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Awards
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| Hey look it's got an oil cooler. | I just keep taking off ugly stuff to find more ugly stuff. |
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| I ran the motor and it sounds great! | I guess I'll have to clean it up. |
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The body came off of the frame next to reveal even more
ugliness. I was pleased to see that there was an oil cooler and oil filter that
was in very useable shape. The more stuff I can use the less expensive the
whole project is. I’ve learned this from past projects. You always want to find
the most complete car that you can find because
scrounging
parts is time consuming and gets very expensive. It suddenly occurred to me that I had
better check to see if the motor even runs. When I bought the car, Herb, the
guy that I bought it from, said it was a class five race motor that he was
running in his racecar. He claimed that it only had about five hours on it.
When I looked at the motor, I thought to myself, ”yah right “. Besides, five
hours of racing can be enough to use a motor up. Herb told me that he bought
the car for him and his daughter to fix up for her to drive when she got her
drivers license. Apparently about the only thing they had done is to put the
motor in the car but they never got it running.
I wired up the engine, put a new
battery to it and gave it a crank. After squirting a little starting fluid in
the carb it fired right off. It sounded really good but I had a very difficult
time making it idle. I fiddled with it for quite a while to let it get good and
warmed up but I couldn’t get it to idle below 1100 r.p.m. I pulled the carb
apart and everything looked OK so I decided to adjust the valves to see if that
was the problem. The valves were just fine but in the process I discovered that
the valve lift was nearly a half of an inch. Maybe this is a class five motor
after all. Personally, I don’t know how anyone
could have driven the car the way it was set up. Sitting in the car, I could
not raise my left leg high enough under the steering wheel to get my foot on
the clutch pedal. The firewall was only inches from the front of the seat and
the pedals hung out from there. The bottom seat cushion was so high that, when
I removed the top section of the windshield, I could look over the top of it.
So, I had to cut down the seat cushion too. |
This site was last updated 02/06/05