Before I head out to the garage, I will update on the Mazda 3 as well.

The Mazda 3 took the Saturn's place in the garage and I immediately set about removing the engine, the exhaust and the fuel tank. We needed to get to it as quickly as possible because we are switching to a digital design process for our work.

With the engine out and the transmission separated from it, we can now use our digitizing arm to grab all of the important points on the transmission. That has allowed us to design our adapter plate more easily and will allow us to store this transmission information for future use should anybody need a 2008 Mazda 3 adapter.

Oops. Looks like life got away from me a bit and I forgot to keep up with the writing. Since I have a few minutes, I will try to catch up on the status of things a bit.

The Saturn is doing well. We essentially delivered it a few weeks ago and it is running really well. Brian wanted very badly to participate in the IBM car show so I made a push to get cleaned up and running for that. There are a couple of things that remain, but they aren't essential for operation or safety so they can wait. By coincidence KVUE wanted to talk to an EV owner that day as well, so Brian got to keep his EV hat on and made it into the evening news too. You can watch it here if you want:

The springs are done. The springs are done. All hail, the springs are done.

Now we are on to finishing up the design for the mount for the AC compressor and getting that fabricated. We will be using this to work out the process for getting these custom parts made quickly and at a reasonable price so that we can concentrate on designing and installing the components in the cars.

We are looking at including MAJAX on our Millenium Server. It is a Javascript library for making requests to Millenium from within pages elsewhere on your site. This is a placeholder for me to remember where the docs are...

• Here’s the MAJAX homepage
• Here’s a description on how to install
• Here’s a demo page that shows all the classes it can provide
• Here’s a demo of a class at VT that lists course resources w/ MAJAX

Chris got right down to installing the front springs yesterday. The first one went fine with the tools that we already had in the shop, but the second proved to be a bit tougher. After some issues finding the right tools, they are ready to reinstall. Here are some pics.

This sucker is a life saver. It seems to be one of the few things that Chris has picked up from Harbor Freight that actually worked out... It is a Strut Spring Compressor and you can compare it to the more often sighted macpherson strut tool. It is simply beefier and holds the spring more securely and it compresses the spring from one point so the operation goes much more smoothly. Something you value when you are trying to remove a high tension part from your car without getting yourself killed...