Brian Gallimore's Blog

The neck of the filler cap on my 2 gallon methanol tank is made of steel. Everything else in the system is either stainless or plastic. So the neck has corroded and little flakes of rust have been falling into the tank and eventually taken off to the nozzle filter. I couldn’t find another filler cap that was the right size made out of plastic or stainless so I decided to paint it, in hopes that the paint would offer a good resistance. Well, two days of use and I see that the paint is already loose and soft.  I called the manufacturer and learned they do make a chrome plated model that might hold up a little better, but they have a minimum order requirement.  So now I need to find a reseller.

As I was re-installing this cap, I found that the bolts were all buggered up.  I got my tap & die set out to see if I could salvage them.  After lots of trial fits and scratching my head, I figured out that the bolts were metric and the nuts were SAE.  Good grief, some numnut didn’t much care what he was doing when he put this together.  Auto parts stores near me don’t carry a very good selection of stainless fasteners either, but I found some suitable ones at Lowes.

So why do I have a custom-fit 2 gallon methanol tank?  Because, when I ordered my supercharger kit, I upgraded it a bit so that I could order a smaller pulley to get more boost.  Before I could use the extra boost, I had to deal with the problem of knocking due to the fuel not having a high enough octane rating to resist the extra pressure.  (spraying a mist of alchol and water into the intake air raises the octane rating of the fuel)  Oh, there was also the copious amount of extra fuel needed too, but I had that taken care of already, upgraded injectors and replaced the fuel pump, which of course required upgraded relays and wiring.  So now I have an issue with belt squeel.  It sounds like one of my idler pulleys is going out, again.  (replaced both of them once already)  I don’t think people who drive Toyota Camerys have these type of problems.  These are self-created problems.  I actually like these problems, except that I don’t have enough time or money to keep up with them!

Quadzilla has been pretty neglected this year.  All the time I’ve spent out of town and my vegetable garden projects have really taken away from the autos.  To relolve my belt squeel problem, I ordered a new idler pulley, and while I was on the phone, I went ahead and had Procharger send me a 3.4″ drive pulley too, which might get me up to around 12 or 13 psi of boost.  Tech support says anything smaller than that will require me going to an 8rib setup, which is about $1000 to get new pulleys for everything that belt goes around.  I need to go ahead and switch to a speed density tune, since the MAF is out or range at the upper end already.  Oh, and my rear diff or rear bearings are going out too…