Stuff Got Done on Saturday
Enough got done on the car yesterday that we opened it up for a driveway testing session. Caroline supplied her own helmet:
Brad came over to the house around 10:00 yesterday and we got in a full day of work. We started off by rolling the car out into the driveway and getting it up on the jacks. Brad’s first big job was to clean the surface rust off the roll cage and get it painted with some matte black spray paint that I picked up at the store the other day. It was pretty surprising how the welds especially had already rusted over, especially considering that it hasn’t been very humid in Dallas for the last week. We found that a rag and some acetone got most of the surface rust off the tubes while the problem spots were dealt with quickly through the use of the Scotch-Brite clean and strip disc on the drill. Those things are awesome.
One task that I accomplished during the week was to complete the assembly and install of the seat harness and the seat cover. I can’t remember if I blogged about that already, but the seat is actually very comfortable. Both Brad and I were surprised by this since the foam on the seat cover is pretty thin in most places, but thick in some others. There is quite a bit of contoured foam in the thigh area of the seat, so the seat feels like it really cradles you nicely. Kudos to the folks at Kirkey for building a good seat at a fair price.
Because I’d already installed the seat and harnesses, we needed to cover all of that with some plastic wrap to minimize the overspray that it would catch. Same thing with the dash and steering wheel; anything else we really didn’t care about. I still had the bag that the seat cover came in, so we used that and some other painter’s plastic that I had in the garage to mask off the seat and dash:
And Brad then went to town with the spray cans. I don’t know how well it’s showing up in these photos, but he did an excellent job painting the cage. I liked the way it looked in raw steel (except for the rusting part), but it looks really finished and menacing in the matte black:
After he got done with spraying the cage, Brad also sprayed in the license plate area of the car. It looks much better with a uniform color and will be a good place to feature our sponsors’ logos on the car:
As you can maybe infer from the large container under the car, the other big job yesterday was to drain, flush, and fill the coolant system. It was a mess, but that was to be expected. Thanks to Grayson’s suggestion, I removed the tubing that directed coolant from the engine block to the heater core after draining but before flushing the system. I couldn’t totally remove the pipes going to the heater because they were trapped by the main coolant tubes that go to the radiator, but I did drain them. Using parts removed from the heater system, I then fabricated this small loop in the cooling system so that nothing was capped and also to provide a high point for bleeding the coolant system:
That valve assembly on which I wrote “open” was formerly the valve that was attached to the heater core in the front of the car. Hopefully it can handle engine-bay heat operations. Maybe I’ll vent the engine lid a little more to help it out. We’ll see, there’s certainly other things that demand attention on this car before that.
Although I filled the system and tried to bleed all the air from it, I’m sure we’ll find more bubbles after we run the car up to operating temperature. I’ll re-bleed and re-fill at that point and hopefully we’ll have all the air out of the system. Keep your fingers crossed.
No surprise, but as I flushed the coolant system, I found evidence of stop-leak having been used in the past. So we’ll want to be on the lookout for coolant system leaking as we go along with this car.
Brad took care of a very fun detail: brake cooling ducts. We removed the turn signals from the front bumper ages ago, back before the car went to Jesse’s shop. Now, thanks to 3″ flexible aluminum dryer duct and the miracle that is zip ties, we have brake cooling ducts that go from those turn signal locations to the brake rotor centers:
Toward the end of the day, Brad sat in the car so we could adjust the main length of the harnesses. We fixed them so that there is plenty of adjustment room in the harnesses for the varied heights of the drivers that will be driving in the race with us.
There’s probably other stuff that we did that I’m leaving out (like using more zip-ties to stabilize the upper radiator mounts, etc.). After Brad left, I ran out for electrical contact cleaner and started cleaning up the cable issue in the engine bay:
I cleaned up this rat’s nest and soldered on new wire late last night. The main goal for today is to get this all wired up and get the car started again. There’s still plenty to do to get this car ready to race, and I don’t want to say that I see light at the end of the tunnel (only to find out that it’s a train coming at me), but we’re closer to the end than to the beginning, at least.
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