19bonestock88's 2004 Saturn "Ion Green Line" build...

[19bonestock88]

I’m still mulling over what I can do to further improve on this car. Other than engine management and sealing up the gaps in the nose and adding more belly pans I may be finished?

[Drifter]

Hitch + removeable boat tail?

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by 19bonestock88

You feel absolutely everything in this car now

Reminds me a Brazilian Chevrolet S10 that my maternal grandfather used to own, with a turbodiesel engine. Whenever the engine was running,, at any RPM, even a deaf guy would be able to notice it because the shifter was shaking...

[19bonestock88]

I’ve been away/gone for a long time (life had gotten very depressing and complicated) and some things have changed with the car. Photos are definitely to come but I’d found a potentially unhealthy obsession with weight reduction for sake of dynamic performance and I’d done a couple small things for sake of aero, but nothing really groundbreaking. Summer and autumn of 2022 were spent deep in a depression and I drove the car *very very* hard, had a couple tanks below 20mpg (if that’s an indication of how hard) and ended up spinning a rod bearing in the engine I’d built by starving it of oil in corners. Changed just the short block in December 2022 and ran the car up to October 2023 and now it’s parked in storage.

My heart wants this to not be the end, but I genuinely don’t know if I’ll ever make progress on this again…

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Is the engine rebuildable, or could you find a suitable replacement? Maybe not exactly the same spec of the current engine, if you're comfortable working on a different powerplant.

[19bonestock88]

So, I basically just swapped all the goodies (ported and decked head, balance delete, aluminum flywheel, etc onto the cheapest short block I could buy from a salvage yard. It had 250K miles at the time of the swap and ran great, minus the thermostat sticking open and the thing never fully warming up. Something else I’d wanna sort if I get back to it… as to the short block that I damaged, I firmly believe it’s very rebuildable, it was only knocking very lightly and I filled the sump with 20W-50 before limping it very gently to where the engine was taken out. Oil was slightly glittery but it only knocked above idle and at very light or very very heavy load

Photo is of the car at the last event I did with it. I did find some improvements aero wise but I also spent more time with togue/autocross rubber on it and mileage suffered some for the additional drag…

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by 19bonestock88

the thermostat sticking open and the thing never fully warming up

A thermostat sticking closed is more dangerous, at all