The Road to ChumpcarThe home of "Apex of Failure" a crap-can racing team.

The main push today was to finally get the car started.  We were not succesful.

Some more work was done on the switch panel.

Gabe filled the tranny with oil… to the max.

I found an air bubble in the water system which allow me to put another gallon of water in there.

Then we tried to get the car started.  No fuel pressure.  No voltage at the pump.

Missing “circuit opening relay”.  Turns out this is the real fuel pump relay, which apparently they don’t want to call “the fuel pump relay”.  Added the relay, no luck.  Tested the relay, tests good.  Tested the air flapper sensor thing, tested good.  Relay is getting out, relay is not giving power.

At this point, the team bugged out low on sleep and food.

An electrical engineer buddy of mine spent over an hour on the phone with me reading through the factory service manual trying to understand these circuits and how this relay works.  (Thanks chris!)  We made a solid step forward.  It looks like this relay has two things that can tell it to turn on.  The ECU and the air flow sensor.  If the air flow sensor is opened all the way up (its just a little flapper) it tells the fuel pump to turn on.  I wedged one open with a screw driver and BAM fuel pump fired right up.  That means the ECU isn’t sending the signal to the fuel pump relay to turn on.

I tried a second ECU real quick, no luck.  Looks like something that supports the ECU isn’t working.  That’s going to be a mess to troubleshoot.  Luckily the factory service manual has some pages on troubleshooting it.  Work for tomorrow.

Pluses from today:

The fuel pump, fuel pump wiring, fuel pump relay, starter, and ignition switch all work.  That’s a good step forward.

Minuses:

We still have at least 20 things on our todo list.  The pressure is stepping up.

We just finished the second weekend long push before our first test day at our local track (Portland International Raceway).  Our goal was to get the engine started, we didn’t quiet get there.

I started the morning off with some detail prep work.  The front area is looking a lot more orderly.

Getting the radiator ready by fixing all the bend fins and cleaning the front off.  Maybe 50% of the fins were covered by YEARS of build up.  Put some degreaser on it, hosed it off, then used the air nosel to clean most of it off.  Good enough for $500 crap can racing.

I couldn’t find the nicer power steering pump (which i later did ) so I cleaned up the nasty one.  At least 1/4 inch of dirt and oil on it.  Looks so much better now.

The bulk for the work today was on engine bits.  Here is the state midway through the morning.

Work progresses.  All the water lines are connected.  I think we will have to leaks to deal with.  We routed new lines around the throttle body and bypassed the heater core.  Solved some mysteries for plugs and wires too.  Were not all done there

Nick finished the steering wheel mount and started on our new “center console”.  Basically some brackets to hold gauges and switches.  That pile of garbage next to he house, uhh, i mean “recycling” came it useful for something.  We sources all our scrap from that.

What a mess.

Bam cleaned up!  I’m glad I took a ton of pictures while we were taking apart the cars.  I needed their help to figure out this puzzle.

Test fitting the new center mount gauge cluster.

Gauges mounted in their completed mount.  Very solid.  It’s better than I had hoped for.  The aluminum pieces at the bottom are the starting of a structure for a switch panel.  A tripple gauge pod will weld onto the cage just above the steering wheel.  The UHF radio fits in here somewhere to.  I think on the top of the tranny tunnel.

This panel is going to mount off the structure… somehow.  We don’t have a welder to do aluminum so maybe some allthread?  I dunno.  Shouldn’t be too hard.  Needs some trimming and maybe some padding to protect our legs.  The warning light cluster thing is going to get glued in under the stock gauges there.

Lots of great progress today but not all the way to where we wanted to be.  Just a couple things to button up before we try to start it.

I ending up spending about half the day cleaning up after all the other projects.  It was starting to look like a disaster area.  There is a mound of stuff in the tarp tent that keeps growing.  It’s kind of an issue.  Enough complaining, on to the race car.

Since we aren’t using the stock dash, the steering column lost its mount location.  Nick is making one up here.  It’s great that we are doing this as we can recenter the wheel a little and fix the driving position.

I spent most of the time getting everything organized and ready to be finished.  Lots of parts runs.  I plugged away at the engine.  Solved a dozen or so wire and hose mysteries.

This is going to be an issue.  When we took out the air pump, we also took out half of the belts for water pump and fan.  We need to find some way to get more engagement on that pully.

This whole front area is still a disaster.  I’d really like to simplify this whole area.  We only need 20% of this harness.  Cleaning it up could be very time consuming and any issues could prevent making our testing track day on the 21rst.  I think I will just have to leave this for another day.

The windshield is preped and ready to go in.  We just need to finish everything that has to be done that requires it to be out.

That’s it for today.  I have at least two helpers for all day tomorrow.  I think it’s actually possible we could get it started!

We might actually might make this track day.  I got a good bit done.  Nothing crossed off the list but eventually all this will add up.

Check it out, the world’s smallest lock pin.  This holds the control rod from the oil metering pump to the throttle.  Apparently its completely mechanical and works against the throttle.

I mounted the clutch line to where it should be and have it a good bleed.  The pedal doesn’t stay on the floor anymore and there is defiantly some feel there now.  Unfortunately our rebuild on the master cylinder wasn’t perfect.

Rare under car shot.  Starter is all wired up now as well as all the tranny senors.

Oil cooler is hooked up.

Rob also dropped off the cable for the new battery/alternator/kill switches.  It’s going to be a pretty long run and could have a pretty heavy load on it so we went the safe route and got 2 gauge.  Beefy stuff, really expensive too.  The power wire is going to run from the alternator to the battery to the first kill switch on the outside to the second kill switch on the center console and finally to the stock positive battery terminal location in the engine bay.

First kill switch is done and wrapped in.

The rest will be done when these areas get finished.  I also did a bunch of little stuff in the engine bay.

I have a couple helpers tomorrow so expect some serious progress!

Edit:

Our latest I/O Port Racing order is here.  A full setup of ChumpCar regulation 5 gallon utility jugs with all the vents/caps/filler necks.  I also got some replacement hardware for the windownet (that we lost somehow).

I have been popping into the garage in and our over the last couple of days to get some little things done.

I simplified the the rear wiring harness.  It leads from the cabin fuse box (by the driver’s feat) back.  It also included all the switches in the center console, the electric damping adjust system, and a lot of the sound system.  85% of it we had no use for.  The only thing we need back there is the fuel pump and the brake lights.

The harness terminates cleanly in the three green plugs you see there just to the left of the fuse box.  It made it really nice to reduce the bundle at that point.  I just pulled the pins of all the wires we didn’t need.  I ended up getting rid of a whole plug (and nearly 2).

I also finished mounting the battery.  Take one cheap battery box.

Mount in passenger compartment with two pieces of all thread (with big washers and lock nuts).  Insert big battery.

Cut a piece of spare aluminum as a tie down, drill a couple holes and voi la.  Battery with battery box, done.

I want to get rid of the stock inginiton switch and put a simple on/off and push start in the dash but we don’t have time to deal with that right now.  Stock stuff going back in.

Started in on the seat belts.

The shoulder belts are as easy as can be.  The lap belts will be pretty easy too.  I just need to drill a couple holes.  Before I do that, I think I’ll wait til someone can take a second look at the placement.

The crotch punishment belt is going to be a problem.  Its hard to tell from this picture, but the seat is nearly touching the floor pan.  In order to make the roof as safe as possible we wanted clearance up there.  That means that we have very little room to mount this strap.  I think we have just barely enough though.

The big issue is going to be how we mount it.  There is this boxed section running in the middle of the floor pan right where it needs to go.  The bolt isn’t long enough to clear the whole thing.  What it looks like from under the car.

The engine is still a huge mess.  I’m shooting to get the car started this weekend.  I feel like that is nearly impossible but it’s a good goal to shoot for.

We started off today with some suspension work.  I had this impression that the car was far too high.  It was but not nearly as much as I had thought.  We are just going to have some pretty serious gab.  The wheel is tiny and the space is huge.  Ohh well, it will make a turn.

Before:

Stuff taken apart.  We cut a coil off the passenger side (to match the drivers from the last work session).  The bump stop got cut down a little too.  We also cut down the threaded sleeve so the bumpstop was able to go all the way down.

We did some stuff to the back too.  It’s pretty awesome how easy it is to take the back shock and spring off.  Three bolts!  Three!  I have never worked on such a simple car.  It’s nice.

Results:

We also installed the seat back brace.  We still need to drill the hole for the quick release pin but other than that its ready to go.

Had to bend this to fit the shape of the seat.

We played with the steering wheel mount a little too.  Now that the stock dash bar is gone, there is nothing for it to mount to.  We are going to make up a bracket to attach it to the cage.  Nick is seen here uhh doing something related to that.

Right turn clyde.

Returning to its rest spot under a tarp in the rain.  Sleep well sweet prince.

Really was a lot easier than I expected.  A little clean up and some rustolium.

We had enough time left that we got in on the suspension again.  There is definitely a lot of work to do.  The bump stops are too high giving us very little travel.  Even with the spring adjusters all the way down we still need the car at least 2 inches lower.

So we tried cutting some spring down.

The results:

Yeah not even close.  Also… it’s sitting on the bump stops.

Nore work to do on the suspension later.

There isn’t a lot of narrative to add here.  A huge thank you to Pat at Thompson’s Motorsport for all his help.  This ended up being a great learning experaince for our whole team.  We also roped in one of the other local subaru guys to help weld and we may have ended up with another driver .  Come on chris, you know you want to.

Credit to ryan for this project.  He found the connections, did all the logistics, and really made this happen.  We saved easily, $1000 with this plan and got it done in 2 days.

Thanks everyone for all your work making this happen.  Here are another huge pile of pictures!

SHE LIVES!

Can you tell I’m excited about the cage yet?

Just a quick post, just got back from the cage shop.  Awesome place.  A quick set of pictures to get everyone’s attention.