CamryOnBronze

Home from Wekfest Chicago- had a great time and met some cool people! Full coverage tonight or tomorrow…

After being down for the count for a week, the car hit the road again last night. I had it on the ground and running on Tuesday night, but I still had a couple tiny things to take care of, so I didn’t drive it to work yesterday. The car had been taking a few tries to start and the key had to be in the perfect position for the starter to actually fire. It has been getting worse for about a month and I was getting concerned.

After doing some research yesterday, I determined that the ignition switch was likely the cause of the issue. I tossed a new one last night, and the car fires right up the second the key hits the “start” position. Much better! That puts me at ease heading into my trip tomorrow. Here is a crappy cell shot my friend Mark took of me buttoning the car up on Tuesday night:

What it would look like if I was working on my car in '98. lol.

Huge thanks to Nick, Mike, and Mark for hooking me up with a replacement transmission and lending a hand with the install. I drove the car to work today and it is crazy how much smoother the shifts are. My old trans must have been majorly messed up. It’s weird to shift into fifth without the dreaded grind or needing to double clutch, lol.

In a little over 24 hours I will be heading to Chicago for WekFest! Really looking forward to the trip. I’ll try to do a couple of posts during the event a writeup afterward. Looking forward to it!

Damon

My cousin came over last night and helped me with the transmission. I know it seems like it has been taking forever, but I have had about a total of an hour to work on the car since I lost 5th gear last Wednesday. Just too busy to work on it at the moment.

Yesterday after work I ran to Harbor Freight and bought a transmission jack, which was a nightmare since the staff there is always clueless. After I finally got out of there, I made it out to Mike’s place and picked up the replacement transmission. My cousin Nick met me at the house, and after some much needed Jimmy John’s we got to work at around 7 PM.

It took us quite a while to get the trans to drop, but we finally got it out. We tried spinning it around 90 and 180 degrees, but it still wouldn’t clear. I am guessing the Cusco mounts had something to do with that. Finally, we loosened the front subframe and the trans dropped right out. I transferred my NISMO pivot ball over and the replacement trans is ready to go in.

Out with the old, in with the "new."

Pretty much the same shot I posted Friday, but now with progress, lol. A friend is coming over tonight to help me toss the new one in- my fingers are crossed that we will be pretty much done by the end of the night.

… is not as fun without TYPE X.

One week until it has to be ready for Chicago. Removed the downpipe and a couple more bellhousing bolts last night. Work resumes Sunday night…

So I don’t think many people that read this really know why my username is CamryOnBronze. Seems pretty random I’m sure, lol…

My first car when I was in high school was a 1994 Toyota Camry sedan. Most kids would probably be pretty bummed about that, but I was just stoked to have a car- let alone one that my mom bought for me. It had about 110k miles on it when I got it and was in pretty awesome shape for an eight year old car.

This thing was my baby- I absolutely loved it. I couldn’t even change my own oil when I got the car, so I gradually learned what I could from message boards and my cousin, who was an engineering student. I didn’t do a lot to the car in high school- thankfully I didn’t have the cash to. I used to make lame drawings of it with nasty body kits, aluminum spoilers, and graphics down the side- LOL. All I did in HS was clear tail lights and turn signals, shaved the front grill emblem, paint the rear trunk panel, and toss in a CD player and Vin Diesel- esque eBay glow gauges. Around this time the car was known as “CamryOnSteelies” since I couldn’t afford wheels and rocked it without hub caps for some odd reason.

Anyway, I progressed with the car for a few years and learned a lot as I went. I was still pretty scared to touch anything, though. I paid a shop to install lowering springs, struts, a rear sway bar, and headers with a custom catback. It sounded like total garbage, but I thought it was cool at the time, lol. I tossed in some unnecessary pillar gauges, added a front lip and 95-96 front bumper conversion, some super dope Enkei 17×7 wheels, and cf hood and trunk. The trunk was one of 14 ever made- I think I sold it for like $750 or something, haha.

pre-cf hood and trunk. I think this is my favorite stage/ picture of the car.

I can't believe this was lowered, lol.

Mad Tyte Autometer...

I took the car down to Speed Source in Illinois to have the transmission swapped to a manual in March of 2006. They basically told me that the subframe was rotting and it was not worth swapping a car with 155k miles on it that would probably not last much longer. I remember being insanely bummed out about that, but I decided to just sell it and buy a new car. I ended up getting my Solara and parting out most of the modifications on the Camry, but decided to keep it as my winter beater.

The car is still my winter ride to this day, despite the fact that it has 242k miles on it and has fallen into a state of disrepair after years of neglect. The rear trailing arm bushings are blown out, so it shakes pretty bad at freeway speeds. The knob broke for the climate control, so it is stuck on whatever the outside air is- which is very cold in the winter. It also doesn’t like to downshift once it warms up. I’m guessing she is in the last leg of her tour of duty, but I really can’t complain… it’s been an awesome car for the almost 10 years I have owned it.

The car today...

And that, my friends, is the origin of CamryOnBronze. lol. Man this is embarrassing…

I think I jinxed it…

I lost fifth gear on the way home yesterday. An old guy in front of me slowed down to 20 MPH exiting 96 onto M59, so when I cleared him I wound out second gear and shifted into what I thought was third gear. The engine just free reved- turns out I had shifted into and busted fifth gear, lol. My transmission has been grinding into 5th ever since I bought the car, but has recently gotten a bit worse. I guess that hard shift was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I started to tear into it last night and made some pretty solid progress considering I had an hour to work with. I removed the shifter, drive shaft, slave cylinder, trans mount (partially,) down pipe bracket, and almost all of the bellhousing bolts. I’ve got to break the top four of them loose and then I should be able to pull it out of there.

Broken transmission? Huge lens flare should fix that right up...

Thankfully, my friend and Formula D superstar Mike has a spare SR trans that he is going to hook me up with on the cheap. Maybe Zilvia will give me some more street cred now that I have a drift driver’s trans in the car, lol. I’ll be out of town all weekend, so I’m hoping to have this all taken care of by Wednesday of next week at the latest so that I can test drive it for a couple days before the drive to Wekfest a week from tomorrow.

For now, I’m rolling in the beast. In honor of this occasion, I may have to do a post giving the rundown of the origins of CamryOnBronze…

I’ll keep you guys posted on progress…

Tuesday’s schedule was fairly similar to Monday- we slept in, then drove down the mountain. This time we headed out to the Pigeon river for some whitewater rafting. Alicia had been rafting on one of the craziest rivers in Virginia before, so the boat tour dudes were all really impressed. I, on the other hand, had never done it before- so I was just hoping to survive the ordeal. It was about a one hour drive from the cabin to the rafting place along some of the twistiest roads I had ever been on- it was a blast. I had as much fun as you can have in that car, which isn’t a lot before the smell of rubber from the front tires rubbing the tubs makes you lightheaded.

Here is the good ol Type X at the rafting place. Everyone stared at us as the exhaust dragged through the lot, so I elected to make my own parking spot to avoid further damage, lol.

NBD really...

Rafting ended up being a lot of fun and I didn’t fall out. We didn’t feel like paying $30 for a jpeg of us on the river, so I don’t have any pictures of me looking stupid in a raft. Sorry about that, lol. After rafting, we had some dinner at TGIFriday’s in Gatlinburg and spent a little time downtown there. We stopped in to a CVS to get a new cooler for the trip home, and I spotted this super awesome knockoff Monster Energy shirt- nice!

We also walked past some sort of movie car museum, so naturally Alicia had to grab a snap of me looking super cool in front of my good buddy Paul’s ride:

We hit up a Redbox for the evening and watched The Lincoln Lawyer, which was decent enough. Alicia loves watching movies, so we usually end up just about everything that comes out at some point, lol. We packed up our stuff a bit and got to bed fairly early, since we had to wake up and make the 9 hour drive home the next morning.

Tuesday night was one of the most intense thunderstorms I have ever experienced. Non-stop lightning and loud thunder through the entire night. The thunder was even more intense up in the mountains echoing through the woods. You know how there is always that one random gigantic clap of thunder during a thunderstorm that catches you off gourd and makes you jump? Yeah, basically EVERY clap of thunder was like that in this storm. I talked to one of the locals the next morning and he said it was one of the worst storms they have had in a long time.

This bug was not messing around...

Thankfully, the car was safe (no hail overnight) and the road down the mountain wasn’t too flooded on the way home. We hit the road at about 8 AM and were on our way. Unfortunately, the day of the drive home was the hottest day of the whole trip. We stopped for some breakfast/early lunch at Chic-Fil-A on the way home at around 11 AM and the air conditioning already felt amazing inside the building. Alicia and I are pretty big fans of Chick-Fil-A since we only have one location in Michigan and it is in a college cafeteria, lol.

TYPE X acquiring chicken.

Gives you wings (And makes you look stupid)

I don’t remember much else on the drive home, aside from being insanely uncomfortably hot and getting stuck in traffic outside of Cincinnati.

Eventually we made it to the dog kennel in Ann Arbor and picked up Tomei from where he had been crashing while we were gone. Somehow, we managed to squeeze him in the car for the last half hour of the drive home. On top of being exhausted from playing with the other dogs and being away from home, I’m pretty sure he was dying with his thick fur coat, so he slept almost the whole way home.

BRO. Can I get some air?

I had my neighbor turn the A/C on in the house for us earlier in the day so that we could cool off when we got home. This is what I arrived to:

So yeah, that concludes the longest and craziest road trip I have ever taken in my car. Was it worth it? ABSOLUTELY! The entire trip was a blast, aside from the lack of A/C. That is my #1 priority for the car this winter. If I am making the trip down to Import Alliance again in 2012, I’ve gotta have it. It’s an event unlike nothing else out there, though- if you have ever thought about it and have not gone, I highly recommend it! Thanks for reading- I’ll have more updates on the car and some posts about WekFest Chicago soon!

Damon

Alright, I’ve been slacking. Back to the rest of the Tennessee trip…

On Monday, I awoke to find that my car had not been flipped over or eaten by a black bear, so I was pretty stoked about that. We slept in for a good while, which was really nice after waking up early so many days in a row. We cruised out to the State Park in Gatlinburg and took a super narrow, twisty road through the mountains within the park. It was pretty wild driving through the mountains on a driveway-esque road, but thankfully it was nice and smooth.

I tossed a 2x4 in front of the wheel, juuuust in case a bear decided to push the car down a mountain while I was sleeping.

A couple snaps of the inside of the cabin- pretty cool:

View from the upstairs loft area.

Pacman in the dining room! So cool haha.

Stairs to the loft.

The loft, with the pool table we never used, lol.

The living room...

Alicia had done some research about waterfalls in the area, so we found the trail head for the specific one we chose and parked the car to head into the woods. It was weird seeing my car out in the middle of a forest- for sure a cool experience. It was about a 1.5 mile hike down the trail to get to the waterfall, which was plenty long for us in the Tennessee heat. We could have gone to a larger waterfall with a paved route and shorter walk, but we decided to at least rough it a little bit.

Checking out the falls- pretty cool:

Waterfallage

Tourist pose!

Back at the trail head.

Rare and elusive TYPE X in the wilderness.

After getting back to the car, we drove back up the mountain to the cabin and got ready to go to dinner. It’s a little tricky to find a nice restaurant in the Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg area. We weren’t exactly looking to go to Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede or anything for our anniversary dinner, even though Alicia loved it as a kid, lol. Everything is just super tourist-oriented there, so that made it tough. We ended up at this place called Bullfish Grill, which ended up being pretty nice and very chill. I was excited to be somewhere that wasn’t super busy like the rest of those towns- non stop cars and people everywhere.

Bull eating a fish...

The next post will be the final installment of the trip!

Damon

I got this care package from Jay over at JDM Ego in the mail yesterday- too cool! Jay mentioned my build in his post on Sunday as well, which was quite the compliment for me!

Head over to his store to score some for yourself. Thanks for the love, Jay!

Alright, so this part of the trip is less about cars and more about my wife and I’s anniversary portion of the trip in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. However, we were driving the Nissan during this leg of the trip as well, so I think it should still be a LITTLE interesting at least. Maybe I can save it by including TYPE X pictures from along the way, lol.

So I left Nashville SuperSpeedway at about 1:30 in the afternoon on Sunday and headed back to the hotel in Murfreesboro to pick up Alicia. It was a bit out of the way, but I wanted her to be able to chill at the pool and relax for the day, instead of toughing it out at another car event at the butt crack of dawn. I cruised back to town with this turbo IS300- pretty nice sounding car!

After I picked up Alicia, we hit the road to Pigeon Forge. It was pretty hot once again, but the excitement of heading to the cabin and starting a new leg of the trip cooled things down a bit. We passed a few cars heading home from IA along the drive, so that kept things interesting as well. It was about 3.5 hours to drive from Murfreesboro to Pigeon Forge on the East side of the state- close to the border of North Carolina. The freeway cruised through some pretty awesome mountains along the way- very cool driving scenery for sure.

I should probably get a hair cut soon… it was so hot with that mop on my head, haha.Stopped to get gas and stretch for a bit in the mountains:

I think this was passing through Knoxville if I remember correctly…

We arrived at the office for Timber Tops cabin rentals in Pigeon Forge at around 7 PM. The city of Pigeon Forge is pretty crazy- for sure one of the most tourist-oriented places I have ever seen. The main road through town was flooded with crazy traffic, jenky stores and go-cart tracks. I was happy to be at the cabin and out of the crazy traffic.

Here is the car sitting outside the office, before heading up the mountain to our cabin:

Once we got our directions and whatnot, we headed up to the cabin. The drive up was pretty nuts- about 3 mines up a mountain on a road that was fairly smooth, but not very wide. Lots of super steep hills and sharp turns. About half way up, we had to go off onto an even sketchier side road to get to the cabin. It took a couple of trips up and down the mountain to learn where all of the really bad spots were and avoid scraping the exhaust. It happened just about every trip up and down, but thankfully it was never too bad and nothing broke.

Here is the view from the back patio when we arrived- pretty cool stuff. Sunset was awesome.

After unloading the car and seeing the sunset, Alicia started unpacking inside and I went outside to take a couple snaps of the car sitting outside of the cabin. When I walked down the road to turn around and take a shot, I spotted one of the craziest things I have ever seen a couple cabins down…

It’s really hard to see since I had the kit lens on and was not trying to get killed on my anniversary, but yeah- that’s a huge blackbear chillin’ down the road. NBD…

I snapped a couple frantic and terrible shots, then ran inside to get Alicia. She got to see him too and wanted to walk down the road a little to get closer. This shot is from when we walked a bit toward him. He turned and looked at us, then peaced it into the woods. Pretty crazy experience for sure- can’t say I have ever seen an animal that big and crazy in the wild.

After the bear left, I got my quick snaps of the car and proceeded to go inside so that I did not become bear chow.

This was actually one of the few times the car was actually in the “driveway” on this trip. I managed to bash the frame rails pretty good backing out of this spot on our way down the mountain  that night. I elected to park it in the road for the rest of the trip and turn around at a cabin down the road a bit with a better driveway.

That was about it for Sunday. We were both starving and exhausted when we got the cabin all set up, so we just went into Pigeon Forge and got some Subway for dinner. What a classy anniversary! haha. We made up for the lousy anniversary dinner with a better one later in the trip, though.