Extra work

[tinhuvielartanis]

The ION was due for a brake flush and a HEPA filter replacement. Instead of a $25 service fee I'm now looking at right around $150. I am so broke! At least I'll have a healthy car for a very long time, though. This car has to get me through school and a new job before I can trade again. When I do trade, I'd like to think that I'll be in a better financial position where I can get my that Beetle Bug I've always wanted. It'd be bright yellow and I'd apply sticky flowers all over it and install a super long antenna on which I would affix a fake raccoon tail. What a sweet ride that would be.

Comments

[brujah.livejournal.com]

I always wanted a grey one with a dorsal fin attached to the top.

dhuuuuhnn nunhh..
dhuuuuhnn nunhh..
dhuuuuhnn nunhh..

Yeah, that's supposed to be the Jaws theme, loses the poignancy in text, eh? :D

[jonathonbarton.livejournal.com]

How could you not love a NuBeetle painted in one of these colors? Perhaps on the fenders, with the main body in Macintosh white?


Oh, and before you send your car in for service again (or at least sometime during 2006!), go to the service department and purchase a Saturn ION Service Manual - it should run you around $100, and you'll make that money back by doing the things that you feel competent to do yourself.
F'rinstance, I'm *SURE* you could have changed that HEPA filter on your own. *Fred Flintstone* could do it, with the step by step instructions that the factory service manual includes. And it's inside the car. Probably done with nothing more exotic than a Phillips screwdriver. (Heck, you can replace the HEPA filter in Valerie's Suzuki Aerio with *no* tools.)
Brake Flush? Technically not so challenging, but certainly a more of a pain in the butt than some things, since it involves pulling the tires off, and I hate those kinds of jobs, as they generally involve sitting indian style on a cold garage floor for more than about 28 seconds.

But there is plenty of stuff you can manage on your own - and if it saves you more than about 70 minutes worth of chargeable labor over the lifetime that you own the car, you'll have made your money back. :)

[tinhuviel.livejournal.com]

That's a pretty good idea. I'll seriously ponder my potential as a mechanic. As for the colours, I do deeply dig the purple. It'd go nice with all the sticky flowers I want to apply.

[jonathonbarton.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this is the same car I found years ago (still at work, and the site is filtered...bah!), but I always found the "Evil Pikachu" to be a fun thing to do to a NuBeetle, too.

painted in the stock "Bright Beetle Yellow", with the VW 1.8T engine that you can find in the 1.8 liter Audi A4 and Jetta (among others) that VW advertised around 1998-1999 as having (you may recall the commercials) "Turbonium", then gone wild with mad power addons... If I recall correctly, the "Evil Pikachu" made something like 260-280 horsepower...but looked basically stock. =)

God I love "sleeper" cars. :)

[jonathonbarton.livejournal.com]

BAH, where's the edit button!
http://formen.ign.com/news/23047.html

[tinhuviel.livejournal.com]

SHWEET!

[jonathonbarton.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm finally home, done Christmas shopping, and can click the supplied link.

While I'm sure some would consider Stephanie Bartak a sweet ride, that's not what I intended.

Here's the original article from August, 2000. I think I shall post it to my own LJ, for posterity. (and because cool stuff like this eventually disappears from the internets, I'm afraid.)

Evil Pikachu Rides Forth on Swift Wings

Pure Wrongness Week continues with Dr. Fright's turbocharged, supercharged diesel Beetle.

August 4, 2000


I rev my engine
Rubber burns with such a smell
Must not jump the light
-More bad car haiku from the collection of Machine reader Michael.
You hang around car guys long enough, you pick up some strange tales, see things that mortal mechanics were not meant to see. Bryan Cardonick, for one, Known to some as The Evil Pikachu, Bryan, a.k.a. Dr. Fright, is the proud leasee of one bright yellow, Y2K vintage 1.9 TDI edition Beetle that has metamorphosed over its brief life span from a happy yellow people mover into That Which Should Not Be. Exposed to the untender mercies of Bryan, Japanese tuner Tommy Kaira, and a very severe belt-driven supercharger, the bored and stroked TDI beetle now squeals the wheels to the tune of 295 horsepower and 210 lb/ft of torque through a stock block bored from 1.9 to 2.6 liters.

Now in care you're not up on your automotive acronyms, TDI stands for Turbo Direct Injection. Diesels take some getting used to. They're sturdy mills, high on torque, low on horsepower, at least in the really real world. Diesel mills offer a very different profile than their petrol-slurping cousins.

They tend to be sturdier and more omnivorous than their petrol-slurping counterparts. They'll eat almost anything. A couple I knew in college drove cross country in a diesel Winnebago hauling along a massive contraption that turned fryer fat into something combustible. Optimal Stoichiometric balance for diesel mills is achieved with much more "O2" per unit of fuel than you'd ever need in a gas plant. This is due to diesel's slow-burning thermodynamic habits, which, incidentally, allow diesel builders a great deal latitude in the cylinder pressure department. For this reason alone do the terms "diesel" and "turbo diesel" become nearly synonymous: Of course they have turbos. We all have turbos. It's the 20th century and no one aspirates naturally.

Diesel plants are torquey, fuel-efficient, and popular amongst truck drivers, battleship sailors, and fiscally frugal commuters. The mills don't have much of a top end, true. At least they're not supposed to. The Evil Pikachu, which, rather breaks this mold, as well as numerous fundamental laws of physics, thermodynamics, and general relativity.

Radiation suit optional…but strongly recommended
Bryan got busy with his happy yellow Beetle soon after he signed the lease. The first part of the makeover was largely cosmetic. He stretched a set of cow print JC Whitney seat covers over the buckets, added a Sony CDX 650 head unit, a Sony Xplod amp, two Polk subs set in a bass box arrears, and rows of neon tubing that snake their way through the cockpit. It kept him amused. But then he got in touch via email with Japanese tuner Tommy Kaira, who offered to burn a chip and rig up a belt-driven supercharger for The Evil Pikachu.

The Beetle's Kaira-built supercharger—a modified truck unit—is a low profile, belt-driven unit that sits low and sucks wind from the slipstream beneath the Beetle's front bumper. Now consider that your typical positive displacement supercharger provides a linear increase in torque and horsepower across the power band. Bryan's blower is not typical. It doesn't even turn on until he guns it past 4,500 revs, although a switch mounted beneath the dash allows the operator to toggle the point at which the boost is loosed.

[jonathonbarton.livejournal.com]

Part II:

There's good reason for Bryan's schizophrenic power profile. The stock TDI beetle nets 40-50 mpg—with a fourteen-gallon tank. A full-time supercharger would drain the evil beast to droplets. Most of the time, Dr. Fright relies on the stock turbo affixed to the diesel block to make sweet music. Turbo down low, supercharger up top—makes no sense, does it? Bryan's a counter-intuitive kind of fellow. It's something one learns to appreciate.

Like all in-progress works, Bryan's Beetle has its rough edges. The stock suspension, for instance has to go. The Evil Pikachu has yet to see its needle dip past 120, because, reports the owner, that is the point at which the front end lifts and Pikachu does wheelies. Fat meets are in the works, as well as a GT-style front spoiler, some lowering, an exhaust, and yet another chip, courtesy of Virginia-based Autothority Performance Engineering, Inc. Seems that the Virginian's promised Dr. Fright a slice of silicon that'll out-perform Kaira's burn.

Suffice it to say that when the lease runs out, Bryan will pay off the balance and hold on to his not-so-mellow yellow Beetle. The Volks-folks probably won't know what to do with it. Me, I'd just tweak the suspension, add some laughing gas, and call it a day. Or maybe a daze.