TARP Blog

I was getting pretty stressed out the past few days, what with the engine not being ready to go in the car and about 10,000 other odds and ends needing to get sorted out. After today, I’m feeling a lot better.

Thanks to Rachel and the wonderful freedom provided by self-employment, I was able to work on the car from about 8:30 am until almost midnight, with breaks mainly just for lunch and dinner and to help clean up the back patio a bit. There’s nothing like a long & uninterrupted work session to melt away lots of stress for me.

Dave came over for a couple hours around lunchtime and it was (again) great to have him helping out on the car. One of the big remaining tasks in getting the car ready for the engine was completing the battery move. We’ve moved the battery to the passenger floor because the new front frame brace made the old spot in the frunk impossible. Dave finished up re-fabricating the brackets that will hold the battery in place and then completed shortening the battery cables. Those BMW cables are thick, so that took awhile, but now they’re the perfect size. And I’d bet that taking just 18″ off of each of them probably removed 10 pounds from the car. Those things are thick! Huge thanks to Dave for pitching in on the car, his help really made things progress smoothly today.

While Dave was working on the battery issues, I finished getting the rear radiator pipes re-arranged for the new-used engine configuration, then finished off the radiator mounting hoses. Many hose cuts and worm clamps later, I think that the cooling system is finally ready to hold water once the engine gets into the car. I still need to figure out the best way to hang a cooling fan on the radiator but otherwise the cooling part of this project is done.

There were a bunch of other little odds and ends that I finally got taken care of too but hardly even remember, but all stuff that is critical to function of the car. Like one of the engine to ground straps had come un-ended, the charcoal canister needed replacement of its vacuum hose, etc. Lots of niggling little stuff that all adds up. Well, I got a lot of that cranked out of the way today.

Also finally got the oil cooler placement and installation completed. I decided to locate it on the passenger side rear fender in the trunk and put the engine compartment fan on it. This isolates it from the heat of the engine bay itself, has easy access to the engine compartment for the oil transport tubes through the fender and the engine cooling vent, and it’s less likely to get collided there than if it were mounted on the rear facade of the car. I want to rig up a scoop to help feed air through the cooler, but I’m happy with it for now.

Speaking of oil, I filled the new-used engine with oil for the first time and didn’t see any of it leak onto the driveway. Of course, I haven’t run the engine yet, so…

Tomorrow I hope to get the oil pressure and temp gauges installed then get the engine moved into the car. I’m not ready to start it yet — not until the gauges are all installed so I can tell what’s going on inside the engine — but that day’s coming soon. Not soon enough

Race Prep Author: Pat

No work on the car last night, as I was tasked with assembly of the new LP grill that I bought for the missus. We like to grill and the one we bought when we moved into the house 7 summers ago is no longer working very well. So now we have a new grill to cook upon. That will not, unfortunately, help us turn laps at the race.

I’m taking a mental health day from work today to do a solid 12 hours on the car today. I’m hoping that Dave can come over for part of that. Full update tomorrow.

Race Prep Author: Pat

Days tend to run together in memory. I look at the blog and it’s been several days since my last post — things have been crazy busy both at work and at home. And yet, the car still needs work and the clock keeps ticking.

Thanks to Dave Anderson, the engine is (finally) mounted to the transmission and ready to be mounted in the car. I had the rest of the engine finished and wired up and everything, but although it’s not really all that heavy, it was just heavy and bulky enough that I couldn’t get it mounted alone. So Dave came over to the house around lunchtime on Sunday and helped me squirm that transmission into place. With 2 people, it actually wasn’t very difficult. The downside was that to get the transmission in place, we had to remove the side gear on the passenger side, which drained all the (pricey) transmission oil onto the floor. Oh well. And then the bracket/brace that connects the bottom of the transmission to the bottom of the block on the silvertop engine, well there’s a section that has to be cut out, otherwise that same side gear doesn’t have room to turn.

A little work with the grinder later and the bracket was clearanced and we had the transmission bolted up to spec, the brace mounted, and the side gear back on the transmission. I need to run out and get some more transmission oil at lunchtime today, as refilling the transmission took more than what little extra I had on the shelf. Nothing like seeing red transmission oil flowing out of the transmission onto the floor to get one scrambling for the oil dry and being very, very glad to have an extra full bag over in the corner of the garage.

Dave and I scrounged around for awhile in the bins of castoff parts to find the transmission mounting plate for the driver’s side engine mount. Of course, it wasn’t anywhere near where I thought it would be, but we found it and got that bolted on, as well as the other mounting brackets. Other than finishing the transmission oil refill, I’m pretty sure that it’s ready to go in the car.

There are a couple odds and ends that I need to clean up in order to get the car ready to receive its new engine. Late last night I figured out the mounting solution for the oil cooler and fan, so I want to get that complete and drill the holes through the trunk firewall for the oil line passthrough. Also, a couple of fuel and vacuum lines need to be extended, and I want to try to finish off the return radiator hose line issue so that’s ready to bolt up. Getting down to that bottom return line will be a total PITA once the engine is in the car. I hope to finish off those couple of items, as well as completing the hookup of the front radiator lines so that once the engine is in the car, I can get water in it and get it started up. Yes, at just under 6 weeks until the race I want to get this engine running

Race Prep Author: Pat

Sometimes progress takes a back seat to trying to get it done right. I got the engine off the engine stand and on the cherry picker and was getting everything ready so that I could mount the transmission. I finished hooking up the wire harness and went to put on the rear plate (which separates the block from the flywheel/clutch assembly and basically contains the clutch dust inside the transmission bellhousing) and remembered that I had not been able to get all the bolts torqued down on the rear main seal while the engine was on the engine stand. There just wasn’t enough room between the engine stand and the block to get a wrench in there.

So I went to torque down the rear main seal bolts. The rear main seal, of course, prevents the pressurized oil in the crankcase from seeping out the back of the engine and all over things. As cruel experience has taught, the failure to keep things oiled in an internal combustion engine leads to, among other things, catastrophic engine failure, overnight drives to find a replacement engine, et cetera. On the other hand, we know that the puny M6×1mm bolts that Toyota uses for things like the oil pan and the rear main seal are not very manly and cannot withstand prodigious torquing.

I used my most sensitive beam-balance torque wrench, since the BGB says that the rear main seal bolts should only be torqued to 9.5 newton-meters. For those of you not familiar with newton-meters as a form of measurement, that’s about the amount of torque that a bumblebee produces when it alights on a tulip. The licking of a cat’s tongue probably produces more than 9.5 N-m. Regardless, I tried my best, but I snapped off two of the 7 bolts that hold in the rear main seal. As a first effort at repair, I thus uttered forth some choice swear words (no doubt procured from a drunken sailor on shore leave, or Nancy Pelosi), but those were insufficient to remove the snapped studs from their ironclad threaded caves.

I next tried to use what is commonly called an easy-out or Grabit bit to turn the studs backward out of their holes. This has proved successful in the past when I’ve broken off an M6×1mm bolt in a block, but not this time. There was no avoiding it any longer, the rear main seal had to come off so that I could repair this work. Unfortunately, to remove the rear main seal, you also have to remove the oil pan, and that was held on by about a metric ton of RTV gasket sealer. All of which will need to be removed and re-installed, a tedious and time-consuming process. Durn.

Rear main seal removed, and one of the bolts actually had enough thread sticking out of the block that I was able to turn it out with a vise-grip. But no such doing with the other one. Several minutes of drilling and tapping later and voila, a Heli-Coil was in place and all was right with the world. The rear main seal went back on (after throwing away all the stretched out bolts that were holding it in before), but the re-gasketing of the oil pan will have to wait for another night. I just wasn’t up to the task last night. So I gapped and installed the new spark plugs, smeared the threads with anti-seal grease and the insulators with dielectric grease, and installed all to their torque spec.

Hopefully tonight I will get to re-attach the oil pan and be done with buttoning up the engine.

Race Prep Author: Pat

This weekend saw the completion of engine assembly. It took a lot longer than I thought it would have, but everything seems to have gone together just fine. I guess I kind of took my time to try to make sure that everything got put back in its correct place, in the correct orientation, with the appropriate amount and type of lubrication. I took the engine off the engine stand and am hoping to get back out there later tonight to fit the rear engine plate, flywheel, and clutch. Depending on how things go, I might even try to mount the transmission up, although to be honest that will probably have to wait until tomorrow.

In other exciting news, former (and future?) team driver Sam and her friend Trevor donated two sets of Miata wheels to the team for the grand total of $0.00. Seems all the Spec Miata teams are moving to 15″ wheels and tires, so these 5-spoke 14″ wheels are out of vogue for them now. That’s great news for us, as the 14″ wheels are lighter and the tires are cheaper (and lighter).

Race Prep Author: Pat

Got a lot of work done on the engine today after receiving the new bearings in the mail yesterday. Installed the main bearings and crankshaft dry and plastigauged them to make sure our clearances are okay (they are). Pulled it all back out, lubed up all the moving/rotating parts, and got the mains and crank back in. Installed the rod bearings, installed the pistons, and tightened those all down. Then I re-installed the rear main seal and the oil pump (making sure to fill it with oil as I was going. Squirted a little oil down the front of the main oil gallery too before I buttoned that up. Then I measured the distance of the oil pickup from the bottom of the oil pan and decided that the oil pickup could move at least a half-inch closer to the bottom of the pan, which should help with any problems of lower oil pressure in right-hand sweepers (there are 2 of these at Eagles Canyon, but neither are too extreme). Fabricated a custom pickup spacer from some scrap 1/4″ thick aluminum. Installed the windage tray, the new pickup spacer and the oil pickup, and then, finally, the oil pan. So, the bottom end is all buttoned up. Tomorrow night I’ll get to work on bolting up the newly-cleaned up head and getting the rest of the accessories attached to the engine. I’d love to get this motor back in the car on Saturday…

Race Prep Author: Pat

Given our clown car theme for the upcoming race, I’m thinking that putting one of these on the front of the car is going to be pretty much mandatory. Not that it’s clowny in the traditional sense, more like the idea of a mustache on a car is very clowning-around:

The replacement bearings came in today, so I’ll be working on engine re-assembly tonight and tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed that I can follow the instructions in the book…

Race Prep Author: Pat

After ordering the replacement main and rod bearings today, I figured I might as well press on with the non-engine related tasks. So tonight I finished up the revised driver’s seat position and got everything mounted up. The good things about the revised seat position is that it is about 1.5″ (maybe more) closer to the center console and further away from the door bars, which makes it safer. It’s also about 2″ lower — we’re almost literally sitting on the floor of the car. The difference in height is really noticeable. The car is still the same small car that it’s always been, so it’s not like our helmets are ever going to have a ton of room away from the roll cage, but at least they’re a couple inches further away now.

The seat now goes back further than it ever did before, in fact, so far that I now need to revise the lap belt attachment points. Right now, with the seat in its rearmost position, the factory lap belt attachment points are actually ahead of the point where they pass through the seat. Not the safest way to fly. So I’ve ordered some Class 8 eyebolts and snap ends for the belts and will add those to the car after they arrive.

Tomorrow night I will work on finishing the revisions to the radiator and front cooling hoses and maybe get to work on the front grille/air dam/splitter assembly. Once the engine parts get in, it will be all engine, all the time. There is some suspension work to do too — super-discount ball joints that I picked up on a wholesaler closeout at Rock Auto means new ball joints on all 4 corners, which should tighten up our suspension and take some of the wobble/slop out of things. I don’t have any illusions that we’ll ever really contend in this race (our driving just isn’t good enough, even for LeMons), but at least we could be challenging.

Race Prep Author: Pat

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.

Race Prep Author: Pat

No, not the abominable cartoon of the same name. I mean the crankshaft for our engine! It returned from its long stay at the machine shop that polished the journals of the small scratches/grooves that appeared when the former owner of this used engine didn’t change the oil very often. Did I mention that when I disassembled this motor it reminded me of one of my favorite reviews of a bad restaurant buffet line: it was awful-looking and there wasn’t nearly enough of it. That oil was tar-black and I don’t know that there was even a full quart that came out of the engine.

Well, that’s all behind us now as I’ve got the engine disassembled, cleaned, and ready for re-assembly. We did a cheapie “valve job” with one of those wooden dowels with a suction cup and reassembled the head, but it’s got no “hot” parts, no “upgraded” camshaft, none of that. I just want an engine that will hold together for an entire race. So it’s new bearings and rings and time to re-assemble now. Last night I cleaned out the oil galleys and the water jacket on the block and the oil passages on the crank before I got too tired and came into the house. I’ve decided that one longevity measure of this engine is that I’m not going to work on assembly when I start getting bleary-eyed; I’ve talked to too many LeMons folks who have put in a bearing upside-down because they were too tired when they were working on it.

The in-laws are coming into town for the Easter weekend, so that may significantly hamper my progress over the weekend. But the next step is to dry-fit the main bearings and plastigage them to make sure that the clearances are all in order, then to fit the rings on the pistons. Cheers.

Race Prep Author: Pat