Abaddon's Riv

matt270avian wrote:

Abaddon wrote:

How is that by any means relevant to what I posted. Seriously.....wtf

It's Charlie, probably

erry day

Well ty for tainting my thread.....

So you guys know I'm still serious about building a Riv or 3800 eventually.....

I just bought a 245mm Torque Converter with 2500 stall speed from ZZP.
They're on sale right now for $175!!!!!

More crap added to my pile of parts! Gonna be one fast fuggin car when I finally get around to it.

Abaddon wrote:

So you guys know I'm still serious about building a Riv or 3800 eventually.....

I just bought a 245mm Torque Converter with 2500 stall speed from ZZP.
They're on sale right now for $175!!!!!

More crap added to my pile of parts! Gonna be one fast fuggin car when I finally get around to it.

aww man.... thought you were gonna say turbo..

wow thats half off tho... ima get one too! Thanks for heads up

charlieRobinson wrote:

aww man.... thought you were gonna say turbo..

wow thats half off tho... ima get one too! Thanks for heads up

I have too many M90 parts to go turbo.

And no shit!! I saw the half off and couldn't resist!

charlieRobinson wrote:

........... turbo..

ima get one too!

do it!

turtleman wrote:

charlieRobinson wrote:

........... turbo..

ima get one too!

do it!

I was planning on getting a zzp turbo kit if the sale friday was enticing... but it wasnt .. and.... I realized I wanna build trans first and do heads then see where Im at before I turbo. And.... I got a bunch of new toys recently so Riv budget is broke until late spring 2016..

I am sure, if the world doesnt end first.., the riv will get turboed at some point or V8 swapped and turboed.  

I am still shocked no one here has done it yet. Always thought you or scott would be the first. I want to see a turboed gen 8 riv so bad.

I thought about doing turbo but I had a friend with a turbocharged 3800 Monte SS and it was constantly breaking things and a tuning nightmare. You will quickly outflow the MAF and get into speed density tuning, and for that you'd better be ready for some research or being good friends with a knowledgable tuner with a dyno. It was a damn fast car though.

It was also NOT a daily driver, since it spent most of it's time with broken parts... I always needed my Riv to be a reliable DD.

Well, here's what I've been working on lately....the new house! This is a "before" pic. It's a small panoramic of half of the front yard. The rest is behind me. We bought this joint over a month ago, and we've been working on it since. No, the barn looking thing isn't a barn. It's part of the house. Got 2-1/2 acres that it's sitting on. I call it a 3 car garage, as it's wide enough to fit 3 cars in with space in between....it just has 2 doors. We're moving approximately 30 miles north-northeast. Right now the last of the contractors are in there working, but it should all be move-in ready by the 31st.

Nice spot scott! I'd go for that in a heartbeat If I could ever afford it and I had some help mowing haha. So what kinda stuff are you doing to the place

turtleman wrote:

Nice spot scott! I'd go for that in a heartbeat If I could ever afford it and I had some help mowing haha. So what kinda stuff are you doing to the place

Thx! Help mowing lol. I went from cutting front and rear, weed whipped and blown off in 45min, to taking 2 hours without weed whipping. I bought a Cub Cadet 46" tractor.

It was a foreclosure. It's been sitting for 1-1/2 years, and the people that got booted weren't caring for much. It's very overgrown. The crawl space foundation was leaking water, so we had to have that fixed. Turns out, there was no drainage system installed in the first place. That's all done....
Right now, we've got Mold Experts of Michigan going through the whole house. When I say mold, I don't mean fuzzy, gross mold growing everywhere. The idiots that painted the place painted the soffit vents shut, and some mold started forming in the attics. It looked like minor staining in the roof sheeting. They also (for obvious reasons) had to remediate the crawl space. No wood has to be replaced, nothing has to be ripped out, just sand it all away and seal it up. They're also sucking out the heating/cooling system with their HEPA vacuum system. Basically, just making it livable. We're actually paying for more service than what's needed, but I don't want to have to deal with any of this again (replacing soffit vents, adding a ridge vent, fixing the attic fans, etc).

We fell in love with the joint as soon as we did the walk-through. Whoever built the place did some planning. It's got central vacuum throughout, built-in Smart Water filtration (on a well), skylights, sun domes, etc etc. The entire lower level of the barn looking end is one giant room with a full wet bar and such. Built in pool  in the backyard with outside access to a bathroom. Master bedroom has a walkout deck on it, a den, and its own bathroom. I'm still finding sprinkler heads out as far as the back of the property. I'd say about 2 acres of the lot is plumbed with sprinklers, as well as the mist pipes in all the flower beds. This place is awesome. It's just severely "malnourished". The house itself is in amazing condition. It's the yard and the pool area that needs all the help. Oh! There's also a slab in the ground at the back of the property big enough for a man-cave/garage. It's just a big slab of concrete that nothing was ever built on.

I could type about it forever....I'm so geeked about it. It's a tad larger than we were looking for, but this is where we're going to stay, and we got it for a great price.

glad you got it and sorry for whoever foreclosed out.

Albertj

Nice, Scott! Good to see your enthusiasm for the project. I cant wait to get my hideout going. been renting for 12 years now and ready to drop some fat roots.

Thanks, guys. There were actually 4 other pending offers before us, and they all backed out. I assume that helped us considering the bank dropped the price about $50k when we found it lol. The selling agent told us that they were all afraid of the mold. When we had it inspected, we had 4 different inspectors out there. The mold people were like "this ain't shit", and everyone else was surprised by the great condition of the place. All said and done, even after the price of the repairs, we still got it for less than the asking price. The bank was just ready to off it. It had been on the market for over a year.

Mold in houses justifiably has people freaked out because of the health effects. However, what people DON'T know about mold costs them a lot. Basically (1) if you can cure the moisture problem you can cure the mold problem (2) the mold spores are in the air anyway, what you have to do is keep them from forming colonies and growing on environmental surfaces, because the colonies concentrate spores in one locale and your body can't fight off the onslaught from their "cloud" (3) you need smart remediation like apparently the folks Abaddon hired -- there are a number of idiots in that business.

The only issue I see now is draining and grading on the far side of the house where the lot rises to the level of the next property. You've got to keep the relative humidity in that structure under ~50% or so. Your remediation people will have details if they have not told you already. I would also take a second look at the trees around the house, as you may need to let more sun hit the roof in order for convection to work right with respect to the attic ventilation.

As for the bank, they don't get any insurance proceeds to recoup their loss until they sell the property, so, although not any price works, the first conscionable deal even at kind of a low $$ will likely work.

albertj wrote:

Mold in houses justifiably has people freaked out because of the health effects.  However, what people DON'T know about mold costs them a lot.  Basically (1) if you can cure the moisture problem you can cure the mold problem (2) the mold spores are in the air anyway, what you have to do is keep them from forming colonies and growing on environmental surfaces, because the colonies concentrate spores in one locale and your body can't fight off the onslaught from their "cloud" (3) you need smart remediation like apparently the folks Abaddon hired -- there are a number of idiots in that business.

Bingo. Although, the remediation didn't cost as much as I thought it would. Mold Experts of Michigan are like the "premier" mold people around here. Very professional, very nice, and very straightforward. They provided us with 2 complete pages of detailed work that was to be done. There was no "this way or that way". It was "this is what needs to be done". Fix it right the first time, and keep it maintained, the shit won't come back. Most homes in Michigan have either attic mold, or basement mold. Problem is, they don't notice it until it's too late.
There are quite a few trees that need to go...like the ones over the house. The dying ones in the yard can be dealt with later (aside from some trimming).

The entire grade of the property is toward the street. In fact, during the monsoon we were having during the initial inspection (which is how we found the crawlspace river), the sump never even turned on. The water naturally drains toward the front of the property. The main problem of all of it was that there was insulation covering all of the soffit vents, and most of them were also painted shut. No airflow in the attics at all (there's 3 of them).

Abaddon wrote:

albertj wrote:

Mold in houses justifiably has people freaked out because of the health effects.  However, what people DON'T know about mold costs them a lot.  Basically (1) if you can cure the moisture problem you can cure the mold problem (2) the mold spores are in the air anyway, what you have to do is keep them from forming colonies and growing on environmental surfaces, because the colonies concentrate spores in one locale and your body can't fight off the onslaught from their "cloud" (3) you need smart remediation like apparently the folks Abaddon hired...

Bingo. Although, the remediation didn't cost as much as I thought it would. Mold Experts of Michigan are like the "premier" mold people around here. Very professional, very nice, and very straightforward... (much deleted)

There is one other thing the mold folks probably did not tell you.  IF your new-2-u place has central forced air heat, you can install an electronic air cleaner and UV air sterilizer on the furnace to keep things in check.  The ELECTRONIC part is important.  The electronic air cleaner works by ionization which makes dust and mold spores and what not clump together and fall to the floor (where you mop them up or vacuum them up as "dust" along with the fabric lint and pet hair and et cetera).  

You probably already know this but for benefit of those who don't:  A HEPA air cleaner filters the air well enough BUT because of fluid dynamics (technically, air is a not-so-dense fluid) you can not get all the air in the house through the stupid thing.  Suppose your air volume is 16 to 20 thousand cubic feet.  Even if you run your furnace long enough to push 20,000 cubic feet of house air thru it, some of that air will go thru the HEPA multiple times and some won't go at all, depending on various factors.  Your house ductwork is not designed to scavenge the contaminants outta the air into the return ducts.   Add to that the fact that the HEPA installation has to be set up to clean +/- 30% of the air passing through and, well, you do the math so to speak.

Another point: The electronic ionizing air cleaners have 3 problems.  One - they generate ozone (which is why when they are running the house can smell a little like the smell you get after a thundershower with lightning, the lightning makes the ozone that you smell) and some people (fewer than you might think) are sensitive to that.

Another is you have to clean them often enough that the metal plates in them don't get dust-coated, they quit working at that point.  That said - when they are working, by ionizing the air, all the air does not have to pass thru the filter in order to get cleaned.  The ionized air blows into the rooms and mixes with the air already there... which causes the dusts to ionize and attract to each other, and in turn when the particles clump up enough they largely fall out of the air.  

When I upgraded my furnace I ordered an electronic air cleaner put on it (the furnace guy demurred but I insisted & he did it).  Which brings up the third problem with electronic air cleaners. Helps to know something about power controls to do the install, not sure how many furnace guys know it... So on my install, after a while (a couple years) it quit.  Furnace guy says "I told you so. How about a HEPA?"  I said No but before scheduling him for a service call I opened the unit up to see what was wrong.  It was obvious.  The ionizing energy had apparently caused certain electrical contacts to evaporate.  So now I had a control board with burned up transformer and spade connectors hanging disconnected because the tabs had vanished. SMH. Probably because they were deficient to begin with. I did not even get to smell the blue smoke (probably was none). Which I took to mean that the contacts vanished and then once the circuit was open it took out the transformer.  So I replaced the control board (bought a new OEM control board from an Internet furnace supply house) cleaned the board's electrical contacts before my install and coated them with NoAlOx.  I've had ZERO problems with the board or the unit since, but I just have to remember to pull the metal plates once in a while for cleaning, and I forget to do it often enough because the unit works so well.  The plates, by the way, can be cleaned in a dishwasher on the rinse cycle.

Here is where the UV sterilizer comes in. It is just a UV-B light that basically denatures the organics in the dust. That is, it kills the mold spores that blow by it, if any, provided they are exposed to the UV-B for long enough time. That means that the mold spores in the air that pass a properly-installed UV-B sterilizer are controlled to the point that they may not be able to colonize as effectively -- there may not be enough of them in the ambient air to do so, provided you can keep the humidity down and the environmental surfaces (walls ceilings and floors) clean enough so they don't stick...

So anyway with all the IFs I figure the mold folks did not say much about an air cleaner. In my personal experience, an electronic one with a UV-B sterilizer might well help you in the long run.

I have to run.

Albertj

Well I never got into details, but the furnace already has one of those fancy-schmancy electronic units on it

Good info for people though. Just the word "mold" freaks them out.

Abaddon wrote:

Well I never got into details, but the furnace already has one of those fancy-schmancy electronic units on it

Good info for people though. Just the word "mold" freaks them out.

be sure to install the UV sterilizer, and open a duct so you can clean off the AC evap coils if you have AC mounted in the furnace.

Albertj

So, we're completely moved out and in to the new house. That meant having to get the '97 up and mobile again. I actually drove it to my shop on Saturday. I seriously miss the Riv. I think I'm going to plate it and put insurance on it, then drive it until it gets shitty outside. This way, I can start transferring the suspension and what-not over to it when I'm slow. and it won't just sit anymore.
It felt so good to get behind the wheel of a Riv again

Abaddon wrote:

So, we're completely moved out and in to the new house. That meant having to get the '97 up and mobile again. I actually drove it to my shop on Saturday. I seriously miss the Riv. I think I'm going to plate it and put insurance on it, then drive it until it gets shitty outside. This way, I can start transferring the suspension and what-not over to it when I'm slow. and it won't just sit anymore.
It felt so good to get behind the wheel of a Riv again

 

Onward!

Well, now I may not have a choice but to plate a Riv. Aztek got totaled yesterday morning. The woman was on her way to work on the freeway. Rolling to a stop for merging traffic, and got blasted in the ass by a full size pickup. I don't understand this string of luck we're having......



She's "ok". Has to see a spine specialist tomorrow. She has 3 discs that are no longer square. They're squished from the whiplash. It certainly doesn't help that she already had back problems from a similar accident 7 years ago.

You guys have had a bad streak!
Hope that ends.
Glad she's "ok"!

Jbird

That's scary! Hope things get better soon Scott.