Anaximander

It is a quick fix and seems to work well in my LS engine on 95 degree days here in Florida in my AXR. I notice that my temps actually come down while running the engine in grid awaiting permission to move up to the starting line in an autocross. Here are the specs: 2135 CFM; 17.2 ampere, 225 Watt heavy duty motor; 3.37" depth Lowest profile high performance reversible electric fan on the market I know you mentioned running the radiator fan on a separate switch. Make sure that the switch wire going to the fan isn't too wimpy. At least 12 gauge to keep it cool while running the current to the fan. On my last LS3/480, I ran a 10 gauge wire and it looked like an "electrical fire hose". Never can be too careful when trying to not overload a wire. On that car, I had burnt up a 16 gauge wire that simply could not handle the amps running to the fan.

Vipergeek, Did you ever install the Maradyne High Performance Fans M142K Champion Low Profile Series Fan that is 14" that I have in my Stalker AXR and are installed in most of the LS-engined M-Spec Stalkers? This fan is a like a hurricane and will really keep your engine cool if there are no other aggravating problems.

Wayne, It had been a while since I had looked at your reconditioning thread on a almost new car that sat. It is amazing what a labor of love is going into that car to have it back on the road where it belongs. Good for you for taking so much time while having what I suspect is a great time paying attention to all of the myriad details necessary to get this car on the road. Keep up the great work! Bob

lotsats, I hate to disagree with your remembrance but it should read "He/she who LIVES with the most toys wins!" Anaximander

Dan, The precision work you have done on the screen frame and pillars has really paid dividends. Have you had a chance to figure out that oil pump issue yet?

No longer for sale. You missed an outrageously good car and retrospectively, I am glad that for whatever reasons, it is still in my stable. See you at the autocross events!

No longer for sale

No longer for sale. See you at the autocross events!

Dan, Take heart and if possible, try and enjoy the ride in terms of the build. When I was building my Stalker kit, there were times when I thought I would never complete the build and at times felt the reported "frustration and headache" that you have experienced. OTOH, when I was able to solve a problem that seemed almost out of my reach, the small victories kept me moving forward. It seems that most of my friends that have either built a car from a kit or rehabbed a antique car tell long tales of the frustrating moments when a seeming 1 hour job turns into 3 days of work and sometimes they have to let the project sit for a day or two before they ultimately overcome the hurdle of the moment. I think any of us who take on these projects experience those moments and a friend who is in the process of a second restoration has taken the attitude that at some point in time, he will have surmounted most of the hurdles and gets momentary periods of elation followed by periods of seeming despair for simple things that he overlooked. I think it is all part of the game and you are definitely in the game! Enjoy the experience as much as you can and when you get that first drive, I can assure you that at least some of the pain will evaporate.

Wayne, Given the tight toe box of your newly acquired car, I would recommend considering buying some Puma Speedcat driving shoes. They are designed to be narrow and will help you with proper foot placement on the accelerator, clutch and brake. They tend to run a bit small and so in some shoes I can wear a size 10, in the Puma's size 11 was ideal. You can find these at the Puma factory store or on Amazon.

@Cueball1 You ended up with a BEAUTIFUL Birkin! Stalkers are more brutish and in some ways less refined because they use a somewhat different philosophy than Chapman proferred. Fortunately, the eventual buyer of the XL on BaT will be using the car for track racing and with its mods and basic structure, it should be an absolute beast on a race track. It is true that our posts are merely two dimensional and it is sometimes difficult to fully express our thoughts and feelings about the subject matter that we are dealing with. However, it's the best we have going and I am glad that we all recognize that we are doing our best to communicate ideas and concepts about this unique class of cars.

Ian, What an incredible labor of love it will take to get this car somewhat near what it was like in 1961. I was living in SoCal and in 1966 almost pulled the trigger on a Lotus 7, I think it was like a 1962? and my father said that I would be crazy to drive it on the LA Freeways even back then before they were so congested. I instead got a red 1964 TR4 and zoomed around SoCal in that. After all these years, it is terrific to see someone with patience take on such a challenging task to rehab it to a driveable state. Much good luck with the rebuild!

Actually, having owned that car and knowing its history along with 5 other Stalkers and one I just completed building last year, with a new crate LS3/480 and all of the other components, it was a good buy. I had several conversations with the seller and it was a case of a couple of California shops not knowing what they were doing and floundering around while the seller was having to pay stupid California shop rates. Like most of our se7enesque cars, it will take some fiddling from someone who knows the car. I suggested to the seller that he direct the buyer to Scott Minehart who knows these cars better than anyone and have him straighten out the relatively minor problems that can be addressed. The fiberglass work is kind of hacked up a bit and I don't know what he can do cosmetically but I don't think that wouldn't even be a big deal with Scott's fiberglass skills. We have to remember that to replace this car would be on the order of about $60k so getting it for slightly less than $30k with the BaT 5% surcharge was a pretty good buy. In terms of lots of concerns and red flags, that was at a time that the seller bought the car and didn't know how to properly set it up. There are some relatively simple idiosyncrasies to the cooling system that neither the seller or the shops knew how to deal with which is common knowledge amongst us Stalker owners and likely lead to the destruction of the original motor and inability to get the new engine cooling properly for the track. I think it is a lesson in connecting with the right people that know the idiosyncrasies of your particular se7en and getting sage advice from people that really know the equipment you are working on. There are lots of opinions/suggestions but I think a smaller percentage of people that actually know how to deal with the interesting variety of se7enesque cars and there problems that we are all interested in.

Croc and gang, I was thinking about pulling the trigger on this F1 car until I read that for 1/2 a million $1's that you don't even get an engine or transmission. Now if it were 1/10 the price, it would be on my short list and I would put an LS3/525 engine and transmission in it. That would fit my budget much better. The video was amazing how the driver's could take all that raw horsepower and play with it like it was a toy. I can't even imagine that level of car control. Oh well, I guess it won't be on my Christmas shopping list.

jmardy, I went through all of your extra pictures. That sure looks like a very meticulous and beautiful build. It kind of caused me a bit of PTSD symptoms for my 2022 Stalker AXR build that I was never sure would work out as well as it did. I am unfamiliar with GBS designs but you could definitely see all the care and precise fettling that went on through the build and by your account has continued to this day. I would think that someone in California would jump on this car because all of the difficult work of getting it street legal in the State has been accomplished. Much good luck with the sale. You might want to share with us how it drives and how it compares to other se7enesque cars like a Caterham. I went to the GBS website and found a link to some of the company's videos: https://www.greatbritishsportscars.com/video-gallery

In reality, if the owner was having any difficulties on the track with all of the added radiator, it is likely that all he had to do was remove the current fan and he would be getting much better flow-through cooling. I was the second owner of that car and bought it from a very experienced Stalker builder who had really dialed it in and during my tenure with it, I romped around the mountains and even did a couple of autocrosses with it. It is a very stable car that blew the doors off a Hellcat one day when I came up to a light outside the city limits. The Hellcat owner asked what I had in it for an engine and I said, just a LS3/480. I said to him that he had 707hp but he also said he weighed x2 as much as I did or more and it wasn't a fair acceleration comparison to the speed limit and maybe a couple of miles over .

Dan, I suspect that things have been busy. How is your Miata-based se7en coming?

Dan, Good progress on the roll bar install. From what I understand, there are several substances used in powder coating and one of them creates a harder shell than another but the costs are higher. Have you heard back from the oil pump vendor? I am wondering if the suggestion from fastg to just use the original oil pump with a new seal and the anaerobic sealant might be the best way to go?

OK Dan. Here in the States, we have a saying "No guts, no glory" from a former Air Force Major General back in the mid last century. I suspect that you are likely obsessing over the possible outcomes of the installation of the oil pump seal with some anaerobic sealant. I've have been holding my breath for days so you could have installed it in my mouth and the sealant would have cured already. We are all waiting to see what the leap of faith is going to produce on you ameliorating that oil leak. We all have our cumulative fingers crossed for you, in a mass, superstitious cult-like manner. Soooo, let us know how this critical hack works out.

Dan, Looks like your making progress in spite of the oil leak issues. Good job! I had to laugh when I saw your use of heim joints for your roll bar as my Stalker AXR uses a TON of them in the suspension setup for unbelievable adjustability capabilities. The suggestion of using anaerobic sealant (sealant that works in the absence of air) sounds promising. It does make one wonder if the seal and dimensions of the oil pump opening were as well engineered as they could have been given the amount of money they wanted for that specialty part. Let's hope this fixes the problem. On my Stalker, we had to add a shim ordered from McMaster-Carr to get the proper interface between my halfshaft and the custom built rear differential which is something I didn't expect to have to do but it worked out perfectly. So, hopefully, the anaerobic sealant will end your misery of this oil leak and you have lots of other fun things to finish up. Dan, These build threads are soooo helpful for all of us. I began to wonder where the name Heim joint came from and it turns out that it was named after a German company during WW2 that developed the joint. In reading about Heim joints, it stated that one of the down sides to the joints are that they can wear out faster, especially if not kept properly lubricated. As I mentioned, my Stalker AXR utilizes a lot of Heim joints in the construction and it was recommended that one use WD40 to keep the joints lubricated and helping to prevent rust and contamination issues. Well, I know from experience that regular WD40 attracts a lot of dirt which would add to the wear so I used WD40 Silicone (also hydrophobic) which was recommended by my garage door technician as an excellent lubricant for all of the frictional surfaces within my two sets of garage doors. So, this morning, with a rag to prevent overspray and using a can of WD40 Silicone with a built-in spray straw, I gave a shot to all of the Heim joints on my Stalker AXR. Thanks for taking us on your journey. I think we are all benefitting from the shared experience.

Dan, Has Fab9tuning gotten back with you about that oil pump seal? It was suggested that you mentioned installing the pump seal which suggest that they might not come installed? Hopefully Fab9tuning will give you some insights into what might be going on? This is an interesting mystery and we are all pulling for you on this issue. If it makes you feel any better, when I was building my AXR, one of the half shafts was not staying in the differential properly for some unknown reason (which became known) and it took a dickens of a time to figure out how to prevent it from backing out. Oil leaks are a bear!

Hey all you wild and crazy guys and gals. If you want to be able to hear anything as you get older, wear ear plugs, always, even before startup! The mufflers combined with the wind will eventually damage your hearing and could do it rather quickly. The only time that I don't wear earplugs in my sevenesque cars is when I am wearing a full face fully padded helmets and doing autocross which lasts for about a minute a run or less. I figure there is still a fair amount of racket but the helmet is attenuating a lot of the damaging frequencies to my tender inner ear physiology and I need to hear the groans and chatter of my tires/suspension. On my motorcycles, I still wear 29 dba attenuating earplugs with my helmets due to the wind and muffler noise. Just sayin'... From all that I have read, hearing loss is cumulative and most often does not come back after physiological damage. I have over 450k seat miles on motorcycles/open cockpit cars and I can still hear you softly sniggering that I am overly paranoid about protecting my hearing

Dan, It seems like your kind of up against it. IMHO, I would contact a specialty company like Flyin' Miata who sells a ton of specialty parts for Miata's and has very extensive experience with building Miata engines for all kinds of applications. They may be able to give you some guidance as to what you might need to do at this point and they may have just the right parts you need to get over this oil leak issue.

Dan, It's just like Roseanne Roseannadanna' (portrayed by the late, great Gilda Radner) was known for saying in the 1970's: "...it just goes to show you, it's always something — if it ain't one thing, it's another."Mar 14, 2020