I'm lucky.
A meeting I had scheduled this morning got moved, so my morning opened up for me. I've got a track day next Wednesday, and I had four new tires mounted the other day. Suddenly, I had time to put them on.
My garage isn't very big. But it's clean and pretty well equipped for most of my suburban-dad tasks. The in-the-floor lift makes working in the small space easier, and in the past couple of years I've updated all of my cabinets so that things are actually pretty organized now.
Lift, you say? As the kids might say, 'Hells, yeah.'
Today I went out to swap in the new wheels/tires and also swap out two cameras to replace a pair I'd been using.
These are inexpensive key-fob-shaped HD cameras that come from China and cost ~$40. I use three of them in the car -- one attached to the front windshield, one pointed at the driver inside the cabin, and one on the back license plate. The manufacturer recently came out with a new model with a wide angle lens built into it. Previously, I'd had to buy a wide angle lens separately and attach it with glue. One of my lenses was coming loose, so I decided to spring for a pair of new ones.
Here's the old one and the new one. The cameras are already small, but without the extra lens they'll be even less noticeable. As a bonus, the new lens has a wider field of view than the old one.
In the picture, you can see the 'high-tech' mount I use to attach the camera to the stalk of my rear-view mirror.
I also added one other thing, since the mount is subject to shift around and there's no video monitor on it to see if it's level. This is a little bubble level that they make to adhere to the sides of an RV or trailer so you can see if they're level when you're jacking them into their resting position. I trimmed off some of the plastic and hit it with black spray paint. Now it should be pretty easy to verify that I'm not going to get too crooked of an image.
But what about that bad news?
Well, I got the old wheels off, and did a little work on improving the ducting around my front oil coolers. Then I checked where I was on brake pad all around. Fine. And then I noticed a little smudge of grease on one of my coil springs. A little investigation, and I found a split in one of my four CV boots. I've got no idea how long it's been there -- it hadn't lost much grease yet. But my CV joints are important to watch, since one of the mods on my car was to move the drivetrain forward about an inch and a half. This means the angle of each CV joint is more acute than it was designed for. I go through a new set of half axles about every two or years on average. And I write down the install dates on the axles so I can track it.
Sure enough, this pair was installed in November of 2010.
But here's the good part of it. It's raining outside. I'm in my garage, which is dry and warm. The place is cleaned up and ready for work. I've got some 1970s-era Springsteen going on the stereo. I've got a pot of hot coffee and a couple of unexpected hours at my disposal.
And I've got Pelican Parts -- which can ship stuff so quickly that I get it the next day. Remember, track day on Wednesday. If I'd discovered this on a check the night before the event, I would have had to stay home.
The axle nuts aren't much of a headache when you pop them off every two years. My cheapo HF impact wrench took care of them without breaking much of a sweat. Also, since I've been down this road before, I've got the right XZN tool to get the CV joint bolts off. Bing-bang-boom. Everything goes quickly. For a few moments, I can imagine I actually know what the heck I'm doing.
(Note: Wayne's book.)
I'm glad I checked the stuff today. At Willow Springs, the failure of the joint with the cracked boot (on the left side) could be a real problem, since the track is mostly made up of very fast right turns -- one of them is a 130-mph corner. Having a CV joint disintegrate there would, well,
suck.
Now, one sensible option would have been to rebuild the joint with the bad boot (two actually, I later found a smaller crack in the inside joint on the other side -- I don't think it was even leaking yet). But with the sharper angle I'm running, I don't want to have to worry about second-guessing the wear on the balls and cage in the thing and possibly putting myself at risk. I've got two kids now.
So, nothing really earth-shaking in this post. But it's a good contrast with a recent day where I tried to fix a wobble in the rear-view mirror base and ended up cracking the windshield. Some days are easy; some days are hard. Today was pretty good, all things considered. As good as you can hope for from a day where you have to pull two axles.