air. It would also make it a prime area for espionage by a foreign power for the same reason. There is one more gruesome scenario which I hesitate to mention because it's unlikely but not impossible. This was a civilian aircraft that suffered a malfunction. It's not unheard of pressurized private aircraft to become ghost ships when the pressurization fails and the plane keeps flying despite everyone onboard being dead. An instrument electrical failure in conjunction with a loss of cabin pressure would knock out all radio contact, TCAS, and occupants. Even without autopilot airplanes are pretty stable in the air and the engines run on a separate electrical system. Primary radar by itself isn't exactly the most reliable. It relies on line of sight echo location to bounce a signal off the airplane. For the most part it works well when used in conjunction with a secondary system like a TCAS transponder - the primary "pings" the aircraft and the secondary interrogates the xponder for details like altitude and airspeed. Even if you don't have a primary ping, if there is a secondary xponder signal the aircraft is usually spotted. So how could it miss a primary radar signal? Well ATC's system is filtered to remove "noise" data from anything that is not a large slow moving aircraft. something operating at 600mph and small like a private jet, in an already crowded sky without a transponder signal could possibly filter out as "noise". I think the current radar range for any one signal is under 300 nautical miles. Hang around enough airports and old time airline pilots will tell you about "ghost" airliners - planes that have been painted over so many times that they failed to register on primary - only secondary radar. So picture this: Private jet departs southern California heading to Northern California or Southern Oregon. At cruising altitude and speed the aircraft experiences a rapid depressurization and electrical failure that kills all on-board and knocks out secondary systems. aircraft continues to fly in smooth 37,000 ft air north for as long it has fuel. F-15's scramble from NORAD but are directed south for intercept missing the aircraft entirely. By the time they turn north, the aircraft is in Canada and either crashes into the sea or the Canadian wilderness. If they were smugglers they would not have filed a flight plan so there isn't an alert for a missing plane.

sigh. Let's clear some things up - not every aircraft is required to have a transponder. In the US only commercial turbine-powered transport aircraft with more than 30 passenger seats (or MTOM above 33,000 lb or 15,000 kg) are required to have them. The overwhelming majority of civil aircraft in the US have them because it's cheap and there are certain airspace classes you can't fly into without them. Military aircraft have transponders (either TCAS or MILACAS-XR) that can be turned off. ATC has very little authority over the military and it is not uncommon to see military operators in Class A airspace (18,000-60,000) not responding to civil transponder interrogations. Not every Aircraft is required to have a radio either. Which means not every aircraft is required to have radio contact. If you are a civil aircraft operating in Class A you are required to have contact with ATC (excluding sailplane and small plane operations around mountains), but again the military is not subject to ATC so they contact at their discretion. Now the other contextual details I will add here are: - Given the current political climate, it is not uncommon to see Russian military aircraft on the edge of or inside US airspace. Last year they flew a bomber at 3700 feet down the center of Washington DC. - the US and Russia have a long standing history of using spy planes for surveillance. And both countries have aircraft with stealth technology. Now, do you still think it was aliens? Or is it more likely something military? I like this write up better than PM's: http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16079/airliners-and-f-15s-involved-in-bizzare-encounter-with-mystery-aircraft-over-oregon

I assume you mean these statistics: Mostly yes, because you are presenting each statistic as if the President is directly responsible for it's growth, and for many of them that is not true. Is there a specific one you want to discuss? because analyizing each one could be it's own tome. Which Social Issues do you mean? IIRC most recently we were discussing Planned Parenthood and you don't really seem to understand how they work or how government funding works, how corporations work, or in general why it's bad public policy to allow corporations to discriminate on the basis of religion in providing health care coverage. None of these things sound like "values" to me.

Nope. It isn't your "personal values" it's your inability to justify or explain them in an intelligent or coherent fashion, your propensity to misstate things or just outright present false information, and your broad sweeping statements that tend to miss the nuance of almost any issue. BTW, Saying the economy is doing well because of the president isn't a "personal value", It's just a false statement. Just because YOU don't believe something doesn't matter (like approval ratings) doesn't mean it doesn't matter to the larger political sphere isn't a "personal value" it's just you choosing to ignore something. See the difference?

Wow...this thread took a massive left turn.... Brandon, We've had this conversation before, but I'll say it again because it doesn't seem to be sinking in. Nobody here really thinks you are not intelligent. It is just very frustrating to have conversations with you because you want to discuss things that you aren't that knowledgeable about, and rather than ask questions or be receptive to the conversation you double down on these bad ideas and then the insults fly. Part of the problem, I think, is that you seem to think all media is biased and because of that you seem to want to give equal weight to something you see on facebook as you would the WSJ or the New York Times. To a certain degree media is biased, but in other ways it is not - it relies on your critical thinking to evaluate each piece objectivity before you absorb it subjectively. There are published standards for journalism (each credible source will have it's own published cannon of journalism), become familiar with them and you will start to see the fake news from what the president calls fake news (but really isn't). here are some examples: http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp https://www.nytco.com/who-we-are/culture/standards-and-ethics/ I genuinely think that you should ask more questions and be more open minded toward the actual discussions. A lot of your rhetoric seems to be based not on facts but on your general hatred of a perceived stereotype of "liberal" that doesn't really have anything to do with politics. Your "manliness" is not tied to your politics - conservatives are not macho and liberals are not pussies, and supporting that lie doesn't help anybody. Now, if you want to point out the accomplishments of the trump presidency, there have been a few, but they aren't the economy or any of the things you listed previously. In fact depending on where you stand, it's hard to call some of these things successes. But let's talk about them anyway. Environmental Deregulation: With Scott Pruitt at the head of the EPA, the organization has been able to do things like dismantle the clean power plan and retract the 2015 Waters of the United States Rule. Permission for new offshore drilling has been granted, and about 30 other smaller regulations have been repealed. The Keystone pipeline is back underway, and fracking on public lands may soon be available. Considering that general "deregulation" was a specific talking point that goes back to the campaign you could say that the administration has been successful, furthermore - the Trump administration's narrative has been the environmental regulations were what was keeping us from dominance in the energy sector. If you were a libertarian, this would seem like a victory to you. National Geographic has an excellent writeup of All the changes if you care to read them: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/03/how-trump-is-changing-science-environment/ Justice Department revamp: Notwithstanding Trump's recent comments on bringing in someone like Roy Cohen (Trump's once personal lawyer, and Joe McCarthy's right hand man during the witch hunt), the administration's narrative has been "tough on crime". The way it has enforced this is to strengthen the government's power of civil asset forfeiture, encouraging prosecutors to seek maximum penalties on low level drug offenses. It has also rolled back it's position against certain discriminatory voting laws, and also extensions of protections to LGBT people under current anti-discrimination laws. Technically this counts as a win since this is what the administration set out to do, whether it is actually good for the american people is another story. Financial Deregulation: From the beginning trump's narrative has been that financial regulation is crippling our industries. The administration has so far been able to roll back parts of the Dodd-Frank act and render the CFPB ineffective through it's recent leadership kerfuffle. Keep in mind the stuff they are "deregulating" are actual consumer protections that came out of the financial crisis. Still Deregulation was the goal and this counts. FCC Deregulation: Net Neutrality. 'nuff said. So Trump has been busy, and his administration has been able to do some of the things he claimed on the campaign trail. The only question is, are they good for the American people?