[ESPCamaro]

I bought an 88 Suzuki Samurai in October.
Should be a fun off-road truck.

Probably all I will do at first is a bunch of armor stuff-gas tank, t-case, rock sliders, cage. Swap to 5.14 gears with mini spool in the rear.
Re-do the brakes, new cheap shocks (may even skip this) and get the engine working flawlessly (since getting stranded in the woods would be REALLY bad.

I figure if it's something we like I'll get more radical with it.

AFAIK Sgarnett and Judd are the only ones here that are remotely interested in something like this.

[slowTA]

My school is full of political crap when it comes to SAE. Originally it was the the mechanical engineering building (where it should be) but the faculty didn't want to have anything to do with us. Then there was a SMALL fuel spill on the formula car and they kicked us out. We had Aero for a few years and the baja for at least 6 or 8 years. We were lucky since the civil engineering department had some extra space and their machinist is a rock crawler and mud drag racer.

For 2 years we had 2 baja teams, I was on the second team both years and captain for the second. Everytime we had contact with the advisor he had something negative to tell us. Like 'you should have gone to see student council for $500 by now' or 'you don't have enough money to order anything'. But get this.. some department of the school gave both teams $2,000 each, but we couldn't touch it untill we raised our own 2 grand. We couldn't start building until February because of this. No wonder we couldn't compete because we had NO time for testing. Broken transmission the day we left, the another 3 times in Ohio.

All the time he was under pressure from the dean to get good results at the competition... FINALLY. But the advisor can't stand up for himself and figured it would be best to kill off the second team. He made EVERYTHING difficult for us. We had to use my dad's truck to tow a rental trailer out there. We had 1 room for 6 people.

The whole time we're being told how the civil bridge contest participants had their own rooms, got a school vehicle to tote the bridge around, yada yada yada.

All in all it's a great opportunity but depressing at the same time. The second team's captain for the first year wouldn't listen to anyone because he rode dirt bikes and was the most stuborn person you would ever want to meet. We also built the car in his dad's garage because there was tension between him and the other team... should have been our first clue things were going to suck. So when I was captain we decided to pull him off of the e-mail list and cut up the car.

Now the car I built last year is halfway dissassembled and someone kicked the side panel in. The old cars just don't last or go to a good home. It is a shame, but I'm not that interested in playing in the dirt to do anything with the Baja.