Welcome to my personal website. I'm Ben Sauve, age 25. I'm married and have a beautiful baby daughter, Hannah. My wife is the best gift God has ever given me, but I have a lot to be thankful for. I'm into tuner cars, anything military or in law enforcement, first-person shooter video games, and coding PHP/MySQL websites. This site was originally built to act as a development center for new websites being built by Walla Walla Web Solutions, and I'm still working on a few sites here. I'm going to start posting pictures of me, my family, my cars, and other interests, as well as guides on modifications I make to my car, or web design coding tips. Basically anything I am working on or interested in. I'll post more pics on this site later, as well as probably a resume, just because I'm looking or a job as a cop, something I've always wanted to do. Below are some links and news as I make changes to this site.

New! Dec. 12, 2007 - added better support for mobile browsers, at mobile.sauve.gotdns.com. This site is already designed to be XHMTL 1.0 Transitional compliant, why not re-write a small part of the presentation coding, simplify the graphics a bit, update the CSS, and make a mobile version of the site that even simple mobile browsers shouldn't have a problem with? I'm still working on making an auto-redirect script to the mobile version of the site when a mobile browser is detected. Will see how that works out.

My first tuner was a 1991 Honda Accord that I bought in Milton-Freewater after I totalled a cheap, little American car, the Geo Storm. My Accord came with a full body kit, dual exhaust, lowered coilovers, and shaved door handles. I loved the look of the car; it was something that the owner had obviously put a lot of effort into and it was unique. It was a good car, but it was old, made a lot of body noise going down the road, and worst of all- it was an automatic. After a couple of years, it was time to upgrade.

I bought the Eclipse from JJ at the end of summer '08, with the mandatory requirement that whatever I got to replace the Accord, it had to be a stick! The Eclipse called to me, being easy to modify, yet not as ubiquitous as Hondas. It's smaller, faster, and looks very sleek and curvaceous, very much a departure from the stark, squared lines of the Accord. While JJ had the right idea with this car, by starting to pimp it out the right way, there was a lot of work left to do, and having learned a lot from the Accord, I wanted to make this car uniquely MINE.

This is how I bought the Eclipse. It still had halogen headlights, really crappy steel mesh on the bumper, and some vinyls promoting a club I don't know anything about. The power antenna was broken, the rear wiper blade had been removed, and the tranny ground going into gears. On the plus side, the car already has completely new speaker wiring and eight Alpine speakers, 18-inch Team Dynamics racing rims and low-profile tires, and a short ram air intake. My work was definitely cut out, though.

I bought a new rear windshield wiper arm and blade, then tore out the old (broken) power antenna assembly, and installed a 2.4-inch short aluminum antenna.

I cut down the shift rod and installed a more ergonomic shift knob. This is really a home-brew short shifter mod, and makes shifting much easier and faster. I've replaced several plastic interior trim pieces that were broken, and repainted much of the white and red theme inside the car.

I've taken off the old speaker cover mesh that was originally used on the bumper, and replaced it with premium aluminum APC mesh. My wife bought me two xenon HID conversion kits: one for the 9006 low-beams, and one for the H3 foglights. Goodbye halogens, hello 10,000K blue HID's! Installation wasn't hard at all. Converting from your factory headlights to HID's involves simply plugging a digital controller and ballast module into the factory headlight plug, then plugging included HID bulbs into that controller. The controller steps up the 12VDC coming from the battery to between 18,000 and 24,000 volts to ignite the arc, then settles down to about 90 volts to sustain the bright blueish-white light. If you ever want to revert to the halogens again, you can just take out the controller and ballast, and plug your regular 9006 bulb back into the factory lamp plug, since you never permanently alter the car.

The most recent addition has been that of a custom Japanese kanji vinyl graphic that I designed myself and had a little help from Mr. Scott Binder installing. I rendered the concept and created a vector file with Corel Draw 8.

This is the final product! Since installing this bold new look in mid-June, it has turned so many heads in Walla Walla and College Place. The best part for me is knowing that there is no other car like this on earth. I designed this myself; I didn't buy a 36" graphic off eBay.

There's now also some killer bass in the trunk and I built a custom trunk floor and amp mount from plywood, carpetted it, and instaled mesh and red LED glow into it myself. It looks pretty flippin' hott at night, and the single 12-inch Kenwood sub seems to provide plenty of bass shot straight forward into the cabin by the hatchback design of the car.

I've more or less completed the installation of low-profile amber/white LED strobes for increased visibility if I stop to help someone by the roadside, or use my personal vehicle to go help one of my co-workers with an outage or something. I can use this car as a first-responder vehicle by adding a green strobe in the front center windshield when I become a volunteer firefighter. I'll get some video posted here or on my facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/bensauve in the near future.

I added a few more finishing touches on the vinyl graphics package, and in these pics you can see the LED light bar in the rear window. As a whole, the car looks pretty good around town! It's the only one like it.