Well, got our nice new 15 tooth starter wheel and new clutch centre yesterday, so, in a mad rush today, we chopped the starter mount off, fitted the new pinion gear, moved the mountings welded it all back up, refitted the clutch, lifted the engine in, bolted the rear frame/cage back on, fitted the exhaust/wiring/oil/fuel lines/etc, and fired her up!
With an hour of tweaking with some cold start enrichments it’s now much faster at starting again, great.
So, fitted the floor, seats, belts, etc, put it in gear to reverse out of the workshop and load up to go racing tommorow. And no drive.
Feck.
So, by this time completely knackered from rushing around, and after lots of energetic swearing, we got stuck in and ripped it all back out in about 10 minutes. Only to find the clutch pressure plate has died and there’s no way of fixing it or getting a new one in time for tommorow.
I am just very slightly annoyed. A little bit. About a hairs-width away from setting the thing on fire.
“Compression test today after a sudden loss of power at the last event - looks like this one is kaput too. Yay.”
After a lot of mucking around, we found out the side housing hardening had been ground through by the engine builder, cue nearly 12 months of back and forth arguements and liability claims, plus missing the rest of the season and being down a whole lot of money for an engine that did 200 miles, and we pretty much got to the point where the car was just sat in a shed for months so we advertised it for sale, so someone else could slap a little 4 cylinder or something in it and enjoy it at a more relaxed pace.
Anyway, a few months later, someone wanted the car - provided we stuck him a Honda 4 pot in it first.
So, we then priced up for rewiring and installling, with him sourcing an engine, etc, etc.
Then thought, well, if we’re putting an engine in the car anyway…we may as well put something decent in and try again…so, some hunting around for a month netted us a fairly cheap, low milage S2000 engine
Anyway, it’s still a fair bit longer and taller than the rotary, so we bought a bigger angle grinder and lost some tubes…
There was 35mm spare in the bellhousing after the clutch was fitted, soooo, bellhousing, meet angle grinder, angle grinder, meet bellhousing.
And bring TIG with you.
Haha, yes, well thankfully the 2.5" into 3" merge is finished and we’ve tack welded a silencer together for mockup, so it’s nearly finished bar a little bit of 2.5" and 3" piping over the transaxle.
Side profile of engine/cage now, that’s the old engine rear protection cage for mockup there, you can see how much longer the old setup used to be. The top bar used to be horizontal too, so you can also see how much ground clearance we’ve gained!
And some of the mountings and plumbing done. Yes, that alternator IS going to be a bitch to drive.
I know the air feed into the plenum and out of the charger need a bit of work but it’s a case of make something easy that works at the moment and improve it later since they’re just bolt-on flanges
Okay, no turbo’s yet so I had to do it the hard way, but this accounts for the manifold/cam timing changes and exhaust/intake work as well as the inefficiency of the charger, so should be pretty close. Ain’t Automation useful?
