This year is going to be different. We are brewing ideas and hopefully will keep them going and keep our drive through out the year so that we don’t run into our problem of BABE ‘08.

This year we probably would have been the most technological team if we had made it. GPS tracking, constant blog updates, twitter updates, and lots of image uploading would be a lot more than almost any other team that I’ve seen in previous years. We plan on adding more features to our ‘09 BABE Car but who knows what will come up. Today we thought of getting constant sound recording going on along with a online song update if at all possible to tell what songs we are currently listening to. It’s dorky but cool. The sound bytes from having mics up would be key though for videos. We are on the search for a different vehicle to use but fear not, the Bus will get going again and it will stay driving on the Florida roads. It might be used as a alternate vehicle for the BABE Rally. Who knows. Maybe we can get a alternate team formed to use it.

Any ways. Just posting a small update for now. More to come when we know more. I’ll post up when I figure out what went wrong with the bus.

I fixed the oil leak!!!  YAAAAA!!!!  But in the process I killed the engine.

Rickety Van’s final day has come and unfortunately it came six days to early.  With the final day that we could possibly leave I have been frantically trying to get the Bus going and on it’s last leg of me pushing it, it has died.  I went to Orlando, came back, got the new parts in, tuned it a little bit then took it for a few test drives.  At the end of the last test drive it started to make some pretty bad knocking noises that were coming from the engine casing itself.  After hearing this I pretty much new it was dead.  There’s a link to a YouTube video at the end here for anybody to listen to the awesomeness of the Rickety Van on it’s last living leg.  I have also done a small walk through and did quick sweeps of the pure ghettoness of the Rickety Bus.  Please remember to look at the brake pedal, starting/ignition setup, rear tail lights, and anything else you might see in there.  :p  Today concludes my torture of working on the Bus for a while.  I think i’ve put in well over 60 hours over the past week working on the bus alone.  Maybe 80, I don’t really know.  I know today was about 9-10 hours of work on 2 hours of sleep.  Later I might try to make another video of all the videos I have of the build but I think people will might stop looking for updates since we have called it quits.

One good thing that did happen… I fixed the darn oil leak from yesterday and now it’s not leaking AT ALL.  1 point for me, negative a million for killing the engine.  Notes for next rally.

1. Start sooner planning/working on car
2. Start sooner planning/working on car
3. Start sooner planning/working on car

Trying to fit a engine rebuild into one week and hope that it’s going to run right isn’t the best thing to do.  Maybe next year we will be ready to go.  Hopefully I will start working on the vehicle sooner so that I have more time to look into properly repairing things.  I thought I was a pretty good mechanic, and yet I have so much more to learn.

Team Rickety Van is planning to go on a small journey for ourselves in North Carolina it looks like.  We will be going rafting, camping, and many various other things that we can do along the way.  We would love to tag along on the rally with all the other cars but we just don’t have a beater to drive and we’d feel real out of place doing the rally in a real car, not to mention the fact that our team wouldn’t qualify for the rally with a daily driver car.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mdjjd0Rnzc

My epic fight to keep the team interested and keep the bus going continues and I’m still going with a vengeance.  It’s a decent amount of work to keep the bus going and now, unfortunatly and I hate to say it, but my team is starting to lose it’s steam.  I’m trying to keep it as easy as possible on them so that they will still go so this morning I will be driving to Orlando and back, an hour away for me, to get the parts needed and then install them when I get back.

Tim talked to me from the winning team of the BABE Rally last year and he gave me some good advice and a good boost in moral.  Thomas, a friend of all of us and avid reader/watcher, gave me a good amount of energy too.  I too was about to give up this morning until I did some reading.

Once I get the parts it should take about an hour to get them in and hopefully that will solve our river flow of a oil issue.  The latest we can arrive there is Thursday morning at around 8:30am or so I think.  It’s the latest for check in.  That gives us about 46 hours as of now to get the bus going and up there.  24 hours of driving if the engine runs flawlessly, 3 hours from driving to Orlando if you factor in traffic, 3 hours to get the parts in and test it, and then another 3 hours to get all the guys picked up and going again.  That’s 33hours taken and another 13 left for whatever may happen.

As of now, I’m going on working on this bus for about seven days straight now and last night I only got two hours of sleep.  I hope I can get it running…. this is the last ditch effort.

Tonight at about 12am or so we set out to start the BABE Rally only to get a tow from one of my friends back to the house.  The small oil leak that I thought was no problem at all turned into a gushing leak at higher RPMs which the oil pressure was at it’s highest.  With oil gushing out and it falling onto the hot exhaust we had tons of smoke coming from the bus.

I don’t think the rally is happening any more.  My teammates Greg and Tim have pretty much given up all hope.  I am going to search for a solution for the BABE Rally tomorrow morning if I can find something.  If we aren’t on the road by 1pm or so then it’s done.  The latest we can leave is 1pm otherwise we won’t make check in.

For now, I want to say I’m sorry to my teammates for not rebuilding the engine properly and I want to say I’m sorry to all the people who have been cheering for us and have been watching.  I will post another update tomorrow morning on what is going on but for now it looks like Team Rickety Van is dead and stuck in Florida.  We might have plans to do a little vacation of our own since we all have the time off but the BABE Rally is looking pretty grim.

I hope Team Born From Jets has a great time as their first BABE Rally.  I would advise anybody who wants to follow a team to follow them.    Good luck out there.

Finished up what I thought was the correct wiring with Jason here and the running lights work but the brake lights and the turn signals don’t work.  The hazards work though so WTF.  This is so frustrating.

So…. we took it for a drive around the block and it’s idling around 1500-2000 and doesn’t seem to pull very well up top at all.  It hits a flat spot.  I suspect the timing is off like a mofo.  I got home to mess with it but to my dismay the fan/alternator belt had popped off.  I got it back on and started it back up but it just popped off again.  So here I sit, typing this message in much frustration because our expected leave time is about…. 3 hours ago.

The bus now runs.  My friend came over and was like… it’s this and this.  1 hour later it started right up… video will be posted soon.

Oh yeah… the rocker arms weren’t adjusted and the valves were still a little open.  Whups.

Today I got up and started working on the steering.  No luck there at all.  The way the bus tie rod ends are supposed to go in kind of kills in way of making it easy to put in.  If it comes down to a last resort and we HAVE to get that thing going then I’ll just weld those tie rod ends onto the spindles instead of using the nuts and we can drive that way.  It’s not the best but it’ll work.  The BABE Rally is the essence of ghetto rigging up things.

Secondly the motor…. it’s still not working.  There’s no fuel still!!  I spent about three hours fabricating up new linkage and moving the alternator a tad so that it’d all fit in there fine.  Now that it does the throttle works and all but it still isn’t spewing it’s fuel out.  I need to pick up some starter fluid and carb cleaner tomorrow at the store and see if I can get one of my carb friendly friends to come and get this thing going.

I will be messing with it more tonight.  As for the other guys, they are at the BABE Rally Send Off Party in Orlando.  I wish I could attend but I have no means of transportation to get to the party since my Jetta is down too.  After I eat dinner I’m going back out to try and tweak the carb a little bit.  I have a few things I can look at and fiddle with to get it to work.

After nervously getting the engine back into the bus and connecting up all of the various wires, hoses, and bolts we went to start it.  It just spun and spun but no putter at all.  After messing with the ignition to see if we were still getting spark we finally went inside to look at some diagrams.

Let’s start with basics of a engine.  There are four things you need to make a motor run.  Compression, spark, fuel, and air.  If you have compression you have air, and we have that.  We also have spark because we tested that.  Thank god nobody got electrocuted.  We looked at some wiring diagrams and figured out we had a wire messed up on the carb and fixed that but still no chug.  My friend and I, Caleb, were looking at the carb and saw one of the linkages for the throttle are hitting our brand new shiney 80amp alternator that we just upgraded to so that we can run all of our nerdy tech stuff.    That made me sad.  So…. I will be dealing with this tomorrow and hopefully that’ll make it run.  Then I can drive it down to the party once I get the steering all fixed up.  Today I think I worked on it for a total of ten or so hours.  So much for taking it easy today.

I think tomorrow I will finish the steering first and then fix the linkage because I know I’ll want to take it for a drive immediately once it’s running.

One thing I wanted to improve upon this year was our connectivity and updates so I’ve devised a plan.  Whether it works in practice or not shall be seen, but here it goes:

For mobile internet access, we will attempt to use our iPhone’s internet connection, as slow and unreliable as it is.  I’m using the method described on LifeHacker to generate a local network and do an ssh tunnel through the EDGE network.

I’d like to also post semi-realtime GPS data on our website so people can track where we are.  To do this, I will be leaving a GPS running and every so often download the tracking data and upload it to the website.  We can then display it using Google Maps using Gmap GPX Parser Software

We will also be using twitter to post updates at times.  If you use twitter, subscribe to @ricketyvan

I’m pretty optimistic this will work, but as anyone who’s used an iPhone’s internet connection before knows it’s hardly reliable so we shall see.

I’ve posted about our upcoming road trip and the technologies that we will be using over at Code Spatter. I’ve also posted a thread on the Orlando Tuners forum about the work that I’ve been doing on the steering.

Hopefully today, Caleb will get the engine back in and running; only a few steps left and it should be drivable.