I just ordered a fender roller for auto, will be trying it out on thursday on the lemons car.
No old style with a Louisville slugger? 
Iâve seen it done a couple times. Make sure to get a heat gun on the area for a good while first.
For this car hammering would probably have been just as easy, but it was pretty quick to use the fender roller, before:
After:
Also test fitted the new wheels and tires, we got a rough camber reading to see what we could get with just one eccentric bolt per strut(got -0.9 passenger and -2.1 driver), will have to go with 2 eccentric bolts per side to get to desired -2.5 to -3 degrees of front camber
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We got the roof vent installed
The list of things to finish up for the race is getting short, we need to do something to fix where the exhaust hits the new rear swaybar, it probably wouldnât hurt anything but the noise might mask some other noise that would indicate a problem.
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Sounds like a use for a rosebud & ball peen.
The car is mostly race ready, but we have a few more weeks so time for some gold plating, I just ordered replacement rubber exhaust hangers (the ones on there are 20 years old), and also a shift light (we want to shift at 5k and never hit the limiter during race).
Will work on installing those this thursday at 7pm
Is there any touch up painting or decorative elements that non-car saavy folks (like myself) can help with? 
I ordered some more cones that we will need to paint (and mount with either short sheet metal screws or bolts to attach to car), the paint on the car still looks good, with only some flaking off on the rear bumber. It would also be good to 3d print a hood ornament that is painted the same colors as the car. (we lost the previous hood ornament)
The other theme related question is if any drivers or team members that will be at the event want to dress up in a mario kart related outfit.
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Possibly the best $57 we have spent on the car so far is for a digital tach / shift light
Installation only took a couple minutes, no splicing wires, just 3 ring terminals because the built in tach is connected through 3 screws
And now we have an awesome shift light to hopefully help us not blow the engine up during the race, much better than the piece of tape pointing at the tach we had previously.
Also fixed the exhaust to not hit the swaybar, probably could have just beat in the exhaust in where it was hitting, instead we bent the exhaust and ended up cutting off and rewelding all the exhaust hangers (previous owner had a custom muffler put in and it has always been fairly hacked up). Would have been very helpful to have a pipe bender (tube roller we have wouldnât work in this application)
Replaced the exhaust hangers with new from dealership parts (cost $10)
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You know we could probably make a pretty good bender. I built mine but unfortunately I currently only go to 2" tube.
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We got the brake fluid flushed / replaced, the car is pretty much done and ready for racing, just have to flush the coolant(to replace it with straight distilled water) and change the oil, which we are waiting to do the week before.
Starting working on a new method of holding down the cone decorations, last time the gratuitous amounts of glue of various types we tried on the unknown plastic cones did not hold at 100 mph and some flew off on track, this time we will have a ring holding the base of the cones down and then the ring is bolted to the car.
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Curious: why arenât you using a 50/50 mix for coolant? As I understand it, coolant mixtures with glycol also raise the boiling point, as well as preventing freezing.
If I had to guess, the organizers donât want to deal with the inevitable cleanup of glycol from the track. It is probably a requirement to enter the race. Changing over is best done as late as possible so you have less time without the corrosion protection.
Yeah antifreeze is slippery and lemons cars dont need any help losing control on the track, so they require you run straight h2o with no additives at all (no water wetter, etc)
3.K.2 Coolant. Coolant must be water onlyâno antifreeze, antiboil, water-wetter, or other additives allowed. (That stuff is slipperyâwhen your car pukes its guts all over the track, we donât want to be sliding around in it.) A functional catch tank is mandatory.
Good reason! 
âŚ,âŚ,âŚ,
Hood ornament will have a much better attachment this time, took a Koopa shell stl from thingiverse, cut it in half in netfabb basic, then using openscad added a hole for an m10 nut and bolt to hold it onto hood.
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We attempted to improve the alignment, we built some wheel stands with turn tables (grease + vct vinyl tiles) so that we could access and turn the rear eccentric bolts and front tie rods to adjust toe with the suspension loaded. We got as close to 0 toe all around as we could, the car has a very slight drift to the right but nothing that will be noticeable while on the track. We have roughly -2.5 degrees camber all around.
Doing it manually was both more educational and simpler than having to trailer the car somewhere to get a real alignment and spending $150, will find out on race day if this was a bad idea or not.
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Brandon, I used to race funny cars as a young man. One of my neighbors owned an auto shop and invited me to come and learn racing while working (for free) for him. Seeing the work youâre doing on the Lemon brings back a lot of memories. It was a time in my life when I could never get all of the grease out from under my fingernails. Fun times. Thanks for posting the pics and the chronology.
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Zero static toe will usually result in toe out under braking although that can depend on how the tie rods are positioned. Toe out makes the car more lively on corner entry but can be tiring to drive.
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