I have not been posting a lot here recently, but there has been some major progress recently. First of all John and Ian continue to make progress rebuilding the 2012 car. The pedal cluster has been installed and suspension installation is underway. They are taking their time to insure all the installations are correct so the car is as reliable as possible. The seat for the car is nearly complete. The layup of the seat was covered in the previous post and since then I've been working on adding some stiffeners to the seat and mounting it in the car.
On the '99 car I installed a smaller fuel cell fashioned from an old Champcar oil tank. I did not like the the way the old fuel cell was mounted and it's position in the car. I'm much happier with this tank.
Another issue I corrected was the long throttle travel due to my pedal cluster design. I decided the best fix was to change the cable wheel on the throttle body rather than modify the pedal cluster. Basically F4i parts grafted onto the AT Power throttle body.
After having pulled my hair out trying to diagnose the engine management issues with this car, I resorted to buying an Antigravity Battery with 160 more cranking amps and immediately the car started up. So, it was time to get to the track! Below is some video of the brief test we did at Camden. Thanks to John and Matt for coming out to make sure I didn't do anything stupid. The in car video is really bad due to a flimsy mounting location, but it's the best I have.
We took it pretty easy on the car, just wanted to shake it down. The brakes are stiff, but not bedded in so braking was pretty weak. The engine is not tuned, but seemed to pull pretty well. The shifting worked really well although there is no fuel cut on upshift so we were making some pretty exciting fireworks on upshift. The paddles need a little fine tuning also. Overall a very successful first run after many years of work. A very fun car to drive.
After getting the car back to my shop for inspection it is clear that the original wheel centers are developing stress cracks and will need to be replaced. This is a sad fact as these wheels were pretty unique and a very creative leap from previous cars. Luckily the rear end of the car will be an easy fix due the ubiquitous use of Geo-Metro parts. I already had a set of hubs on hand from Jason's parts cache and was a really quick swap. New wheel centers will be the other item required. The fronts will be a bit more difficult, but not a huge problem.
