JMortensen

The L engine has no hydraulic lifters, the valve lash is manually adjusted. You need to get a manual if you're not familiar with valve adjustments, and you should also look up "timing chain tensioner" here and elsewhere on the web before you start.

I'm wondering why you couldn't get a custom length circle track bar (commonly available here in the states), and then either machine a plate to fit the splines or make new arms with the tab to bolt to the rod end integrated into them. As to your original question, I wouldn't forsee any problem with welding as shown in the picture assuming the welding was done right. Of course I don't have any heat treating knowledge either...

#12 should be between #14 and #15. You need to bolt the cam towers down and then rotate the engine so that a cam lobe is up, then you loosen the valve adjuster all the way down and force the rocker on. Once you have them all on then you can adjust the valves cold. You might want to consider that the cam may require different thickness lash pads, and that to get the full benefit of the cam you'd really need to degree it (look in the stickies for this forum for more on that). But if you just wanted to slap it on, then I think you have all the main steps in your list that I can think of off the top of my head.

I'm struggling to figure out how this happened. You put the rockers on AFTER you installed the cam towers, of course. So you should be able to tighten the cam towers down, spin the cam and make sure everything is aligned correctly, then put the timing chain on, and then lastly stick the rockers on. Maybe you did it a different way??? Marking the towers is a good practice. I'm not sure the bolts need to go back in the same holes though.

Good point John.

I don't think its the left/right balance. I've seen really fast cars that were extremely unbalanced left to right. Like Gian Bowles's 510, which was really underweight, probably weighed 1600 lbs, and Gian himself is 220, 230 lbs. There is just no way the car was balanced side to side, but it was amazingly quick. My buddy Larry Butler's 510 is much the same way. It is a fast car that probably weighs 1800, Larry is also generally between 215 and 240 lbs. I'd be tempted to move your magic number up and see what happens there. I think you should be able to raise the front ride height a bit to get that accomplished. That 5% is not a hard fast rule. It's more of a general guideline and you need to fine tune it in a bit. Sounds like maybe your driving style and your car like 6% better... Sounds like a fun weekend! 4 seconds faster on a 35 second track is incredible.

Looks like Dennis might be right on this one. Tough to say for sure, but it definitely looks like it has vibrated part of the way out.

NASCAR has airbrakes that pop up when a car spins all the way around. I think they're supposed to prevent the cars from flying as well. They don't have any active aero for going faster though.

Me too. That would have been my dream come true as a 12 year old...

Yes and yes.

It's easier in my opinion to pull the cam towers. But then you have to drain the coolant and hope the headgasket holds. I've done it twice and never had a problem even though people will tell you that it can't be done.

Changing title. We want titles to be descriptive so that people don't have to open them up to figure out what it's about when they're searching the database. As to your car I think you had best get some quotes from several body shops locally. Any guess over the internet is not going to be very accurate.

This is basically what Cary is talking about with the yaw moments idea. Yaw moment is a fancy term for how much force is trying to swing the ass end around in a turn. My argument there is that it still appears as though there is more total cornering force available when the WHOLE wing is used, and one would assume that this increase in grip would reduce the tendency of the car to yaw without needing to differentiate one side from the other. Again, it is true that affecting the inside tire makes a bigger difference to available grip than the outside tire (based on the quote in my sig), but more total available grip should outperform in every situation, and more grip would equal less yaw in every situation, unless I'm missing something. It also seems that the old Nissan version from the 60's would do a better job differentiating side to side since that wing was attached directly to the hub, where the one in question attaches to a sprung chassis. I'm not sold on the old version either, but I think it has a better potential to have a real effect on yaw than the new one. If the idea were to prevent yaw aerodynamically, it seems like a rudder would be a better device to perform that task. Since cars have tires, and they are powerful yaw dampers in and of themselves, adding a rudder to a car seems redundant.

The flares that are being sold are not the ones on the orange car (which are the steel ones that are actually a take off of VW beetle flares). The ones in the auction look similar to the MSA street flares to me, a generic bubble flare sort of shape. You might try a search on "MSA street flare" or "bubble flare" to find some pictures.

We had this discussion on another forum and Don Potter's solution was to use two solid roll pins from a Ferrari I believe. Later Dennis Hale suggested that the problem can be solved by safety wiring the stock pin, as I guess the theory is that problem usually happens when the pin vibrates halfway out of the shift fork, then shears. I suppose you might see part of the pin hanging out the bottom of the rail if this were the case. I've never seen that happen personally, although I have seen vibrations move the 5th gear rail and so the trans can get stuck in 5th gear and 2nd or 5th and 3rd gear at the same time. This then locks the rear tires instantly. I watched my friend slide sideways past a concrete corner worker's stand at fairly high velocity when this happened in my car. There is another possibility... when I see broken shifters and sheared roll pins, I tend to assume the guy driving is shifting like a gorilla on meth. Putting extreme amounts of force on the lever is not the way to shift faster, and if you need to do that to get into the next gear, there is probably something wrong in the transmission, or you're just being overaggressive with the stick.

Yes, and there are pics on page 6 of that thread.

[disclaimer]I'm not an engineer. This is a SWAG.[/disclaimer] I thought maybe there was a way that I could prove my point about this, so I dug out the book that the weight transfer quote comes from, Tune To Win. There is a formula for figuring out weight transfer in the book on p. 36. It is overly simplified to be sure, but it states: lateral load transfer = lat acceleration (g forces) x weight x cg height / track width. The example used is the rear end of a Can Am car, and it breaks down like this. 1.4 x 1080 x 13 / 60 = 328 lbs. That means that 328 lbs moves from one side to the other, and assuming a perfect symmetry, the inside tire reduces to 212 lbs and the outside tire increases to 868 lbs. You can use fig 5 on p.18 to figure out the resultant cornering force, and it works out to 1400 lbs. Who knows what tire they're using to produce the graph in fig 5, but I'm guessing (hoping) that the basic shape of the graph is still useful 30 years later... So my attempt to use this info is as follows. The downforce added by the wing should be independent of the formula, so I just added it to the corner weights and checked them against figure 5 for the following approximations: If you have a wing that produces 150 lbs downforce, and that downforce is spread evenly between the two tires, you get weights of 287 and 963, and a resultant cornering force of 1550 lbs. Add the 75 only to the inside corner and you get roughly 1460 lbs. So having the pressure on both sides does look better. Use a more effective wing and the results are more dramatic. Say for instance that you have a wing that produces 1000 lbs of downforce. Your inside gets loaded to 712 and outside becomes 1368, and the resultant cornering force is 2298 lbs of cornering force. Use the inside 1/2 of the wing and you get only 1990 lbs. While it is true that adding force to the inside corner makes a larger difference than adding force to the outside corner, I think it's pretty clear from this calculation that adding downforce to both makes more available cornering force. It may be conceivable that the drag that comes with the downforce is enough of a hindrance to make an adjustable wing more suitable, but even then it looks like a single adjustable wing makes more sense than a side to side adjustable.

The way I'm reading it the question here can be restated: "Don't you want downforce on the inside tire to counter weight transfer?" I think the answer isn't necessarily yes. The reason for downforce is independent of the reason why it is advantageous to have less body roll. The more downforce you have the more traction the tires have, and the idea behind a wing is to give vertical pressure without the weight penalty. As a relatively extreme example, if you have a 2000 lb car with 3000 lbs of downforce, when you go around a corner the car still acts (centrifugally) like a 2000 lb car, but has the vertical pressure on the tires of a car that weighs 5000 lbs, which gives the traction advantage. The amount of weight transfer might be insignificant when compared to the total downforce available, making the weight transfer less important to the total available traction than the downforce. To give another example, back in the early 70's they used to attach the wing to the hubs of the car directly so that the body of the car itself could be suspended independently of the downforce. This isolated the chassis from the pressure of the wings and so the cars didn't need to be sprung stiffly. The chassis could roll, but the tires were stuck to the pavement. If the wing were attached to the chassis they would have driven around most of the track on the bumpstops. Again, getting the downforce on the wheels was more important than reducing the roll. When I first saw this wing in action I was thinking that this would be an attempt to keep the inside tire from unloading and spinning on corner exit, which seems to be what you are thinking as well. But if the downforce is high enough, you really don't need to isolate one side or the other to get that traction benefit. And if the total downforce is very low you might be losing more than is gained by cutting the wing size in half. I think this would work well on a softly sprung chassis at relatively high speeds and low downforce levels. If the downforce levels are higher (maybe amounting to more downforce from the wing than there is weight transfer), then it seems to me that isolating one or the other tire is losing potential downforce to gain an effect that may not be necessary. I would suspect that the amount of traction gained on the inside tire alone and the effect of adding traction to just that inside tire would be less beneficial than running a full wing, and getting more traction to BOTH wheels. That is obviously a hunch, but I'm going to stick with it until I see some proof that I'm wrong.

Yes, the eye things are the mounts. How? Well, they get an eye that is larger than the bar, thread the bar through it and attach it to the control arm. That's it. The bar just flops around inside the eye, so far as I can tell. I just subscribed to Circle Track magazine and I couldn't believe what I was seeing when I saw one installed like that. I guess the idea is that if you wear out a bar off of a Chevy they're so common here that you can just go get another one, and in the meantime there is no bushing to create any bind. Picture here: http://www.circletrack.com/ultimateracing/ctrp_0810_urban_force_racing/photo_10.html I like the way my setup came out, but I still haven't used it yet. Can't beat heims joints for freedom of movement and lack of stiction. I can tell you that when all bolted up the thing moves really nicely.

You could cut the wings off and make new ones and attach them.

I don't think the whale tail is legal for any class of autoxing. Maybe if you ran A Mod, but that'd be a joke. If I recall the Prepared rules say the wing must be within the body lines when viewed from above. Aside from the legality issue, I suspect that there are much more efficient wing shapes for producing downforce, even though the whale tail faired fairly well in the wind tunnel testing.

That's what I'm thinking too. If you're running really stiff springs, and you should if you're going to make a lot of downforce, then there won't be that much roll, so you can have the whole wing working and get twice the downforce that you would from this thing.

I tried some of the fancier blades from mcmaster.com that have different sized teeth at different spacing, and found them to be expensive and crappy compared to the one that came with my Harbor Freight bandsaw which has 18 tpi. This blade cuts .120 DOM tubing no problem. Takes a while to cut, but I think that is a function of it being a cheap ass $160 HF saw. These blades are hecho en Mexico, surprisingly: http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/displayitem.taf?Itemnumber=42374 Looks like they carry some 93 inch blades too.

Agreed. If you forced all the air that went into the grill opening through the radiator with a duct, the car would cool better and you would reduce drag. Thanks for the info on the Kydex. That seems like a product with many potential applications...

Did you watch the video? This is different. It pops up on one side or the other depending on which way you turn, and both sides lower under accel and raise under decel. I have to wonder if having more downforce albeit at the cost of more drag wouldn't be a better way to go, especially when the speeds stay under 80 mph.