D-61: Engine & Safety Improvement
The in-laws were in town all Easter weekend, so while I got some work done on Saturday, Easter Sunday was a wash, car-wise. But here’s the summary from the weekend:
I got the crankshaft and started messing around with it on Saturday and the block and thought to myself, self, let’s get this block good and cleaned out. Took it to the local spray-and-wash and $1 later the block was all sprayed down with engine cleaner and cleaned out with high-power water. Brought it back home and sprayed it down everywhere with WD-40 to force out all the water in the nooks/crannies. Made the floor in the garage damned slippery. Then I chased every threaded hole in the block with some thread chasers so that the fasteners will go in right. Only one or two of the holes had much resistance at all so the block stayed clean.
I got the mains and the crankshaft into the block and plastigauged them and everything was fine, but then I got to looking at the main bearings and although they came from shrink wrap, they are all pitted. I confirmed that fresh new mains should be smooth and shiny, so I’m going to get some others. No sense in putting marginal bearings in this engine at this point.
Since I need to order those online and couldn’t get any more work done on the engine on Saturday, I turned to something else on the list: safety improvement. Last race we liked the sliders but the seat was both higher than we wanted for our Lurch-height drivers and closer to the cage than we’d prefer. So I pulled out the seat and all the brackets and re-engineered it. Test-fitting the new installation shows that the seat is about 1.5″ lower and about 1.25″ more inboard than before, so that gives us a little more room between helmet and cage. I sat in the car for the test-fit and although I’m shorter than our really tall guys, even with my helmet on, I wasn’t touching the cage unless I leaned my head over to the left deliberately. So hopefully that makes things safer for us. I’ll probably need to jack with the steering column a little bit to center it up on the new seat position but that shouldn’t be a deal breaker. I’ll finish that up tonight, I hope. Cheers.
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