How I Spent My Summer Vacation
(And my stock options and half my retirement fund,
and most of the food, clothing, and entertainment budget)
As many of you know, I've been acquiring parts for a race car
for most of the past year. It's the realization of an even older
dream, one I've had since I watched SCCA club events at the old
Vaca Valley Raceway off highway 80 between Sacramento and San
Francisco, back when people raced Sprites and MGBs because
they were new.
Vaca Valley is no more, but people are still racing Sprites and
MGBs -- and after this year's SCCA driver's school, there will
be a few more of each, with Jeff Zurschmeide's HP Frogeye Sprite
and my EP MGB. I'll let Jeff tell his story. Here's mine.
A quick recap of some of the major acquisitions might help: In May
I bought what is known in the racing game as a "roller," that is,
a chassis, body and interior with no drivetrain. That's a fairly
common thing to see in the want ads of the SCCA's newsletter and
magazine, but it gave some laughs to a few friends of mine. "You
bought a car without an engine? Even *I* know that's important."
In late June I bought Pete Gregory's $500 MGB with the intention of
removing anything I could use and selling the husk when I was done
with it. In November I buckled down and built version 1 of my race
car, using a lot of parts lent to me by Andy Banta, who had been
racing all throughout 1991 in an E Production MGB-GT. I took off
most of December and got back into serious race-car building in
January, in order to make it to driver's school in February.
We had pulled the motor out of the parts B back in November, and
in fact the transmission from that car was still in my race car,
untouched except for a replaced throwout bearing and slave cylinder.
Second gear ground unless you were careful to do a proper rev-matched
double-declutched downshift, but it worked. We had some undisclosed
damage to the rear brakes from my off-course excursion at the Capri
Club school in December with version 1, when I learned why you should
always check the lug nuts before each event, but otherwise the car
was mostly sound.
But in January, I stripped the 18V block out of the parts car, noting
the valve pockets ground into the top of the block as well as the
horrifyingly scored crankshaft. Could it be used? I took all the
parts that required machining to Kaeding Performance in Campbell, home
of Brent Kaeding, a successful sprint-car driver. These people knew
race engines; it turns out that their head machinist had been on the
championship-winning team of Terry Visger, who won three successive
SCCA National championships in an MGB in the late Seventies. After
several trips to bring them everything they needed (oh, you want to
balance the flywheel too? How about some bolts for that?), they had
the complete rotating assembly -- pistons, rods, crank, pulley,
flywheel, clutch -- and of course the block and main bearings. They
would also check valve-to-head clearance with my oversize valves
(within the EP class limits but larger than stock) and high-lift
camshaft. Since I'd also had British Parts Direct build me a
cylinder head to provide a 10.5:1 compression ratio using stock pistons,
there was need to check for clearance there as well.
Two weeks and $463 later, I picked up a station-wagon-load of beautiful,
freshly machined engine parts from Kaeding and took them home to start
assembly. (Oh, yes: in the meantime, I'd developed a serious case of
repetitive strain injury in my left shoulder, from building the car back
in November. It flared up the last weekend in January and required a
trip to the urgent care facility, where I met a doctor whose restoration
project, a 1962 Jaguar, had left his shoulder in sad shape once or twice.
A week-long layoff from car work was unfortunately part of his
prescription, but fortunately this was while the parts were at Kaeding.)
Now it was time to start building. Andy hoisted the engine block onto
the stand, I installed the bolts, and we began oiling, cleaning, and
assembling. The crank went in very well on its 0.020" undersize
bearings and journals; the mains had been align-bored so that it was
perfectly centered, and it turned freely on the assembly lube.
The rods would be another story. Unfortunately, one of the previous
owners of the parts B had let it run dry once or twice, with the result
that Kaeding had to take the rod journals down to 0.040" undersize.
(You may now join the literally dozens of people who have looked
askance at me and said, "Forty thou under? In a race motor?") It seems
that no one else likes forty-thou-undersize rods, and I managed to find
the last remaining pair in the state of California, in Los Angeles.
They arrived the Monday before school, meaning that over the preceding
weekend we assembled the pistons to the rods, dropped them into the
block, and installed the cylinder head, as well as putting in the fire
system.
If you're planning to rebuild an MGB using the full-floating pistons
(I think this includes engines built after the 18GB series and before
the 18V series), save yourself a lot of gastritis and buy new pistons.
I was using Andy's stock, 8.7:1 pistons 0.030" oversize (the rulebook
says you can go up to 0.047" overbore, so I'm within spec). The problem
is that the gudgeon pins are held in with circlips, included in every
set of pistons -- but not available individually. We were fortunate
to find a shop with whom we'd been doing lots of business; they took
a set of circlips from a box of VW pistons and, sure enough, they
fit. The shop manager handed the box of pistons to his employee and
said, "Send these back to the manufacturer -- they shipped them
without circlips." Thanks, All Parts. We had to modify the circlips
just slightly to get them to fit -- the loops at the end of the wire
need to be pinched a little to fit in the gudgeon pin bore -- but with
application of a blow dryer to expand the pistons (answering quite
clearly the rec.autos.numbskulls question about whether the hole
expands or shrinks under heat), sufficient banging with adequate
hammers, and gently prising the circlips into the bores, we got the
pistons assembled.
We, uh, then had some problems figuring out exactly how to fit a
set of 18G-series rods into an 18V-series block. The answer is that
the bearing caps go on the camshaft side of the engine, and after
you bend the locktabs out of the way, you might still have to take
a couple passes with a hacksaw blade or a file to get clearance.
(18V engines used a modified, and weaker, form of connecting rod
with the bearing caps fitted perpendicular to the rod's long axis;
18G series rods have the bearing cap fitted on the diagonal, and are
much stronger.)
Night after night we attacked the race car, Andy and I, with help from
a number of people on the net and off; eventually Larry Colen and I
got the motor installed, and the subsequent evening we had a whole
gang-bang session in which half a dozen people swarmed over the car,
fitting exhaust manifolds, cables, fire systems, and other necessary
evils onto the car so that it would be able to start.
Finally, it happened. The day before school started, Andy and I --
after spending a long time and draining a battery cranking the motor
to get oil pressure up -- decided to go for broke. "Let's try
firing it up, but leave the oil pressure gauge fitting disconnected
so that we can see if it has any pressure," Andy said. (We'd been
pumping with the fitting open so that we could look for pressure
coming out of the fitting.) A couple shots of ether in the carbs,
flick the kill switch away from the OFF mark, turn on the master and
the fuel pump -- and gas pours all over the engine compartment. Andy
traced it to the fuel pressure gauge fitting, which we removed, and
to the rear float bowl, and I remember that I'd used the good rear
float in the street car. We took that float cover out of the green
MGB, installed it in the race car, tightened everything up and tried
once more.
Ga-ZOOOOOOM! "CUT IT!" yelled Andy over the hellacious roar of a
high-compression four through a 53" long, 2" wide exhaust pipe with
only about four discs from a SuperTrapp on the end of it. I killed
it. Andy held up the rag he'd had near the pressure gauge fitting:
it was soaked with easily half a cup of Castrol GTX. "I'd say we
have oil pressure," he said. He cleaned the starter, connected the
fitting, anaesthetized the carbs and I fired it up again. Once more,
it started immediately, running strong and loud and with fabulous
throttle response. Oil pressure was 75 PSI at the race carbs' idle
speed of just over 2000 RPM (no tach, but I'd checked them out on
the street car the preceding week). I ran it up and down through
the RPM range, by ear, for 20 minutes -- what the machine shop said
to do to break it in (since I couldn't really do much driving on the
street). Then we shut it down and congratulated one another while
waiting for it to cool enough to drain the oil.
Just about dusk, as we were getting ready to load it onto the trailer,
Andy said, "Well, aren't you going to find out how it works?" I smiled,
climbed into the seat, and fired it up once more. Down the driveway,
into the road, and a quick blip of the throttle brought me to what
felt like a quick pace. I went down the end of the street, conscious
of the furtive stares from my neighbors as the roar of the motor cut
through the gloaming, turned at the end of the street and came back
to my driveway.
"I doubt you got it over 3000 RPM," Andy said. "You owe it to yourself
to wind it all the way out once." I grinned and set out once more.
This time it was different. From idle to 4000-4500 or so it had much
better throttle response than my street car. From there on up it was
like getting rear-ended by a JATO-assisted Impala. A cold, funny
feeling came into the pit of my stomach, like the feeling you get
when you realize the woman you've been longing to kiss for months
has just pressed her lips to yours and opened them gently, yet also
like the feeling you get when you realize that the rumble you hear
is not a truck and the walls and windows start shaking. I hit the
brakes hard -- remember, the Ferodo DS-11 pads had been bedded in well
back in December -- and realized that my bleeding and adjustment from
the previous week had given me the best brakes I'd ever felt, sure and
firm and linear.
Dammit, I'd built myself a *RACE CAR*. With a lot of help from my
friends.
Next episode: SCCA Driver's School
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