I spent all of last weekend [racing](https://social.lol/@jbowdre/112553473338423232), and I spent all of *this* weekend working on my daily-driver racecar... in preparation of racing it again next weekend. 🏎
On Saturday, I disassembled the driver-side dashboard so I could then unbolt the steering column and get at the electric power steering motor. I had been hearing a really alarming-sounding rattle coming from behind the dash for the past couple of months, and (through the process of elimination) deduced that it might be coming from the coupler where the motor attaches to a worm gear on the column itself. After removing the motor, I confirmed my suspicion:
.jpg) A shiny metal housing with a central gear surrounded by broken bits of green plastic or rubber. The asterisk-shaped coupler had disintegrated over the past 10 years, and that was allowing the components to knock against each other. I popped in a $7 replacement, and set about reinstalling everything.
Getting everything taken apart wasn't a quick or easy job, and getting everything back in place was even harder. I did eventually get it all sorted, though, and it only took ~3 hours longer than The Internet told me it would, a broken bolt, a trip to Lowe's for replacement hardware and an extractor bit, and two bandaids. On the bright side, though, this *did* completely eliminate the noise I'd been hearing! My car doesn't sound like it's falling apart when I hit slightly-uneven pavement anymore. So that's nice.
Today, I replaced my worn Winmax W3/W4 brake pads with basically-brand-new Ferodo DS2500s kindly donated from a fellow competitor. Swapping those out only took me about an hour total, and I didn't break anything or injure myself this time. (Maybe I'm not quite as inept as I felt on Saturday! Interior work just suuuuucks.)
