Getting Things Done!
It’s been an eventful and awesome week of progress across the many projects and programs at Blackbird Performance.
The wizard of wiring Carey Bales, the master of mounts, Doug Marino along with a little help from yours truly on dash displays and control placement and mounting have been steadily turning the Demon into a full on, easy to run, work on and maintain race car. Should have it back to life soon.
Keaton Vester was working hard across the board as usual, organizing, arranging and expanding useful work space and storage, mounting displays and modules in the Hellraison Drag Pak, pulling a battle weary Turk Diggler out of BlackbirdX and more …as I was off working on the improved replacement, Wild Turkey.
And I was blessed to spend some of the week in the home shop as well as one of my favorite places away from home, BES Racing Engines. There we tested an improved Wild Turkey to go back in BBX, and get the 3 races / 4 test session Turk Diggler out for a refresh. Of course working with Rich Kolb, one of BES’s dynamic dyno duo and putting WT through its paces after Ben Hoitink did another stellar job of building it.
The big surprise while at the Oracle of Horsepower shop, I got to see and hear a wicked Pontiac stocker engine, of Don Turk and Rae Ann Warner Turk being tuned and refined by none other than Michael Wiener, the other half of the dyno dynamic duo, and in this case, the builder / crafter of this one bad Pontiac 455 HO. After seeing it run and looking at the results, I’d say it’s a pretty fair bet some new significantly improved ETs and trap speeds will be coming from a beautiful red ‘71 T-37 at a track somewhere, very soon.
Lastly, I come home to a much improved trailer and toter delivered back at the shop. Jason Dietsch and the team at Jason Dietsch Trailer Sales did a fantastic job taking care of a long list of needed maintenance items and upgrades and topped it off with a fresh generator in the toter… coming to get it and returned, all in under a week… and cleaner than almost ever. The lesson here, buy your trailer from a racer and his family business, who take care of their customers and stand behind their products. They ‘get’ racers, their often short timelines and their needs.
Lots of testing and racing of various cars coming up next week. Stands to be an exciting one.
