Have you ever wanted to learn how to tune the suspension on a car?

Well, I haven’t really wanted to know that, until recently. Now I NEED to know. I took the Evo Advantage program this past weekend at the San Diego National Tour and felt like a total newb when the instructor kept telling me to do things to the car and I had no idea what he was talking about.

So now the question is, how best to learn the art of suspension tuning? Well, I started off on Amazon and picked up Tune to Win: The art and science of race car development and tuning by Carroll Smith.

I’ve yet to crack it open, but I plan to start on it this evening. I’ll post more on the website later when I have a feeling for what it actually provides, and can talk about what I am learning (hopefully I’ll learn something!)

I was pretty down today. Going into the first set of runs I had a headache that didn’t seem to want to go away and I wasn’t happy with my performance the day before. I was actually sitting there thinking, why do I do this? I really was thinking, I love seeing friends and talking to everyone, but I was pretty down on the racing part of things.

While I was announcing first heat a number of cars were DNF’ng corner 3, all the MOD cars dnf’d their first run. I thought, what is wrong with these people, why are they dnf’ng up there? Well, on my first run I found out, as I did the same damn thing. I was flying around the top of the course, looking ahead (or so I though) and all of a sudden I realized I wasn’t anywhere close to making it where I needed to be, I slammed on the brakes then decided there was no way I was going to make it so I hit the gas and drove on.

My second run started off okay, but coming in to the end I clipped a cone, I knew it, wasn’t one I should of hit, but did. So I was sitting in 8th or 9th as of that run, where I started the day in 7th.

My 3rd run I wasn’t really happy going into, I was sitting in 3rd place in ZSP (our little Z car competition with 4 drivers). I went out and did as well as I could. I put up the lowest Z time for the day and moved into first in ZSP and 6th in BSP. Had I not had issues yesterday I truly believe I could have taken 5th for the weekend (1 out of trophies) but I still would have been 4 or 5 seconds out of first.

I’ll have videos up in the next couple of days, I have some photos uploading at the moment, when they are all complete they will be found at

https://www.flickr.com/photos/chammond/sets/72157626299376321/

I’m worn out, so this will likely not be as long as it should be, but here’s a quick summary of the day today.

First heat, they got an extra run/look at the course due to some unforeseen issues with the surface, the course got changed, and the event started over 1hr into the day. Good deal for them, not so much for those who were working. Fortunately I was just walking around talking on the mic.

Have you upgraded your website to DotNetNuke 5.6.2 yet? I’ve upgraded a few of mine. ChrisHammond.com being one of those.

More to come next week, doubtful that I’ll get to them this week with the National Tour in San Diego this weekend!

Project350z got enough “likes” on facebook today to get our own URL https://facebook.com/project350z/ head on over and like us there! Most of the likes actually came through facebook ads. I ran an ad campaign, with a $5 max. I’m rather impressed with the results and the number of impressions the ad saw, and even the click throughs from the page to the site!

What are your weekend plans? I’m hoping to get the car together!

I made some progress tonight, not much, but I proved (to myself) that what I need to get done tomorrow can be. I got one of 4 set screws into the control arms tonight. the other 3 should be easy now.

Well it just goes to show you. Having the right tool for a job is the key to getting the job done right.

I think it’s time to buck up and get a damn vise. I didn’t get anywhere notable on the bushings tonight even though I got home earlier tonight.

This is what the one I’ve been banging on looks like now, still a long way to go!

Nothing seems to be working tonight!

I spent some time in the garage tonight, and didn’t manage to get a single one of the bushings out of the control arm. I’m hoping to spend some more time tomorrow after work.

Then I came in to work on some things for the office tomorrow. All I will say about that is, I can’t stand SQL Express! It is such a pain to try to get it to work when it just doesn’t want to.

Today I went to a machine shop (twice as he wasn’t open the first time) to try to have the bushings pressed out of the OEM upper control arms. Unfortunately the didn’t think he was going to be able to press them out due to the way the oem bushings are shaped.

I ended up coming home and going back to the approach that John from BetaMotorsports suggested earlier in the day on a forum.

1. Burn out the rubber part of the stock bushings and push the center out.
2. Take the blade of your hacksaw and thread it through the bushing opening.
3. Reassemble the hacksaw and cut one or two slits in the steel outer bushing shell.
4. Using a chisel, carefully curl the cut corners of the steel outer shell into the center.
5. At some point you should be able to push the shell out.

So tonight I came home and completed step 1 on all 4 of the bushings (I had one done yesterday). Unfortunately I don’t have a hack saw! Tried to stop by Ace Hardware on the way home, but they were closed. So I’ll head somewhere tomorrow and grab one and hopefully get through steps 2-5. I doubt I’ll have the car back on the road tomorrow night, but hopefully I can get it done Wednesday.

I also got the Longacre Alignment tools from SoloPerformance today so I can align the car after all these changes.

So I didn’t make any progress today, well not much at least. I spent the morning watching the baby while the wife got to get some much needed pampering time. After that I spent time working on a work related project.

I also, with the help of my buddy Dave, figured out the additional items I needed to get so I can use the custom bushings that I blogged about yesterday.

So, Sunday is suspension day. Hopefully I can get it all done!

It will likely be a full weekend for me, lots of suspension work to do on the car. Though the biggest task might be making room in the garage so I can get the car inside! Typically when I’m working on the car I move a lot of stuff out to make room, but it is supposed to rain for the next 5-10 days, so I doubt I’ll be able to move too much outside. I may have to move some things inside into my office for the interim.

I’ll be glad when we have a larger house, and possibly a storage unit!

So I wasn’t able to find a part that would make the SPL Upper Control Arms legal for BSP yet, though I am still looking.

As an interim, possibly long term, solution, I have some new offset bushings that should be here soon. John Coffey at www.betamotorsports.com made two sets of Hydlar Z offset bushings. One set for his car, and then one set to sell. Apparently he sold them once, but the buyer sent them back as he wasn’t up for the fabrication involved in installing them. I on the other hand am game (at least I hope).

I’ll be installing everything this Saturday, it’ll be a long day, but hopefully I can get everything installed. I unfortunately won’t be able to do an alignment on the car, at least not likely, but if I can get done I may try to run somewhere and have it done. Hopefully things turn out!

Expect lots of photos and video this weekend!

Well the Wiki module is back in motion! The last I talked about the module I reached out to see if I could find someone willing to take over the project, unfortunately that didn’t pan out. So now that I’ve cleaned up a few things I needed to get done I’m back in action on the module. I spent a number of hours last night working on one of the biggest issues, the ability to use special characters in the titles of Wiki entries.

So in yesterday’s blog post I talked about how I reinstalled Windows Home Server, the original version. Well tonight I ditched that and installed Windows Home Server 2011 RC (release candidate).

Why? Well, I talked to my buddy Rob Chartier and he told me to forget about Windows Home Server (original) because of all the improvements to 2011 (built in Windows Server 2008 R2 instead of Windows Server 2003).

I also figured out that the machine I installed on yesterday is a 64bit machine, so I could install 2011 without trouble. I downloaded the release candidate today and gave it a try. The install went great, much faster than yesterday, mainly because there were far fewer Windows Updates necessary.

I got the software configured and then spent some time getting the hard drives into the new external RAID tower that I picked up over the weekend. I then, with the help of my good buddy Subodh I got the RAID configured in a 1+0 format and started the process of creating the array. We’ll see how it works out 14 hours from now when it is scheduled to be done!

So it’s been a while since I’ve actually used my Windows Home Server, for the past year or so I have had some troubles with it, so ultimately I ditched it and went with just a single external hard drive for my files. I wasn’t too keen on the idea, but it has worked out well so far.

My Windows Home Server (v1) had 6 terrabytes of drive storage, so it was a shame that I wasn’t using it, but part of the reason I wasn’t is because this is how I had it setup for the past year, while it was running, and even when it wasn’t for the past few months, it looked like this.

Not exactly an ideal configuration considering we have a baby and two dogs. Fortunately the baby isn’t yet mobile, and the dogs avoided things as to not create a spaghetti incident.

I’m becoming paranoid about my files though, and decided it was time to have another solution in place rather than just copying the external hard drive to another external drive for a backup. So I wanted to get my WHS up and running again, but due to a variety of configuration issues I wanted to start fresh and pave the machine. I also wanted to get a drive bay to put the 4 1.5tb drives in, so I picked up a Sans Digital 5 Bay Raid tower.

I am going through the process now of installing WHS on my old desktop (the same machine it was on before) and while that goes, and I run windows update for I don’t know how many times, I am going to get the 6tb of drives into the new tower. I don’t expect it to be all done tonight, but I’d like to have a lot of it going so that I can get the data transfer started this week.

And no, I am not planning on using Windows Home Server Vail (2011) or whatever it is called, the machine I am running this on is 32bit and won’t support the latest release as far as I know (because it requires 64bit).

Yesterday’s adventure to San Francisco was caught on camera! Check out the video of our drive

No, you won’t likely see that happening anytime soon. But here we are in the Bay Area of California and woke up this morning to news of a Tsunami warning in the San Francisco Bay Area. We live at around 700’, so I wasn’t worried about it getting anywhere near here, but I work in a building that is within reach of sea level. Fortunately things never really panned out, at least not in the bay area.

This is the only thing I have seen from a surge in the bay

photo copyright Dr_Speed on Flickr

We even went into the city this afternoon/evening to take a friend who was visiting from “out of town” sight seeing. The first thing we did was headed up to the Golden Gate Bridge to show our guest. While there a girl came running down the path and said “have you seen a helicopter go through here?”. To which we replied no.

She said that her cousin sent her a text message that said he would be flying a Cobra under the bridge at 4:15, it was 4:12 at the time. So we stuck around. It wasn’t long (maybe 10 or 15 minutes) before we finally heard the roar of the choppers coming, and then we could see them. Pretty amazing site to see them flying under the bridge, I just wish I had a better lens to go with my nice camera!

Click here to see more photos from our trek

While we were there we also took a family photo or two.

The other day I posted on how to add the new Facebook Comments to your DotNetNuke website. This worked okay for basic modules that only had one content display, but for a module like DNNSimpleArticle this didn’t work well as the URLs for each article didn’t come across as individual URLs because of the way the Facebook code is formatted. When displaying the Comments I also only wanted to show them on individual articles, not on the main article listing.

There is actually a pretty easy fix though, a number of options, you could write a very simple module to do this, you could embed some of this into your Skin, or the method I chose. I wanted to make this work using Razor with the new Razor Host module in DotNetNuke 5.6.1.

For instructions on how to get the Razor Host module installed you should watch the following Video.

St. Louis did something to me. Ever since I got back from STL I’ve had problems getting to sleep. I sure as heck know it isn’t because I miss it! I don’t miss the city, I do miss the friends. But I talk to most of you guys online anyways so you may as well be right here in California.

But, why can’t I sleep lately?

How do people get things done? I get home from work, spend some time with the baby, have some dinner with the wife, and then try to do some work. I don’t get anything done, then it’s time for bed.

Up at 6am tomorrow and then start teaching at 8am, back at it.