But first we had to assess the damage / situation, to do this we once again needed a leak down tester as we had cannibalised ours a little, so a big thank you goes to Sam Freeman for the loan of his tester and three hours of engine tuning tips to my son and crew chief Steve. It was three hours because I got stuck in London on my motorbike on the way to Sam's place because of a dam peddle bike race which shut off so many roads I ended up going round in bloody circles for hours on end thank you TFL for all the diversion road signs....not!!!
So in the end instead of meeting up with the crew at Sam's I went straight to the truck just outside Bedford, first things first, move truck out a little, let the tailgate down and get the genny out and running and plug compressor in, remove spark plugs and rocker boxes......
I must point out at this stage we are doing a leak down test on a cold engine, it should be a warm engine giving the rings etc time to expand and seal properly so if the results were okish then the chances are the rings are OK too, the results we got were quite low which was a good sign till we realised we reading the gauge the wrong way which meant the results were actually rather bad, under advisement we squirted some oil into each pot and started the test again..the oil sealing the rings and the results shot up sooo!!!..it looks like we will need another set of of total seal rings...
...the problem is there are two reasons why this could have happened..1. bore wash..this where the engine has been running too fat (rich) for too long and the oil has been cleaned out of the bores completely by the fuel..methanol therefore no lubricant in the bores so the the rings wear out quick, or 2. Running too lean for too long and having the rings "shocked" which would also wear them out, the problem is we don't which our engine succumbed too!!
And of course we will have to check the bores and hopefully we will get away with a quick hone?? So that is the first problem dealt with.Next is the injection system, it is old but we don't' know how old ?we have had a lot of trouble setting it up and huge amount of problems with the barrel valve which looks like it is starting to corrode, as most of you know we have had nothing but trouble with getting the fuelling right and maybe we it is time to change the injection system..well not maybe we will have to change the injection system.....
It looks like we will have to put a tunnel ram system on our car something very similar to what Mark Coulsell runs on his slingshot. Next problem is our Torque converter our 60 foot times show it is not man enough for the job it was ok on the last engine but that was around half the horsepower our 60foot times have slowed up considerably, so I have now got to get in touch with BTE or similar and get one made to fit out engine.
Oh! and did I mention we need a new flex plate as ours now has a few teeth missing and probably a new mini high torque starter.
So we have an awful lot of hard work in front of us if we decide to continue and a lot of money needs to be spent,,as I was told a day ago I have probably spent enough money that would have bought me a complete brand new rear engine 4 link super pro car?? oh well. And while we were tinkering with the engine on Sunday we found another problem.....
This would not have helped with the running of the engine either and once all this work is done we still have the worry that the final drive ratios are correct or not? we will worry about that once all the other work has been done.
So are we going to do this work and get the car back out on the track ?
..of course we are, I was hoping to get everything done for the Hot Rod Drags in September but it does seem that we have more to do than I previously thought so that might not happen now, in fact it may be next year before the car sees the track again but when it does!!!! maybe it will fly like we hoped she would!!!
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