Fingernails

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Old School pics

This past weekend I did a photo shoot for Carboy magazine. Carboy is a Japanese car tuning magazine for those of you who don't know. They are doing a series on Americans who have been in the tuning industry for a long time. The story is about me and my history I think. We'll see when it comes out. The series has included people like Toshi Hayama (JDM Insideher), Mike Ferrara (D-Sport mag), and now myself. Yasu, who freelances for Carboy and a host of other Japanese magazines, asked me to dig up some old pictures. It too...

Apexi Bergenholtz Racing Drift FD - round 2

So the Bergenholtz brothers arranged for the engine to get built and ported. If the engine is built well, then it should be able to generate more horsepower and be stronger at the same time. Rotaries, as some of you know, have the Achilles tendon: the apex seal. Hopefully this built engine has better seals.

So two weeks ago on a monday night, I went to break in the engine and tune the Apex Power FC ECU at the same time. Rotaries really do need quite a bit of break in. There are so many seals in them that they all need to seal really well before the engine can generate good power. When XS builds an engine, the customer is always told to drive it around for 1000 miles. ...

DEEP SPORT

So my buddy Mike Ferrara from D-Sport Magazine bought a boat. Yes, the magazine with the Westminister Vietnamese coffee house chicks on the cover every month. Wow, the magazine business MUST be good. Mike is probably one of the hardest working old dudes (36) I know so he deserves it. The good thing is that he's my friend...hahah. Yes, that means I get to occasionally go fishing with M&M (Mike and his girlfriend Mitsuko). He named the boat DEEP SPORT. Rather appropriate don't you think?

So we took off early last Sunday morning at 4:30am in an attempt to go to Catalina Island and catch some yellowtail. It turned out to be a beautiful day despite the morning overcast. ...

Gay Miata

Craigslist<...

3 Piece Connecting Rod

What a waste of a perfectly good connecting rod. I had to cut it for the sake of quality control and research and development though. I'm sending it out to our lab to do a material compositional analysis, hardness profile, bulk hardness testing, and a microstructural analysis. I bet you don't see Eagle or those other 15 brands of piece of $hit made in China rod manufacturers doing this. Or even any of the American made rods. This is one of the reasons why Cosworth parts are expensive. You can be damn sure you'll be getting a good part that will not fail on you though. Don't forget people - when it comes to cars, you pay for what you get (most of the time...).

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LP to MP3 plus TORQ

I decided to transfer some vinyl records I had to mp3 so I could put some of the tracks on my Ipod. This is actually quite a task because there's a ton of records to go through. I've had a pair of Technics 1200's for a long time, but I've been lazy in transferring the records to mp3 because you can download most songs. Now that new music more or less sucks ass and I've run out of music to download, I'm starting to dig through the crates. Literally. Anyhow, I started the search for the perfect software to carry out this daunting task of LP to mp3 transfer. The coolest, easiest to use, and fully featured software I found was Cool Edit 2000 v1.1. It's an old version of Adobe's Aud...

Karaoke

I was looking through some pics and I found some pics of the time we were partying at the Tajima house. I rented a Karaoke machine for the night and it has like 20,000 songs in English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, etc. For those of you who don't know, Mike Ferrara the publisher of D-Sport Magazine and my good friend, is a hardcore karaoke enthusiast. I am too, but only when I'm drunk. You guys should try it some time: get hammered and then sing! It's funner than you think. Trust me, I was a non-believer at one time too. Karaoke is like the national past time in Japan. You can't walk a block in the city without passing a karaoke place. If a whole nation digs it, you g...

Mitsu EVO Turbos

I was talking to my friend in Japan today and he was telling me how the development of their EVO line of turbos is going to be available very soon. These are turbos for the EVO 4-9 that all bolt on to their intended application. The reason why I like these turbos is because they are genuine Mitsubishi turbos that have been tested and manufactured by Mitsubishi. The turbos you buy from little turbo shops here in America are basically slap togethers with "custom" made compressor wheels. The turbo on the EVOs are reverse rotation so what these turbo people do is digitize a wheel in some CAD software and then invert them. There is no testing, no development, or anything of the sort. ...

Rotary Power

Having always been a Mazda rotary engine fan and enthusiast, I was pleased to see a story on the 13G 3-rotor powered LMP2 car in Racecar Engineering. Or I should say previously 13G powered. Mazda switched over to the AER 2.0L piston turbo engine earlier this year in an attempt to be more competitive. I'm not sure how a 2.0L inline 4 turbo can be competitive with a highly strung normally aspirated 3.5L V-8 (a la IRL), but whatever floats their boat right? The AER engine is supposed to be a derivative of the Mazda DISI 2.0L engine found in the Mazdaspeed series of turbo cars. The key word here is SUPPOSED to be.

Anyhow, I'm glad that Mazda at least tried the rotary. The car wa...