What a week. It has been hot, several days in a row where the thermometer
has slithered up over 100. And today the humidity rocketed up over 20 percent,
I'm gonna die.
But all is not lost, there was some good news this evening. Cool! I finally
got around to popping the head off the red racer. I was expecting to see holes
the size of quarters in a piston or two, half inch deep gouges in the walls
of the cylinders, or something like that. Turns out that preliminary evidence
shows that the excessive blowby, oil everywhare, overheating and such was due
to head gasket failure. The pistons and rings appear intact. I was surprised
to see that the pistons had "STD" stamped in them, while bore size measured
40 over. Turns out the pistons are GT-6 units, based on the part number, so
no need to panic. Well, there is a bit of a ridge in the cylinders, next
iteration of this 1296 Mark 3 motor could be fun.
So, what to do now. I could round up a new head gasket, and get the little
red Spit back together for the August IVR and VTR events. Or I could do what
I think should be done, and tear apart the rusty racer for a complete makeover,
estimated completion, uh, mumble mumble...
Or I could take this really nicely ported head now sitting on the bench and
slap it on Killer, which would bump the compression ratio up many notches,
maybe swap cams while I am at it. I'd need a weekend or two to retune the
Webers. The GT6 gearbox now in Killer boots me out of Street Prepared, so
why not just forget SCCA Solo classing, tweak the motor and go for maximum
fun at VTR? And a healthy dose of extra grunt to apply to the RX7s at the
August IVR event could be waaay fun.
This could be interesting.
mjb.
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