Well, its pretty crazy here in Colorado right now. An upslope weather system is hovering over eastern Colorado and just dumping feet of snow. You might know what that means if you are from Colorado. But for everyone else, basically moisture gets sucked out of the gulf of Mexico to the south, cold are comes from the north, and we get tons of precipitation. It mostly affects the area of the state east of the mountains. This isn’t your normal storm that tracks to the east across the country from the Pacific. These upslope storms are much more serious for those of us that live just east of the continental divide

I barely made it home from work, and it had only been snowing for a few hours in these pictures. As I pulled ontly my street my Volvo got stuck in the deep powder where nobody had driven or plowed. It was just too deep for the low riding 242 and even the steel studded snow tires were no match for knee deep snow.

It looks like I’ll be relaxing at home and working from home for the next day or two. I wish I was in the mountains for some skiing about right now. Its going to be wonderful out there tommorrow.

This will be the beginning of a series of entries about progress on my current project car. It is a 1988 Volvo 740 turbo station wagon. Its already nicely modified and very fast for a Wagon. I have plans to do some road race style track events with the car and eventually the One Lap of America. Let the Journey Begin . . .
There are alot of things I’ll need to accomplish with “Irene the red headed stepchild wagon” before she makes her debut on any road track. Most importantly, some suspension work, tires, and brakes. But of course there have been distractions keeping some of that from happening.

It always seems like Irene’s progress is one step forward two steps back. The new engine was making decent power, but then suddenly this week the car began having ignition troubles. I pushed the boost level up a little from about 13 or 14 psi to a nice steady 15 psi. Really, I just tweaked the manual boost controller enough to remove a taper it had before. Before the tweaks boost was starting at about 15psi, but falling to about 12 or 13 by 6000 rpm. The new improved boost was enough to reveal a weakness in the ignition system and now the car just falls flat on its face at about 5000rpm. So I’m working to address that now. I’m going to try some different spark plugs, smaller plug gaps and possibly a Capacitive Discharge ignition box like the MSD or Mallory units. I really feel like the car just needs more spark energy.

Here is the dyno graph with a huge power loss dip at 4500rpm.

Here are the exotic Bosch plugs I am trying. Though they didn’t really make a difference.

Take a look at the photography page. The setup was a little complicated, so it doesn’t look quite right yet. But I am slowly figuring things out.

I can also now easily embed pictures in my posts.

Here is a night time picture of Irene. If you don’t beleive me, notice the stars in the sky.

This is my first Blog post. EVAHR! I’ll leave the title Hello World to stick with the programming tradition. This should be interesting. I’m not convinced I really want to do this yet. I’m still learning.