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:
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
…when I write only in generalities. But I’ll risk being specific to say on behalf of us all: Thanks, Pat, for pulling together the TARP crew for this insane project. Without you there would be no we. And we led that race for a chunk of day one, not to mention having a lot of fun up to and even past when this “half-shaft” ejected itself from the car. And even then if the junkyard would have been open or one of the other MR2 teams could have helped us out…but I digress.
Thanks, Pat.
Engine Trouble, Logistics, MR2, Parts, Race Prep, Team Strategy
We had our break-and-tune testing session on Sunday out at the Motorsport Ranch complex in Cresson, Texas. Big thanks to Jack Pharr for letting us use his track for about an hour to shake down the TARP Special and get in some seat time for all the drivers who were able to make it. Another thanks to Shannon and the guys at Motorsport Enterprise Racing for letting us borrow a Miata for the track time too; between the MR-2, the Miata, and Jack’s Mustang, we all got in many turns of high-speed practice. Who knows if it will translate to success at MSR-Houston in a couple weekends.
One of the mechanics at MER is an MR-2 fanatic and pointed out a few free things to do to the car to make it handle better. Primary among those was to cut the coils. So we’ve taken a coil-and-a-half off the front and a full coil off the rears. Did it with a cut-off wheel on a die grinder so as to not heat-temper the springs, which are soft enough as they are. It definitely lowered the ride height; we had taken so much weight out of the car that it looked like it was ready to go rallying!
We put the car on the scales: 2007 lbs. Not too bad for a car that was at 1050kg (~2315 lbs) from the factory!
Grayson is doing some welding work on the front engine mount today, then Jesse’s going to flatbed it back to my garage. And I’m sure that what little work I have left to do on the car, I’ll be working on tonight 
Brad and Dave joined me in the garage last night to throw some man hours at the TARP Special in preparation for our track testing day (a/k/a Break and Tune) this Sunday. Although I took some photos, those didn’t make it into the office with me this morning, so all you’ll have is my stirring narrative. Lucky you! More after the jump:
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