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

Just another rainy Tuesday.  First up, the steering rack is ready!

The water pump is on the 3rd motor.

We finally got all the missing pieces for the shifter assembly.  We were certainly missing some shims and the bushings were completely done.

Lower intake manifold it completely cleaned up and nearly ready to go.  We just need to plug up the space where the oil injectors were.

The last project for the day is to make a block off plate for the oil pump.

First off, make a cardboard template.

Then we transfer this shape on to some spare aluminum and start some cutting.

Close.  It needs some trimming but it will wait til next week.  The plan right now is to get this motor completely ready next week.  T

We are mostly waiting for the rest of our engine parts to get here in the mail.  First off nick has taken some time to clean up the throttle body that came with the 3rd motor.  It was pretty nasty.  Were also going to take the time to plug up the bits we aren’t using anymore.

We also started tackling all the gasket surfaces that need to get cleaned up.

Still a couple more to do.  I wonder if looking at pictures of us cleaning gaskets is as boring as cleaning gaskets…

Rob cut us a new access hatch for the gas filler neck.  It’s still fiddly and annoying to deal with but at least it takes less time now.  We are going to make some cover hatches too.

Aside from that, the rest was just moving some fittings over and cleaning up the manifolds for the third motor.

During tech at the AutoX we noticed a weird clunk in the front suspension.  I’m going to take the care down to tire factory tomorrow and get it up on a lift to see if it can find out where its coming from.  I want to test the belts (not actually showing positive signs ) and checkin

While researching simplification mods for our new motor, I decided to take a look into the steering rack as well.  We were never thrilled about running the power steering pump.  There was a manual rack that came one some 2nd gen rx7s but the steering ratio was horrible.  The steering ratio measures how much input you need to give on the steering wheel for the wheels to move.  A “quick” steering rack requires less input in the wheel which is ideal for our purpose.  So the “slow” manual rack wouldn’t work.  Taking out the power steering will also require more force to turn the wheel.  Parking could be a bit of a chore, but once we are up to speed we won’t even notice.  Due to an annoying beep from the power steering ECU at Spokane (due to the steering angle sensor, which was plugged in) we disabled the ECU.  We actually ran that whole race without power steering and no one even noticed.  Now that I have a little more time on my hands, its time to do something permanent with this steering.  Apparently miata racers have been doing this for years.  I followed these instructions from rx7club http://www.rx7club.com/showthread.php?t=440198.

We had a spare steering rack out of the white car.  My plan is to mod that rack and install it when we put the new motor in.  I went out to the tarp tent where the ChumpCar and discovered that a furry friend had decided to make its home there (just a cat!).

First off, time to get the steering rack off the front subframe.

Looks like the semi that hit this car bent one of the tie rods.  That will have to be replaced.

6 quick bolts through the bottom to release the steering mounts (with the bushings inside).  Don’t just hit the nuts with the impact gun, they are welded on to make it easier on you.  I make this mistake.

Bare rack.

Next, remove the tie rods.  Take the boot off first.  Since this tie rod was going to be replaced anyway, I cut the boot.  It’s important to have good boots so that the parts stay well greased and clean.

Next, I removed the steering knuckle.

Then I removed the locking nut and cover on these two access areas.

After removing a plastic dust cap, a snap ring needs to be removed from the top of the spindle.  It took me forever for some reason.  I even had the correct tool.

Next the spindle can be tapped out gentle from the bottom and removed.

Remove the lock pin on the passenger side end cap (by turning clock wise until the lock pin pops out and then counter-clock wise until it is removed).  The main shaft can now be removed.  Give it a good tug and it will pop out.

Slide the larger carrier bit off and the lock ring bit at the end.  All that will be left is the offending pneumatic seal.  All this work is to get this out of the system.

I prep’d the vise and got to work with the grinder.

Success!

Leave the little lock collar on the rod.  Next up, removing the fluid lines from the housing.  Since there will no longer be power steering fluid in this unit (just grease), all these holes need to do is be well cap’d to prevent dirt and water getting in.

A hammer finished these off nicely.

For the ports to the pump its self, I managed to find hardware in our box that matched the treading.  They were unfortunately too long, so I got out the dewalt bolt shortener.

For the line feeding the cooling loop, I found our spare loop and cut off the fitting that normally goes there.  It got the same hammer treatment.

Now it’s time to put everything back together.  The carrier bit slides back on the main shaft.  Apply a ton of grease.

… and reinstall.

Reinstall the lock pin.

Grease up the spindle and reinstall.

Lock washer goes back in.

On the bottom reinstall the nut (25ft-lb) and the housing cover (35ft-lb).

Before reinstalling the tie rods, make sure these little pins are pushed up.

Assemble the last door, half circle washer thing, spring, cover.  Tighten the cover to 43ft-lb four times.  Then loosen one quarter turn.  Then tighten up the lock ring while keeping the center tight.  If you were an idiot like me and striped the nut, apply grinder until the 14mm head becomes a 13mm and swear a lot.  Reinstall tie rods.

Nearly done!  The only thing I have left is to install the new tie rod and put it into the car.  Great saturday project.  Bench only projects make me happy.

I picked up a new present for us yesterday.

Motor!  It’s a pulled block from an n/a S4 (there were two kinds of 2nd generation rx7s, we have the earlier S4 car).  I saw it pop up on craigslist and jumped on it straight away.  It was pulled from a daily driver that was getting its own turbo II motor upgrade.  It has only been out of the car a month and looks to be in good condition.  It’s been rebuilt by FD3s engineering at some point.  We don’t have a lot more history than that.  The coolant seals were tested fine and it was running fine a month ago.  It cost us way less than a rebuild would cost.  The plan is to put this in the car as our primary motor.  The motor that’s in there now will then become our known good spare.

The guy we got it from was a real rotor head and hooked us up with a bunch more spare parts.  That’s the great part of running the lower trim levels.  No one wants the parts!

Manifolds, a tranny, starter, alt, and a cut wiring harness (good for replacement connectors!).  While we were fiddling with the new motor, nick get started on mounts for the new wingy.

We started swapping parts off our blown motor on to the new (to us) shiny one.  First off, the flywheels.

Just a couple of 2 and 1/3 in nuts later and were good.  The bearings in there were shot.  We have some spares but the seal at the end will need to get ordered. Some of the coolant lines on the blown motor were… bad.

The rats nest comes off.

Some block off plates are moved and the motor is shifter back so we can get at the water pump.  It’s amazing how light the “keg” is.  Two people can easily lift it.

On this motor, we are going to take some advice we got (several times already ) and premix the gas.  Rotaries are like two stroke motors is that they need their lubrication sprayed into the combustion chamber.  These motors have an oil pump and oil injectors that serve this purpose.  These pumps can fail and when that happens you can kiss your motor good bye.  So we are going to mix oil into our gas as we fill up the car and remove the oil injection system.  This is where the injectors once went.

The tentative plan right now is to just blue it with a bolt.  We also removed the water pump.  It looks serviceable still but we want to make sure we have a nice tight seal for the housings and the pump (it could be what caused our failure at the last race).  The pulleys have to come off first.  (We have a good spare set now!)

Boy was this thing a pain to get off.  One of the studs was so rusted that it filled the passage with rust and it took us a good ten minutes with a hammer and penetrating lubricant to get it off.

That’s it for tonight.  I have a good shopping list to work with and I think we have a great new motor!

So middle of august right?  Rain.

Tarps and tarps on legs to the rescue.  Here is the state of things after the AutoX.  This is after nine ~45 second autox runs and 20 or so miles of freeway driving.

More direct pictures of the damaged belts.  New vs Used.

The newest and I think best theory for all of our belt problems is rusty pulleys.  It then acts like sand paper against the belts and just grinds them down.  These pulleys were on the gray car originally and had been sitting for 8 years growing this “sand paper”.  The state of the pulleys currently on the car:

Not awesome.  The pulleys on the blown motor were much better.

Despite having three stock alternators at one point, I couldn’t find any other pulleys.  I think I threw them away thinking that the double pulley would solve all our problems.  We did our best to clean up the only remaining stock alternator pulley.  It’s not perfect but its a lot better.

We got a protip from a local guru (Thanks Bert!) about the fan.  It was designed to run idling in traffic with the a/c on.  We will certainly never have that kind of standing heat load on this car ever again.  We don’t need all 8 fan blades!  This should reduce load a little.  We were even told that maybe 2 blades would be enough.  Off with their blades!

Nice.

So now for the bad news.  I’ll tell the story in a series of pictures and then explain.

This is a series of pictures of the exhaust ports on our first (blown) motor.  I’m not going to go into the basics of how a rotary works but you can read about it here http://www.howstuffworks.com/rotary-engine1.htm.  It’s not at all like a normal piston motor.

I’m pretty sure that white fluffy stuff is mold.  In the third picture you can see the center iron which contains the chamber sides for both motors.  It’s blue.  I’m assume due to excessive heat.

The motor is FULL of water.  I think this pretty much means we have completely shot coolant seals.  If you turn it it just spits out massive amounts of water.  In the rest of the pictures I was trying to get a good shot of the combustion chamber surfaces.  These are supposed to be perfectly smooth and have a mirror like finish.  They are scored and pitted.  It’s likely that they are warped too.  That means that this motor is so badly damaged we can’t even rebuild it.

Lame.

Anyone have a rebuild-able S4 or S5 2nd gen N/A rx7 motor they want to sell?

Another great day for an AutoX.

Nick was nice a enough to give me a ride home yesterday and back to the “track” today.  The course was the same as the day before, only backwards.  It’s amazing how much that can change it.  I got a pro-tip from an veteran once that if you really want to learn the secrets of a track you should walk it backwards. I’m going to try to remember this at the right time during the next event .

After the walk was the customary driver’s meeting.

Then it was time to go out for some course work.  Some of the lines changed out there and had some gravel left on them.  It’s was nice to let the first group deal with that .  By the time I was out it was all cleaned up.

Then it was time for my runs.  We ended up getting 5 runs.  This pavement is great.  We were able to get 3 cars out on track at once.  It really cut the event time down and let us get the most runs.  I managed a pair of 46.2′s on my last runs.  I’m pretty happy about that.  This car really isn’t setup as an AutoX car at all.  No other issues to report.  I love driving this car.  It’s so forgiving and light.

There will be more work next tuesday.  See you then!

More car pictures:

Our next race is only only 2 and a half short months away!  It’s never too early to get ready.  With spokane still fresh in our minds we got started making use of all the things we learned.

First off, some combination of our window tabs and the boiling hot water from the overheated motor didn’t work out.  We have cracks forming at both of the bottom pieces.  Not much we can do about it now.  We don’t have any more spare windshields.  I think we will be able to do portland without fixing it.  I doubt we will make it through the winter without them spreading though.

The next big thing was this darn gas filler neck.

Yeah screw it.  This thing is such a pain in the butt to deal with.  Were going to cut the panel out here and just make it easier to work on.  We will have to make some kind of shield to protect the cabin but it will be work it.  So we just put it back to the way it was.

The shifter was positively owned.  It had over an inch of play vertically.  The bushings were completely shot.  It wasn’t this bad when we started the race.  My theory was that we left something out when we put it back together and that caused excessive play.  That let it wear out pretty quick.  I found some spare stuff in our parts bins and got it … better.  I still need to get another couple of serviceable pieces for it to be totally right.

The rear view mirror was such a silly little mistake.  We mounted it way too far to the left.  We ended up with a view of our helmet and some of the passenger side blind spot.  It needed to be moved over to the right at least another 4 inches.  As it was, you couldn’t even see a car directly behind you.

Much better.

Next up, just a little bit of clean up.  So much belt material.  It would have made working on the car a lot less fun.

All clean!

We also got a gift from a friend!  Mad tight wing.

Just needs to be mounted.  I’m stoked.

Time to work on the belt problem.  Were going to try the most common solution to the belt routing issues that come from removing the air pump.  The double pulley didn’t work for us to time to try the yahoo belt.  It’s some kind of fancy belt that doesn’t need a tension mechanism.  It’s just the right size.  I hear tractors use something similar.

We nicked the belt trying to pry it on.  I hope that isn’t going to be an issue.  We did get two just in case.

I’m going to take the car to a local AutoX (with EESCC) this weekend for a super-mini shakedown.  Hopefully this solves our belt problem.  I’ll report back next week.

I have been at war these Motorola mobile radios for over 7 months.  Today, I won.  The goal was to get a nice high strength, reliable, car powered radio.  Hand helds are a real pain for 24hr races (due to dieing batteries) and often don’t have the power to cover the whole track.  The trick with mobile radios is getting them hooked up to helmet kits (mics and speakers mounted in helmets).  Motorola seems to like keeping their customers in the dark and treats this like black magic.  This has lead to a lot of misconceptions about what needs to be done to make a helmet kit interface with the radio (otherwise known as a radio harness).  This has been the real battle.  I tried a couple times to make my own and failed miserably.  This latest battle was started when a friend found a website of a radio shop on the east coast (Racecom of Virginia, link to the right).  They listed a standard interface cable for my radio to my headsets for a nice low price.  I called them to talk about it (talked to mike) and finally found someone who completely understood the problem.  There are a number of things you need to do (impedance matching, split grounds between mic and speaker, amp the mic, ect) to the signal from the helmet kit before it will work properly with the radio.  This harness does it all and WORKS.

Well, it works now.  It didn’t work yesterday when we got them.  We had 3 problems to work through.  First, the radios were programed wrong.  There was some details it needed about audio handling that were set wrong.  Mike from Racecom pointed me in the right direction and once we found this setting and fixed it, that let just take the next step forward.  The second issue was with the helmet kits I got off ebay.  Some a-hole who made these wired them backwards.  Speaker was hooked to mic and visa versa.  Awesome product random guy from e-bay that I can’t remember.  I spliced these in the middle and swapped the wires around.  I have 2 of our 4 helmet kits fixed now.  The other two will have to be done tonight or at the track.  The third issue was that one of our radios was bad.  That’s fine, we have spares.   It did cause a bit of drama during testing with nothing worked though.

So a big pile of stress, more than a couple hundred dollars, a dozen or so favors called in, and 7 months is all it took to make our radios work.  Well.. work on the bench.  The real test will be this weekend.

The glorious radio harness:

Splicing our developmentally challenged radio harnesses back together in the correct configuration.

One of the many favors I called in, getting access to my buddies work bench.  This sure made it easier!

We are starting to pack up all the parts and tools now.  The trailer will get loaded her in a couple minutes.  The truck gets picked up tomorrow and loaded in the morning.  We hope to be in spokane by dinner tomorrow.

ChumpCar here we come.

Today was the last Tuesday before the race.  The time was mostly reserved for that little final stuff.

First up, our radios.  We have a Motorola Mobile radio for the car.  The great thing about mobile radios is that they are nice and high power.  The not-so-great thing is that they aren’t for end users.  They are meant to be engineered through a custom harness into a vehicle.  Headsets like ours, known has helmet kits, are unusual.  Possible, but not the every day thing.  I have been looking for months for a solution on how to get an IMSA standard helmet kit connected to our radios.  I tried a couple times to make my own harness and fail (like, why are the headphones burning me fail).  I leaned on some friends in the industry to help me and we also ran into issues with interface boxes not working.  I finally got hooked up with an outfit that specializes in racing radios and has experience with Motorola Mobiles.  They have a specially engineered radio harness specifically for this purpose.  This harness arrived today.

Looks like quality stuff.  The orange cord goes in to the back of the radio and splits out two lines, one to the IMSA plug and one to the push to talk button.

You can see the radio there turned on its side at the end of the dash.  There is a spare radio sitting on the top of the car next to the push to talk button.

More spares.  aaaaaand nothing works as we would like it.  We got no RX or TX audio out of the helmet kits.  PTT works.  I was able to get RX audio out of a different helmet kit but still no TX.  There isn’t really anything else to try.  There must be something wrong with these radios.  Programing doesn’t match our configuration?  Jumpers hooked up wrong?  I don’t know.  I’m so tired of fighting these radios.  Were just out of time.  No time to get parts.  No time to put a different system in place.  *Sigh*  Tomorrow Ill take another stab at it but I’m not expecting any results.

We did get all our stickers today though.  Ryan did an awesome job with these.  The sponsor stuff looks awesome.

I think we got the brake fluid issue fixed too.  Tomorrow we have a ton of errands to run.  T-Minus four days to the race.

We got the guys together again today just to finish up a bunch of little things.  First off, the exhaust leak.  We had thought that exhaust was just bent wrong and could make the surfaces totally flush.  We got the exhaust off to install a flex joint that hopefully resolve this.

When we got the flange to the bench we discovered this.

The flange isn’t flat.  It was curved and there was no way it was going to get flat with anything.  That explains the issue.  We went at it with power tools.

Much better now!

… and reinstalled.  The car has never sounded like this before.  Nice and deep.  Maybe even a little louder but in a different way.  We though something was wrong with the engine due to the new noises LOL.  We also cut the tip off the muffer.  There is no point in it being there with no bumper skin.  We figure if we get hit from the back, that would be the first thing hit and we don’t want that.  In chumpcar, if your car is too loud they will black flag you and you will be forced to fix it before re-entering the race.

We had disconnected our rear swaybar during the track day practice but never got around to removing it from the car.  We went ahead and did that today.

Unfortunately we found another issue.  This is brake fluid.

This is from the passenger rear.

There are two bleeders on this brake caliper.  This is the top one.  It looked pretty clean.  The wetest one was the lower one.  All the lines look dry so were assuming that this fluid is from the bleeder.  We couldn’t find new bleeders at the corner parts store so we stole some from our spare brakes.  We bled that corner and it looks OK.  We definitely want to watch that during the Friday practice is Spokane.

Gabe also got started on a ghetto dash cover.  We are getting a good amount of glare off our gauges and wiring.

That’s better.  I wonder if we could spray it some contact adhesive and black felt or something to make it even better.

The tow hooks are done.  These should hold lol.

I made some terrible arrows for them too.

We also added some protection for the hot wire off the alternator.  I was worried about it rubbing to a pretty nasty short.  It’s very well insulated now.

We also got permanent power put in place for the cone-lights.  They are completely done now.

The only things left on our todo list are:

* Apply stickers
* Install the radio harness (for the headsets)
* Clean up the car (we have really made it a mess with all this work).
* Gather some extra parts, a tire, tools, ect to bring with us to the race.

Only a hand full of days left.  Spokane here we come.