Relentless- Practical jokes and head fakes.
For years I had been a street racer and part of the culture if you are in deep is the head games you play with people to get an edge. More often than not it works and I love devising new ideas to keep people guessing.
(not mine, just an example)
I'll give an example in regards to my 67 Dart. A number of people knew I had an Edelbrock crossram for a small block Mopar and I started a rumor that I had installed it one weekend and reinforced that by refusing to open the hood of the car when we were hanging out. This went on for a month with the tales getting more and more outlandish. I simply stated that if anyone wanted to see under the hood, they had to beat the car.
Well one night I slipped up and lost and I swear there must have been a crowd of 120 people standing around when the hood was popped.... And nothing more impressive than a Carter AFB on top of a TM5 single carb intake greeted them. I laughed like hell.
So in 2001 my friends and I played a practical joke.
I can't recall what the exact impetus was but I had this 16V 2.2 engine I was never going to use (and was sold to AJ intact with utterly no damage) and the 8V head was off the Reliant. So we popped the 16V head on to check something and the next thing you know the ball was rolling... here is a log posted on my website from 2001 for all to see.
Later I found out that one of my competitors fell for the ruse when he made a public statement about how I burned up a 16V engine..
I simply posted one of the unphotoshopped pictures and laughed like hell... Just delicious to find out years later I succeeded.
10/27/01
2.5 liters, DOHC & 35 psi of boost =)
That turbo back there looks mighty big.
Whew! Glad someone pointed it out to me, I had the back valve cover on backward! Still new to this 16V stuff, thought something wasn't sitting right. <fixed> Hope to have car running in a few days, still fabricating stuff!
10/30/01
A TIII with an automatic?! Yup!
A friend of mine came up with a fabulous idea! He took an underdrive pulley and mounted a shutter wheel to it. Then he fabricated a bracket to hold the factory sensor in place and viola'! I can even adjust the base timing!
11/01/01
Check that out! Ported & ceramic coated DOHC exhaust manifold. SWEET!
11/05/01
This is bad.
At this point it looks like
an injector failed in cylinder number three, the one without an EGT probe of
course. 1500 degrees, pulling hard and then poof.
So I'm going to Cecil with the SOHC- Should be interesting considering I sold
the hybrid I was running for the last 2 seasons.
Going to be busy guys, I'll give you an update in a day or two.
And on 11/12/01 seven days
later the Reliant mysteriously had a SOHC engine again and was racing at the
track.......perhaps some funny business was going on? heh.
Here are the pictures that were not used or photoshopped for use above.
Notice the timing belt? Just tucked in there.
Notice the AN fitting just sitting on the barbed end of the STOCK regulator? The rear valve cover was an early woops!
Intercooler not hooked up, turbo not even close to being able to be hook up and the cut off heater hose.
More stuff out of sight via clever photo angles and photoshop.
Need more proof? I still have the piston that was used in the posting above, now you know why it was only shown from the side.
It seems to be missing two valve notches. It was just a random 8V piston pulled from a pile.