It's Alive!

OH! Wait, Not Bob! The car is alive!

The two Bobs came over on Wednesday and did the best Earl Scheib paint job I have seen in quite a while. They used only the best paint $2.99 can buy and used a whole six cans on our black beauty. Their professional attitude toward the job and the serious attendance toward detail has paid off. The car is now black and not any black but "Satin Flat Black". They will be doing the top secret stuff on Monday, Sorry no Photos.




Andy came over today and we went through and put in all the liquids.
We finished installing the "Kill" switch and tried to start the car. we heard a click and then smoke, not the good kind of smoke either. I was concerned that the previous owner had really screwed the wiring up which he had. Andy did some splicing and I got under the car and pulled the starter, after a few miracle adjustments and a prayer it started. Andy is going to to come over one night this week and trace down all of our wiring issues.

Work Continued

Bob T and Andy came over on Saturday and worked on the car. They were lucky to get to the shop because of the Marathon that was going on that day. It took Andy an hour and a half to go the twelve miles from his house. We lost power shortly after they arrived and it was off for most of the day. We surprisingly did get a lot done, Bob and Andy were successful in pulling the motor from our street car and prepping it for installation into the race car. I finished most of the cage and took the two five speed transmissions over to the car wash. It was not a pretty sight when I came back with black clutch carbon all over my face and clothes. Larry came over for some parts and to bring me a piece of exhaust we need to make our car complete, and we wrapped up the day.




Sunday was a quiet day at the shop, the weather couldn't have been any better.
Progress on the engine started a little slow. I went to Napa to pick up a throwout bearing for the transmision, later to realize from everything I could see there is no throw out bearing for these engines. God Please don't email me now and tell me there is one because the engine is in and everything mated up and went together nicely.
The throw out bearing they have listed is too small to fit the shaft and the shaft is the same size as the hole in the crank shaft.
I looked in the book and could not find reference to one anywhere, so the engine is in the car. My buddy for the day was the hydraulic jack shown in the picture, he made the install go very nicely. The next project is to find out why the previous owner cut a lot of wires to install his bastardized alarm system. This may take a while since he cut two main connectors completely off that come from the CPU. More study of electrical this week.

Roll Bar continued

Here is the latest on the roll cage.
A few of you were asking if I as going to skin the doors and run the bars out into the panel. Well I have to tell you this is probably the most difficult task in building the cage for me. I think I got lucky the top bar sits nestled in the groove of the of the door card. I chose to keep the door card for additional strength just in case we get T-Boned. I think it will work just fine. So now I have a question, Per the rules of roll bar padding on areas around the driver, do the door bars need to be padded?
I will be doing the cross bar that goes under the steering wheel as a last addition.
The whole thong should be done Saturday so we can get some other things done. Like a Motor.

Fire In Da Hole

O Yea! and one other thing. When things get hot down "there" sometimes that's not a good thing!

Latest Progress

40 days left till Reno, and this is the latest.
Thursday I got all of the gear together and started the roll cage.
Things started out a little slow, I guess I was dreading doing another cage.
I started with the dreaded main hoop, one miscalculation and I'm screwed and the DOM pipe isn't cheep. My first try and all is well!

I decided to move on to the Pillar Towers and get them in place so I could size up the main hoop. This takes too much time, in my opinion. Both Pillars are in and the boys came over to inspect the work.




Bob, Bob T and Larry their friend came around to look so I didn't get much more done. I would like to welcome our 5th team member to the group, Bob T.

Day Two: Friday
Today Bob and Bob T joined in the celebration, it was nice to have some help working on the cage. I think we got a lot done. Thanks guys!

Bob went through and put the rubber coating on all the sharp edges so us "dumb asses" won't get hurt when we are crawling around under the car.(Mainly Me!)

Day Three: Saturday
Andy joined in the celebration today and again it was nice to have help with the cage.

We are very close to having the cage done. I hope to finish the front pillars and have the door bars done tomorrow. then the only thing left will be the harness posts and cleaning before we paint it all up.


Next week the engine and decorations. Thanks again guys!

Two day scramble

So Monday and Tuesday were my first two days off in 17 so I needed to get something accomplished and fast. Monday started out wonderful (NOT) I spent 3 hours dealing with the DMV trying to get the trailer licensed to to no avail. It seems that the bank and the DMV have different rules on how the title is suppose to be presented. Gosh I wish It could be like the Peoples curse where you take the one that pisses you off the most and crush them. In this case it would have been both!

Anyhow I needed to destroy something and fast, so our little car was the victim.
I started with cutting out the battery holder, hmmm starting to feel a little better.
I then moved on to tearing out the interior seats, carpet, console and dash, feeling better.


I then moved to take out the rubber sound insulation that goes along the floor and up the firewall behind the driver. Pat with Team TARP racing told me about using an air chisel to break it all off. Thanks to his info and an hour of venting here are the results of day one.

I'm all better now!

Day two

Day two started by me renting a plasma cutter from a friend. I have never used one before so i didn't know what to expect for results. I started with the sunroof top, it got ugly quick. I could not get the cutter to start up, a phone call to Jeff and adjusting the air pressure and some more adjustments and bamm! it worked. I then proceeded to get carried away, I found out I can't draw a straight line to save my life or yours. It started to get ugly again, my little compressor that I have had for years didn't like pumping life into the plasma cutter so it's little engine died.
Well out to the new trailer to tear out the compressor it has. A half hour later and I was back up and running. I learned that by using a straight edge I could do some real quick work of cutting out weight.




I then tried my hand at doing circles with mixed results but results just the same.

Second try is always better than the first.

Well that's it! I think we are back on schedule for the race, next week will be a full roll cage with an engine thrown in somewhere along the way.