My new nickname is possibly LastMinuteMike, since according to MattW i always wait til the last possible second to work on my truck to get it ready for any event. I think maybe I just prefer the wrenching cram sessions to get that feeling of getting lots done at once.
I'd gotten my truck running a few weeks prior, worked on the tune a little (thanks to help from MattW and SY-1193!), and even drove it a couple miles to work on some load/driving tune. Then life got in the way and priorities shifted and i kept saying "i'll work on it tomorrow" as per usual. It sat and sat...Carlisle went from 2 months to 2 weeks to 4 days away. It was now time to officially work on it.
I thought i'd maybe fouled a plug or two since i'd converted from a 5.7l to a 5.3l motor and am slowly just adapting the tune, and it's pig rich in many spots. Plus i had some weird idle issues compounded by a hard cold start. So it was time to get some fresh plugs and wires on the thing and dive into the tune for real. One plug wire was severed and dangling (hiding in some fiberglass sheathing) so i figured that was my erradic idle. I'd spent some time smoothing my fueling to get rid of the peaks and valleys and hopefully help smooth things out. Load the tune into the ecm, fire it up....and it's idling super high at 1200-1400rpms. weird. guess i'll go back to the previous tune and not make so many changes at once.
My inspection was overdue, as well as my registration. So i limped the truck, on wednesday, to the inspection place and got my stickers...now i can finally legally drive it on the roads to get the tune going. I live in the middle of nowhere kind of, but i still prefer doing things legally. Meet up w/ a buddy to help me w/ the tune and we get the cruise tune dialed in pretty well for the 40-70mph range that i'll be hitting most. Things are great, so i'm driving home and come up over the mountain to my house and two black bear cubs run out in the road to cross it, and i end up splitting them almost hitting both...but somehow made it through the bear traffic. That would have been great.
Get home and things seem great and i'm all ready for carlisle. Figure i have about 80miles on the motor now...lets drive it to work on thursday also just to see how things go. Start it up, start driving and it's completely hating life...horrible idle and afr's jumping all over. sweet! mess with the tune while i drive to work...and by the time i'm to work it's idling and driving well again. weird. Leave work...and it's back to square one w/ a bad idle and afr's bouncing all over. Basically...getting up to speed is sometimes difficult, but highway speeds it purrs along - yup, it's ready to take to Carlisle!
Mike from Erie met me at my house friday at about 8:30 and i was finishing packing, changed my oil to make sure no metal bits were in it, quick wash...and we're off!
Aside from the slow traffic near my house, as soon as we hit the highway it was great weather, great cruising, and smooth sailing
We took the scenic route to Carlisle, but i forgot that route involved 2 monster mountains to climb over...and my truck was not yet ready for any boost - so it was an interesting crawl up the mountain, breaking up a little and attempting to find the sweet spot in my tune to keep the truck happy. We bombed downhills even though Mike's truck is lacking converter lockup currently and getting roughly 14mpg. He still kept up w/ my going 80+mph downhill. :lol:
We get to Carlisle by 1:30pm and there's already about 22 trucks there! Sportmachines has the building all setup already and they greet us w/ name tags as soon as we enter the building. Was great to see everyone right away! So...let's get this Carlisle thing started!
For anyone unsure of what to expect from Carlisle or unsure if they should attend...here's the scoop. Carlisle All Truck Nationals is typically about a 1,000 car show field. You decide if you want to be judged or non-judged (judged is for the serious show cars and there aren't many syty entries into that field - plus you have to park amongst the other judged vehicles) I personally am far from a show vehicle so it was a no brainer to go non-judged. But a super clean and super straight syty could do well in our class. John Gerber won a 1st place last year, and we all know how nice his trucks are.
For Friday, Sportmachines got an auto-x event setup on the premises. The Corvette Club was gracious enough to set the course up and provide tech & timing and handle registration. Tom had asked me to help them out, they appreciated my offer, but had it all handled on their own. (they run auto-x there often) It's a small tight double-lap course that the times are in the mid 40 to mid 50 second range for those that ran. Unfortunately not a lot of people raced, but it was still fun for the drivers and fun to watch (seating we up high so you could see the entire course, safely, from shaded bleachers).
This was the end to day 1. We haphazardly setup a group dinner at Quaker Steak n Lube and a group of about 35 people got a room to ourselves. Wasn't the fastest dinner ever but was fun to all be together. Then off to the hotel parking lot for typical syty tailgating/camaraderie. It was a little low key as people were tired from travelling and some called it a night early.
I was still fighting a high idle so decided to try to figure out the issue and recruited some help from others standing around. We swapped IACs w/ MattW's 4door Typhoooon, but i still had the same issue. And my IAC work in his truck. My truck wasn't plunging the IAC at all, so that was the cause of my high idle. My only guess at this point is the wiring got pinched or melted and is shorting it out (the IAC also gets really hot). But not wanting to tear into wiring at midnight i decided to just manually set the IAC to a partial plunge and unplug it so that my idle would as least not be so high. Seemed to work.
Next morning go to drive to the fairgrounds and the truck won't stay idling, so i back the plunger out a little...and give it a higher idle but at least it stays alive. Drive to the car show, traffic is horrible and it's hot...and i'm watching my temps climb with my high idle. Get parked inside and i'm now spewing some coolant. Sweet!
So Saturday at Carlisle is the main event day. It's the highest population. There were at least 900 vehicles...probably hit 1000. Tons of vendors selling new products, tools, car-part-crafts, signs, stickers, license plate signs, much much more, and also many flea market style setups for about any car part you could need or not need. We hit 38 trucks i think the final tally was! Lots of traffic, people pointing and drooling over our trucks...asking questions.....Sportmachines selling tons of t-shirts and some other products. It was a busy car show day. Most SyTy owners spent at least half of the time under tents in chairs just talking and enjoying the nice weather, planning out future mods, discussing products and asking tuning questions, or whatever else came up. Whenver you get bored of SyTys you can stroll around to the s10s which are right next to us, stroll through the conversion vans, the big rigs, the fords, the frame scrapers, the monster trucks, the off road rigs that are chromed out and look like they've never been driven, old school rat rods, frankenstein builds, and so so much to take in. There is something for everyone at this show, whether you're strictly a syty lover and don't care about anything else, or a through and through gear head who enjoys someone elses passion for their vehicle, whether or not their taste is the same as yours, you can do nothing but respect the amount of time that goes into all the individual builds.
I personally had a lot of people interested in my truck and when i was near it had people asking questions and telling me they liked it. So that was cool since usually it's just us syty'ers. I might have told some people it was mostly stock whenever i had the hood closed just to save some time from answering more questions :lol: But hey it happens.
Saturday came to an end, and we found ourselves at the official planned dinner at Appalachian Brewing Company. They'd roped off a section of their parking lot for us so we could get some group photos, which took way too long since we are a bunch of ill-skilled parkers.
Great dinner having a room all to ourselves again....Tom raffled off one of his sweet aluminum xmas trees that he fabbed for the show, and even shed a tear or two as we had a brief honoring of Jack (Icarus-54) who unfortunately passed away recently but his wife Karen and son Zack (Sy10) were there for the show, and had a Sy and a Ty in the show!
After dinner some more parking lot shenanigans.
Sunday is primarily a packing up day. Lots of the saturday attendees didn't bother coming back on sunday (both syty, and for the entire attendance of the show) so the sunday is a nice low key day where we mostly just hung out together for a little and packed up everything. A group of people decided to hit up the local 1/8th mile dragstrip to make some passes, but it was pretty crowded and a ton of different classes were racing, making the syty's only get a few passes in before we all headed out.
I got the typhoon home and parking in my garage. About 475 miles on the motor now. Definitely needing to spin some more wrenches on it, but i'm very happy that i drove it down for the show, even though it wasn't exactly show-ready or super clean. But the more trucks the merrier, and hanging around with the syty family is always a good time.
A big kudos to the Sportmachines Team. Even though Carlisle is a car show that would occur even if we didn't show up, Tom goes well out of his way to make sure the SyTy section is extra special and one of the better setup pieces of the puzzle. Positive that as a group we were the biggest outting of any club or single type of vehicle, which is impressive since we're one of the more rare at the same time. So thanks to everyone for making the #s what they are.
Anyone on the fence about going...it's worth it. You could get away with only coming for Saturday if you didn't want the expense of an entire weekend trip, but you'll get more out of it if you come for multiple days. Shout out to Harmon for coming up from FL with his syclone, again. and to Tyson for driving from Lousville. And even some Canadians showed up, and some ford focus supposed syclone owners from North Carolina. Definitely had some travellers come to this, and i don't think any of them regretted it!
See you all there next year!
I'd gotten my truck running a few weeks prior, worked on the tune a little (thanks to help from MattW and SY-1193!), and even drove it a couple miles to work on some load/driving tune. Then life got in the way and priorities shifted and i kept saying "i'll work on it tomorrow" as per usual. It sat and sat...Carlisle went from 2 months to 2 weeks to 4 days away. It was now time to officially work on it.
I thought i'd maybe fouled a plug or two since i'd converted from a 5.7l to a 5.3l motor and am slowly just adapting the tune, and it's pig rich in many spots. Plus i had some weird idle issues compounded by a hard cold start. So it was time to get some fresh plugs and wires on the thing and dive into the tune for real. One plug wire was severed and dangling (hiding in some fiberglass sheathing) so i figured that was my erradic idle. I'd spent some time smoothing my fueling to get rid of the peaks and valleys and hopefully help smooth things out. Load the tune into the ecm, fire it up....and it's idling super high at 1200-1400rpms. weird. guess i'll go back to the previous tune and not make so many changes at once.
My inspection was overdue, as well as my registration. So i limped the truck, on wednesday, to the inspection place and got my stickers...now i can finally legally drive it on the roads to get the tune going. I live in the middle of nowhere kind of, but i still prefer doing things legally. Meet up w/ a buddy to help me w/ the tune and we get the cruise tune dialed in pretty well for the 40-70mph range that i'll be hitting most. Things are great, so i'm driving home and come up over the mountain to my house and two black bear cubs run out in the road to cross it, and i end up splitting them almost hitting both...but somehow made it through the bear traffic. That would have been great.
Get home and things seem great and i'm all ready for carlisle. Figure i have about 80miles on the motor now...lets drive it to work on thursday also just to see how things go. Start it up, start driving and it's completely hating life...horrible idle and afr's jumping all over. sweet! mess with the tune while i drive to work...and by the time i'm to work it's idling and driving well again. weird. Leave work...and it's back to square one w/ a bad idle and afr's bouncing all over. Basically...getting up to speed is sometimes difficult, but highway speeds it purrs along - yup, it's ready to take to Carlisle!
Mike from Erie met me at my house friday at about 8:30 and i was finishing packing, changed my oil to make sure no metal bits were in it, quick wash...and we're off!
Aside from the slow traffic near my house, as soon as we hit the highway it was great weather, great cruising, and smooth sailing
We took the scenic route to Carlisle, but i forgot that route involved 2 monster mountains to climb over...and my truck was not yet ready for any boost - so it was an interesting crawl up the mountain, breaking up a little and attempting to find the sweet spot in my tune to keep the truck happy. We bombed downhills even though Mike's truck is lacking converter lockup currently and getting roughly 14mpg. He still kept up w/ my going 80+mph downhill. :lol:
We get to Carlisle by 1:30pm and there's already about 22 trucks there! Sportmachines has the building all setup already and they greet us w/ name tags as soon as we enter the building. Was great to see everyone right away! So...let's get this Carlisle thing started!
For anyone unsure of what to expect from Carlisle or unsure if they should attend...here's the scoop. Carlisle All Truck Nationals is typically about a 1,000 car show field. You decide if you want to be judged or non-judged (judged is for the serious show cars and there aren't many syty entries into that field - plus you have to park amongst the other judged vehicles) I personally am far from a show vehicle so it was a no brainer to go non-judged. But a super clean and super straight syty could do well in our class. John Gerber won a 1st place last year, and we all know how nice his trucks are.
For Friday, Sportmachines got an auto-x event setup on the premises. The Corvette Club was gracious enough to set the course up and provide tech & timing and handle registration. Tom had asked me to help them out, they appreciated my offer, but had it all handled on their own. (they run auto-x there often) It's a small tight double-lap course that the times are in the mid 40 to mid 50 second range for those that ran. Unfortunately not a lot of people raced, but it was still fun for the drivers and fun to watch (seating we up high so you could see the entire course, safely, from shaded bleachers).
This was the end to day 1. We haphazardly setup a group dinner at Quaker Steak n Lube and a group of about 35 people got a room to ourselves. Wasn't the fastest dinner ever but was fun to all be together. Then off to the hotel parking lot for typical syty tailgating/camaraderie. It was a little low key as people were tired from travelling and some called it a night early.
I was still fighting a high idle so decided to try to figure out the issue and recruited some help from others standing around. We swapped IACs w/ MattW's 4door Typhoooon, but i still had the same issue. And my IAC work in his truck. My truck wasn't plunging the IAC at all, so that was the cause of my high idle. My only guess at this point is the wiring got pinched or melted and is shorting it out (the IAC also gets really hot). But not wanting to tear into wiring at midnight i decided to just manually set the IAC to a partial plunge and unplug it so that my idle would as least not be so high. Seemed to work.
Next morning go to drive to the fairgrounds and the truck won't stay idling, so i back the plunger out a little...and give it a higher idle but at least it stays alive. Drive to the car show, traffic is horrible and it's hot...and i'm watching my temps climb with my high idle. Get parked inside and i'm now spewing some coolant. Sweet!
So Saturday at Carlisle is the main event day. It's the highest population. There were at least 900 vehicles...probably hit 1000. Tons of vendors selling new products, tools, car-part-crafts, signs, stickers, license plate signs, much much more, and also many flea market style setups for about any car part you could need or not need. We hit 38 trucks i think the final tally was! Lots of traffic, people pointing and drooling over our trucks...asking questions.....Sportmachines selling tons of t-shirts and some other products. It was a busy car show day. Most SyTy owners spent at least half of the time under tents in chairs just talking and enjoying the nice weather, planning out future mods, discussing products and asking tuning questions, or whatever else came up. Whenver you get bored of SyTys you can stroll around to the s10s which are right next to us, stroll through the conversion vans, the big rigs, the fords, the frame scrapers, the monster trucks, the off road rigs that are chromed out and look like they've never been driven, old school rat rods, frankenstein builds, and so so much to take in. There is something for everyone at this show, whether you're strictly a syty lover and don't care about anything else, or a through and through gear head who enjoys someone elses passion for their vehicle, whether or not their taste is the same as yours, you can do nothing but respect the amount of time that goes into all the individual builds.
I personally had a lot of people interested in my truck and when i was near it had people asking questions and telling me they liked it. So that was cool since usually it's just us syty'ers. I might have told some people it was mostly stock whenever i had the hood closed just to save some time from answering more questions :lol: But hey it happens.
Saturday came to an end, and we found ourselves at the official planned dinner at Appalachian Brewing Company. They'd roped off a section of their parking lot for us so we could get some group photos, which took way too long since we are a bunch of ill-skilled parkers.
Great dinner having a room all to ourselves again....Tom raffled off one of his sweet aluminum xmas trees that he fabbed for the show, and even shed a tear or two as we had a brief honoring of Jack (Icarus-54) who unfortunately passed away recently but his wife Karen and son Zack (Sy10) were there for the show, and had a Sy and a Ty in the show!
After dinner some more parking lot shenanigans.
Sunday is primarily a packing up day. Lots of the saturday attendees didn't bother coming back on sunday (both syty, and for the entire attendance of the show) so the sunday is a nice low key day where we mostly just hung out together for a little and packed up everything. A group of people decided to hit up the local 1/8th mile dragstrip to make some passes, but it was pretty crowded and a ton of different classes were racing, making the syty's only get a few passes in before we all headed out.
I got the typhoon home and parking in my garage. About 475 miles on the motor now. Definitely needing to spin some more wrenches on it, but i'm very happy that i drove it down for the show, even though it wasn't exactly show-ready or super clean. But the more trucks the merrier, and hanging around with the syty family is always a good time.
A big kudos to the Sportmachines Team. Even though Carlisle is a car show that would occur even if we didn't show up, Tom goes well out of his way to make sure the SyTy section is extra special and one of the better setup pieces of the puzzle. Positive that as a group we were the biggest outting of any club or single type of vehicle, which is impressive since we're one of the more rare at the same time. So thanks to everyone for making the #s what they are.
Anyone on the fence about going...it's worth it. You could get away with only coming for Saturday if you didn't want the expense of an entire weekend trip, but you'll get more out of it if you come for multiple days. Shout out to Harmon for coming up from FL with his syclone, again. and to Tyson for driving from Lousville. And even some Canadians showed up, and some ford focus supposed syclone owners from North Carolina. Definitely had some travellers come to this, and i don't think any of them regretted it!
See you all there next year!
The wheels alone are worth bringing it.
