This past weekend at 100AW I got to spend a little time with Ken Block. Ken won the 100 Acre Wood rally in his Subaru. Here is a cool video of him doing some fun drifting. I love the way he lives his dreams!
Trouble Shooting Will’s Jeep Cherokee
Jeep Engine Repair
Will’s 1991 Jeep Cherokee 4.0 has been running poorly lately. It started dieing at traffic lights. We cleaned the idle air control valve several times. Each time we cleaned it, his Jeep would run fine for a while and them stall again. Naturally it would stall at an inopportune time.
Eventually his Jeep got to where it would run rough all the time. I began pulling plug wires to isolate the bad cylinder. The number one cylinder was dead. It seemed that the injector simply was not firing.
There was good spark, just not firing in the cylinder. Removing the plug wire did not change the engine speed at all.
The plugs were nice and tan but very worn. We replaced them along with the wires to see if it would help. The engine ran smoother but there was still the dead cylinder.
We posted the questions about the Code 27 that the engine computer was showing on a couple of bulletin boards. Both the XJ list and Hesco forums suggested that we test the injector before looking at the ECU.
Code 27 indicates trouble with the injector firing circuit.
The injector tested fine at bout 14 ohms.
As I was showing Will what was involved in swapping out the ECU, we noticed the connector looked strange so I wiggled it around a bit. When Will restarted the Jeep it ran fine.
Later we pulled the connector and sprayed some cleaner on the contacts. So far his Jeep continues to run great with no more stumble.
Hopefully all his troubles were related to this simple bad connection at the ECU.
Rally Racing in the 100 Acre Wood
Rally Racing in the 100 Acre Wood
This weekend I traveled to Salem, Mo to be steward for Rally America and the rally in the 100 Acre Wood. This car rally is a stop on the national tour of the rally America Championship as well as the Regional Rally Championship. There are two regional road rally races – Trespassers Wil on Friday and 100AW on Saturday. The national rally is both days combined.
Coming into the Holiday Inn Express looked like walking into the land of Pooh. The rally committee had decorated the lobby with lots of stuffed animals including Piglet, Pooh and Eeoyre. The hotel workers all sported 100Acre Wood Rally T shirts. It was great to see such community support for the event.
Registration and Technical inspection was held at the Dent County fire house. I was enjoying the 70 degree weather. I met up with several old friends and fielded the question about when Cherokee Trails will run again.
Just as we posting the seeded start order, the fire department advised us that we were under a tornado watch and hail was expected. They wanted to get their fire equipment back inside before the hail hit. We gathered up our stuff quickly and headed back to the hotel. It was raining buckets soon but I never saw any hail or tornados. It did however get very cold very fast.
The start of the rally on Friday was in Potosi, Mo at the Lions club park. Subaru and Mitsubishi had big displays of their racing equipment. NOS and red Bull were passing out free samples.
41 cars started the rally. By the end of the day, most were still running. Front runner and crown favorite Travis Pastrana was not one of them however. He crashed his car on the last stage of the day. Many of the fans at the final MTC were very disappointed not to get to see him come in.
Saturday, during the Parc Expose on the downtown streets of Salem, snow began to fall. By the time we headed out to the stages, the main highways were covered in snow. While the rally cars had little trouble with he snow and winter driving conditions, the workers and officials had a bit more trouble.
The talk of the day was which rally tires to use. Some teams chose snow tires while others gambled with running gravel tires. The early stages had little snow after the course opening vehicles had gone through so gravel rally tires were mostly the right choice.
I am sure Richard Miller can give some winter driving tips for Ford Mustangs after running his 5.0 Mustang on BFG all terrain tires. While these make good gravel tires, they are not so good on ice and snow. I have these same tires on my four wheel drive Jeep so I know he had fun.
Surprisingly the northern stages had less snow than the southern ones. Since it kept snowing mostly of the day as the rally moved south, there was more and more snow on each stage. Those afraid of winter driving need not apply for a race like this one.
The transit to the final two stages was so bad that the course opening cars had trouble making it there. One of the medical staff ran off the road and had to be helped along by one of the sweep vehicles.
Most of the racers had little trouble with the snow covered stage however the leader in SP slowed a minute to drop him to second place. Winter driving skills were put to the test both on the transits and on the racing stages.
The last stage of the day ended up being cancelled due to ice on the low water crossing. Several of the workers were not able to transit the stage to their worker positions. They became stuck along the route and the decision was made to end the rally while they were recovered.
The fans in Salem, braved the cold and snow to come out to the courthouse square for the Mountain Dew Spray of the winners. Salem does not allow open containers of alcohol making a Champaign spray illegal. The victory party was continued at the Eagles Nest west of town.
Car #43 Block / Gelsomino again won the Rally in the 100 Acre Wood. This is the fourth time that Block has won this rally. Following Block were Car #20 Comrie-Picard / Durant finished 43.1 seconds back and Car #34 Foust / Beavis finished 58.6 seconds further back.
Emergency Electrical Repairs
Saturday afternoon I got a call from my friend and business partner Nicole. She had no water! The well that supplies her house also supplied water to the house next door. Well the house next door no longer has power so she no longer has water.
Her landlord was busy and did not have an electrician on call for emergencies. So she called me knowing that I have an electrician’s license.
I studied the system for a bit and figured out that we could run a temporary extension cord to the well house and get water.
Today I went back and ran a new service from the landlords workshop to the well house. This involved digging a trench and adding a new breaker to his breaker box.
After a few hours work, we had a permanent solution to the lack of power situation. Nicole now has water again and a much more reliable power source for her well pump.
Finding the right Video codecs
h264, mp4s and AVIs oh my!
My son Will is doing a video for his media class. He borrowed our friend Jenny’s camera. This all seemed simple enough. Just download the files and edit them right? Not so fast there!
None of our computers had the right codecs to even play the files. And his editor program would not even recognise them as videos. It seems that they are stored in something called h264 or MP4 format.
I hit sourceforge for a converter program. I quickly found and downloaded a MP4 to AVI converter. The program error ed every time I clicked on a file. I dug through the advanced trouble shooting to find it only worked with h263 files whatever those are!
There was a procedure to convert h264 files but it was too complicated for us to follow and we were missing some of the software.
As we grew more frustrated and the deadline was fast approaching we tried a different approach. We used the camera software to upload the videos to You tube. Then I used a capture program to convert from You tube to AVI.
This worked pretty well but was very slow. Especially having to wait for Youtube to process the file. Eventually Will got all his files uploaded and converted. He then loaded them on his thumb drive and brought them home.
Then he discovered that his home computer, the newest and fastest one we have, would not play the AVI files! He still needed a codec. After some googling and a lot of reading on the Miscrosft site I found wmplugins.com. This site had the instructions for finding the right codec and had the codec in an easy to download and install package. Thank you WMPlugins!
The story does not end there however, because today eh got to class and his files still would not play on the school computers. And he does not have rights to install a new codec. Hopefully his teacher will help him sort it all out.