My daily and the weekend toy - warning, get coffee. And food

Well, got our nice new 15 tooth starter wheel and new clutch centre yesterday, so, in a mad rush today, we chopped the starter mount off, fitted the new pinion gear, moved the mountings welded it all back up, refitted the clutch, lifted the engine in, bolted the rear frame/cage back on, fitted the exhaust/wiring/oil/fuel lines/etc, and fired her up!

With an hour of tweaking with some cold start enrichments it's now much faster at starting again, great.

So, fitted the floor, seats, belts, etc, put it in gear to reverse out of the workshop and load up to go racing tommorow. And no drive.

Feck.

So, by this time completely knackered from rushing around, and after lots of energetic swearing, we got stuck in and ripped it all back out in about 10 minutes. Only to find the clutch pressure plate has died and there's no way of fixing it or getting a new one in time for tommorow.

I am just very slightly annoyed. A little bit. About a hairs-width away from setting the thing on fire.

Long overdue an update, some pics from the next event:







Unfortunately, the engine blew up, again.

And here's some more of that muddy stuff:

And the inevitable:

"Compression test today after a sudden loss of power at the last event - looks like this one is kaput too. Yay."

After a lot of mucking around, we found out the side housing hardening had been ground through by the engine builder, cue nearly 12 months of back and forth arguements and liability claims, plus missing the rest of the season and being down a whole lot of money for an engine that did 200 miles, and we pretty much got to the point where the car was just sat in a shed for months so we advertised it for sale, so someone else could slap a little 4 cylinder or something in it and enjoy it at a more relaxed pace.

[Daffyflyer]

Anyway, a few months later, someone wanted the car - provided we stuck him a Honda 4 pot in it first.

So, we then priced up for rewiring and installling, with him sourcing an engine, etc, etc.
Then thought, well, if we're putting an engine in the car anyway.....we may as well put something decent in and try again....so, some hunting around for a month netted us a fairly cheap, low milage S2000 engine

Anyway, it's still a fair bit longer and taller than the rotary, so we bought a bigger angle grinder and lost some tubes....





Machined the flywheel to take a bigger 225mm push clutch:







Moved the gearbox forward and made new polybushed mounts:





And the money shot:



One engine in, and ending 35mm further forward than the rotary!



I'm pretty sure that big hunk of steel holding all these tubes together wasn't vital, was it?

New tyres are in order so we checked to see if we could go a bit wider....



That's a no then

Chopped the centre out of the mounting plate with an angle grinder and tried the clutch:



This accidentally turned up....







There was 35mm spare in the bellhousing after the clutch was fitted, soooo, bellhousing, meet angle grinder, angle grinder, meet bellhousing.
And bring TIG with you.



Bit of tidy up work:



And the engine is now almost 75mm further forward than the rotary (old engine cage on here)

Spaghetti junction time!





And a day later, still doing it...





And the day after....



Got fed up of looking at exhausts, made up big-ass pulley for big-ass supercharger:



Some goodies in the post and out came the angle grinder and bolt croppers to chop some spare bits out of the engine:





And after that, some beer mat-type sketches of where the new rear bonnet/scoops will end up given we know where everything was mounted, old one:



Roughly what'll happen with the new one:



And some, errr, extras:



And from the rear, old one:



Concept #1



#2

[Killrob]

This nicely shows why Race Exhaust Manifolds are not mass-producible in Automation xD Nice work!