KevinGale said:In reply to ShawneeCreek :
It does capture some of what Washington is like. Seeing just sky behind the car is accurate. At times if I had the time to look I'd see that one side of the road is just a drop off with lots and lots of air!
That's why I really like this picture, it truly is "The Climb to the Clouds"
In reply to Challenger392 :
Yes that is a great picture!
The temperature and weather in general hadn't been cooperating with painting the chassis outdoors. Then there is the problem of moving it. I probably could get the tractor to lift it, I've done it before but it is awkward. So Kelly had the idea that we use the long easy up to build a paint booth.
One nice part of this is I used the lift to raise the car for painting the bottom of the chassis. Overall it worked great.
Clever. I'm keeping that idea for later.
In reply to ShawneeCreek :
It worked well. First a couple tarps for the floor. Then put up the easy up and attach clear plastic to the sides. I left an opening in the back down low and put a floor fan in it. I just ran that on high the whole time I was painting as an exhaust fan. I left the garage door open part way to allow the fan to blow out. The day I painted turned out to be a reasonable temperature so I had no problem keeping the garage warm even with the door part way open. If it had been ready cold I would have probably created some sort of shroud for the fan exhaust.
I'm just happy that I was smart enough to create some sort of paint booth. Which should be read as "I've made that mistake before". Having to clean the paint off the floor and dealing with paint dust on EVERYTHING sucks.
When I did the trailer inside I put down tarps but I couldn't figure out anything to enclose the whole trailer. I'm still cleaning black paint dust off random items when I pick them up on a shelf for the first time since the trailer was painted.
I like it when the weather is warmer and I have something small enough to move outside much better.
Motor is going back into the chassis!
Also have some new safety gear. They are not kidding about the lite part. By feel this weighs half of the Simpson Hybrid it is replacing.
The other new safety gear was a new harness but there was a problem with that and it is on the way back. The "new" harness from Jegs was actually pretty old. The expiration date on SFI tag was June 30th 2019. Which is the same as the one I have now. The nice lady at Jegs is drop shipping me one from the manufacturer and said she was going to have them pull them all from the warehouse so all the others they have can be checked.
In contrast the SFI tag on the Necksgen is the old style with a manufactured date instead of an expriation date but the manufactured date is Aug 2019. So it is newer than new!
Motor is in! Just lots more to do.
Seeing an ol skool SBC in a most appropriate chassis makes everything right in my 'world'... carry on maestro !!!
Made some good progress on reassembling. The rear suspension is also done. After this photo I put the left front hub on and when I roll it its not rolling smoothly,. little bumps. Hoping it is just a bearing so I ordering new bearings for all the hubs. I also ordered new races and a bearing race driver kit just in case. I've never had to replace a bearing race before. That will be a new experience if I have to do it.
Lots of work being done but I haven't been posting it. So here are a bunch of pictures.
The new belts arrived and this time the tag isn't a month from expiration.
Where do you get your hoses and fittings?
Last year I said
The end of the push rod was a little beat up but I decided it would probably be fine.
It wasn't. I found a bit of pushrod in the old oil pan. Notice one of these things is not like the other? The push rod is about 0.100 short. The nice part is Comp Cams puts the part number right on the side of the pushrod so I didn't even have to dig into my notes to order a replacement.
Challenger392 said:Where do you get your hoses and fittings?
The Speedway brand push on fittings are great and cheaper than anything else I have found that is good. However I don't recommend the Speedway push on hose. I've had some bad luck with it leaking and I now always buy the more expensive Aeroquip socketless hose.
I did spend some time looking for cheaper alternatives since I had hundreds of dollars in hose and fittings this time. I didn't have a lot of luck. I did find one place that had fittings cheap but it was shipped direct from China and the shipping times quoted were very long and I wasn't sure they would really be any good. So I ordered one -12 fitting from them. I did get it and the shipping time was much less than quoted but the fitting is low quality. It only has two barbs for holding the hose instead of three on the Speedway and Aeroquip fittings and it also has a much smaller inside diameter so it will flow a lot less. So not really a great deal.
Lots more stuff done. Mechanically the car is getting close. Tonight it was setting the brake bias. I removed the old brake bias adjuster that came with the car. This consisted of cable and knob setup in the car that allowed the brake bias to be adjusted while driving. For circle track this makes a lot of sense. On longer runs where you are doing the same corners over and over you can adjust the front to rear bias which optimize braking as the car's handling changes. I hear that sometimes adding a little more rear bias can help the car turn in under braking.
But for hillclimbs where I'm in the car for minutes and no two corners are the same it doesn't make much sense to try adjusting the bias while driving. Removing the adjusting mechanism probably took half a pound out of the car and I'm all about reducing weight.
I'm glad that back on page 28 of this thread I documented the front and rear pressures I was using because I had to do a lot of adjusting once the old mechanism was removed to get the pressures back to where they were before.
I'm supposed to leave for Philo on Friday. Still hoping to have the car back together for then.
Came into the garage this morning to find this.
So now the car loves me? From the way it has tried to kill me a few times I always figured it didn't really care for me that much..
Turns out my wife loves me! I left a light on in the garage which she noticed late at night when she woke up. Before turning it off she left me the message using all the rivet mandrels that are littering the floor right now.
Living in the garage for a couple months pays off! It's a whole car again as of an hour ago. I even took it for a test drive around the house earlier. Just need to set caster, camber and toe tonight.
Good thing since I need to leave for the first race at Philo tomorrow.
In reply to KevinGale :
Nice to see it together. Have fun.
Back from Philo and the car is all in one piece! I even ran pretty well with a 1:06. Sherman and Paul were both ahead of me but I expected that. But they were not really far ahead. We ran, 1:04 (Paul), 1:05 (Sherman) and 1:06 (Me) in class. My best at Philo is a 1:05 so I'm feeling pretty good about a 1:06 given the problems I had.
Problems:
Saturday morning I drove down the hill for the fam run. At the bottom I shut off the car while waiting and it wouldn't start again. It wouldn't turn over acting like the battery was dead. Some nice people gave me a push start and I was able to complete the fam run. At the top I noticed an awful electrical burning smell. When we pulled the hood off I could see that the charging wire to the alternator had melted. All the insulation had burned off and the wire itself had melted into two pieces. At some point I had accidently moved the wire and it was touching the header. So two mistakes there, moving the wire and not having it tied down enough so it couldn't get near the header. I lost a few runs on Saturday fixing this problem. I was able to borrow some wire and I replaced the melted wire and tied things back away from the header. Thanks to Brian Dennis for the loan of electrical tools, connectors and a piece of wire that was so perfect for the job that I didn't even have to cut it. Sherman also threw tools and connectors at me and showed me proper electrical crimping technique (always something new to learn).
The battery was all but dead so I also borrowed a battery charger from Sherman.
Once the battery was charged enough to start the car Jamie Melhuish (who was helping) noticed the starter was wiggling all over the place while starting the car. It turned out that the adapter bracket for the starter (to allow it to work with a 105 tooth flywheel) was loose. So it was another session of crawling under the car.
Got everything buttoned back up and went to take another run. At the bottom the car once again wouldn't start. The battery acted like it was low in spite of just having taken it off th charger fully charged just minutes ago. I got another push and made a run.
At the top while trying to figure out why the battery was dead again I got a report that I was leaking fluid. That one at least turned out to be easy. After a few minutes of searching I found the power steering tank was leaking and tightening up the fitting seemed to fix that.
The car kept failing to restart even when the battery was full when I left the pits. I had to resort to not shutting the car off. I also turned up the idle so the car would charge while idling since normally it won't. But the higher idle and idling all the time lead to an overheating problem. So I was constantly stressed that the car was going to overheat before I got a run in. And of course if it got too hot I would have to shut it down and then it might not restart. It made it hard for me to concentrate on driving!
The next run I got to the top and noticed smoke coming out from under the hood. I thought I had fried the charging wire again but this time it was the oil vent line from the valve cover dripping oil onto the header. I had to pull the valve cover to fix that.
I was getting really tired of opening the hood and/or crawling under the car after each run!
Sunday was better. I still had to keep the car running but I was able to adjust the idle so it would just charge without overheating. I managed to mentally get it together for a couple runs and I'm pretty happy with a 1:06 for the shakedown cruise after a complete rebuild.
I'm hoping the whole starting thing is just having killed the battery and I have a new battery on the way that I can put in before leaving for the next event at the end of this week.
People helping me work on the car.
That sounds pretty miserable.
Nothing like endless problems! It seems that your car should have no problem keeping it cool just sitting with a high idle. I assume that’s more like 1500-2000 vs 4500.
Is it just lack of airflow at 0 mph?
If you shorted the alternator wire and did not blow a fuse or fusible link somewhere, you may have burned up the diodes. Time to test that alternator.
Jerry From LA said:If you shorted the alternator wire and did not blow a fuse or fusible link somewhere, you may have burned up the diodes. Time to test that alternator.
I should add a fusible link, no question about that. The question is if I will do it. :-)
The alternator is charging. I can see that on the voltage gauge I have in the car.
jfryjfry said:That sounds pretty miserable.
Nothing like endless problems! It seems that your car should have no problem keeping it cool just sitting with a high idle. I assume that’s more like 1500-2000 vs 4500.
Is it just lack of airflow at 0 mph?
We are talking 1500-2000 RPM. And yes my thought is it shouldn't have overheated from that with the fan running (which it was). It doesn't overheat idling near 1000 RPM or a bit lower. I need to check the coolant system tonight to make sure I don't have any air bubbles in it or that it is low on water. It also doesn't overheat racing with or without the fan running.
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