Optimism bites.

What a mess.

The cool thing about this kind of project is you learn a lot. You learn about ambition, patience, and determination. But, more than anything, you learn about optimism. Typically optimism is a good thing to have - until it's misdirected, then it's disastrous. Late Sunday, our optimism turned into a big steaming pile of disaster.


It was a late night of wrenching Saturday, so we were a little slow out of the gate Sunday morning. After sleeping in a bit, Matt was busy. By the time I arrived the front spoiler had been re-trimmed, and installed under the four-eyed bumper cover. It was installed in a manner to allow clean separation from the bumper should it run into anything (that would never happen,) and we have one or two more Ranger spoiler spares.

A couple of little items awaited our attention before we could test fire.

• Reroute clutch cable
• Replace stock clutch quadrant
• Wire up O2 sensors and protect wiring from heat
• Replace engine grounds

Bling bitches!

A friendly reminder will face our drivers.

We also took the opportunity to revisit every nut and bolt under the car while it was up in the air (one last time) and then wheeled the car out into open space to connect a 'few remaining things' on the wiring harness. What a joke that turned out to be.

WTF?

This isn't meant to sound critical, everyone involved in the project so far has donated a lot of valuable free time to help out. As we divide up the tasks amongst ourselves, rarely do you hear anyone say "I can't do that." But that is where optimism can work against you. However it happened - either we didn't allow enough time for the work, or we weren't all 100% clear on what was expected - some mistakes were made altering the wiring harness. Significant mistakes.

It sucks to have to go back and redo work, but that's what we were facing. The sun was going down, and a storm was coming in - riding sharp winds of this week's cold front. After several hours of trying to find missing connections and identifying mysterious leads - Matt made the call and dove into his parts trailer. He emerged with another wiring harness. It was intact, just as ours had been six weeks ago. Over the next hour we managed to remove the old harness - and install the new one. We got the car back in the tight garage as the rain began.

Lacking awesome hotness.

OEM awesome hotness.

The only casualty of the swap was the oil pressure gauge feed line. After all of the connections were made to the new harness, a flip of the key initiated all of the clicks and whirs that were missing from previous trials. After 19 hours of wrenching this weekend, we had finally progressed to the all important test-fire - and only a month behind schedule.

The car eventually started after some coaxing - but we still have tuning issues. Since time is running out, we'll need to work some evenings during the week. Yay, just in time for record low evening temperatures. We had hoped to bring the car to the monthly club meeting - but that's not going to happen. We'll be wrenching that night instead. If we can get our hands dirty a couple of times this week, and choke back any lingering optimism, we should have the car ready to move this Saturday.