Cage Pictures!!!

So, lots of work has been done to bring the car closer to race-ready. Todd and Eric (not SHO as seen here) welded in our cage for next to nothing. The results are pretty good.

We went from this:

To this:

 

The seat, harnesses, kill switch, and gopher are on. We picked up a putt-putt hole on craigslist for $30. the roll cage is lazily painted white rustoleum, to prevent, you know, rust! A little more hacking and we can put on the astroturf and start attaching more theme gear. We have a new member, Pranav, from the MustangIInicorn team, has upgraded to ma platform that runs! The girlfriends of a few lucky members are planning on dressing to impress 3 weeks from now. We are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel!

2010 Gator-O-Rama

YES!!!

We are in! Gonna be an awesome weekend! Time to get our shit together and get the props/costumes for the theme! See us at the 2010 Houston Gator-O-Rama, February 20th-21st at MSR-Houston!

Horray!!! The cage parts are here!!!!!

Now, it's time to prep the car, so we can take it to Todd's shop and get that pile of tubing into the car! A view of the office is below: Who needs a dash when we have zip-ties!!! You can even see the now-sort-of-awesome shifter!

The team debating the pros and cons of various themes, form Mario Kart, Trailer Park Ferrari, The Big Lebowski, Miami Vice, and generally hoping we can make if fun enough to get in for the February race. Our buddy Tyler is on the left.

OK, it's cage prep time!

Will gets the doors off and preps them for some hackage. Gotta fit NASCAR bars in if we want to survive a t-bone attempt by a gold-flaked 9C1 Caprice. We've seen enough videos to blow off any safety stuff. Some of us have girlfriends that would want to see us around.

Our friend, Ben Ritz, helping us cut up the doors.

Hamzah and Will attacking the sunroof, because it gets in the way of A) the cage and B) Will's big-ass head. We wouldn't have this problem if he'd just lean like a cholo!

Daniel actually looks serious for a little bit, chopping one of the billion welded tabs holding the cassette in.

Will is doing some spot-weld drilling. Love those hot metal shavings?

SHO and Daniel pretending to plan out what they are about to do.

Yeah, this happens a lot.

Will tapping out the edges of the cassette.

Is there anything finer than a Shiner? Yes, A Shiner and bashing on the Lemons car! Wait? Who is this? What do you think YOU are doing here?!?!?

Batting Practice!


Put your mouth on the curb!

One more for the road, you say?

Oh, we couldn't NOT use the Chebby! WOOOOOOOOO SUM-BITCH!!!!


Let's get the hell out of here, the neighbors are getting spooked!

Tickle-Me-Elmo the following day:

More Backstory

So we have this car, finally, in College Station. Now we can do something more productive than masturbating to sweet DTM videos that we trade back and forth on Facebook message threads.

We park the car at SHO's apartment complex, The Zone, to access the hooptie-ness of our purchase.

Notes:
Barbecue sauce found in interior, along with fake diamond earrings and lots of trash. Who said stereotypes aren't true?

Matt apparently felt we could use all his broke-ass parts, too.


Speaking of broke-ass, we find the motor mounts don't even have nuts on top of them. The motor was just sitting down on 'em. How did this NOT fall the fuck off on the way up here?


Front subframe bolts are LOOSE. More awesome!!!

Due to the front of the drivetrain being so nicely installed, the guibo (cush drive) from the transmission to the driveshaft looks more like Erika Badu's afro on a spin cycle.


All the lights are some sort of FUBAR'd, brake lights are always on, except on the passenger side.
AFM is dangling in the engine bay. No airbox whatsoever.

HOLY SHIT! there is working AC in this car!!! kickasss!

1 out of 3 ground straps are attached to the engine.

The transmission is not the regular E30 Getrag 260, it's got a 1:1 5th instead of the expected 1:0.84. That, coupled with the 4.10, means we get to shift like a bunch of heavy-haul truckers with a shifter limper than Joseph's dick at a titty bar.


Back to the story

Now we attempt to fix stuff. We bolt the AFM to the old airbox bracket after drilling some holes in it, find a used dryer sheet, fold it over and voila, we have a air filter! A trip to the hardware store and we have nuts for the engine mounts. Hamzah orders a guibo from his parts buddy at the dealer. Good thing it's cheap. Will goes to tighten the subframe bolts. He earns his nickname by trying to tighten the cross-treaded subframe bolt, and snapping that shit INSIDE the framerail. Awesome. Fan-Fucking-tastic. We drill through, get the bolt out, and replace it with a nut and bolt from the hardware store. Why the hell don't we have a used bolts bucket yet? We need to start selling shit, now.

Fixed AFM, Hell Yeah!

Subframe bolt

One of Hamzah's buddies with more money than sense decides to donate $500 to us, because he thinks a $500 race car is badass! Sweet, we love free money!!!

We are trying to get everything plugged in, zip-tie the radiator to the core support, and then Will, being a klutz again, swaps the CPS and oil pressure sender plugs, so we waste a night chasing the no-start issue. Will swithches it back when he realizes what he did, and it cranks, but what's that god-awful smell? OH NO!!! DON'T LET THE MAGIC SMOKE OUT!!! Lucas is cackling in his grave. We burned up something in the engine harness. Fuck. Will, having some making-up to do, cuts open the harness, locates the toasted ground for the oil level sensor, and pulls the ground out & unplugs the sensor. Who needs oil, anyway right?


Luckily, some of the interior doesn't suck too bad, and a quick soak in 303 protectant, and it's off to take pictures for forum-whoring whatever is still in one piece after we rip it out. Carpet, Door Panels, Antenna, AC compressor, all of it goes, bringing the total down to a more reasonable $250ish after accounting for the guibo and hardware. We help a guy (Eric Hakos) at the local track (Texas World Speedway, or TWS) who broke his master cylinder. Rebuilt ones go for around $180 at Napa, so we show up with the one from the lemons car, and one hour & $120 later, he's back on track! We get home, lo and behold, I find one from a parts car in ohio for $27 shipped!! No BMW tax on that part! nice profit!

Master Cylinder, Aged to perfection in a DOT 4 reduction.
That's what's for dinner!

Put on another master cylinder, Yay! the car still sucks, but we drive the wheels off of it, scaring Mustang owners with our newly-lightweight exhaust, since we sold the cat-back to some poor bastard whose exhaust rusted off! Now we are loud and pissing off the neighbors.

The "Undercover" cop at the complex thinks we are stripping the car, we show him the title, and he leaves us the hell alone. Who strips a car in an open parking lot? kinda crappy place to dump a chassis, but whatever. Silly Noobie.

Will breaking subframe bolts

Will finds this as a good excuse to buy wheels. A few weeks after getting the car, we have a set of 4 new (!!!) TD Pro Race 1.3 wheels. At least they are $99/ea. Then he gets a set of BBS RF(?) with decent tires on them for $500. Will is starting to become a wheel slut.


Remember that guy that gave us $500 earlier? Well, cockbag decides he wants his "donation" back. How nice to tell us this now. He makes a point to bitch and scream and whine to Hamzah in front of their mutual friends any chance he can get. Lemons is NOT for whiners! You want your money? Oh, you'll get it, cum-dumpster.

Hamzah takes the $500 cash to the local Bank of America, because America is the shit, and we don't fuck around! The teller gladly give him $250 in pennies, and $250 in dimes, since they don't have any more pennies.

We have a little team meeting about the situation, and proceed to spend the next 4 hours or so, all 5 of us, unrolling the change and dumping it into canvas totes we have lying around. The trash filled 2 garbage bags of just rolling paper.

This is 150 lbs of coin, bitches. Loose and thoroughly mixed. Hamzah personally delivers the coinage to Capt. Cocksmoker's apartment. He flips out, doesn't want to accept his $500, returned just like he asked for. From his 3rd story doorstep, he accidentally dumps one of the smaller bags, raining change on his neighbors. Broken, the dumb son-of-a-bitch gives in. he can't handle the awesomeness that Hamzah has brought upon him. We get to keep the money, and one more asshole learns not to fuck around with us! RMR!!!

Everyone gets really fucking busy with school, work, women(!), and fixing our own busted POS cars. We still fap around on Facebook about how we should do a billion things, few of which have any relevance to the Lemons car. Once, we even took it to an autocross!

We finally decide to get a weld-in cage kit, since we A) don't have a welder B) don't have a tubing bender C) don't have any business using either of the two aforementioned pieces of equipment. Plus, we'd have 5 different cage designs that all probably sucked in one way or another, and we'd spend the next year actually getting it installed. Will ordered 2 kits (one for his POS E30, one for the village bicycle E30) from Evil Genius Racing on September 15th, the payment for the cages went through. We got the damn things after much haranguing, November 20th. What a clusterfuck that was! Being cheap and poor, we had to get it installed, but don't want to fork out the $1,500 the guys at TWS want. For fucks sake, the tubes are bent and notched!!! We find a local pal, Eric Bradley, that's building a Late-Model, and has such builds to his credit as a rollbar in an geo metro, the Witchdoctor 3rd Gen that got 2nd last year, and the MustangIInicorn that only made 16 laps this year. He and his surly friend Todd Farris will weld it in for us for only $300 in Todd's kickass shop. That's more like it!

That brings you pretty much up-to-date with our exploits. Media will be added as soon as I can get a hold of it!

Backstory

Being a bunch of car-obsessed college students, we HAD to get our fix for racing sometime. Sure, Autocrossing is cheap, and you can get free track time if you sucker up to the management and sling flags, but as the goes, we need mo money to go wheel-to-wheel, and mo money mean mo problems. Specifically pesky tuition fees and such.

Then along came Jay Lamm, Prophet of CheapThrills from the the land of ManBearPig, California. He came to Houston bearing Lemons, and it was good!

Finally, an outlet to live out all the Dale Earnhardt/Bernd Rosemeyer/Randy Pobst dreams, but all in a $500 car with a big 'ol party between the laps. Must find a way to get in on this!

So the search began for a car. We had some standards, it had to run, or be very close to running, we had to be familiar with the chassis, and it should have parts we could sell off to fund the booze.

Being a motley crew of BMW drivers, we looked for something cheap, where we'd have spares in case it broke, which it most definitely will. We looked for E30's and E36's, since they are plentiful. We bounced back craigslist ads for a few weeks until we finally got a good lead on a car in Missouri City. It's an '89 325i, has a manual transmission, it runs, and it's got a 4.10 LSD to boot! Kickass! One catch: he wants $900. Gotta get that price down below $500 if we want to have any ability to fix what will most certainty be broken. Febuary 22nd, 2009; Hamzah, SHO, and Will road-trip down, hop into SHO's namesake: a black '89 Ford Taurus SHO, complete with floppy rear bumper, peeling tint, faded paint, and the distinct aroma of gasoline, you know, desire smells like that to some people.


Our trio arrived at a gravel lot in between two older subdivisions. The sound of a hundred bees rolling in a tin can greets our ears as we see the car approach. It's more beaten than we thought, so no luck in selling body panels or the bumpers. There was a chinese floormat covering the gaping hole in the trans tunnel to accommodate the 5-series shifter, as it dangled in the air. The seller, Matt, a Prarie-View A&M student with a serious need for some cash and a dad who made it very clear the car was to be gone by the end of the day allowed us some wiggle room on the price. We haggled for a while, pulling singles and fives that were wadded up in our pockets out. "We need some money to eat on the way back" we argued, He didn't want to go any lower than $600. And then the car died. Matt tried to get away without telling us about the dead battery or that he ran it right out of gas before he showed up. Dad was not pleased. We were. The price settled on $410, a bill of sale was signed on the back of a receipt, we put a few gallons in the tank and switched off driving the clunker back to College Station under the cover of night.

We have a car!!!

RMR Introduction

Welcome to Red Mist Racing's better-late-than-never build of our entry for the Febuary Gator-O-Rama Lemons race at MSR-Houston. We have 5 drivers:


Hamzah "Tool Time" Hezam- Like Tim Allen, this Saudi is full of enthusiam and getss of to Craftsman and Eastwood catalogs. He has two of every tool we could need, hidden SOMEWHERE in his packed garage. More 'Murican than the rest of the team, combined.


Daniel "Silent Death" Records- He tracks what we spend on this abortion of a project. Good at beating on stuff, he also serves as our voice of reason. Just don't feed him Mexican, for the love of all things holy.


Eric "SHO" Stautberg- Know for his Penguin outfit and trademark "Money" hat, he's the resident beverage pro. Most likely to say "Fuck it, That'll work."


Will "Smash" Hiltebeitel- The E30 "expart" with a propensity to find a way to snap a bolt or fuck something up on the car. Most likely to come up with the fix in the end. Known to keep buying parts, and squirreling them away, much to Daniel's chagrin.


Joseph "I wanna go FAST" Lammers- Our dear DE whore, Joseph will do whatever it takes to get more track time. His addiction to tires and tracktime rival's Tyrone Biggum's love for the crackity-crack.