Hughes Family: October 26th 2012 – October 28th 2012

This past week we had an outdoor pack meeting for Scouts. Mike had fulfilled all the requirements to get his Wolf and we were all going to attend.  Fran offered to provide the hot chocolate, but after mixing the one can we had bought she realized that it wasn’t going to be enough. We were already a bit late and there was no time to get more. Fran suggested we mix Ovaltine with hot water and condensed milk. It was actually really good.
Once we got on our way it was apparent we were in for a “treat”. Snow was falling.

And as it fell, the snow began to blow. And it blew harder and harder until they called off the award presentation portion of the meeting. Everyone stuck around and drank hot chocolate (we had made just enough). It was cold!

A few days later we all got ready to hit the Sabin’s Halloween party. Mike and Gabe were Ninjas, Claire was Cleopatra, Fran dressed as a leaf, Chloe was a lady bug (Fran and Chloe were a pair) and I dressed as a rapper…. or something. I don’t even know if people realized I dressed up.

The Sabin’s party was delightful, as always. Spooky decorations, crazy costumes, festive food, a Halloween pinata, and tons of crafts and games for the kids! Fran and Chloe won the “Most Creative” award this year and scored a sweet Halloween movie.  Many thank to the Sabins for their exceptional parties.

Here are a few quick pictures of some of the outrageous Halloween decor. You’ll get to see a lot more on Rachel’s blog once she puts up her party post.

And then it was time to carve pumpkins! The cool thing about these pumpkins is that they were all grown in Fran’s garden! And some of the kids even did their own carving this year, which was nice.

From left to right: Gabe, Cam, Claire, Chloe, Fran and Mike. These are the pumpkins in the light…

…and in the dark. How positively terrifying!

Next week is Halloween and the kids are already hard at work building a candy immunity. Will they survive? Stay tuned!

Corvette Project Update

We’re making slow but steady progress on the Corvette. Nothing is as simple as we expect, but I guess that’s part of the fun!

I mentioned that the CV Boots on the C5 axles rubbed against the new coilovers. After searching online we found a simple and effective solution- just scooch the CV boots back a bit. Presto.

The big delay getting things back together stemmed the turbos. With the APS kit there’s simply not room for larger turbos and that’s really what we needed. In the end we sent my Garrett GT3582Rs to Comp Turbo in California. They overhauled them and added lighter and larger 64mm billet inducers. In theory this will allow us to build more boost at lower RPMs. We shall see…

The Turbo installation went smoothly…

…and everything fit back together pretty well. Installing the AMS-1000 was a bit tricky. Vince and the crew got the boost controller elements hooked up and he felt confident that it was “probably right.”

Here’s everything under the car all put back together. Vince and the guys did a fantastic job and the reinstallation looks really clean.

The first time we tried to start the car it fired right up and seemed to run perfectly. The video below is the second time we tried to start it.

And then there was a little mishap with a transmission cooler line that wasn’t hooked up. Really we were just cleaning out the old fluid.

And then we were finally able to film it with no mishaps while it was running. It sounded really good!

I called Marc hoping he could swing by to give the car a quick tune but he was off at SEMA. And as it turned out there were a couple of small issues to take care of so I sent it up to Premier in West Jordan. And that’s where it is now… hopefully behaving.

Each time we make some progress I get excited. Hopefully I’ll get to drive it a few times before I need to park it for the winter.