pethier

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.

At the LOG, the autocross turned out not to be the scored-and-trophied event that we have come to expect from LOGs, with classes and rules made up pretty-much on the spot. (Actually LOG43 gave us more warning about stuff than usual). No, the autocross at LOG44 was essentially an autocross practice day administered by Chin-company personnel. For those as ignorant about Chin as I was until LOG43, they are a company which contracts with racetrack owners to administer track days and parade laps. I do not know if they have offered autoccross practice days for other outfits. I paid 30 dollars to LOG44 as an entry fee to "an autocross". This is not what I got, but this time out it was better than I expected. The upsides for entrants: I did not have to work the course. A guy from Chin was sitting in a side-by-side ATC (faster than a golf cart). If he saw someone hit a cone, they held the start and he motored out there and reset the course. I got to see my time right away. Two guys from Chin were at the start line minding the timer. The timer, sensors and finish-area display box were run on radio, so there were no wires to run into. There was virtually no waiting time to make a run. There was virtually no limit on the number of runs. They were open from noon to 4:00. They didn't care if you had a number on your car. They actually just asked me if I had paid for the autocross. They never checked a list or asked my name. They may have glanced at a wristband I had been given. Since this was the first time I had actually got a chance to go around the cones since there was a Zetec in my seven, it was great to get out there and feel all the torque I had expected. Getting the advantages of the improved cylinder head would have been nice, but the junkyard engine with the Hayabusa injection was doing the business. Thanks again to savagete2860. They had no apparent restrictions on ride-alongs. Downside for entrants: They didn't keep track of anything. There were no classes, no trophies, no awards, no mention of us autocrossers at the banquets. They had no loaner helmets. The guys at the start told someone who asked to go to the track-day desk and rent one. As this was a Chin track day, I assumed that would be 50 bucks a day for an SA helmet. I gave the "asker" the key to my truck to get one of my extra helmets for his SO. I actually had a third helmet for folks to ride with me. ===== This might actually be a way to get more Lotus cars into autocrossing. No whining about having to work. No whining about tiny amount of driving time. Way cheaper than paying for a track day. ===== Discussion about Chin probably deserves its own topic. The Glitch in the next post...

It is now obvious to me that Steve, the builder of the Birkin, (who is now building it into an electric car) followed the Birkin instructions to set up the clutch. The shop transferred the hydraulic clutch system into the Caterham which had used a cable system. The action turned out to be quick, and there was a lot of pedal travel left after the clutch was fully disengaged. After over half a century driving standard-shift cars, I didn't know this was a problem. The is a bolt with a locking nut on the aluminum bell housing which can be adjusted to provide a hard stop as soon as the clutch is disengaged. This bolt was turned all the way in. I assume that a stop was done on Steve's Birkin at the pedal end of the mechanism either by accident or design and Steve autocrossed the car for decades with no trouble. Since I didn't know any better, and the professionals who should have known better didn't, that bolt on the bell housing never got turned out to block the throwout lever at the appropriate place. I seized the engine by using the clutch in the normal manner. I had by this time taken the car to a tuning shop, which had always been the plan. When the engine seized, I brought it back to the tuner, who suspected I had rotory-welded the thrust washer (which I had in my ignorance assumed was a bearing). Tuner suggested I get a junkyard engine to get me through the season. As he dug into the engine, he was surprised to find that the oil pump, which is on the crankshaft on these Zetec engines, had taken the hit. To clarify, it is not that the pump failed and the engine seized due to oil-pressure failure. The pump itself seized and prevented the engine from turning. This is entirely a clutch setup problem which did not harm the clutch but harmed something on the other end of the engine. This engine will come apart and be cleaned and balanced over the winter. The junkyard engine is in the car with the Hayabusa injection working. The clutch throw has been properly limited with the bolt on the bell housing so this can not happen again.

That's the source of my Zetec woes. I had a shop put the Zetec/T9 combo out of a Birkin into my Caterham. It is now obvious to me that Steve, the builder of the Birkin, (who is now building it into an electric car) followed the Birkin instructions to set up the clutch. The shop transferred the hydraulic clutch system into the Caterham which had used a cable system. The action turned out to be quick, and there was a lot of pedal travel left after the clutch was fully disengaged. After over half a century driving standard-shift cars, I didn't know this was a problem. The is a bolt with a locking nut on the aluminum bell housing which can be adjusted to provide a hard stop as soon as the clutch is disengaged. This bolt was turned all the way in. I assume that a stop was done on Steve's Birkin at the pedal end of the mechanism either by accident or design and Steve autocrossed the car for decades with no trouble. Since I didn't know any better, and the professionals who should have known better didn't, that bolt on the bell housing never got turned out to block the throwout lever at the appropriate place. I seized the engine by using the clutch in the normal manner. I had by this time taken the car to a tuning shop, which had always been the plan. When the engine seized, I brought it back to the tuner, who suspected I had rotory-welded the thrust washer (which I had in my ignorance assumed was a bearing). Tuner suggested I get a junkyard engine to get me through the season. As he dug into the engine, he was surprised to find that the oil pump, which is on the crankshaft on these Zetec engines, had taken the hit. To clarify, it is not that the pump failed and the engine seized due to oil-pressure failure. The pump itself seized and prevented the engine from turning. This is entirely a clutch setup problem which did not harm the clutch but harmed something on the other end of the engine. This engine will come apart and be cleaned and balanced over the winter. The junkyard engine is in the car with the Hayabusa injection working. The clutch throw has been properly limited with the bolt on the bell housing so this can not happen again.

Many moons ago on the ShopTalk email list, members warned not to use Simple Green on aluminum at all.

Where do you get carriage bolts that are not made of cheese?

A Twink? That's a restomod. And I suggest you put the flag on the front. The streets are different than the dunes at Pismo Beach. :-)

I know that one.

Don't you own Visegrips?

I don't know if Panasport wheels are available in 14", but the Yokohama tires are available in 185/55R14.

I strongly suggest 15" wheels because of the tires. I have Caterham Prisoner wheels on my car. They are 6.5 x 15. The tires supplied by Caterham were 195/50R15. The exact size is available in the Yokohama A052 tire, which I believe to be the ideal tire for these light cars for street and autocross. They stick when cold and will last a long time on the street on our light cars. It just so happens that I was just offered a set of five Prisoner wheels by a member of this list. I didn't need a second set, but he tempted me with a set of ROH wheels from Australia in 8 x 15 and I could not resist. When I had my 1979 Caterham I wanted to suplement the 13" wheels and I bought Panasport wheels in 7x15 from Tire Rack. If these are still available, they would meet both my preference for 15" and your preference for Minilite looks.