If it's not been obvoius in past posts, I really love the car. It handles great. It has more than enough power throughout the entire rev range. It's a joy to drive. It gets plenty of attention. Etc...
...but until recently, it was also kinda annoying to drive. See, there was a vibration-- no, scratch that. There were about a dozen really aggravating buzzes, rattles, shakes, and resonant sheet-metal-shake-your-eyeballs-out noises that ruined otherwise perfectly great drives....
...so, we've spent the last month slowly-but-surely tracking down noises and squashing them.
The biggest culprit was simply all the sheet metal on the car that would buzz at certain speeds, usually when I lifted off the gas around 4000rpm or so. Solutions we applied included glueing fire blanket material to the backside of these various offending locations. We also added a heat shield to the underside of the bonnet over top of the turbo and exhaust, and included insulation there, too. Plus we crimped down the headlight buckets to form a tighter grip, added rubber gaskets to the doors, intercooler interface to the bonnet, installed a boot on the shifter, etc... Well, you get the idea.
This week, we'd gotten rid of ninety percent of the racket, but one loud buzz remained somewhere toward the back of the car. So, while I drove up and down the freeway frontage road, Joe risked life and limb, crawling all of the car, listening and applying pressure to potential noise sources. Again, long story short, we traced the last big buzzing source to the rear-most body panel that would intermittently touch the old bumperette mount behind it. A clamping bolt was quickly installed and, voilá, problem solved.
The car is still a joy to drive--and it's relatively quiet, too. Well, that's if you define quiet as the wide-open throttle symphony of the 2.4-liter turbo spooling up. Love it!
No comments:
Post a Comment