race weekend

sounds like your April trip to Va will be to VIR.... that is very near me... and Shaggy too....

Yup, I think that's it.. I don't have any details yet though, and I'm not sure how many cars we'll be babysitting.... :D I'm pretty sure it will be more than just ours.

We also rent our car for trusted, capable drivers. If I had a licence, I could race it for free.... lol

For the time being, we only have one car ready to race. The 911. We just retired a 912 4-cylinder that did very well, it was owned by a customer but raced and worked on by us. We also have a 356 race car that has been raced for 34 years or so, but it was hit some time ago when someone on the track spun around and rolled backwards, right into the nose of the car. It is waiting for restoration back to full steel body race car. Not sure when it will be finished, still not sure which body shop we'll use for the metal reconstruction work. There's more to be done than just fix the accident repair. Fenders were cut off and attached with quick release fasteners, the plans are to have new metal fenders welded on permanently. The crash also trashed the steering box and a bunch of steering related parts. I'll start prepping a new box when time permits, between races this season. I just fitted an early 356 with a later model steering box on Monday, a tight squeeze but nothing a BFH couldn't fix :D

Oh yea, we also have a semi-tube frame later model 911 race car in pieces, the main body shell up in the rafters in our shop... one of those "one day" projects I guess!

Jan

And better still you get paid for this work???. When it,s your income I guess the fun fades a little. Also just slightly off topic is two of my kids have got modernish cars with polycarbonate headlight lenses. I was doing some work on both cars as Dads do and noticed the polycarbonate was going "opaquey". Got some Polishing wax out that had some very fine "cutting" action and gave them a polish for ~ 5 minutes. Crystal clear. Was only a surface film, cheaper than new lens assembly. In Australia the annual car inspection is carried out by blokes who would look good in "brown shirts" and would surely have knocked it back.!. Had one cove who was staring into my headlights, asked him what he was looking at and he was counting rust spots on the reflector. John

LOL sounds like a finnish inspection :)

Yea the fun and glamour certainly fades a little bit, not all of the work is so great. But I still get to work on aircooled performance stuff, and it seems we get to enjoy the excitement of firing up a freshly built engine about once a week these days :) Everyone is gearing up for the new season.

Well, our fun was cut short Saturday. We qualified 5th in the Vintage class, but from the beginning of the actual race to about half way, the engine seemed to get weaker and weaker. It finally started puffing out smoke on deceleration, so the bossman decided to call it quits and turn the engine off and have the car towed back. This was the first non-finish ever for this car, and it has done several 6 and 12 hour enduro races etc... This is basically a rebuild of the same old engine that was found to be reliable before, with only minor changes. The heads are a bit different. Both drivers babied the brand new engine too, we never pushed it to the limit.

We haven't been able to figure out what went wrong yet. It cranks over, seems to have at least some kind of compression, and it fires up and wants to run with starter fluid. But we couldn't start it up on it's own anymore the rest of the day. We are thinking the injection pump went out or the pump drive belt jumped and the injection pump timing went out. It has mechanical CIS fuel injection.

On a positive note, our several days of chassis/suspension setup paid off. I hear the car has never handled so well, never had so good traction. Got one thing right :)

jan

Update for those who care.

Cylinder #2 leak down result 100%. Several spark plugs indicated extreme lean condition, center electrode insulation heavily eroded.

I guess the fuel injection pump took a dump.

Dropped the engine and tranny tonight. This was a 2.4 liter, boss now needs to decide if he wants to rebuild this one or build his next evolution version, 2.9 liter...

Jan

Jan Anderss>

100% eh? that's not good....

Sounds like a Holy Piston to me :)

yep...

Here....

Looking at a complete teardown, cleanup & flush, then back together exactly the way it was, with a new (used, tested) injection pump.

We intended to go to Sebring again in 2 weeks, don't think we will go. Piston and cylinder are on their way, but there's so much other work to do...

damn... hate it when that happens.... been there before...

Never happened to me... well not since my 2-stroke days :)

>

Hmmm weird link glitch...

try again

no that's not me :D

Mine was white. Bought it new in '86 :D Bumped it up from 50cc to 80cc, different gears, bigger carb, sky high compression ratio etc.. The little thing hauled ass. Gears limited top speed to about 60mph, which was enough for me. Acceleration was what I was after anyway :)

Back then, I didn't fully understand compression ratios or why my piston kept welding itself to the cylinder wall! I just knew more compression makes it go faster. Sign me up!

Hmmm weird link glitch...>

this is what I used to play with as a kid (still have it, actually):

is silver metalic, not green.... otherwise the same.. I've burned quite a few pistons in the past, some worse than others... lean is fast... to a point, then it's bad...LOL