09 Perth city to Surf Annual Fun Run

Well, its time I update my blog again after more than a month of stagnation.

Looking through some of the photos I had taken, it seems like I forgot to blog about the time when I participated in the Annual Perth City to Surf fun run.

The run starts from close to the heart of Perth city to the City Beach, and there were various options such as 16km, 8km run and 4 km run.

Since I had not train for this, I took it easy and went for the easiest option.

The 4km run starts in one of the suburbs closer to the finish line. The traffic going to the start line was pretty bad, but there were ample parking for those who are prepared to pay for it.

After I sorted my parking, I followed the masses to the start line. Its been a while since I last seen so many people at one place at the same time.

There were so many people that it took me 15 mins just to cross the start line after the start of the race.

Looking at the photo above, its obvious that the 4km run/walks were catered more for families. Maybe this year I’ll try the 8 Kms.

It was a bit frustrating trying to clock a good time when there’s so many people around blocking the way.

Fair to say when I reached the finish line, my time was pretty embarrassing. Some of my mates that did the 8km run were only a few minutes behind me.

Despite the poor finish, everyone was a winner that day. Everyone that participated and appeared at the finish line were given medals and merchandise.

Sometimes I wish I work for a big company as most of them have corporate tents with BBQ and and live entertainment.

There was a stage for the prize giving, and apparently some Aussie celebrity was there. Since I am still pretty new here, I have no idea who they were.

There you have it, if you are in Perth when the City to Surf fun run is on, its definitely worth doing if you are fit. The 16 and 8km runs were along the Swan river and the view throughout the run is simply amazing.

Perth Hail Storm 22 March 2010

Just when I thought Perth is an uninteresting place, last week the heavens opened up and dumped its load ending what seems to be a 6 months drought.

Usually when its forecast-ed to rain here, it’s pretty much a non-event with only a light drizzle at night that hardly gets noticed. But last Monday, it was different.  Halfway through my afternoon meeting, the electricity went out and it started raining cats and dogs.

The rain came down with such fury that my street was flooded within 10 minutes.

Trees were falling in Kings park around cars,

This was followed by hail, and unlike any hail I’d experienced, these suckers were big, some of them close to 60mm in diameter.

Do not let the photos fool you. The sky was clear only for a brief moment after the first arsenal from the heavens. The heavier storms were just rolling in as I was driving home.

Extremely heavy rain soon followed and there were water everywhere. I could see people trapped in the rising water.. like this poor cyclist in Leederville.

Visibility on the freeway was very bad and there were traffic jam everywhere,

There were a few occasion when the hail came down with the heavy rain, and being stuck in traffic means that there’s no where to run. The sound of the car being pelted with big tennis ball-sized hail was indeed a new experience for me. There were cars around me with their screens being smashed in..

Fair to say, I tried a different route through the city, to avoid having the same fate as the car above.

Wellington street was flooded, and so was Adelaide Tce, the main street that passes through the city.

It was a long and anxious drive home, anxious because I am curious what damage my car sustained from the hail. However, thank god I made it home safely. Lots of cars were stalled on the way home, but I was lucky.

I was stuck outside my house because there were no electricity for my garage door to work, so i took a photo of a rainbow.

The electricity didn’t come back until a day later, and the heavy weather left Perth in a mess.

The media reported that this 4 hour storm caused more than 108 million worth of damage.

This is not hard to believe because a lot of cars and building were damaged, and the electricity was out for up to a week in some places.

Photos of hail damage from car yards were circulating around

I feel for the owner of this Porsche, all the panels had dimples from the hail.

I used to think they were exaggerating when they say Australia is a land of extreme, now I actually think its true.

Oh yeah, my car had a few dimples too.. but its a cheap car

Thoughts..and Fremantle Wharf..

Its hot and muggy, been doing heaps over the past few months, but unfortunately my Sony Ericsson T650 died so i didn’t take any photos. Perth still feels really new to me and i am still coming to terms with the fact that I’d left NZ and all my cars. I still feel quite foreign here and deep down, I still call NZ home.

Reality is, its time to move on, so i am trying really hard to make Perth my new home. I think I am still too new here to really appreciate Perth. I miss my Kiwi friends and the down to earth ways we get about doing our own things.

Times like this I would go for a drive and try to walk off my homesickness…

I drove for a while and ended up at Fremantle Wharf where the museum is. It was past 5pm, so the museum was close. Behind the museum, I noticed a big, matte black, gear knob shaped structure and decided to check it out.

It turns out that its the nose of a submarine that is usually part of the museum tour.

The submarine was pretty impressive. I am sure it is mentioned in some tourist brochure somewhere, but I prefer to stumble upon things this way, i think it keeps life interesting.

Further down the wharf, there was an old school sail boat called Leuwin.. something like that.

It was just docked there when i was there but from the looks of things, I think it takes visitors out on a cruise quite often.

I’d decided to take the long way home and drove through Kings park, Perth indeed is beautiful,.. maybe one day I can call Perth home

Out and about Perth-Mountain biking at Goat Farm

Hello world.. my procrastination has reached epic proportion and i thought I should at least blog again to let you know that I am alive and well. Thanks Fred for giving me the nudge that I obviously need to get off my lazy ass and start blogging again.

I’d been bored and not been cycling much since I bought my AE71 corolla. However, while surfing youtube, I came across this clip;

Although it is a BMX clip, it instantly got me motivated again. I chucked my bike in my old corolla and headed towards the hills (Goat farm.) Apparently Goat Farm is a popular mountain biking venue.

Truth be told, I am a very lousy Mountainbiker. I only got into it because some of my NZ friends were into it but shortly after I bought a decent bike, most of them left NZ. I only went to Woodhill in NZ less than 10 times, so my skills were close to non-existant. (one of my friend actually went to Portugal to build a mountain bike track, how cool is that?)

There were downhill tracks at this mountain biking venue, but being a pansy, I chose the cross country route that rode around the park. Initially the trail was pretty easy

But it got progressively rougher, with big rocks everywhere

riding uphill over these rocks proved to be too much for me, i was powering over the rocks until one of the bigger rocks got the better of me and I flew over the handle bars

Unfortunately I did not see that there were barb wires in the bush. Luckily for me only my leg got cut.

I think once I get medicare here, I’ll look into getting my tetanus shot up to date.

Eventually, I reached the top, you can see Perth city in a distance from there..

Going down was easy, I let gravity do its thing until I came across this

Well, unfortunately for me, I took one of the corner too sheepishly (yeap, I applied the brakes when I saw the drop,) i should have harden up and power through the corner. Again, i went over the handle bars and scrapped myself on the top edge of the drop.

Luckily my bike didn’t fall over the edge.

It was then that I started to ride a bit more conservatively seeing that the bike track was very close to the edge

Over the course of the day, I had a few other nasty falls, and more cuts and scrapes

Overall, the mountain bike trail was not as great as Woodhill in Auckland,NZ, but its fun none-the-less . I would do it again, but i guess Its better going with someone else who is better than myself to show me the ropes.

Anyone in Perth keen to head out there? send me a msg.

Out and About Western Australia- Lane Poole camping prt 2

As we continued our trip, the road got dustier and dustier,

The road surface was actually red dirt, and are very notorious for becoming dusty really fast and sticking on cars, we had to keep our distance to ensure that we can still brake effectively. I’d seen quite a number of Kangaroos appearing out of nowhere, and unlike possums or rabbits, hitting a Kangaroo can do serious damage.

When we arrived at Lane Poole, we were greeted by park marshals asking for a park entry fee of $6.50 per person at the gates. Upon handling over the money, we were given a park map and also a rubbish bag.

We decided to camp at Charlies flat because it had provisions for having a camp fire. There are other camp grounds like Chudith that does not allow open fires but has a sheltered BBQ area.

Anyway, we got there around noon and it was pouring down, so we hasten our effort to set up tents,

I’d bought along my giant inflatable flip flop to use as an air mattress.. again, having an old car was great, I need not worry about scratches

Since the ground was wet, we decided to check out Chuditch sheltered BBQ area and prepared our lunches.

After lunch, we went for a walk around Chuditch, the view was ok..

As the night drew closer, we prepared for dinner back at our Charlies flat camp ground

We started a fire in the fire pit, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.

The fire pit was well setup with a pivotable tray for cooking.

Cooking around a camp fire was indeed challenging as we could not see what we were cooking,

The night was really cold and with the sky being cloudy, it was really dark. At 9.30pm, we thought it was midnight. After playing a few camping games and telling stories, we went to bed. This was the view inside my tent.. pretty cool huh?

The night was really cold and I was really glad i had my air mattress to keep the cold from coming up from the ground. I was also lucky in that I had a double layer tent with an inner netting. In the morning, the interior of the tent wall was covered with condensate and it kept the water from dripping on me.

The next day, we explored the area, and found that the Nanga Mill campsite was heaps better than the one we were at.. arghh.. such is life…

We also did the King Jarrah walk, It was not as interesting as I hoped it would be. Its pretty much walking though some short tree forest for hours and hours with no interesting lookout or geographical feature. I guess coming from New Zealand, hiking here just do not seem that nice.

Anyway, as we finished the loop, we reached Nanga Falls,

The waterfall was not what I’d expected, its more like a drain. I was expecting a waterfall that I could at least go for a dip. To put it into prespective,..

Yeap, its pretty small.

Anyway, Camping in Lane Poole was great but that’s about it.

Out and About Western Australia- Driving to Dwellingup (Lane Poole camping prt 1)

After all those effort getting the car into shape, It’s only fitting to take it out for a drive, so I rounded up some of my new friends in Perth and headed to Lane Poole ( a camp site not far from Perth,) close to Dwellingup.

Seeing that this was an overnight camping trip, we started early and filled the car with supplies and camping gears

The trusty corolla has an average size boot, but we still managed to utilize every inch of it.

The drive was rather sceanic, but it’s nothing compared to New Zealand.

The drive to Dwellingup took about an hour and 30 mins, it was a great felling driving the old car.. reminds me of my childhood times when my mum had one of these,

When we arrived at Dwellingup, we had a toilet stop. Both of  my other friends’ cars were Toyota Camrys. My car sure looked old in the photo below.

We’d decided to visit the info centre since the toilet was just next to it. It had this scary sculpture with a guy and an axe in front of it, made from welded scrap metal.

Dwellingup information centre

Apparently Dwellingup used to be a prisoner’s camp, and they had a very big fire and there were quite a few casualties.  As such, inside the info centre, they had this old Mack fire engine.

The photo does not actually convey the size of te thing. The wheels of the fire engine was actually as high as my my hip.

Anyway, seeing that we are on our way to a camping trip, we started to make up stories about ghosts, and how the scary scuplture will come to life and hack us to bits at night.. but we soon realize how immature that was and we moved on.

The road to the camp site was actually unpaved,

Times like this I was glad that I had an old car and not something new and precious..

To be continued….

Fixing the Mighty AE71 Corolla-Changing the Timing belt and tuning

I don’t know how the other bloggers find the motivation to blog as often as they do, especially when they have a proper job.  I think its to do with dicipline, which is something I must work on. I am usually really easily distracted and checking something on the net usually result in  hours and hours wasted browsing the net.

Anyway, in continuation with my previous 2 posts, and possibly the last one I will do about fixing my car, this post as per the title is about changing the timing belt. When I got the car, the mileage on the car was about 230,000 kms. Usually the timing belt should be changed every 80 to 100 thousand kms, and seeing the condition of the car, I doubt that the timing belt was changed when it clicked over the 200 thousand kms mark.

I bought a timing belt kit from a local auto shop Repco, surprisingly they still keep stock of these kit even though the car is 25 years old.

The item on the left is a crank pulley puller. Normally the crank pulley is seized on the crank shaft that a minor tap is not sufficient to loosen it, hence a puller is required.

Before removing the crank pulley, all the belts connected to it were removed, including the clutch operated thermo fan normally attached to the water pump.

When I tried to fit the crank pulley puller on the crank pulley, I realized that the radiator was too close to it, so I removed the radiator to clear some space

This is how you use a crank pulley puller

A quick turn on the middle threaded shaft will pull the pulley away from the crank shaft.

Anyway, the timing belt on the car was indeed a bit worn. It was a genuine Toyota item and small cracks were starting to appear on the face of the belt

Good thing I was bored and decided to change the timing belt, otherwise if the belt breaks while the engine is running, the engine would have been a writeoff.

After taking off the crank pulley, I removed the lower timing belt cover, cleaned it and marked the numbers with a white marker so that when I tune the car, I can see where the timing is at.

Normally, before taking the timing belt out, the proper way to change the timing belt is to turn the engine until all the marks on the cam wheel and the crank pulley points to TDC (top dead centre,) but I was lazy. Since I had my white marker with me, I marked the old belt and the position on the cam wheels, and then transfered the markings on the old belt to the new belt by counting the teeth, and fitted the new belt on. This way the fitment of the new belt should be as per the old belt.

After fitting the new tensioner and idler pulley, I reassemble the covers, pulleys, the belts  and the radiator.The car is back to its usual self again. I can now drive on the freeway with the engine singing away, and not worry about the engine letting go.

I also bought a timing gun, dwell meter and a vaccum gauge for setting the timing and also adjusting the carburettor to ensure that the car runs optimally.

I realize most readers are probably bored with my car fixing blog, so I guess I’ll skip that bit.

The car runs great now, but still guzzle a bit of fuel (13L/100kms,) not sure if thats normal, maybe cars around that era are not that efficient.

Fixing the Mighty AE71 Corolla-changing brake hoses

After discovering that the brake hoses were perishing while changing the inner tie rod, I started to have this horrific thought that the brake hose might pop every time I apply the brakes. I guess i could always rip the handbrake and let the car spin to a halt should that actually happen.

Anyway, just to be on the safe side, I bought some brake hoses, brake fluids and a bleeder kit to change the hoses.

While changing the hoses, I realized there was only one brake hose in the rear, so I returned the extra hose that I bought.

The rear brake hose did not perish like the front brake hoses, but it was very stiff, so I changed it anyway.

Removing all the brake hoses didn’t take long. All the hoses seemed to have hardened in some way or the other. The front brake hoses were particularly bad as the braided portion were starting to show

The front brake hoses were in 2 sections, but the one I bought only came in a single length. The coupling in the middle of the front brake hoses fitted into a bracket on the strut.

Since the hoses I bought didn’t have any attachment points, I decided to use grommets in the bracket to prevent the hoses from being ripped to shreds by the bracket.

After fitting all the hoses, I topped up the brake fluid reservoir and bled the brakes from the furthest to the brake closest to the brake master cylinder.

I hosed off any excess brake fluid under the car and took the car for a spin.

The brake peddle felt really firm when depressed now, and its good to have that peace of mind again.

Fixing the mighty AE71 Corolla-steering tie rods

My AE71 corolla seems to have a mind of its own when driven fast (100km/h) on the freeway, not to mention the 3 speed automatic seems to be geared a bit short making the engine sing along at that speed. The corolla would sway left and right and a turn of the steering wheel of up to 25 degrees would yield no response, making driving the car a bit challenging if not scary.

Thinking this was not normal, I crawled under the car and have a look, and low and behold, the right steering boot looked like this,

The left steering boot was no better.

Perth’s soil is mainly sand and God only knows how long ago the boots let go.

For those of you who are not familiar with the mechanics of a car, the steering boot protects the tie rod from dusts and other contaminants. If contaminants manage to get its way into the tie rod, it would wear out the ball part of it. Simply put, the wear will cause sloppyness in the joint and this in turn causes play in the steering. Easy.

Jacking up the car and wiggling the front tires revealed that there was significant play in the steering joints.

Time to take things apart to fix it. First, I removed the wheels. (i made sure the car was securely on jack stands and the tires were under the sill, those who know me will know I had a bad experience with a car falling on me breaking my right arm about 2 years ago.)

Next I removed the outer tie rod bolt connecting the steering to the steering knuckle,

Then I used a tie rod remover to remove the tie rod from the steering knuckle (its amazing how tight taper fit can get. )

Once the tie rod taper “pop-ed,” i marked the inner threaded sleeve of the outer tie rod and removed the clamping nut that keeps the thread from undoing.

Removing the outer tie rod and the torn steering boot revealed the worn inner tie rod. Yeap, that’s the steering rack that its attached to.

To remove the tie rod, I had to straighten the locking washer,

Once the washer was straightened, I undid the inner tie rod from the steering rack using an adjustable spanner.

See what I mean, the grease in the tie rod was missing and there was significant play in the ball joint

I purchased a pair of new tie rods from WA suspension. The Repco and Supercheap autos that I went to didn’t have the tie rod listed in their catalog for some reason.

Before fitting the new tie rods, I applied some thread locker to the threads to ensure they do not come apart.

The new tie rod was tight.

To protect the new inner tie rod, I also fitted some new steering boots.

I then bolted everything back. There was no more play in the steering now.

unfortunately, or fortunately depends on how you see it.. I discovered another problem,

The brake hoses were severely worn. Its hard to believe cars like this is still allowed on the road without periodic check. In NZ, WOF check would have detected all these issues. No wonder there were heaps of broken down cars on the side of the road here.

Anyway, I’ll change it next time as I have to buy the hoses first.

Back to the Tie rod change. Since I changed the length of the steering tie rod, this would affect the Toe setting of the car. I placed some useless flyers under the front wheels as slip plates and use an old school tape measure method to set the to back to 0 degrees.

The car drives straight and steering was tight.  The difference was night and day, and the car is so much safer to drive now.

Out and about Perth- Sculpture by the sea

Back in March, My friend Liz came over from Adelaide  for a visit (Check her blog out, apparently she started her blog after reading mine, and her’s looks so much more advanced than mine now.)

Since I got my cheap run around car, I thought it would be a nice gesture to show her around Perth, and coincidently, Sculpture by the Sea was in town that weekend.

If memory serves me right, it was a particularly hot day, and the beach was really crowded.

I felt a bit embarrassed that my old clapper didn’t have a working air conditioner, but luckily Liz was a cool sport and didn’t complain at all.

Sculpture by the beach featured lots of very big artwork littered all over the beach, some of them were really hard to distinguish from junk, such as these burnt out containers

Others were quite obvious, such as this big trike made from tin, yeap that’s me in the photo.

My personal favorite was this big watch, the strap was actually rusted steel but it looked the part,  yeap, that’s me again cam wh0ring

One other notable art piece was this big pencil. Despite having a “do not touch sign,” the kids continued to touch it.. I always wondered how they anchor the pencil on soft sand, as it was pointy. It would be interesting if it fell.

Anyway, Perth was recently rated as the 5th most livable city in the world. I guess with free art shows like this (not including the $15 brochure explaining the artwork,) and free movies by the river, its not hard to believe.