Recently my posts have been shorter, more frequent, and filled with pictures. It kind of reflects the ramped up rate of work on my Lil’ Red Wagon. I have either been at work, or working on the race car, every day for the past couple months trying to get ready for some racing before the season is over. Today I worked on gettting the car cornerweighted. It’s not a complicated process, you just need a good friend to loan you an expensive set of car scales (thanks Tim), a little patience, and an afternoon off in a quiet garage so you can keep track of the process. Here is an article from Grassroots Motorsports on the subject. The idea is to use your fully adjustable suspension system to create a neutrally stable car while cornering.
My garage floor is really sloped and uneven, so it took a while to get the scales level using lots of boards and shims.
Next I added weight around the car as it would be in racing conditions: 175 pounds in the driver’s compartment, 7 gallons in the tank, and a couple of yet unmounted components placed in their proper positions. Tire pressures should be equalized, and sway bars unhooked for accurate readings.
Next get some inital readings, take lots of notes, and start adjusting your spring perchs until your crossweights are as close to 50% as you can get.
My buddies at The Moore Speed Co really came through for me by working with me all weekend wrapping up several projects on the Race Wagon. We finished up the paint, door panels, fuelcell firewall, and a bunch of little things I needed some help with. I’ve still got several more issues to wrap up prior to getting the goon on the track, but we are almost there.
We painted on a couple stripes, got the front end back together, and made some door panels.
We got a nice coat of fresh red paint on today. Some stripes and numbers are up next.
Loaded up and ready for a fresh coat of red!
This week I had the opportunity to meet Pete Weber, the owner and chief machinist at Quiet Horsepower. Pete’s one of those smart and quiet guys that has probably forgotten more about high performance exhaust systems than I’ll ever know. I purchased one of his Phase 10 mufflers for the Race Wagon and had it installed down at my favorite local exhaust shop. Maybe next year I’ll have the time and money for one of Pete’s beautiful full stainless exhaust systems. I had my exhaust system built with all slip joint junctions so it can be easily disassembled in sections at the track to allow for easier servicing (ie. trans or diff swaps). I’ll need an additional silencer of some type to pass sound control at Laguna Seca’s quiet days, but I’ll deal with that issue later.
My Lil’ Red Wagon belched it’s first breath of fire this morning, a small step in the long run but a big deal today. I dry cranked it first with the sparkplugs out to make sure I had oil pressure, then tried to start it up. After figuring out I had the dizzy leads reversed (doh!), it fired right up on the next crank. It settled into a nice high idle, so I checked the timing and found it pretty close. Oil pressure was 80+ psi, and the fuel pressure needed to be adjusted down to 3-4 lbs. No big leaks, so I let it run for about 5 minutes, then shut it down. After letting it cool down for several hours I retorqued the cylinder head and cam tower bolts, checked the valve clearances, and tightened up a couple things to get rid of some little leaks. Next will be finishing up the exhaust system and airbox, then getting the steering aligned and the car corner-weighted. Tick-tock, tick-tock…
I was originally going to rivet the rear flares on after painting the wagon so I could keep the rivets unpainted, but I decided to put them on now so I could check the fit beforehand. These are 14×7 Panasports with standared zero offset, 225/50/14 Hankook Z214′s, and .40″ spacers, using a Datsun 510 2 door IRS under the wagon. The rear clearance looks real good, but the front flares with a .75″ spacer under the wheel is looking a little tight (again). I’m also working on getting the front end looking right.
