I got the brake bias proportioning valve from Summit Racing today. It was only $31 and I had to buy a couple of fittings to adapt it onto the power steering pump. My plan is that if I can adjust the pressure going from the pump to the rack I should be able to adjust how heavy the steering is, which would be ideal. So far so good, it all fit, but I wasn’t really able to test it as I currently have no downpipe or exhaust on the car and didn’t really want to flood my garage with exhaust and piss off my new neighbors. Will have to try it after the exhaust is back on.

I also got my new in-car camera today. It’s a Panasonic Lumix LZ7 which is a normal ‘point and shoot’ camera as opposed to a video camera, but records to Quicktime MPEG 848×480 @ 30fps which is pretty awesome. It also supports SD-HC cards up to 8GB, has a very high recording data rate and has excellent image stabilization. Thanks to John Wurth for the suggestion. I got a refurb model from B&H for only $90! I also took the opportunity to remount my camera mount so its more centered and so I can see my hands. It’s really pretty helpful to be able to review video after an event and especially when you can see steering action as well. I hope to be able to have some cool video up here pretty soon.

I finally wrapped my downpipe with some header wrap to try and keep the under-hood temperatures more reasonable. I had to take the downpipe off to get to one of the turbo bolts so took the opportunity to wrap it up. Speaking of the turbo bolts, as I mentioned previously I’ve been having a serious problem with the bolts coming loose after a session or two on the track. Patman from rx7club.com suggested using stainless steel nuts and bolts as they don’t stretch as much under the heat. Of course the only hardware store in Santa Monica that has stainless bolts only had them in 1.5″ length which doesn’t quite fit after you include the 2 washers and lockwasher. I took a pic of it and you can see that it doesn’t really thread enough into the nut. I had to order some 1.75″ bolts online which will come next week…it always feels absurd buying $6 worth of stuff online as the shipping is usually more expensive, but what can you do. Hopefully this will be the last of my turbo bolt problems.

After discovering the broken brake rotor in my previous post I thought I should take a look at my brake ducting. It’s pretty tough to find any good ducting point now as my front bumper houses a radiator, 2 oil coolers, an intercooler, and a power steering cooler. I remembered that a while ago I bought these little 200CFM 3″ fans which could blow air to the brakes, NASCAR style. My plan is to mount the fans onto the undertray and have them kind of sucking in air from an angle to one of the openings in the bumper. It’s not ideal but I’m pretty much out of spots to draw air from so it will have to do. I’ll have some pics of the setup hopefully next week after I either acquire or make my undertray.

hakeem