TARP Blog

It was a nerve-wracking day yesterday, but as the headline reads, the rebuilt motor is alive! After rotating the crankshaft by hand to get the no. 1 cylinder to TDC (or close), I installed the distributor (with new cap and rotor) and wired up all the spark plugs and the coil. Rolled the car out into the driveway because if you burn down the car, you can always rebuild it, unless you burn down the garage, too. Sage advice, Stevo.

On the first try, I flipped the ignition switch and the red light didn’t even light up. WTF! Turns out that I forgot to re-plug in the main power harness to the switch when I was finished working on the switchgear. Problem easily fixed.

Second try, flipped the ignition switch and the red light comes on. Success! Short lived, though. Press the starter button and nothing. Bupkis. Double WTF! Rolled the car back into the garage. Clearly something is not right with my wiring work, right?

Ha! Wrong! Turns out that one of the two main connections between the body harness and the engine had gotten knocked loose sometime during my work on the engine. That connection contains the lead that goes from the starter relay to the starter that tells the starter to go-go-go.

So, plugged that in, rolled the car back outside, sat down, flipped all the flippy switches, pressed the starter button and - whir, whir, whir. Turning over but no start.

In my head, I knew that this is normal. After all, there’s been no fuel in this fuel rail since at least November. But in my heart, I was freaking out a little bit. What if all this work is done and I can’t get the engine to start? Epic fail.

Second try, whir, whir, whir — vroom! Yippee! Even though I hadn’t set the timing on the distributor to anything than basically dead center of its range, it started and purred like a kitten. Oil pressure came right up (yea!) and hung steady at about 75 psi, which isn’t surprising given the thick break-in oil that’s in the car right now. I let the car run at somewhere just above idle for a few minutes, then noticed some wispy smoke from around the exhaust manifold. It’s probably just the new seals on everything getting hot for the first time, but I shut it down anyway. I’ll roll under the car tonight to see if we’re melting anything important

Yesterday was a big hooray day. Looks like we’ll have a car with a running engine for the race!

MR2, Race Prep Author: Pat

Sorry that updates are coming slower, but it’s not because I’m not working on the car. Precisely the opposite, actually. I finally got the oil cooler work all completed, including the wiring back to the relay and the switch in the dash. Yesterday was spent mostly getting all the electrical work in the dash area finished up (and hopefully done right), including wiring up the new electronic gauges — volts, oil temp, water temp, and oil pressure. Each of the gauges (except volts) has a warning light feature that goes off if the gauge senses that things are amiss (temps too high or pressure too low). Apparently they have a warning buzzer sound too, although who knows if you could even hear it during the race. But the light is bright and should be helpful to help us not grenade the engine. Also moved the tach to the middle of the steering column and the bright blue “SHIFT NOW!” light right within easy eyesight of the driver

The engine is almost ready to fire. I’m going to reposition the distributor tonight and finish up tying up some of the wiring that is laying around loose. I need to fill the car with water and then hopefully we start it for the first time tomorrow! Keep your fingers crossed for us. More info soon.

MR2

I worked last night on getting the radiator hoses fabricated and all finished up. I’m waiting on a couple of parts for this too — some aluminum connector pipes — but I think that I have everything cut to size. Of course, the American big-block radiator that we’ve switched to has different sizes than the teensy Japanese radiator hoses, so there have been some upsize and downsize issues, but I’ve found some reducers that mostly take care of that. I worked in a bleeder near the top of the intake side to help bleed the system of air (we know that is a problem) and a fitting on the output side of the radiator into which I’m going to fit a secondary water temp gauge with a peak/warn light so that our driver(s) will have a better visual warning if the water’s getting too hot. I can finish up this job once the additional connector pipes arrive (one in 1.5″ and one in 1.75″) and then get the fan fitted. After that I need to figure out the ducting from the radiator through the firewall and then from the firewall to the new escape duct that I need to cut out of the hood.

After working the cooling pipes issue to the point where I’m waiting on parts to complete, I resumed work on the bumper/air dam. Taking a week or so off from this topic has helped to provide me with some clarity on how to solve the problems (namely, crappy cheap bumper cover and the near-total absence of hard points on the front of the car from which to mount the entire contraption), and I think I’ve figured out how to structure the whole thing so that we can get it on and off with just a few dzus but keep it in place for the race. I want to make it easy to remove and put in place because one thing we’ve seen is that the low nose of the car gets messed up when getting the car on and off the trailer.

So, unless the mail/UPS brings a cornucopia of engine parts (keep fingers crossed!), tonight I’ll resume work on the front end/air dam.

MR2

Final race prep was a little anti-climactic last night. The vinyl car numbers arrived in the mail, so I put those on the car. They look sharp and are a good contrast to the fuzzy white meatball on which they’re placed on the doors and roof of the car. It’s a LeMons-perfect kind of look. More after the break:

Read more…

MR2, Race Prep Author: Pat

If you’re reading our blog for the first time, it’s pretty likely that you’ve gotten here (directly or indirectly) due to the article “Lap Dogs” that was written by our own Brad Cope and published in the August issue of Spirit Magazine. Brad dropped an advance copy of the article off at my house the other night and I was entertained and thrilled with the article. I’m sure the rest of the team will be too when they read it. And obviously if you’re reading this now, it’s probably a fair bet that you found it interesting too.

Due to the limitations of space and time, Brad was only able to include a sliver of our LeMons experience in his article. Please feel free to surf around our blog, which chronicles our experience from the very start all the way through the race. I’ll post some more updates soon about what’s coming up for the team as well as some additional memories that didn’t make it into Brad’s story.

If you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email. My address is patrick mulry at gmail dot com. Maybe putting it down like that will keep the spambots away. Cheers and welcome!

Pat

Driving Tips, MR2, We Need Parts Author: Pat

As I’ve probably mentioned separately to various TARPers, I picked up an el-cheapo set of eBay-derived “coilovers” to replace the crapp-ay cut coil springs that were serving as our suspension. I use the term “coilover” very loosely because a coilover setup is typically very high-dollar (well into the four-figures) and well-engineered, whereas this was more like $50 and is the least engineered bit of suspension kit I’ve ever seen.

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MR2, Race Prep Author: Pat

No, I didn’t cut off my leg. That wouldn’t take two days.

Instead, I found some additional weight to cut from the TARP Special. As the title of the post may have tipped off, I was able to remove 13 pounds of needless weight from the car on Wednesday and yesterday evenings. Where was this hidden weight? Right in plain sight.

About 8 pounds was spot-welded to the floor in the area directly underneath the seats. Speculation is that the 3.5 pound cast iron weights were added by Toyota late in the production process to help control some noise/vibration issue. After drilling out 22 spot-welds on each side, it was possible to remove the weights and the steel panel that held them to the car.

The other 5 pounds was removed by stripping more of that asphalt-tar coating on the interior surface of the floor (and a little that was still on the firewall). Using dry ice helped to flake out the more gummy bits, but mostly it was just elbow grease and a slightly sharpened paint scraper.

The result is that the car is now well under 2000 lbs and I’m sore as heck this morning.

MR2, Race Prep Author: Pat

It took the better part of yesterday to finish getting the oil seal replaced and then a late night last night to put all the pieces of the drive shaft and left rear suspension back on the car, but by 1:30 this morning, it was done. And yes, the half-shaft bolts were torqued on to spec (27 ft-lbs for those playing at home).

After dropping the girls at school this morning, I came home to test the car. And what do you know, it worked! I’ve started it a few times since the race just to circulate the fluids but this was the first time that it had moved under its own power since that fateful broadsiding that robbed it of its precious bodily inboard joint. I drove it around the block. Same sounds as before.

Tearing it apart and putting it back together revealed some interesting things about the car. The strut insert (a/k/a shock absorber) on the driver’s rear is totally blown; I suspect the same is true for the other rear corner. Also, the rear brakes are hardly being used even in race conditions; the rear pads were barely worn. So there’s a couple of things to add to the list: new, cheap rear strut inserts and a cheap brake proportioning valve so we can get some more oomph (or any) out of the back brakes.

But for today, a small triumph. At least the car is ambulatory again. Huzzah!

MR2, Race Prep Author: Pat

I’ve started the repair work on the TARP Special. As it sat on the jackstands in my garage, I noticed a small river (rivulet?) of oil making its way from the car’s nether regions downhill toward the garage door. Upon further inspection, that oil was coming from (go figure) the oil seal that the prior owner allegedly replaced.

I figured I should probably repair his repair to prevent that oil leak. Plus the leaking Red Line tranny race oil is expensive stuff, like $11/qt., and I didn’t really want to see that go to waste. I wish that I could say that I wanted to make sure that we didn’t oil up my driveway, but you guys know a lie when you read one.

To replace the oil seal, one has to remove the differential side gear (which connects to the inboard joint tulip, which connects to the tripod joint, which is connected to the half-shaft, which drives the wheel). To remove the differential side gear, one uses a 3-jaw slide hammer (available for borrowing from your neighborhood Auto Zone). To get the slide hammer in there, one has to remove the entire suspension for the rear wheel. As I’ve said numerous times on this project, thank heavens for air tools.

Once the wheel assembly and strut were out of the way and the brake caliper hung from sturdy steel wire, the side shaft came out easily. There is packing grease all over the underside of the car from when the joint tulip exited the car, so it’s a Mike-Rowe-Dirty-Job working around that area right now.

Next on the list is to remove and replace a snap ring on the side gear, then remove the existing oil seal. Then put in the new oil seal and re-attach everything. Then the car should be driveable again.

Repairs to follow after that will be to pound out the dents from the Houston action and then I’m pretty sure that we should install better driver’s side door bars for safety’s sake.

MR2

Thanks to the ever sainted Mrs. Mulry, I spent the better part of the weekend under the TARP Special and the ‘87 out in the driveway trying to figure out how and why the inboard joint tulip went bye-bye during the race. That’s the part of the car that disappeared during Dave’s drive on Sunday morning.

After fooling around with the remaining functional half shafts on the other two cars, it became abundantly clear that the joint tulip failure wasn’t caused by Dave’s getting run over by that 280z. The reason that the inboard joint disappeared is most likely due to a crappy bolt-up by the prior owner when he “fixed” the transmission oil seal leak. We know that he’d done a bunch of work on that side, probably even going so far as to at least attempt to drop the transmission and differential from the car. We know that because he did a crappy job bolting the transmission back up to the rest of the car, including the engine mount on the left side of the car, among other critical failures.

It never occured to me that he might have failed to bolt in the inboard joint to spec, and it’s not like it’s hard to do, either. My speculation at this point is that he didn’t wrench the bolts hard enough to get the heads to seat (they’re splined, so you do neeed to apply some force to get them to seat properly). And if that’s the case, then it was just a failure waiting to happen. Which it did.

In other TARP-related news, I just got the post-race valuation back from Chief Perp Jay Lamm. I think he must have just finished off his morning crack pipe smoking, as he valued the car at $400. I guess we’ll have to duct tape it back together for the next race to stay under the $500 cap.

Knowing Is Half of the Battle!, MR2, Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were, Race Analysis Author: Pat