pethier

Interesting coincidence. I bought 7x15 Panasports for my 1979. They went with the car to a buyer on Cape Cod. By the time the car came to the most-recent who has contacted me, the Panasports were gone and only the green wheels remained. The ones I had were well-made and true. (I don't know how they came to be green, but the paint was very good also). Good luck with the sale. These will will be a great choice for someone going 13".

When I shipped wheels I went to tire/wheel shops and got boxes from them. They get wheels in from the makers and install wheels on customer cars, so have boxes. Nowadays the wheels are bigger, though.... BTW, those look like the wheels that came to me on my 1979 Caterham. Painted green. Last I heard, the current car owner still has them.

Shot in the dark: Have you tried Eibach's selection of sprint-car springs? I don't even know if they still do this, as it was a long time ago I bought springs for my Europa.

Nice. I don't have any wall space left at my place.

Fred did not run in the autocross. The car I rode in was also a 420. The red was a little more orange. That car was not in the concour, so...

Oops. Those feats were in my Elise. The Europa did OK in the earlier events.. I think my worst showing was when Hazen convinced me to drive his Sprite. I just checked the Internet, and there is a listing of Wamandee events AND the Afton events. https://waumandeetimetrials.com/results/ Afton Alps was happy to continue, but one person on some government body or other was going to refuse to vote to renew their permit for special events unless motorized events were prohibited. I can't blame Afton Alps for agreeing. They made a fortune off of "Mud Dash" events. That's what got Tom to start looking for a replacement, and he came up with Waumandee. He has worked very hard on this year after year. Of course the reason I searched the Internet to find this was for Dean. He was there for several events over the years. It looks like his best years were 2016 and 2022. I believe Kathy was there at Waumandee this year. She really likes Hazen, and his charismatic presentation of the rules. BTW, Afton Hillclimb was not on a ski hill. As you approach Afton Alps in your car, you are at the general elevation of this part of Minnesota. You drive in past the golf course. then you drive down a steep asphalt road (into the Saint Croix River valley) marked with a sign: "USE LOW GEAR" to discourage incidents with school busses and the like. At the bottom of the hill is a big asphalt lot with ticket kiosks. There are several footbridges across a stream to the chalet. Beyond the chalet there is a large parking area where the hillcllimb participants and spectators would park. The entire lot where the kiosks reside would be used for autocross. You start on a countdown which is heard on radio by the timing folks at the top of the hill. You proceed through an autocross on this flat area between the stream and the ski-lifts through a figure-8, past the kiosks, into a right which feeds a sweeping 180 and then up the hill. There are a few chicanes and one left bend in the road (that my cars never needed a lift for, just a prayer that there were no deer in the road) and up to the line at the top where they stopped your time for the entire course. Amery was different: There was a tight autocross on the apron which was timed separate from the speed-run. Time ended just as you started the straight-line speed-run on a taxiway which was scored by the readings from a radar gun. In later years, there were electronic timers for the autocross part. Course layouts varied from event to event, as did the location of the speed-run finish. Neither event had a return road.

It was the Waumandee hillclimb in Wisconsin. Tom Hazen used to be the EM for several driving events for the Minnesota Austin-Healey Club. I ran several cars in them (in more than one Afton Alps Ski Area hillclimb I had the fastest time in an un-supercharged car, my Europa). I had the fastest autocross time in an automobile at the Amery Airport autocross/speed-run one time (I do not consider shifter-karts "automobiles". When Tom started up the Waumandee hillclimb the insurance folks demanded cars only up to a model year older than both my 2005 Elise and my wife's 1973 Stag. I wound up never running that event, and kinda stopped paying attention to it. Now Dean and Kathy tell me the event accepts any car 20 years old and also they are starting to accept motorcycles. FTD last week was some young guy in a BMW (I assume car). I have not seen a results sheet.

Kathy remembers talking to "Scott".

OK, water rail. Explains the different fill location. Is that common on a Birkin? Is this then a 2000cc Zetec? Looks like the same throttle bodies Dean has also.

I have some pix of the Factory Five Racing 818S, but I have one foot in a track shoe right now.

The engine in the Mora car. What engine is this, 2000cc or maybe something else? Is this a RaceLine head or something else? The location of the coolant cap makes me wonder what this is.

Cathy likes the Factory Five Racing 818S better than the Birkin. She thinks the Birkin is ugly by comparison. She called the 818S a "Fab Five" on the telephone. This does not surprise me since she reported to me also that Dean had a Lotus "Elsie". Then she texted me a picture of the 818S. The picture is from the BAT auction. Dean has apparently run several autocross events around here in various cars. I have found a record of an MR2 at Amery Airport. I have more autocross records to check, but I have to scamper and measure a house door in another city.

Waumandee hillclimb in Wisconsin?

OK, I have trouble following the bread crumbs in this thread. So this is the Birkin in Lakeland, MN? I can check it out this week.

I'm close to Minneapolis. If I knew why youy wanted someone in close to Minneapolis, I have forgotten...

Both the Triumph cars and the Ferguson tractor had versions of the Standard engine. Standard designed the engine for both uses from the beginning.

I think the tractor had a Triumph engine, but I'd have to look that up.

There was a way to do that on my wife's Triumph TR4, but no way was I going to pursue that. The crank for a Seven would have to be really long...

Stock on my 1961 SAAB. In fact, it was not just a starter switch. The cable pulled on an arm that mechanically engaged the pinion gear into the ring gear on the flywheel. That accomplished, the same arm pressed the button on the starter which was the high-current switch. The original cable was messed up, so I replaced it with a piece of clothesline. The car was my first ice-racer, so the glovebox and the door therefor had been removed for weight reduction. This left the steel outline of the bottom of the glovebox doorway sitting there like a towel bar. A handy place to tie up the end of the clothesline. Just reach over and grab the line and yank on it to start the car.

As a now-redundant answer to your question, it didn't ingest anything to cause it to fail. It was the squeeze from an uncontrolled clutch that caused the oil pump to stop the engine. The hope for the winter project is that whatever shrapnel resulted did not yet destroy much in the engine and that a thorough cleaning of each component will suffice. I think a complete disassembly is an opportunity to balance everything.

Ron has the fuel pump out. It's a Walbro 392. He has ordered a new one that apparently the supplier called a Walbro 392 SL. I see online that after a series of mergers the new company will use the TI Automotive name. I hope he gets a good one, online reviews suggest there are a lot of bad ones out there. Reviews tend to suggest that if you put one in and it is quiet, it's a good one. If it starts to scream, you are on borrowed time. Turbo Phil has a surge system that looks good, but of course it does cost a grand.

I put a cigarette lighter directly in the dash of my Seven.

Again here, I want to thank all the folks who responded as I drove through the Lotus-parking lot to convince folks to go around the other side of the field-hockey bubble to the trailer-parking area and help us make the swap of Seven driveline parts from the back of my truck to the back of a van for wheels/tires from the back of the van to my truck. I made a serious promise of beer or other beverages for those who helped, but nobody held me to it.

I did that on my Europa. None of the stuff for the heater was in the car when I got it, except the heater cores and the steel pipes inside the frame. The car was from Oahu. I put a plumbing valve in one of the heater hoses I fitted under the dashboard to connect the heater cores to the steel pipes. Even if I had the original parts, there was nowhere to put the cable. The original center armrest had been replaced with koa wood. There were no cables for heater valve or choke.

The Glitch. 74PHIL was running strong at the LOG 44 autocross practice day. There was a tight turn just after the timing start. At a competitive event, I'd like to see that reversed. It was hard to figure out where and how to change from first to second. I would probably experimented with launching in second, but the marshaling line was seriously uphill. There were some offsets. There were some big sweepers coned only on the inside. There was a fast slalom where I usually hit the 7200 limiter near the end. There was a significant right-left to the finish at that juncture which would have made it a net loss to shift to third. As it neared 4:00 I started to get some breakup. I assumed that I was running low on fuel and the fuel gauge was lying to me when it said I had half a tank. Since I knew they were about to pull the plug on the event, I was reluctant to think about checking out the fuel supply at PittRace. (I recalled how disappointed I had been recently at a practice day in Iowa. I had stopped to take a break for awhile and when I went to line up again, the took down the course. At 1:30! Wimps.) So I drove a few more runs until they told me "this one's your last". Last run had a few breakups. The car ran fine at gentle speeds back to my rig. Sunday I found a station that had both 93 octane for the F-150 and non-oxy (albeit only 90 octane instead of the 91 non-oxy we get in Minnesota). The car ran badly when I pulled it out of the trailer. I had the usual amount of trouble getting gasoline into the car. It ran lousy when I started it. I was lucky there was a clear path in the gas station property so I could drive it around in a big circle for a while until it seemed to straighten out. I put it back in the trailer and went back to the convention hotel because it was getting to be time for the final banquet. By Tuesday I was in Auburn Indiana at the museum there. I gave rides to a couple of people there. The damned car was breaking up above 4000. Back at the hotel, I called Ron and he said "send me a video". Unaccustomed as I am, I shot a video https://www.flickr.com/photos/pethier/54777277518/in/album-72177720326088078 The car was acting very well, except it got goofy at idle once, so I turned it off and it started again OK. Put the car back in the trailer and left the next morning for Columbus Indiana. Saturday at the autocross the car was cutting out, tossing me into my shoulder straps and turning truly-miserable times. It didn't help that after working 6 runs in the hot sun, it started raining when it was my turn to run. I never got a run in truly dry conditions, but it probably does not matter. I wound up near the bottom of the heap. I wanted to make sure that the car was truly full of gasoline, so I went to Menards and bought a plastic gas can. Disabled the dumb stuff and kept the smart stuff. Found a source for non-oxy (90 octane again). Topped off the car with the push-to-fill method until I could see the fuel in the filler. Drove the car around a couple of block until I seemed OK. Back in the trailer, back to the hotel. Sunday morning got back to the site and unloaded. Drove the car hard on the county roads and it seemed OK. Took my first run. Car ran truly terrible with cutouts of every shape and kind. Second run was better. Third and fourth runs didn't seem to improve. Fifth run fastest raw time yet. In line for Six and we were told that today the weather man was not as scary and we were going to get 8. Sixth run was fastest yet raw time, but I hit a cone. Still a lot of breakups. Seventh run raw was faster than Five but not as fast as Six, and another cone popped up in the live-timing, but I was unaware of where that happened. Eighth and final run was an ocean of breakups netting a clean run and substantially-slower time. Have to stand on run five. Right smack in the middle of the pack: 25th out of 50. At least I beat the EM car that was there. Some sort of skeleton job, with a rear-mid sidewinder. Not an Atom. Got back to The Cities Tuesday night. Wednesday, went to Ron's shop. He thinks the fuel pump is louder and making a different noise than he remembers. He does not like the sound of it. I left it there. I'm not going to bug him until Monday. Ron has always done well for me. Maybe I should have asked him to do the entire job in the first place, but I thought he might not want to do whole thing. I guess I'll never know. Two weeks from tomorrow is the final MOWOG-series event. I'm leading the points for XU now, but if that Exocet shows up the best I can hope for is second. No Exocet and the Seven is at full strength, I have a shot at winning the series.