Miata Mailing List: April 1994, Message #188
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   From: Miq Millman 
Subject: 150mph, california coast, jack points
   Date: Mon, 11 Apr 1994 02:12:32 -0400

In revers order of the subject:

When I change the tires on my car, here's what I do:

1) loosen all the lugs a bit, make them hand tight only, this way I can loosen
   them by holding the tire with one hand.

2) jack the rear end up by placing a floor jack under the differential just
   infront of the four bolts that hold the driveline cage to the diff.  I
   lift the car enough so that both rear tires are off the ground.

3) then I jack each front tire up separately, using the front leg of the
   lower A arm of the suspension right where the bushing is.  I figure this
   place has to hold the weight of the car from the tire, it should hold the
   car on the jack as well.

I have a large 2 1/2 ton floor jack with a removeable cup on it.  I have to
take the cup off to fit the jack under the diff in the back.

Two summer's ago my wife and I drove north over the Golden Gate bridge,
turned left (towards the ocean) until we hit the beach, then continued north
along highway one until we reached Lincoln City, about Salem Oregonish for
distance northward.  We then headed to Portland, the Columbia gorge, Tacoma
Washington, and then back to our then home in the Bay Area.  In all told,
2900 miles, 9 days of top down driving.  

This portion of the coast is less traveled than the LA to SF stretch, but
just as pretty, and just as twisty.  I've also done the Santa Cruz to San
Diego via the coast highway.  It took a looooooooonnnnnnnngggggg time.  About
28 hours non stop, and frequently I got stuck behind a Winnebago towing a car.

150 mph and no brakes....When I was younger, and more fool hardy, I had an
RX-2 with a turbo'd 13B 6 port engine.  It put out about 370 hp, the car
weighed less than 1700 lbs.  I used to road race it on the track.  I also
used to drive it to events.  One time on the way to Riverside Raceway (in the
middle of the desert) my buddy and I decided to see just how fast we could go
on a long straight part of highway 14 (I think, memory is fuzzy due to red
outs I suspect).  We hit about 150 judging by counting the time between mile
markers.  It was 6 am on a sunday morning.  I saw some headlights up ahead
and decided that the possibility that it could be a cop were enough to
warrent slowing down by 70 or 80 miles an hour.  So I ever so gently tapped
the brake pedal, and eased to slowly towards the floor.  Unfortunantly, it
made it all the way there without encountering resistance.  I then tromped on
it maddly a couple of hundred times, all to similar results.  I had no
braking capability in the hydrolics.  However I was able to downshift, 13,500
rpm has a surprising amout of engine braking capability, and fortunantly the
engine had a 15,000 rpm redline, so there was little of the engine breaking
possibility.  I managed to slow the car down to about 70 mph in 2nd gear
before the cop passed us.  (yep my instincts were correct.)  Using further
engine braking by down shifting I was able to slow the car to about 20 mph at
the end of the next off ramp and coast to a gas station.  

It turned out that the brake proportioning valve was not doing the proper
job.  It thought it was supposed to proportion some of the brake fluid to
areas external to the car instead of just between the front and back.

I think I learned a lesson there, I sold the car the next month at a race.

-- 
Miq Millman   mmillman@ptdcs2.intel.com	  503 642 6139   (Aloha site)
AL4-55  Intel, 5200 NE Elam Young Parkway, Hillsboro, OR 97124-6497
See also miq@teleport.com