Team V6 Vandals
7:00 AM.
The Vandals piled into the Sinistra Swift, with Amy taking the hot-seat and Cody claiming shotgun. Luke and Jake settled into the rear seat and buckled in, before Amy turned the key.
The Swift fired up with a rattle and screech. The rattle was normal, and the screech went away once the engine had done a couple thousand revolutions, thereby ending up being considered normal anyway.
“The hell did you three do to this poor thing yesterday?” Amy asked, before giving a light sigh. “Poor V6 is all full of top-end rattles because someone doesn’t know how to shift instead of redlining the gears.”
“At least it’s the '87. If it had one of the mid-90’s SinCam engines, we’d be fucked right now. Reliable though they were, high oil-pressure would brick-shit the cams. Ever seen what happens when a Sinistra Twin-Cam engine gets one bank stuck in the High-Lift mode and the other stuck in Low-Lift? It ain’t pretty.” Cody said, chuckling. “They got it figured out by the end of the 90’s, but an early 90’s SinCam? Time bomb right there.”
“I thought they were good engines, personally.” Jake said. “Sinistra was always trying to be bleeding edge, even if it meant sacrificing some reliability to do it. SinCam was one of those things, bringing variable valve lift into the common market as early as they could. Good fuel economy, good performance, with the compromise being early units having a higher chance of failure. It’s a good overall deal if you asked me.”
“You’re not the one who had to drive one for 3,000 miles in a shitbox rally with the left bank backfiring and popping at low RPM, and no power at high RPM because the right bank wasn’t contributing.” Cody said.
“Well, to be fair,” Luke started, “you did choose that car 30 minutes before joining the rally.”
“Wasn’t by choice, I’ll say that much. Was preparing an Ardent Smoke when it decided to become its namesake. I mean, seriously, who runs the rear electrical harness right next to the fuel line?” Cody shot back.
“I doubt the manufacturer would have made that oversight at the factory. After all, we ran against one and it didn’t burn up.” Jake replied. “Might’ve been a base-model shitbox, but it stayed together long enough. You just got greedy and bought the lemon someone was hawking for $75 because you thought it’d be fun to win a prize for having the cheapest car. Instead, you had to burn that $500 budget on a 1996 Sinistra Serenade with a blown SinCam unit.”
“Dude, I thought I was safe avoiding the '95 with the paint-shaker triple by getting the Boxer-based LC 2.0. How was I to know they failed asymmetrically, and that the LC had plastic intake manifolds that could shatter?” Cody whined.
“They weren’t fucking plastic.” Amy spat. “Not much better, admittedly, but at least Old Man Sinistra had the sense to use cast aluminum. Hell, they were halfway eco-friendly because he used recycled aluminum where he could in the LC models. They were cheap shit, but they ran. You just got hoist by your own petard, Cody, because you tried to go cheap, then tried to recover by getting the first car barely within budget.”
“So, what’s gonna blow up in our Swift, then?” Cody asked.
“It’s the '87 with the all-aluminum 3.9 liter V6. When she goes, I’m betting head-gaskets.” Amy said, only for Jake to burst out laughing.
“Clearly you’ve never pulled the head off of one of these. It’s almost fucking impossible because there’s a quarter-inch ridge-and-valley cast into the block and head. The head gasket on these things is only a formality, I’ve seen people mod 'em by pulling the gaskets off to raise the compression a little.” Jake said. “It’s like Old Man Sinistra knew about gasket problems ahead of time.”
“I’d say it’s more that he was doing that because it’d hold the engine together better on the old 90-degree V6, and it just made sense to use the same head molds for the new aluminum 60-degree one. But it meant the block needed to use the same pattern.” Luke said. “No, if Mister Sinistra knew about warped heads and blown gaskets, he’d have likely done his thing by not mixing metals.”
(Sorry about the long post. Not much for the team to talk about, so I invented a mild issue that got them talking, then ran with a few ideas. Plus, it helps for the future of junkyard challenges if there’s a few known flaws with other Sinistra cars…)
; excited about next day happenings; passenger seat
*; at Connor] “You still haven´t learnt shit, have you?”
]
] “FUCK! Do i need to tell you everything?? STOP THE FUCKING CAR!!!”
] “Really? I have told you before we left… You would likely have smashed Connor to pieces if i wasn´t here…”
