74PHIL build thread featuring Zetec with Suzuki Hayabusa Keihin/Denso injection.

[pethier]

Update!

 

Ron texted me.  It was not the thrust bearing that locked up the engine.  

 

The oil pump grenaded.  The engine was essentially at idle when the incident occurred.  If I had been on the freeway at 3000 RPM, the damage might have been a lot worse.

 

In the interest of getting this car back on the road for LOG, Ron is not going to clean the engine for shrapnel, but use the block from the engine that I just bought.

[wdb]

One wonders what the oil pump ingested to cause it to grenade...

[pethier]

2 hours ago, wdb said:

One wonders what the oil pump ingested to cause it to grenade...

Good question.  I will soon visit Ron's shop and ask what he knows.

[pethier]

IMG_9128 seized oil pump

Apparently, the oil pump runs concentric with the crankshaft. It seems to have taken the brunt of the abuse of the unrestricted clutch travel.

 

The original block and head will need to be thoroughly-cleaned to remove all the shrapnel.

 

[pethier]

On 8/17/2025 at 6:44 PM, pethier said:

In the interest of getting this car back on the road for LOG, Ron is not going to clean the engine for shrapnel, but use the block from the engine that I just bought.

After consultation, Ron and I have agreed to use both the block and head of the bought engine.  This saves Ron from having to clean the head.    

 

Alternator and other parts are different in the Birkin.  There a few aluminum Ford pieces that are not used, and other pieces have been created to support the different configuration used for the Birkin.

 

The result of using the bought cylinder head is not likely to give as much power and torque.  Steve had made some changes to the head to improve the flow.  With luck, I will have a useable engine for now and all winter to clean up the "Steve" engine and have it back in the car for next season.

 

Apparently all this is because the other shop missed the importance of the simple clutch-travel limiter right there on the bell housing. Ron spotted it.  My guess is that Steve never needed to use it because the pedal layout in the Birkin stopped the travel before the throwout could cause trouble.

Edited August 27 by pethier
Just spotted a sabotage-by-spellchecker.

[pethier]

Went to Isanti today to pick up my (sold) 1700 Super Sprint engine and the T9 gearbox that came with it.  Came home and started putting into my truck all the peripherals that I had removed from the Isanti shop earlier.

 

Took the Cayman to an autocross practice day in Waterloo IA.  The Seven is still in Ron's shop in Lakeville.  This is getting close.

 

Seven or no Seven, my truck is going to LOG in Pittsburgh where I hand over the lot to the buyer.  The only upside to going to LOG without a Seven is that my F-150 gets massively-better fuel mileage without the trailer (unlike my 496 Suburban did).

[pethier]

On 8/26/2025 at 10:51 PM, pethier said:

 

Seven or no Seven, my truck is going to LOG in Pittsburgh

Seven.

 

The foam filters had way too much resistance to air flow.  At 5000 RPM under load, the airflow could not keep up and the car started cutting out.

I could not find on short notice filter material that flowed. I went with Ron's aluminum-window-screen idea. Hose pieces were formerly used for mounting the velocity stacks.  Keeps out the big stuff.  I don't sweat the small stuff since this is the junkyard engine.  The car now pulls all the way to the rev limiter at 7500.

 

Brian's shop must have unhooked the steering column for access to something else.  When they reconnected it, they didn't put it back the way they found it.  When driving straight, the steering wheel pointed off to the right.    I straightened it by rotating the steering wheel hub two grooves to the left. This has no effect other than changing the positions where the parking lock hits. No effect on the turn signal canceling since these cars don't HAVE turn signal canceling.

[pethier]

IMG_9117 Junkyard engine wearing Hayabusa injecton.

 

Ron discovered that the automatic-transmission version has a different mounting than the manual.  This makes sense, as a flywheel and a torque converter are different animals.  Swapping in the item from Steve's engine worked fine.

 

 

 

Photo Copyright RS Motors.

Edited September 1 by pethier
add photo credit

[pethier]

I got tired of arguing with Champion Power Equipment.  After the remote for their winch failed I consulted their website which informed me that all I had to do was call this phone number to order another keyfob remote.  So I called the number and was told they don't stock remotes and can't get them.  I needed to buy another entire system including contactor and have it shipped for more than 100 dollars.

 

I bought a another brand of remote system and wired it to Champion contactor (the big relay).  Shipped pronto to an Amazon locker.  It cost about twenty bucks and included two keyfob remotes that are smaller than the Champion lump.  They both work just fine.  I tested each at a considerable distance.  Belt and braces, though, I wanted to have a fallback.  Leary about wiring in the Champion manual switch, I wired it so I can open my Union-Jack-decorated box and unplug the receiver and plug in the switch.

 

Now I can once-again walk my Seven or my Cayman into my trailer with one hand on the the steering wheel, one thumb on the WiFi button, and both eyes on where the tire is tracking.

 

 

[savagete2860]

Hi @pethier it was good to see you at LOG44. I was the guy in the orange 420R. Wanted to drop a photo and a video I had of your car at the autocross. Hope you had as much fun as I did!

 

 

 

 

[pethier]

13 hours ago, savagete2860 said:

Hi @pethier it was good to see you at LOG44. I was the guy in the orange 420R. Wanted to drop a photo and a video I had of your car at the autocross. Hope you had as much fun as I did!

 

 

 

 

Thanks!

[pethier]

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.

[pethier]

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...

 

 

 

[pethier]

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.

 

 

[pethier]

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.

[pethier]

On 8/18/2025 at 7:17 AM, wdb said:

One wonders what the oil pump ingested to cause it to grenade...

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.