62. Will it wont it? pleaaasssee!!!!!!

What a long day yesterday was 28/04/2015 armed with a borrowed distributor and a 6 man tent from my daughter I made my way back round the motorways to Swindon, while travelling down the M4 I noticed lots and lots of blue flashing lights in the other carriageway.

A cement lorry had crashed through the barrier and tipped over, the motorway was still closed last night I didn't get home till just after 3am I left Swindon at 9:30pm.

Anyway got to Swindon took the truck and car round to Mr. O'Sullivan's workshops where we unloaded her...

A little bit of work required to change the distributor and modify a set of leads to fit on the MSD cap as it is different to the Mallory one. Then we filled up her fluids connected the battery , we turned her over got the oil pressure up primed the fuel and hit the ignition and she tried to fire up straight away...timing was way out..so some fettling and we tried again..same result, this happened three times, if you go to our You-Tube channel  Slimline Racing you can find some video clips of this and of course......this one.........

She's alive at last, all the hard work was worth it I know on the video the car sounds really rough but it didn't sound that bad in reality, yeah the timing was right out and the leads didn't fit properly but she ran so now the rest takes place at the track, can't wait to get in it and drive it now, I would like to say thanks to everyone that has got us this far, especially my son Steve, his wife Kerry for putting up with not seeing him from one week till the next all the guys at the track, John O'Sullivan and Sam Feeeman for lending us a distributor, See you at a track very soon...be afraid be very afraid LOL !!

61. We keep plodding on...!

Well here we go again one step forward three back...this defiantly seems to be the story of my life at the moment, after all the hard work over the last few weeks we have yet another problem, it looks like we have had an electrical spike go through the ignition system somewhere in the past the person who wired up the MSD box left the in-line fuses out which would have saved all the damage...still they are in the right place now the new MSD box is functioning properly but we still have no spark the reason for this is the magnetic breakerless ignition module is also toast.....

The problem is the latest batch of these from Mallory were faulty so they have been re-called I can only get them from the States so this puts us back by another two or three weeks.....oh well.

In the mean time other jobs are getting down the gear linkage has been extended so we now have all the gears new gauges have been wired up, Steve has been working very very hard to complete all other tasks ready for firing up the car when the new part arrives.

The car is beginning to look like a race car again thank god.......

As I type this Steve is making the new screen for the car after which with a bit of luck the wheels will go back on and the car will be complete again.

An update to today's blog I spoke to the hard working Steve tonight and just about everything is done now apart from firing her up and he sent me a few piccies of the car before he packed up for the night and I have to admit she is looking good.

All back together in one piece something I was beginning to wonder would ever happen god my son has worked hard, and now I have to thank Sam Freeman as he is going to lend me a distributor so we can get the car fired up and set so we can packer her off back to Bedford ready for her first....since rebuild...trip up the track.

60. Here we go again...!

First of all how come no-one noticed I had missed out the 40's altogether on my post numbering system LOL, spent the last hour sorting that out. What a disappointment not to make Shaky last weekend but sometimes that's how it goes I suppose, so what did we find? well we had no spark and it looked like the MSD digital 6 plus box had malfunctioned, Steve got his mate to take it apart and have a look and sure enough there burnt out tracks and resistors they tried to fix it but it didn't work. So a quick run round the internet and I found a new one....

...which duly arrived the next day, while this was going on Steve had the trans brake button put on the steering wheel and had the gear linkage made a wee bit longer...

So we are getting there....this evening Steve has another friend...who is going to check all the wiring out for us as regards the MSD box then they will check for a spark, if everything is OK then fire up soon, we just have a new screen to make and to sort out the solenoid on the trans brake and re-fit the body panels, then all things being equal we might just get the car to the Pod on the 17th May for a test and tune and then see what happens, God this has been a long off season!!!!

59. So close but no cigar

What a week this has been, our original plan has always been to try and get the car ready for the Spring Madness weekend at Shaky well the Sunday anyway. But one problem after another surfaced trying its s best to stop us running this weekend.

Steve had done so much work it's unbelievable, I took the batteries down on Friday Steve showed me what was to be another problem to sort out, this time it was the floor pan, the new gearbox has a deeper sump and fouls the floor pan so some modification is required.  I left Swindon with that 50 - 50 feeling but it was good to see the car just about back together again..

On Saturday I popped over to Shaky just to see some familiar faces and see what's going on and of course to listen to some loud engines...

Apart from new paint jobs I did notice new/ rebuilt engines..more on this later, well done to everyone looks like the off season was a success.

Plan B was just to get the car fired up on Sunday, Steve worked hard all day on this at around 1pm he rang to tell me that the good news the battery and starter turn the engine over and that he has oil pressure and as much as he can see all the electrics work apart from the Trans Brake...phone call to All on Monday I think., He was ready to try and start the car he just needed to know that the ignition system was working so he was going to turn it on and just check the last few bits out.

I threw my camera in the car and was about to leave for Swindon when Steve rang me back.."hold on" he said " can't get a spark" so I got back out of the car and waited for another phone call. An hour later Steve rang back, I have checked all the wiring everything is where it is supposed to be and he had been through the MSD problem solver and still no spark...the MSD box is toast.....

So that's it can't go any further Steve got on to Zannetec who are coming to check it all out this week if it can be repaired fine if not I need to source a new one..

An hour later Steve rang me back he had got our part time team member Al round ad he had taken the MSD box apart and found one of the tracks on a circuit board lifted and broken they fixed this got the power light back but still no spark!!!

We have also got an issue with the gear linkage which needs sorting gout before the car can drive...shouldn't be too much of a problem then sort out the trans brake then....who knows eh. All I know is I had no idea that changing an engine would take so long and be so involved Steve has worked 24-7 on this and I am dam sure his wife must be getting seriously pissed off by now, and the neighbours are really not happy about no parking spaces...the truck does take up a lot of room.

The 7 Second Club

To get back to what I was saying before, there has been a lot of talk on a popular forum about how many British built slingshots have run under 7 seconds I seem to remember the number 12 popped up, that's not a lot considering how many slingshots there have been over 50 years or so We know that Bob has two of these cars that have 7's his older Time Traveller car which was on pump gas and carbs but with a real healthy dose of Nitrous but not injected methanol, and the new Time Traveller ex Speed Demon. And of course there have been a few new slingshots built recently with powerful supercharged engines and we know that they and our Bob  are chasing the elusive "6" second run.

So to get back to the cars with the new/ rebuilt engines injected methanol engines that is, are they after chasing 7's, I will have to do some research on this as I can't remember if Hemi Hunter when running an injected set up was running Nitro or not or if it ran a 7 in this guise before the supercharged engine was put in..so could it be that "No" injected methanol slingshot has run a 7 answers on a post card please if I am right then......"The Race is on folks"

58. maybe...maybe not!

Wow what a few days Ok so I did say that we could not make Shakey on the 19th as there was no way the car would be ready on time...but!!

Over the last two days Steve has not stopped working on the car, thanks to some help fromm the guys in the Wild Bunch the oil pressure switch is on the torque converter has been filled and put in place, gearbox is on and the coupling has been sorted so now we have the complete drive train....

The brakes will be finished tonight and our associate crew member Ali is coming round tonight to sort out the wiring and wire in the air/fuel sensor and trans brake.

I ordered the spark plugs from Real Steel this morning so fingers crossed they will arrive tomorrow which means...if we can get her fired up..and Steve is hoping to do this on Thursday we might still be able to make the 19th at Shakey after all.

So even though tomorrow is my birthday I will spend it sorting out my fire suite and helmet and trying g to find some spare boxers as this engine should dam well fly...hopefully up the strip and not just up!!!

So Steve has managed to get the car from this..............

To this...nearly ready to fire up..........

...in under a week..wow and there I was thinking I would never see the car in one piece again LOL..what a team, what a crew chief, what a son...see you all at a track very soon.

57. Little by little!!!

I haven't put much on here over the last couple of weeks as I have not been too well I spent a week in agony with an abscess on my tooth and just as that was getting better I got hit by this horrible coughing flu bug...fed up with it all.

But on the other side the engine is coming together we have had a problem or two to sort out first  one was the size of the harmonic balancer on the from of the thing it is huge, so big it fouls the fule pump drive....

We have had l lot of f good information on how to get round this from using a pump drive extension to a separate belt driven pump or even an electronic pump, my son was talking to John O'Sullivan about this and John suggested asking someone that really knows about such things he told Steve to expect a phone call from someone that day. Later that day my son Steve was chatting on the phone to the engine god that is Nick Davies from Ice Automotive and what he told Steve was if all the internals have been internally balanced then it will be OK to use the old harmonic balancer which was smaller, this will allow us to use the original pump set up if Nick says it will be OK then it will.

I was toying with a colour change on the car from red and black to green and black but we wont have time to finish that off now, We must concentrate on getting all the mechanical side sorted out so the car may look at strange as we now have a green tank and green stacks on the injection system...

We are lucky in that Steve does seem to know a lot of people in the automotive industry one of these friends is hot on paint dipping...so if you need anything like that give us a shout in the pits.

The engine should be back where it belongs in a couple of days and with a bit of luck she should be fired up by the end of the week if everything goes to plan then we will be at Shakey on the 19th, It will be a bit tight as to if we make it or not but you never know........

What are we looking for then, well the first couple of runs we would like to get past where we were last year 9.2's ie get into the 8's that will do to start with then one more RWYB to try and get the car into the  7's which is where we want it if possible, Then it's off the Nostalgia Drags and Dragstalgia...looking forward to it now.