CaterPillar's AutoHome

The S is 15 years old. A bit oxidized and hazy. Therefore I am doing a headlight restoration anyway. (10/15/16) The best kit is, I would say, 3M restoration kit. However, that would require you to use a drill and apply it to certain RPM on the surface. I don't have a drill, so I go for the Turtle Wax Headlight Restoration Kit, which is pretty cheap, 7 bucks. Only 3~4 steps in the process and it's relatively quick. Just follow the instructions and the result would be awesome. Before - left Before - right Well do remember to put tapes on so that the spray and rubbing won't damage the paint, just like this: After cleaning and masking, before rubbing. And the results would be like this: After rubbing with the lubricant. Mostly done, right before last coat and seal And here is a short video showing the result! Result  Finally note that right after wiping with sealant, the vehicle is ready for driving. So no need to p...

The reason I went to the school was that one week before I was spinning in the middle of the road when it was slightly raining at noon. Seriously and literally, spinning in the middle of the road. That was an 180 U-turn and I went in with some speed around 20mph. The 80% of the turn was good, including the turn-in and apex. However, when it came to the finish, I was kinda afraid of spinning so I lifted off gas a bit. Maybe that was not a bit but some, I could feel that the rear end kicked out. At that time I was not that nervous and I tried counter-steering. Well it worked but it caused spinning to the opposite direction. I was fixing it too late as well as being lack of gas (no gas at that time at all, weight not transferred to back). The experience really scared the shit out of me. I made up my mind and attended the last school I could find on Auto4U this year, with MSNE. It turned out that the school was much more than helpful to me, and it was fun! 180 bucks for 20 runs, good...

Yesterday the button on the lock was off as well as some little part inside the latch. Because the top was locked at that time and it seemed that I could not open the top at that time. So, late at night I took some screwdrivers with me and started fixing it. (Otherwise I would kick off the weekend with the top!) I tried to find clues from the good latch lock and got an idea on how this thing worked. Then I used the screwdriver to push from the side where the button used to be and successfully opened the lock. The inside looks like this: Then I knew two things: 1. I lost two screws there, that was why this thing came off, as well as the washer. 2. How could these two parts fit in? Well, the mechanism of this part is actually pretty easy to understand, if you try to use hand to mimic how it works. You can also understand it from the size and shape of the little piece, the right one in my hand in the pic above. And.. I spent 5 mins and found one of the screw and its washe...

The car comes with K&N Air Filter, which is the only non-stock part. Since I didn't know how long it has been since the installation, I decided to clean and do a recharge for the intake. The process was quite simple. (09/18/16) The tool is the K&N Recharger Air Filter Cleaning Kit. Cleaning kit You can buy it in AutoZone, Advance Auto Parts, whatever. In the kit are one cleaning sprayer and one oil sprayer. Though there is instruction in the kit, I will briefly summarize below: 1. Apply cleaner Liberally spray K&N Air Filter Cleaner onto both sides of filter and allow to soak for 10~15 mins to loosen the dirt. Do not allow the cleaner to dry on air filter. 2. Rinse filter Rinse off air filter with cool low-pressure water from the CLEAN side out in order to flush the dirt out of the filter. Don't mess it up doing the opposite side. Continue to rinse the filter until all traces of cleaner are gone. It may be necessary to repeat steps 1 and 2 if the fil...

The first thing I did on my car was oil change and filter change. Since on last Wed I found that my car was severely lack of oil and the remaining oil was almost black, oil change and filter change came to the top of my list. I did it that weekend, 09/10/16. Since this was the first project, I made a shopping list of tools and did a research on the work. Here is what I did on that Sat. In the morning: Basically tools shopping. 1. Bought Honda OEM Oil Filter at the Honda dealership.  There are two kinds of Honda OEM Oil Filter in the market now and nothing but one is designed specifically for the S2000. You can definitely use the general filter for your S2000 but why not use the specific one if you can easily find one at the dealership! Note that the S2000 Oil Filter comes a bit larger than the general one, although both would fit on your engine block. It's blue and would cost you around 27 bucks. 2. Also bought Honda crush washer. Similar to the filter, buy this one No. 9...

Have bought the car for a while but haven't got the chance to have an inspection on all parts. Last Wednesday (09/07/2016) I went to Billman250 for an overall inspection of the vehicle. The S2000 suffers from: 1. When the car comes to a stop, clutch down or in neutral the car would be tending to stall. This actually happened three times when I was driving at around 7, 8 mph in the past month. Not quite often and no influence on daily driving but was kinda annoying. 2. Rough idling, especially cold start at around 2k rpm. 3. Clutch buzzing Billman's inspection on the vehicle: 1. No cracked retainers on my AP1, which was good news and was also expected because the car had only 54k on it. 2. Under the valve cover and above the spark plugs was nothing but dirty oil. 3. Valve adjustment was no good. 4. No clutch fluid in clutch cylinder at all! 5. IAC Valve Unit was somehow stuck. 6. Coolant was way under required level. 7. Lack of window washer fluid. 8. Oil was b...

Here comes the full list of drag racing videos that I took on Aug 21 afternoon. 10-second cars Supercar shootout: 9.08 seconds: Other cars: For all other videos, please go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxHg9q0KOKwe91cfSrTU7Jw. The 30th Annual Mopars at E-Town Show and Race also presented nice and awesome cars. A brief look around: Most of the cars are challengers.. and Chrysler 300, Super Bee, GTX, etc.