WORDS WORDS WORDS
I put the rear seats, trunk liner, and glove box back in today. I also started working on my front end mods...
While I was working GClark was textin' me. He brought up the point of interiors were rice... Which while silly, and reflects upon my jabbing at his taste, has some merit in it.
I pulled the rear seats because it was instant weight loss at the cost of undoing 6 bolts. Not a bad deal if it can make your turd lighter and shave a few tenths of a seconds off of race times. The problem is, all that interior crap gone out of the back end of the car makes it noisier. With 140 tread wear summer tires, that's a lot of road grime being flung against the unibody that you have to listen to. Since I'm going to Bangor for Wednesdays meet... Yeah, I want a nice quiet car. This brings up the concept of..........
NOISE, INSULATION, DAMPING, AND DRIVER FATIGUE
Last year when I was a senior in college and my sister was a freshmen, I found myself making this drive:
(yes Bryan, I know I take 46 instead of buxport, I took the screen shot and didn't want to take another damn it)
Granted I managed to take different routes and shave googles estimate of 3 hours and 21 minutes down to under three hours. But damn. Three hours in a car, a base model POS Subaru, it's a long ass time. Along with this drive, I had to make a few other 4 hour out of state drives a little while back, but that's old history at this point :|
My car has always been a lemon. It has a lot of little things wrong with it. I've said it before in this thread, but damn it I'm getting senile, so I'm saying it again. The car is like the girl you've been with a long ass time. She's not as pretty as she used to be, you're realizing shes a little bit crazy like her mother, a few years into the relationship she has catastrophic meltdowns and is finicky about solving them. After all that raisin, you still love her. That's this car.
SO, while I should have damned this eternal steaming pile of raisin to the crusher YEARS ago, I'm still putting time and money into it, because unlike a piece of raisin daewoo, camry, cavalier, the impreza platform is actually worth two shits.
But back to the car being a lemon. One of them being is bad seals. The drivers side window has a bad leak that makes noise at highway speed. The windshield also has a leak near the driver, but it isn't bad at all. I shimmed out the drivers side window seal with some pennies to solve the issue. BUT, this something to note. When I started adding mounts and bushings, along with my SHOT stock seats, it soon became apparent that driver fatigue was a pretty big issue. Especially when sis forgets something 45 minutes into a trip and I have to turn around turning a 3 hour drive into a 4.5 hour drive. :|
One major thing, I have a VERY bad back. A family history of back issues, I'm the third generation I know of. My father has had multiple back surgeries and has about 6 inches of medical grade metal grafted to his spine (sets off airport security woops). My sister managed to have some disk issues due to her overworking at school. I've been lucky and know when to call it quits to preserve whats left of my back, but damn some days it's tough. Those long long ass trips on my stock seats SUCKED. There was no lumbar support on them, almost as if some fat dude crushed the seat padding all in. I sniped some leather RS seats from Ray this summer, and while the bolstering isn't as good as the 02 seats, the lumbar support is existent, and actually pretty good, which has helped my back. I'll be throwing a heated seat kit in and that'll solve that issue completely.
Less damping in the car and longer trips results in me being more fatigued. Thankfully the new bushing setup isn't outright noisey or terrible, fine for commuting, but on long trips there is a bit more driver fatigue. People overlook NVH and fatigue.
This brings us to the crossroad of what to do with this car. I'm classed out in most racing competitions, thanks to the regear. Autocross is SM, which means I can do all sorts of stupid raisin to the car like gut it. While I don't really want to, the problem is, other people can; keeping up with the jones'. Rallycross? M4, again, the super modified do w/e you want class (I also suck at rallycross, I'm unlearning the harmful autox stuff and learning the loose surface techniques, but I wont be competitive for a long time). The rallyx stuff learning to drive better comes before gutting the car to squeeze those 1/100ths of secounds out. Hillclimbs, I'm pretty sure I'm SP, which is similar to the others. I haven't read the rule book enough to be 100% though. All of these have the same thing in common, mod your car like nuts to go fast. Problem is, modifications allowed in this class negatively impact the daily driving and long distance driving of a car, often creating a noisy, buzzy, rattly car. So what do you do, DD the car gutted like abenson, or suck it up and run 'er as is. Dynomat the car and enjoy my extra comfy-ness. (rhetorical questions)
Today while putting the big interior pieces back in I realized. Wait a minute, if it takes 6 bolts to take the back seat setup out, and it's no big deal for race day... Why don't I put sound deadening on the removable pieces... Duh, long drives + DD duties I'll have the seats in (unless I'm driving to racing stuff), and the extra weight I add will come out anyways on race day. Everyone wins.
Sounds like a good compromise until I someday get another creampuff wagon DD and the RS gets delegated to race day trailer slut status.
Here's todays bonus cat picture, he's in a basket!