Rabbit Farmer said:Ready for Ascutney #1? :)
Not yet but I should be. Need to put the side of the car back on. Going to get fuel and tires next week. I need to do some test laps around the yard to see if my new clutch slave cylinder is working.
Rabbit Farmer said:Ready for Ascutney #1? :)
Not yet but I should be. Need to put the side of the car back on. Going to get fuel and tires next week. I need to do some test laps around the yard to see if my new clutch slave cylinder is working.
Good day today. Got a bunch done. Filled up the dry sump system with Oil and primed the motor. Changed gears in the quick change. And I nearly got filling the cooling system with water. I say nearly because I had a leak. My coolant overflow/expansion tank from Speedway has had one modification to it. It has an extra inlet added that take a small line from the back of the intake. Actually there are two lines, one from each back rear corner of the intake but they join together and one line comes back to the tank. John Reed created this and I think it is to prevent any air pockets from happening in the back of the motor. In any case the tank is very thin wall aluminum. The small (-4 I think) fitting was screwed into the the thin aluminum with some RTV around it. It worked for many years but this time it started leaking.
To fix the leak I had to drain part of the system I just filled. Of course! Once I got it out I found I couldn't tighten the fitting at all. It was just completely stripped. I found a 1/4" pipe thread adapter that the fitting would thread into. Got out the tap set and tapped the hole up to 1/4" pipe. That tightened down but there is not a lot to bite into so I mixed up some JB Weld. I added the JB Weld to the threads, screwed in it and then all around the base. We will see. If I'm luck this will hold for another ten years or so.
Tires and Fuel.. Got three of the tires mounted yesterday. Also fired up the rebuilt motor for the first time and set timing.
I also forgot I had to do some percussive maintenance to the fuel pump.
When I first fired the car it started up and ran but died after a short while. It wouldn't restart and acted like it wasn't getting fuel. A quick check of the fuel pressure gauge showed no pressure. So it worked on the prime setting initially to fill up the carb but then stopped pumping. I could hear the pump motor running but nothing worked now not even priming.
I started cracking lines. Pulled off a carb line and had no fuel. Thinking it might be the fuel pressure regulator I pulled off the line before the regulator but no fuel there either. Which left me staring at the pump. The electric Holley pump isn't hard access or to disassemble. There is a rebuilt kit and I've done the rebuild in the past. But while I am staring at it I starting to think that this car hasn't been run since 2019 and maybe something is just seized up. So grabbing a piece of roll bar tubing that was handy I rapped on the pump several times. Went back and tried the prime switch again and like magic I had fuel pressure.
This worked for a minute then I had to repeat. But after the second time the pump ran fine though several firings of the engine. I ran it long enough set timing and then to get the new headers hot and burn off most the the header paint.
I'll have to watch it and if the car won't start I at least know where to direct my anger. I'm hoping however that it is fixed for now. Glad this is a racecar and not a plane for example. I'm pretty sure that for an airplane that no one would think that banging on the pump to get it to start working again was an acceptable fix. :-)
In reply to KevinGale :
It sounds like an SU fuel pump problem.Clean the points or whatever electrical connections you have.
In reply to KevinGale :
Yes but can you smash on it while approaching the bridge on Ascutney?
dextervw said:In reply to KevinGale :
Yes but can you smash on it while approaching the bridge on Ascutney?
The bumps at Ascutney will smash it enough. :-)
frenchyd said:In reply to KevinGale :
It sounds like an SU fuel pump problem.Clean the points or whatever electrical connections you have.
I don't think it is electrical. The pump motor ran every time. It just didn't always pump.
I've been working on the car and lately I've been getting a coat of paint on the right side body panels that are off the car right now. Most of the side body panels are fairly beat up from various off road excursions. I'd like to replace them but that's a project and I don't even have tools for bending large sheets.
Anyway NEHA doesn't have any cosmetic rules and I don't have to worry about presenting a good image for my sponsors. :-) So I mostly just want a fresh coat of paint to hide scratches and dents and keep the panels from rusting. Still that represented a problem. I have numbers on the side panels and I don't want to order new vinyl to put on the old beat up door. So I needed to mask off the numbers to paint the rest of the door. The numbers are of course not a simple straight line shape. They are all curves. So masking them off was looking to be a major pain. The vinyl is also very thin so it is pretty hard to see the seam once the masking tape is over it.
Clear masking tape to the rescue. I was looking at the problem thinking if the tape was just clear I could see what parts need to be trimmed off. So I did a google search for clear masking tape and here is what ai found.
3M brand 8911 is a tape that works as a clear masking tape. It's not cheap but boy was it handy. I ordered a couple rolls from ULINE. Once it was applied it was super easy to trim the excess off with an exacto knife.
Got a bunch of stuff done yesterday including finishing the exhaust. Mostly it was just giving it a coat of high temp paint.
Today was grip strength test day. This is about half of the rivets I did by hand today:
I'm not a big muscular guy but my forearms have some muscle definition. Good thing too. I used to have access to an air riveter but no longer. I've been meaning to buy one since they are cheap but when I am not doing the car body I don't need it and then when I am doing the car body it's too late to order it. :-)
Got the right side body panels back on. They are not pretty by a long shot and the paint isn't good but it has a coat at least.
Going to be ready for Ascutney?
Challenger392 said:Going to be ready for Ascutney?
I certainly hope to be ready. Things don't always go to plan. Yesterday I planned on getting enough stuff done to be able to take the car for a test lap around the yard. When I actually went to do this I found out that my clutch wouldn't disengage. I figured that either the new Howe slave cylinder wasn't working properly or I had somehow assembled the clutch incorrectly. Either way the transmission bellhousing had to come out. So I started taking things apart.
The clutch checked out fine so that meant there was some problem with the new slave cylinder. Maybe I somehow got the number of shims wrong after checking and measuring many times. It could also be defective. I decided I really didn't have time to mess with it so I threw the old Quarter Master slave cylinder back in the car. And late last night I had it back together and could verify the clutch is now working. Maybe I can get that test drive in later today. Still need to do caster, camber and toe on the front end and lots of little stuff but I think I should be Ok. You can see the storage location for our scales. How about your car Luke?
My car has had an undiagnoseAble problem lately. Keeps breaking up under load. Next thing to try is sending the fuel injectors out for cleaning and flow check. No Ascutney for me, hope to be at Burke.
Challenger392 said:My car has had an undiagnoseAble problem lately. Keeps breaking up under load. Next thing to try is sending the fuel injectors out for cleaning and flow check. No Ascutney for me, hope to be at Burke.
So sorry to hear that. Hope you make Burke.
It drives! Just got done from doing several laps around the house. I was able to test all 4 forward gears and reverse. The clutch is working. I still want to get that smaller and lighter Howe slave cylinder to work but another day. I was also able to get it hot enough to burn most of the residue from the paint on the headers. The high temp paint still burns off something the first time it gets hot.
Okay I see a cylinder head with bolts .....where is your other exhaust support point?
759NRNG said:Okay I see a cylinder head with bolts .....where is your other exhaust support point?
The end of the muffler has a tab welded to it which bolts to the nerf bar. The other side has something similar but it happens on the inlet end of the muffler there. I did the same thing with the old mufflers and it supported things just fine.
The end of the muffler has a tab welded to it which bolts to the nerf bar. The other side has something similar but it happens on the inlet end of the muffler there. I did the same thing with the old mufflers and it supported things just fine.
Knew you had it under control ......camera angles leave alot to conjecture.....carry on
Ready to go on the trailer for Ascutney tomorrow!
Ascutney was up and down. It was nice to get back to racing after such a long break. The car ran great and didn't give me any problems. Saturday was beautiful day all around. Here is the car on the top:
Sunday wasn't all bad either. I got one of these.
But I also got some of these (shelf of broken parts)
And those were from this
On my last run I was going for it. Paul was out in the Super Chicken and I had a chance to win overall with a fast run. Part way up the hill it started raining but it was only some drops on my helmet and traction was good. So I kept pushing. Unfortunately it was raining a lot harder right at the top. I came up over the rise and charged down into the entrance to turn 29. It didn't really sink in that that road was a lot wetter right there until I tried to stop. The car wouldn't stop and I went right off the outside of the corner. I'll do some more damages updates later. But it all looks fixable before the next event. I did win my class and was second overall to Chris Reilly by just a couple tenths of a second. So good points outing at least.
In reply to KevinGale :
Glad you're ok and don't seem too annoyed by the off-road adventure. Did you get any video of the runs?
In reply to edwardh80 :
I did get some video of a slower run on Saturday. But I didn't put the camera in the car Sunday. Just kept forgetting. I'm not expecting I will take the time to post the Saturday video now that I have so much to fix on the car before the next event. Part of it is that the video just doesn't really interest me. I have posted video of Ascutney before and it looks just the same.
This video for example is from 8 years ago. The car looks a little different but the in-car could have been from today.
Here is some of the damage. I've cleaned it up and put a coat of paint on because I decided I'm not going to try to fix any of this. The bent tubes are not hurting anything. Battle scars!
The super strong radiator support also is bent up a little but not enough to cause any problem and it protected the radiator. The rear of the car below and behind the fuel cell also had a bent tube but again not enough to bother anything.
So here are the damages:
I'm also replacing pretty much all the heim joints but that is mostly for my peace of mind. The Speedway Motors chromoly heims are impressive. Not a single one of them is bent or has any play in it. They all feel pretty much like new. The Howe ball joints also came through unscarred.
The oil pan has some battle scars but they are not big enough to cause a problem. I first turned the motor over by hand to make sure everything felt OK and then I fired it up. It started instantly and sounds perfectly happy.
Now I just need to spend a bunch of money to replace the broken stuff. :-)
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