Auto Mobiles

German tuners seem to get their hands on every hot new vehicle and make it a bit better - though as with everything, this is not always true .

It was a double victory for the Audi R8 sports car. At the 2008 World Car of the Year awards, the mentioned vehicle was able to take home two awards - the World Performance Car award and the World Car Design of the Year award.

The vehicle that is chosen as the recipient of any award from the World Car of the Year set of awards is really a deserving vehicle. All vehicles nominated for an award go through various tests and checkups. Deciding on who takes home the award are 47 jurors who all are experts and come from 24 various countries scattered around the globe.

According to the jurors, the Audi R8 as the 2008 World Performance Car came with “solid credentials on paper thanks to its mid-mounted 420 horsepower V8 engine and aluminum construction. But where it excels is in the exceptional balance, refinement and control that grant the driver the confidence to push to the limit. It has astonishing precision for a car of its size category.”

Kudos Audi!

This year marks the 60th year of Group Lotus Plc’s being in the auto industry. And as part of their diamond anniversary, the company has decided to celebrate this event in style. A list of high profile happenings are already planned and all these events are focusing on the roots of the Lotus brand and just what the auto industry should look forward to. One of the most awaited events would be the Birthday Party for Lotus and the company is already expecting more than 15,000 guests to arrive and share the night with them.

Group Lotus Plc started back in 1948 when its founder, Colin Chapman, completed his very first racecar. From that first unit, Chapman continued designing stylish vehicles that are packed with power and maintain a good performance on the road. At present, Chapman is known as one of the best engineers in the auto industry with his “performance through lightweight” theory highly regarded as the foundation that today’s racing teams still apply when creating vehicles

"It is important to note ... that even if the national average monthly gasoline price peaks around $3.60 per gallon this summer, it is possible that prices at some point will cross the $4 per gallon threshold"

Retail gas prices could climb as high as $4 a gallon this summer, but prices at such lofty levels will make many Americans think twice about hitting the road this summer, the Energy Department said Tuesday. via NewsCenter 25

Just received word that the 2008 edition of the Great Race - the one that promises to take entrants from New York to Paris, just like the inaugural 1908 Great Race - has been postponed indefinitely due to permitting difficulties in China. “It’s just for a short time, though,” officials said.

Hemmings Motor News had planned to take our 1934 Dodge humpback panel truck on the first four days of the race, scheduled to begin May 30. The China leg wasn’t scheduled to begin until June 16.

I’m sure it has absolutely nothing to do with what went on in San Francisco the other day. Nothing at all.

We’ll keep you updated as we hear more.

The engine is back in the 900, at long last. I put some cardboard in to protect the radiator, and lowered it in nice and easy. The whole thing went without a hitch, and the engine settled nicely onto its three mounts.

The Saab 900 clutch is a little tricky to install. It goes in at the back of the engine, which is at the front end of the car, and has to fit between the flywheel and the bit of the gearbox that wraps up and around — that’s the piece with the yellow bar code tag that you can just see here. The clutch disc, pressure plate and donut-shaped slave cylinder go together like a sandwich, and have to slide in together between the flywheel and the gearbox. The trick is, they won’t fit if the pressure plate isn’t compressed.

You can’t use the slave cylinder to compress it while it’s out of the car. So here’s one way to do it. I put the pressure plate in my press, and used the old bearing to compress the fingers.

An old brake pad was small enough to allow room for the next maneuver.

Saab had a special tool for this, but I made one that’s just as good out of a couple of pieces of brake line. With the fingers depressed, you just fit these between the fingers and the clutch cover…

and voila. A pre-compressed clutch. Once it’s installed, you can have a friend hold down the clutch pedal while you take the spacers out. Now, if you’ve had to replace some part of the hydraulic clutch system, as I did, you have some bleeding work ahead of you. The usual method will never get all of the air out of the 900’s clutch, but there’s an easy way to do it. All you need is a bike inner tube, a hose clamp and a tire pump.

I take no credit for this — all the instructions came from SaabNet. I cut the inner tube about a foot past the valve stem, and tied a knot in the end. The other end I stretched over the master cylinder reservoir. A hose clamp made sure that it wouldn’t pop off.

Then all I had to do was to pressurize the system with the foot pump, loosen the bleeder on the slave cylinder, and let the fluid run until there were no air bubbles. Piece of cake, just as long as you make sure you don’t overpressurize the system and blow out some seal somewhere. About 5 psi is plenty. You also have to watch the fluid level in the reservoir — it serves both the clutch and the braking system. The pickup for the clutch is higher, so that a leaking clutch won’t disable the brakes.

In its natural environment, the Saab 2.0 turbo engine is nearly invisible under its mass of hoses and hose clamps, and Iit took me a couple of days to get everything plumbed back together again. I had photos from before I had taken it apart, but I wasn’t sure that it hadn’t been goofed up in its previous life — good thing I had the Bentley manual. I pre-oiled the turbo and cranked the engine with the coil disconnected to build up some oil pressue. Then I connected the coil, took one last look around to see if I had forgotten to connect some wire or hose, and turned the key. Amazingly, it started on the first try, and settled into a nice, smooth idle.

The hardest part of the HMX’s front suspension rebuild so far has been the removal of the bushings. I tried to get one local shop to press them out, but that didn’t go too well, as you can see below.

Note that even though the shop removed the bushing, the collar which the bushing slips through pulled away from the control arm itself, causing the metal there to stretch. That doesn’t seem safe to me.

I do have a couple spares (what AMCer doesn’t?), so I figured I’d do it myself. Fortunately, blog reader Mike Smithson, a fellow AMCer, not only told me how to use scrap tubing, washers and nuts and bolts to push out and reinstall the bushings, but he provided an excellent diagram with dimensions of all the scrap pieces he used.

So I put Lentinello to work pushing those bushings out at a recent editorial garage night. It’s fun telling your boss what to do.

As you can see by the lead photo, he popped the bushings out of the two lower control arms, leaving the uppers for me to do. After a little sandblasting and paint, we’ll then be ready to push the new bushings in.

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