Gotta get back from the racetrack somehow...
A few more battles with a problematic rear hub seals... had one side fully apart and one side half apart, seem to have fixed the problem at least for now.
In other problems, on the hoist at Shockworks, a crack was noticed in the expansion chamber. Faaaaark.
I quickly welded it up on the last day, added some more little triangular gussets along this edge, and welded some small laminated areas where the tube meets the box. No weld porn here, just fixing and praying for longevity.
Period aesthetic rules at Wilby Retrospeed mean no huge diameter wheels, so in addition to needing some decent rubber, I had to lose the monster rear wheels anyway. Pulled a pair of my 15x10" Hotwires off the shelf and started giving them a renovation. Never restored single piece alloy wheels before. Certainly not a 2min job!
First step was laying down some ally TIG weld repairs in the areas where there was pre-existing damage... unsurprisingly there were a few marks from their last 50 years of life.
Then gave them a bit of a sandblast to get rid of any loose paint and unfortunately do a number on some of the flatter machined surfaces I'd rather not damage :(
At least I used this to clean the inside of the wheel which was stained with awful marks. I also remembered that one of the wheelnut counterbores had been hogged out to a bigger diameter (presumably to fit a larger locking nut).
Without having any machinery super handy to open up all the other counterbores to match on a rushed timeline, I figured the best option was to make a sleeve and weld it in to bring it down to the size of the others.
More of my imperfect welding:
Ground and sanded:
Laid down some pressure pack high fill primer, orange, and concept 2k clear.
Used an angle-cut blade on a handle to start ripping off the paint on the front of the spokes:
Then hand wet-sanding out various repairs and marks:
More sanding and then some polishing on the car:
Cleaned, and wrapped in some gorgeous Pirelli P7 Corsa Classics ft. happy me. (this wheel resto actually took a lot more work than I expected, and I only finished it the night before I had to leave for the event lol)
Taste the rainbow.
The car was sooooo bloody fast and felt amazing. This track surface is loads better than Calder, the dampers are working beautifully, and I had lots of grip with the new rear tyres.
Still lifting the inside rear wheel a little bit coming out of the tightest corners, so it was a little slow to be able to roll into the throttle (the two choices I see are putting a KAAZ locker in it instead of the TrueTrac, or down-sizing the rear swaybar... I'm still leaning towards the swaybar change).
I pulled about 1.6 seconds off my best time in the 911 and had loads left in the car, but started getting oil starvation on the sweeper. I put another 1-1.5L in the motor (which only takes 5L to "full" on the dipstick so I thought may be consistently under-filled) but at that point it started popping the dipstick out and didn't really fix the starvation in the sweeper, so couldn't do much other than take it easy.
I've already got a bigger sump with crank scraper, diamond box, and trap doors etc.
My rocker cover mod fixed the problem where the motor was pumping the oil into the catch can - so that isn't emptying the motor like it was at Optima.
And I've got the restrictor push-rods in the motor now, to reduce over-filling of the top end. I don't know how full it's getting now.
I'm not sure if external drain-backs from the rocker covers to the sump are what is needed? Or whether they are even likely to fix this?
Maybe an Accusump/Oil Accumulator is needed, but that is hard to do without it being very visible...
So the car is a hell of a package. It's still obviously not perfect but even with all of those problems I was 1.5 seconds off the fastest time of the day.
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