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This weekend was about making sure the car is ready for my track day at Thunderhill this coming Friday. I had a number of items I needed to do. I put the car up on jack stands, pulled off my street wheels/tires. Then I replaced the front brake pads, which were Wilwood Q compound, with more aggressive E compound. The change was really easy as the calipers have a cross bolt that you just remove and then pop out the old pads. push the pistons in a bit with a c-clamp and the new pads drop right in. I also had a set of rear drum brake shoes that I’ve be sitting on for years. I finally sucked it up and replaced them as well. It’s been over 10 years since I’ve changed drum shoes and it’s one of those things that takes an hour to do the first side and then 10 minutes to do the other side. While I had the car up on jack stands I also checked the u-joint strap bolts. Couple of other things I did were to screw my clutch pedal pad to the pedal backing plate with 2 screws. The pad kept coming loose. The other thing was to lengthen the clutch master rod that connects to the clutch pedal. I had noticed driving the Javelin on the street that it was getting hard to get into gear. Not so much when moving but when trying to get into 1st from a stop. Anyway, I remembered that when I first hooked up the clutch, after moving the master higher up on the firewall that I couldn’t get the car into gear. I then lengthened the clutch rod and voila, easy gear engagement. So, I assume as I’ve been wearing the clutch I probably have gotten to the point were I needed a little more stroke. Anyway, it definitely fixed the problem. However, I’m probably maxed out on length so when it wears some more I may need to figure out how to lengthen the rod on the slave cylinder a bit. Also switched to a 6500 RPM chip in the MSD. And lastly threw on the track wheels/tires and drop the car on the ground. I also have a Microtrak II digital audio recorder that I’m going to try to use to record the exhaust when I’m on track. Here’s hoping for a good track day!

well, while you were all eating hot dogs and hamburgers I was busting butt trying to get the Javelin that much closer to being done. I bought a wilwood brake proportioning valve about a year ago and am just now getting around to installing it. installing the valve was easy. I just used a longer bolt and bolted it right to the proportioning block. the harder part was plumbing it. I needed 3 brake lines. 1 from the prop block to the input of the prop valve, 1 from the output of the prop valve to under the passenger footwell and a final line from there back to the rear braided line that feeds both rear brakes. I did it in 3 pieces because it would have been a lot harder to bend a single piece to go from the output of the valve all the way to the back. I had a coil of stainless steel 3/16″ line that I bought from summit a while ago and I just bought the eastwood flaring tool. I learned about the tool on V8TV (thanks Kevin!).