Almost Ready

Alright, So I've had some downtime, I couldn't make it to the race in June and the July race has been pushed back to August 4th. In the meantime I've created a campaign to help raise the money to finish my car and start racing in the Rally America series for 2013. I've drained my account getting my car to where it is now, but still need a little help to get everything finished. If you want to donate or know anyone who would like to help out I would appreciate any help that I could get. You can visit my campaign here: Let's Rally!

Until then here is a new video I made as a rally racing promo for myself. The video can also be seen at the campaign website.

Rally Baybay!

Had my first RallyX race today out at Pleasant Valley Raceway. It was freaking awesome! I took my navigator, Ariel Rose, even though she didn't need to do any navigating, so she could get used to riding in the car while flying around corners. On my second race around the track I was getting a little too cocky for a corner and took it too fast and ended up going off the track, but quickly recovered. The bead on my tire couldn't take the stress and popped, but after a good 1/2 hour I got the tire all fixed and running again to do a 3rd race around the track before I had to take Ariel home and go to work. Here's a few pics and a video for y'all to watch. Let me know what you think!

Roll Cajun

Got the roll cage all put in and ready to go. Looks pretty good if you ask me. I only had 2 days to do so I spent both days up until 6 in the morning trying to get everything finished in time. There are a few things I need to add to it, but it's fine right now for AutoX and RallyX events until I get into the Rally America series.

Make Yourself Comfortable

Well I got the racing seats in the car. I started out with retrieving some seat brackets from an Escort at the junkyard, and then bolted up some cross beams to get the seat to fit. This was no easy project, maybe if I had a mill it would've gone 2 or 3x as fast, but it took a few long nights to complete just using my hand drill.

And of course, right after I got the seats in the car and everything set up, I went to go reread over my rulebook and noticed my highlighted sentence "polyethylene seats are not allowed". Well crap. So these won't last very long, but they look good while they're there.

Double Duty

Wow, I certainly got quite a bit done over the weekend. Right after I had finished gutting out the entire rear of the car I got a call from a guy from Twin Falls wanting to know if I still had the bucket seats for sale. So I headed down and took about 10 minutes to get the seats out of the car and sold them for $10. He got a great deal, because the seats were actually in really nice shape, they just needed to be cleaned a little bit, and I would much rather have sold them for only $40 than just end up throwing them in the trash.

So after I got the seats out I decided to start on the front half of the interior, since I wasn't originally planning on tackling that project for a while, but since the seats were already gone, why not? While I was tearing out the carpet and had the center console apart I noticed how long the shift lever was and decided that needed to change. So I got my grinder (I want to hug whoever invented the grinder, it takes care of EVERYTHING! For example this evening I used it to cut some unnecessary speaker wire, and also used it to open a plastic package because I didn't have scissors or a knife on me).

Speaking of using a grinder to cut open plastic packages, I used it to open up the hood pin assembly package I bought earlier this evening after I got off work. Got the hood pins installed and removed the factory latch.

After I was finished with the hood pins I returned to the interior and got the emergency brake fixed, the lap belts out, got the headliner out, and also removed the track that the shoulder belts traveled on. I'm Still trying to decide exactly what I'm going to do with the sunroof assembly. I can't decide whether to just replace it with a metal roof and keep the functionality of it, or just remove the whole time entirely and weld the hole shut. Tough decision.

So in summary almost all of the interior is finished. Just have to make a final decision on that sunroof, and get some racing seats in the car. Tomorrow I'll be working on the engine again, trying to start getting that water pump removed. I can't wait, I'm just such a big fan of how tightly they packed that engine in there.

Paint Splatter

I'm pretty excited, I get my garage at my apartment complex tomorrow, so I can get Bryci in there and start getting her race ready. First I have to replace the water pump and actually get her running again, then I'll start tearing out what I don't need from the interior. So...if you need any interior parts for an Escort just let me know. Below is a basic design that I'm going for with the car, keep in mind that it is pretty basic.

Day 1

Alright well thanks for checking out my blog. This is me, Brad K. Pedersen. I am Paint Splatter GraphX, and I am a new and upcoming rally racer. This blog is just a look at my journey from the start of my rally career to wherever I end up. I'll be posting along as I go about my car and what I'm doing to it to get it ready to rally. My car will not be ready to race until half way into the season, but I think that a few practice races before next season couldn't hurt? I am getting a garage to park my rally car in tomorrow and I'll be able to start working on it there. I bought a 1991 Escort GT, which has the Mazda 1.8L in it, and I'll say the thing is pretty quick, and that was with about 100lbs of subs in the back of it. No joke. When I'm done getting everything out of the car it'll be even quicker! Thanks to my friend Ariel Rose, who will be my co-pilot and Navigator for my racing season. She's about as excited as I am to start rallying so I definitely know that no matter how we'll do when it actually comes down to the racing that we'll both have a lot of fun!







 Here she is as she sits right now. Her name is Bryci, and below is a basic paint design I have that will be applied.