The Duster

I finally had a chance to drag my friend and his digital camera over here, so I took a bunch of shots of my machine. It's still sloppy under the hood because I haven't gotten all the vaccum lines where they need to go and the throttle and kickdown cables were kind of an afterthought :), but it runs and drives and just a few days ago proved itself capable of the 200 (or so) mile trip between here and my friend's house with a couple of very-out-of-the-way stops en route. The trip back (~120 miles) was accomplished with speeds averaging probably about 70-75 mph.

The Duster, with clamped front springs to make up for the loss of the a/c system, and with properly inflated tires (finally), is surprisingly stable at speed. I drove my father's '88 Civic out to Ohio this winter and was apalled at how unstable it felt at the same speeds. Wind noise is significantly lower in my car as opposed to the Honda, and during my experimentation (long stretch of road, already doing 90, what the hell...), the Duster felt perfectly stable at about 100 mph whereas the Honda was just plain scary. The fact that my car can even make it up to 100 blows my mind. :)

Here are some pics until I have a chance to finish coding this page. Look closely at the last one...the red thing is my start button. Why do I have a start button? First, it's cool! And second...the key switch doesn't work. :)