Hola Amigos! I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I been pretty busy lately… (ok, the Jim Anchower homage ends here).
As much as I like to stay in touch with the VX community, I just couldn’t keep current with this site (and the 928 forums, which are about 3x as busy as this one) and manage to do anything else productive, so I had to quit my daily site-monitoring activities late last summer. Now that things have calmed down a bit, I wanted to post an update of my goings-on since then.
My biggest news is that my VX turned 100 on March 14th! Whoo-hooo!!!!
http://www.vehicross.info/gallery/da...4080828a_1.jpg
The downside of that is my extended warranty ran out a couple thousand miles ago, so everything that goes wrong with it is exclusively on my nickel. I had a string of problems in the last month, too – a recurring CE light and code P0101 have been wracking the brain of my mechanic (which is what brought me back to the site – to do some research), and something was making the ToD operating and check lights dance rather amusingly for a couple of weeks, until the display went out altogether. Turns out a wire clip underneath the truck broke, and the ToD system wires were hanging on the catalytic converter until they melted and shorted. All better now, though! We still have no idea why it’s throwing the CE at me so often… Bad mass air pressure sensor? Bad MAF? (Even the replacement?) Hidden air/vacuum leak? We’ll figure it out...
If anyone recalls, I put a Flowmaster muffler in the VX last summer in order to extract the rest of the power potential of the supercharger. I initially complained about how loud it was, but it mellowed out significantly after a few weeks of driving. It’s still loud as heck, though. Also, concerned that the oil from the K&N air filter burnt out my MAF (which I replaced, but with no affect on the CE light situation), I put the stock air box back in, but cut a new opening in the front face of it as another air inlet. It improved high-rpm airflow into the engine immensely, but not quite as much as the K&N – it seems ever so slightly starved for air above 6k rpm compared to the K&N setup. But I can live with that, and at least I don’t have to worry about frying my MAF with K&N oil.
Confession: I’ve started looking for a used Mini Cooper S for my daily driver. I don’t want to drive the VX into the ground just yet, and I certainly don’t want to sell it in this gas-hog-averse market, either! But with 100k on the odo, the seemingly unsolvable check-engine issues I’ve been experiencing, and the ~14 mpg fuel economy I’ve been getting on premium (reformulated) gas since the S/C install, I need to put my commuting miles on something a little more livable and a lot more economical. While there are a lot of cars available that intrigue me, the Mini Cooper S is definitely the most fun you can have at 30 mpg. I’m looking for a 2004-2006 model with a sunroof and a stick shift.
Ok, time to do some CE light research…
