"Mini"-Monster truck

Here's a sort of cool video of a monster truck rally... I find it quite interesting for the visual effect.

Woah... Autocross++

And I thought our autocrossing was fun... Check this out!

Oh, and the title of this post is a programmer joke. The "++" means "take this and add one to it" - thus this is one more than autocross.

Watch for the insane Segway bit. No helmet!

Heart transplant well underway...

Today we resumed work on the Escorts - we wanted to get them to a state where we wouldn't need to work on them outside in bad weather... And we definitely did!

A new team member, Tony, contacted us last week and said he would be available this weekend, so we decided to take advantage of his willingness to help! We pulled the escorts out of the back and started on the process of transferring the engine from the donor to the racer...

The racer rolled really well, and the engine had obviously been out of the car at least one time in the past. With the learning curve it took us about 2 1/2 hours to get the engine out of the car... No significant snags or difficulties. And we didn't have to cut... much.

The donor car had a seized front disk brake, so we had to pull that apart outside, before we could roll it into the garage. Once in, that engine came out pretty well as well. The experience of taking out the racer just before was a real asset to taking out this one. There were extra bits that we had to extract as well, but it went well. So well that we kept going and were able to pull off additional potential parts - Windshield washer resivore (more on that in the future), and fuel tank, which was in better shape than the one on the racer.

Now the next step is to disassemble the donor engine and make sure it is in good shape... Then put it back in the racer...

Overall, a very productive day, and we have a lot of time left to do other things!