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Facts
Year: 2004
Model: Corvette Z06
Mileage (at purchase): 7853
Current Mileage: 12600 (2/16/08)
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So I finally got around to cleaning up the Corvette yesterday. It really needed a coat of wax and a good going over with the clay bar so after a round of golf in the morning I came home and gave the car some love.
Here's the order of things on Sunday.
Wash
Claybar
Wash
Polish
Wax
RainX
I spent 4.5 hours or so cleaning up the car. All the marks are removed from the paint, though there are still some cone marks in the clear vinyl that I had troubles removing. And now for the results
So it's Wednesday already, I've been back for a few days and haven't done a review for the Midiv Divisional Solo event in Kansas City this past weekend.
So how was it? Based on my driving performance, very poor. Based on everything else? It was okay. Unfortunately I always feel whenever I go to KC things are rather unorganized, though I'm sure folks that come to STL from KC feel the same way with the way events around here have been the past few years.Saturday took a long time to complete, we started just after 10am, and didn't get done till after 5pm if I recall correctly. Sunday ran much faster, which made for a decent arrival time at home.
Registration opened up for the 2008 Tirerack Solo Nationals so I jumped and registered as 198 SS for the event. I know I am excited for September to come this year, but I have a lot of work to do before then to be ready. I'm not sure if Natalie will be running Nationals or not this year, we need to see what the horse show schedule looks like.
Wow what a weekend. So here it goes, it is 10:19pm, let's see how long this takes.
Wednesday after class I ran home and grabbed the truck so I could run off and pick up the trailer. I grabed the trailer and Andy Hohl helped me load the car up. I had to load up on Wednesday night because I was heading to Atlanta Thursday morning. The trailer load went well, as did the trip to Atlanta and back. Friday morning I left the house around 7:30 and hit the road to Newport Arkansas.
So.... tip when you get new wheels/tires/lugnuts, triple check the darn torque on the lug nuts. I was driving to class tonight and starting getting some horrible feedback from the car. I pulled over to the side of the highway and started checking lug nuts, at least one loose on each wheel, and all I had was my hands to tighten things down. I did my best and headed home to tighten things up before continuing on to school.
Lesson learned yet again...
I've had new street tires for a few weeks now but finally got my new street wheels today. I called around a few places. I tried Autozone and I think they told me it would be $30/wheel to mount and balance the tires. That was a bit higher than I had hoped to pay so I came home after work and tried a service station shop down the street, they told me they couldn't do the wheels because of the size. I then ran to Dobbs in the same shopping center.
Dobbs told me it would be $60 for each of the rear wheels and $50 for each of the front wheels. Excuse me? Are you serious, $220 to mount and balance 4 wheels and tires? I don't think so Dobbs!
So I called up Sears at Chesterfield Mall, they did the alignment on the car last week (more info coming later in this blog post about the alignment), they said they were open till 8pm and if I got there before 7pm they'd be able to take care of them. I got there just after 6pm, and I think I left the store by 7pm. Yet again they were excellent, mounted and balanced 4 wheels and tires, plus mounted an additional r-comp without balancing for $111. So what do the new wheels look like? They're awesome! 
I finally took some time to install the Hardbar harness bar into the Corvette this evening. Pictures tomorrow.
Due to a vendor mixup I'm short a set of wheels this weekend and autox season starts up. I need to buy a 17x9.5" C5 Z06 wheel to complete a set, and I need to do this before Thursday so I can get tires mounted Thursday night and drive to Kansas City Friday morning.
Any chance anyone local has one wheel? I'd even consider a pair or a full set (2 17s and 2 18s) if someone has them. They don't have to be in good shape, just not beat to hell and back.
I'd even be down for a set of C6 wheels in C5 Z06 sizes if anyone has them local.
So Natalie and I cut the St. Pat's trip short by about 14 hours. After the fun I had last night, I wasn't feeling up for another night of drinking so we left Rolla around 6pm this evening. Lesson learned, don't over drink yourself the night before your birthday, otherwise you spend your birthday in bed feeling your new age.
Sunday I'm looking forward to a few things. I'm going to raise the front end on the Corvette up probably 1/4-1/2 inch, to hopefully stop dragging everytime I come to an inclined driving surface.
I'm then going to head to Illinois and stop by the Novice School, try to get the car Annually teched, and then possibly go swing by Tuxedo Park and see how dirty the 240Z is. If Steven is over at TPR I'll do my best to try and talk him into letting me dyno the Z06, I'd like to get a baseline run in before I put the Borla exhaust on this week.
So I got up this morning, washed the F350 before Natalie took it back to the barn, where it will live until it gets used to tow again. (Good planning on my part sending it back to the barn with a winter storm supposedly hitting St. Louis tomorrow). I then washed the Z06 to get the travel grime off it from the trip back from Atlanta last weekend.
Today I went over to Nick's house for a while to work on removing the motor out of his 1995 Cobra. That took us FARRRR too long, stupid mustangs. We actually didn't get it all the way out before I left, the ram on the cherry picker died on us when we were probably 95% done. He ran off to Cummins Tools to look for another one, I went home to work on the Corvette.
I took the Monroe Sensa Tracs off the front end and put the stock Z06 shocks back on the car. I figured out, thanks to a tip from Alex, the easy way to mount shocks is by compressing them and holding them closed with a zip tie. That made things a lot easier!
So at the National Tour in Cecil Georgia this past weekend I took my Garmin Forerunner 305. Why? Because I wanted to use the heart rate monitor and see what my heart rate gets to when I race.
I wore it on Sunday, when walking the course and then when taking my runs. It's interesting, you can see my heartrate steadily climb over a run. On my third and final run my heart rate peaked at 171bpm.
It's been two weeks since I've run, but that is about 10bpm lower than what is my high generally when running.
I'm trying to get the event uploaded to motionbased.com so that I can link to it from this blog post and you can see some of the data. I'll also be working with the data from DL1 this weekend, and getting more videos together from the Dixie Tour.
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Needed:
Wheels
Borla Exhaust
Sponsored:
Koni Shocks
Clear Bra
DL1
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We would like to thank the following sponsors!
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