iFixit Racing Team

photo courtesy of @mdjuric under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 license

I work at iFixit, the online repair manual creator and parts/tool retailer in San Luis Obispo, California. It’s a pretty sweet gig; the people are cool, the atmosphere is relaxed, and we get a lot of flexibility in our lives. One of the projects we’re working on is building a race car for the 24 Hours of LeMons competition in March at Infineon Raceway.

It’s pretty exciting for someone who doesn’t really have much hands-on experience with the mechanics of cars. I’ve installed a few car stereos, speakers, and subwoofers myself, but never had the confidence to touch any of the engine components.

A couple of Saturdays ago, I replaced the clutch on the 1992 Volvo 240 wagon. Well, the team did it as a group, but I still took all the bolts off of the engine connecting the transmission, separated them, and hooked it all back up when we were finished servicing the clutch.

Typically, I wouldn’t have known how to do it, but the racing team captain, Scott Dingle, has done repairs on quite a few Volvos before, so I had a good mentor.

We’ve been filming around the repairs, and are going to be featuring episodes of each of the repairs on iFixit.org as we make a push to introduce automotive repair into the iFixit realm of possibility. I wrote the first blog post which will come out around the same time as our first episode. Basically, I touch on the concept of how similar cars and computers are. Look for it coming out in a week or two.