Cars X Girl

Summer is fun for many reasons, but one additional treat is that each of my two cars have joined me in a summer month.

In July of 2007, the Miata came in and eventually changed my entire life.

Almost two years later, June 2009, the 240SX became my first huge car project.

I’ve had a ball ever since the Miata came into my life, but the 240SX has simply been on a whole other level.

One Year!

Earlier this month marked one whole year since the 240SX became part of our family. There’s been a lot of headaches and pain, but she’s also been an absolute joy that I wouldn’t want to trade for the world.

She’s been a good demonstration in how plans end up changing and you never know how things will go — I never imagined that less than a year in we would attempt the SR20DET swap that I wanted to do. Sure, it was going to happen… Someday. I never expected someday to be so soon!

Quite the change from only a year ago...!

She’s gotten new wheels, new tail lights, a whole lot of new suspension parts and a totally different engine in a year.

Place to get work done…

Despite all this work, she’s still got some haunting issues. My gauges aren’t working, save for the tachometer. There seems to be an electrical leech somewhere in the system, and we aren’t sure that the radiator fans are kicking on.

These issues have been keeping her from being a 100% up and running car, and she’s been limping around with them for months now. Down in Arkansas, there was pretty much no place we could take her with any sort of guarantee that anything would get accomplished.

So I knew we’d be waiting until we got to Washington, and I was hoping we wouldn’t have to take her all the way to Seattle, though I was prepared to if necessary. Lucky for us, we won’t have to go all that way…

We just need to get her to KaizenSpeed‘s shop.

Great Visit

We got the recommendation for them from some locals out at Spokane County Raceway, which was what I was looking for. Not only that, but they’ve worked on SR20DET’s before. Yay!

So I made sure to email them, and one Saturday we took a drive down to visit the shop. I wouldn’t trust any shop that wouldn’t let me do such a thing, honestly — I need to know the people there, see the shop and get a feel for the place before I feel comfortable dropping off my baby for some work.

Well, needless to say the visit went very well, and it’s looking very good that she will finally be 100% by the end of the summer.

Edit 6/25: We met some new people who know Nissans very well and volunteered to fix her instead, so she’s over at their place being worked on now. No crazy long trips being towed, yay!

Besides…

I instantly love any place that lets me poke around with my camera for a bit! Hehe. Check out what I got to see on our visit:

I'm pretty sure all these supercharged S2000's are going to lead us to end up supercharging ours...

A very classy, race-prepped Evo...

Oh, and then this little treat -- An R33 Skyline. (GTS) Skylines make me happy now that I know their significance. (I didn't when I was in England and saw a few.)

Meg

In 2007, Meg began learning about cars. Two years later, she had a very modified '97 Miata and a '90 240SX project car, as well as the Rookie of the Year autocross title. Life now completely revolves around cars and she wouldn't have it any other way. CarsxGirl is her way to encourage others to get into racing (it's not horribly expensive!), to document & share her car builds, an outlet to share & improve her automotive photography skills and to show that real car girls do exist!

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