when passion drives you

A difficult part of leaving one state for another for work is abandoning your loved ones; family, friends, partners, etc. Or in my case, the Pig.

Upon returning to Victoria an idea popped into my head while downing yet another can of Monster Energy Drink. I’d seen a few people (such as Mad Mike and his off chops RX-7) using real or look-a-like Red Bull cans as oil catch cans in the engine bay and thought it scored a solid eight or nine out of ten on the rad scale.

I wanted one!

Being a pretty big fan of Mr Ken Block’s work and coming to the conclusion that the black and green livery of Monster would work far better in my reasonably tame engine bay, the decision was made to go with the green ‘M’.

Step one involved me thoroughly enjoying the last few drops of liquid excitement, rinsing the can and cutting off the top and bottom. As I already had a plain black catch can installed, I felt it would probably prove wiser to effectively make a new Monster ‘skin’ for the current catch can instead of finding out just how good (or bad) a normal aluminium can would work. This also meant I’d avoid the extra stuff-around of having to fit up a new drain plug and all the other bits and pieces.

Trimming up the can went well with just some household scissors and a little bit of care. This left me with a nice, malleable sheet of aluminium to work with.

I removed the catch can mounting bracket and oil level indicator and checked and double checked the position of the skin, employing the ‘measure twice, drill once’ approach to fabrication.

As the skin was slightly smaller than the catch can itself, I lined up the gap with the back of the can where the bracket would go, thus resulting in the front looking shmick.

Two holes needed to be drilled for the oil level indicator bolts and I found a block of wood behind the skin made things a lot easier.

A sneaky little tweak was then performed by folding the top and bottom edges of the can using the highly specialised ‘put the edge of the skin just slightly over the lip of a piece of wood and gently ‘roll’ it by tapping it with a hammer head wrapped in a soft cloth’ technique. This worked far too well.

Finally some strategically placed double-sided tape went around the edges of the skin and one down the centre to ensure it doesn’t slide off and look sub-par.

Then the oil level indicator and bracket went back on and my new Monster Energy Drink sponsored catch can was bolted back into Piggo and the oil breather lines hooked back up.

All up it took about two hours but you could probably bash one out in about an hour or maybe even half an hour, depending on how much Monster you’ve consumed.

Dave