Back In The Saddle

With the engine complete we finally got on the track for the first time.  August 31,2013 at Auto City speedway.  My first latemodel race ever here.  Got some good practice in.  Then entire goal of the night was to shake the car down.  Not to push it and wind up breaking anything the first time out.  We did our qualifying and I wasn't surprised by my 15th out of 15 for qualifying.  But they had no heat race scheduled and just were going to make it a 60 lap race.  Oh joy!  An endurance test right off the bat with this engine and car.  It was a long race so I decided to make sure I was going to make it the whole way one way or another.  Just after the completion of lap 1, 10 of the 15 cars piled up in turn 1.  I was able to avoid the mess and make it through by shooting low and not spiking the brakes in a panic like some others had done.  In the end I wound up finishing 7th.  Not bad for just taking it easy.  Sometimes you don't need to be fast to finish well.  Sometimes patience pays off.

Engine Status

Here is where we stand today.  Engine painted with Ford Blue.  Small things getting painted and cleaned up.  Should be getting installed this week.  Intake is ready to go.  Just need some more RTV to seal the ends of the intake.  Distributer will go in along with plugs.  The trans pilot bushing needs to get pulled out one that is extended needs to go in.  Clutch installed and it will go in then.  Maybe it will get broken in this week too.

Piston Clearance Fix

What do you do when you have a piston to valve clearance issue?  We don't have time or money to send them off for a machine shop to do them.  Plus we don't need that much taken off.

 The wall of the relief is too close to the valve. 

There is no issue with the clearance to the floor

of the relief. 

 First we need to protect the rest of the assembly from the shavings and grindings.  Some tape around the top rings and a grocery bag will work fine.

 Next is some electrical tape to protect the bottom.  We just want to remove some of the wall.

We need to some how mark what we want to

remove.  A Sharpie will make seeing our work real easy.  I took a cotter pin then to follow the current wall and ground the other part of the pin to a point.  By following the current relief and spreading it I created a scribe line that was about 0.05in line to use as a guide to grind to.

Here you can see the result of using a die grinder

with a big drum sander attachment on it.  Patience is a must here.  Carefully remove and be smooth here.

A final smoothing with some sandpaper and a good

cleaning gives us everything we need. 

Getting Back At It

After way too much time off we are going to try and get this thing going again.  It's been over 5 years.  Way longer than I ever imagined being off. 

So here we were looking to go racing last summer when we found water in the oil.  After stripping the top of the engine down we found that the head gasket had some how got screwed up and let some water into the #1 cylinder.

So off to the engine shop it all went...and racing in 2012 was put off again.