Birkin42

You can pick up a nibbler pretty cheap locally at Princess Auto. I have one that you are welcome to borrow as well. You'll need an air compressor to run the tool. Jack

I have found Forks of Credit River usually too busy and too many police. The tight turn pictured was alway fun going down on my RC30 since it didn't have enough steering lock to avoid using the on coming lanes! Going up Appleby Line from Derry Rd has a similar corner going up but even tigher. Always fun when a transport truck ignores the signs and tries to go down. SR15 is fun. Check out the roads around Limehouse when in the area. There is a nice curvy climb. Take SR22 west from 4th Line. Hockley Valley Rd is great, but a bit on the fast side.

I thought the 15 year old exemption was only in effect when they brought drive clean in. I think a car that was required to be tested ages past 15 years will still have to be tested until the car is taken off the road. I also thought that if you fail, you need to spend $x to try and fix. If it still fails, you get a 1 year pass, but I thought the following year there was no limit on what would need to be spent to get it to pass. If you cannot get it to pass, you cannot get your sticker renewed. I could be wrong on either of these, but that was my understanding. I'm sure this is all explained somewhere on a government web site if you dig for it.

To bad. Thanks Jack

I have a brand new unpainted factory Birkin bonnet with the factory made cutout on the right side for a Zetec TBI or side draft configuration. I would be interested in a swap if you have an as new condition factory bonnet with no cutouts in it and preferably unpainted. I am in Canada so we'd have to deal with shipping over the border. Jack

I believe this is the first Deman Dan built. He built it in England before he came to Canada and believe is the only right hand drive Deman. I believe it has a DeDion rear end. I can't recall the donor car that was used for brakes, etc. If I am correct on the car, it was licensed for the road in Ontario.

Nice! Pic's of the engine bay please. Jack

Shiva, is the track St Eustache by chance?

Confirmed I have a 14mm colourtune. If you want to borrow it or buy it, let me know. Jack

I have a colortune, but haven't used it in many years. I am not sure of its condition or thread size, but pretty sure it is 14mm. I will look tonight. We aren't far apart and you are welcome to borrow it, or purchase it if you like. For balancing carbs, I prefer to use individual mecury vacuum gauges, one connected to each intake port. Many motorcycles are setup from the factory with individual vacuum ports. I haven't seen any cars setup this way, but adding the nipples to the manifold is pretty easy. I made myself a gauge years ago but don't think I still have it. I'm pretty sure you can still buy them from motorcycle shops though they would likely need to order it in, or I'm sure you can get them off eBay or mail order.

I wanted to go with a fairly high end shock for my build so I ended up going with Ohlins TTX36 shocks. They are custom built to order for length, stroke, mounting and dampening. There are a number of distributors in the US that can build, tune and service the shocks. They can be built to nearly any length/stroke combination but the base stroke length is fairly long to start with. I believe they come with 1/2" spherical ends as standard. They also use standard 2 1/4" coilover springs. There are a few really cool things about these shocks. They come standard as 3-way adjustable with spring preload, low speed compression and low speed rebound adjustments. You can upgrade them (at any time) to 4 or 5-way adjustment by adding high speed adjustments to the compression and/or rebound. All of the valving is in a pair of cartridges that are accessable from the outside of the shock. The piston is solid and has no flow through it. The body is a twin tube so the flow from the bottom side of the piston runs through the annular cavity to the cartridges. Damping is done based on the full flow and not just on the area of the piston rod, which is typical for most nitrogen charged adjustable shocks. The nitrogen charge is relatively low compared to other shocks since it does not have to protect against the damping cartridges from cavitating. I won't even mention the price as they aren't inexpensive, but I believe you get what you pay for, and for me, shocks are a key ingredient for improving the handling of a vehicle. At this point, I don't have my car together yet (don't go there) so I can't speak about how they work on my car, but from my experience with motorcycles and mountainbikes, Ohlins knows what they are doing with shocks. The quality of manufacture is top notch.

I would assume "ether" not "either". I would assume a spray starter fluid is the most convenient source for this? I agree that this is likely a great place to start as it directly relates to the work you did on the car. I assume the car was running fine when it was put away?

I live about a half hour from LMC, but sad to say I've never visited. I have always meant to drop by, but... Once I get my Birkin on the road, I'll have to swing by.

I did a 3 week trip from Calgary to Vancouver, down to SanDiego, out to Vegas, and back to Calgary on a sport bike many years ago. This was on top of trucking the bikes from Ontario to Calgary and back. The drive through the Rocky's was spectacular. Through a few other trips out west I've hit most of your destinations, but not driving anything exciting. These all sound like great stops on a pretty epic trip. At this point, my car is far from finished. It may be possible to get it done by then, but that will depend on how busy work is as well as family life. Logistics of getting out as well as my wife and 4 year old daughter would not make it easy. I'd say the odds of me making it would be small, but if the stars align, I'd love to attend. Please keep me in the loop. Not that I need more motivation since I am still very anxious to get the car done, but a goal never hurts.

The weather forcast for Sunday sure doesn't look promising. So far undecided if I am going or not. Enjoy.

I suspect there is likely also a similar connector between runners 1 & 2. I have seen these many times on high end motorcycle headers. I am not 100% certain but believe they are to widen the torque band, kind of like a 4-2-1 header.

I would assume you could leave the hose connected and just undo the screws holding the flange plate on, and remove the whole pump assembly as 1 piece. You are going to have to break this joint anyway since I believe this is where the gasket is you want to replace. If you want to remove the hose, leave the crimp in tact and undo the bolt through the banjo connection. When you go to reassemble it, you should replace the crush washers as they are 1 times use.

A nice collection of cars to compliment the 7. Now if I could get a few of them in my collection, that would be nice, but that would take money so that ain't going to happen anytime soon.

Ron, I measured the stock Birkin frame at 1100 ft-lbs/degree and my modified frame at 1600 ft-lbs/degree. In both instances this is the stripped frame with no aluminum panels riveted to them, which I believe would add some stiffness.

I modified the frame of my Birkin to accept an S2K engine and transmission. This required a complete rework of the members in the engine and transmission tunnel area. I also reworked the rear of the chassis to convert from a live axle a DeDion. I modeled all the changes in CAD and calculated the change in torsional rigidity and found it was improved by nearly 50%. This was validated by physically testing the stiffness before and after the mod's. In doing the mod's I removed the bolted in connection under the transmission as well as removed one of the 2 upper engine bay brace tubes. I did take a lot of care in triangulating the frame tubes I did add try to maximize the strength and stiffness. I didn't analyze as to where the major gains were made, though I suspect it was likely a combination of a number of small gains more so than mostly due to one of the changes in particular. I do know in analyzing the stock frame, cutting out 1 of the 2 upper engine bay diagonals maked practically no difference to the torsional rigidity even though visually you'd think it would have made a big difference. I did check this single change both before and after and confirmed this. Ultimately there are countless ways to design a frame. I would think in most cases you could leave out a tube that seems important and design other parts of the frame to carry this load. Of course there are lots of ways to design the frame poorly as well. Here's a pic of the modified frame.

I'm interested in a group buy for a Burns muffler, particularly if it is special that is a bit longer. I am looking for something reasonably quite to suit street use and track days. I haven't got to sorting out how I want to do my exhaust yet, but it is a project that is coming up soon, so a group buy opportunity would be good timing. What spec's are we thinking? Jack

Dale, Though you can go through the math and figure things out, there is an easier way since you have something physically built. Take the coil off the shock (I'm assuming you can do this easily), disconnect the sway bar, and take the wheel off. Starting at full droop, move the suspension in small increments, say 1/4" at a time. At each position measure the shocks eye to eye length. Once you have done this for the entire suspension travel, you can plot on a graph wheel travel versus shock travel. This is easily done in Excel. A falling rate is when the shock travel is progressively less relative to wheel travel as you go from full droop to fully compressed. Rising rate is the opposite. Now the likely next question is, what should I be aiming for? That's tough to give a definative direction on. I would suggest that before you do anything, you also determine whether the front is falling or rising rate. I would suggest a good place to start is the reasonably closely match them, and to try to get near neutral, though most 7 front suspensions with canted outboard shocks are slightly falling rate. Hope this is of some help. Have fun. BTW, I agree that Carrol Smith's series of books are a great reference and a good place to start. Jack

A straight on shot would help to see how the push rod to rocker angle compares to the rocker to shock angle to better see if it is falling, neutral or rising, though it does appear to be somewhat falling rate. By making the angle of the rockers a little narrower and pulling the shock mounts on the chassis a bit further apart, it should be easy to get it more neutral or rising rate. That rear sway bar looks pretty beefy though it drop links attach to the A-arms fairly close to the pivot. Could probably go a lot lighter with a smaller bar and attach closer to the uprights. Unless you want to analyze the geometry in detail, it will likely be a bit of tuning to get the rates etc where you need them to be to balance the car once you have it running. Have fun.

Are you taking orders for your aluminum nose? As I work in Ancaster, we should try to hook up some time and compare notes on the cars we are building. I'm guessing we could both benefit from it. BTW, if you want any info or want to take any measurements of an S2K engine and trany, I have one for my car. Sorry, it's not for sale. Cheers

I’ve been a 7 enthusiast for as long as I can remember. A few years ago I started building one my visions of a 7. I have many, though my wife, back account and time is limiting me to one, at least for now. I wanted to keep the original size/proportions of a traditional 7 since I like that feeling of wearing the car rather than sitting in it. I looked at a number of options but settled on a Birkin when a found a deal on a new roller that I couldn’t say no to. I decided I wanted to engineer all the changes I wanted to make so I started by stripping the chassis, measuring it up and modeling it. I then spent a lot of time modeling the changes I wanted to make and analyzing them for strength and stiffness. As you can see from the pictures of my progress to date http://www.flickr.com/photos/10827861@N07/, I have modified an awful lot of the original car so far, and there is still a lot of work to do to get the car done. Progress this past year has been poor to say the least as I have been working stupid hours on large project at work. Hopefully that will taper off in the fall and I can get back to work on the car. For me, designing and building the car is a lot of the fun so I am not panicing to get it on the road, but I can’t wait either. Definitely hoping to attending the British Car Day at Bronte Creek, but it’s on the tail end of my holidays so I don’t know yet whether that will work out. Always a great show to go to. Jack Cambridge, ON