How To Build A Rally Car

[altezzaclub]

So many distractions! I came up last friday but Pete reckoned we should go and watch the Border Ranges Rally. 2hours in the chopper, spend the day chasing the cars, stay at a farmstay for the night and back on Sunday. Beautiful smooth roads that didn't break up, some lovely machinery.. all very nice!

 

Steve is back at home more so we have a chance of getting the car finished and getting rallying next year. Its all planned for this week, but... Pete borrowed a trailer from a neighbour for feeding out hay (at 1200kg per load) and the pivot bar stays were the most horribly designed (and broken!) things I've ever seen.

 

So its been welding up the trailer for the last couple of days. Now we need to clean out the tractor shed and fill it with KE70s to get them out of the weather!

[altezzaclub]

arrgh! All day pushing cars across paddocks, washing the bird poop off them and then pushing them into the tractor shed! Not something I need to do every week!

 

So we have the 2-door Escort to sell as well as the Celica, which should make some room and buy us an extra set of tyres! That damm Cedric wagon can go too, even though Steve thinks it is wonderful.. its the size of a battleship and although a whole KE70 would fit inside I can't see us needing it as a service wagon!

 

Another couple of KE70s could be cleaned up and sold, he's got 22cars in sheds now! We might get Murray Cootes suspension then!

[love ke70]

LOL this sounds like an ongoing argument!!

 

22 cars is ridiculous and MCA gear is awesome, I run custom MCA gold shocks in the rear of my patrol ute and have his s13 gear in the front of my corolla.

 

Good to see things happening again!!

[altezzaclub]

We'll just clear the shit off the mezzanine that is out of the picture to the right of all those cars, get rid of the rubbish and move stuff in from the OTHER shed we want as a new workshop. What could go wrong..??

 

We'll have to cut the first section off and level it...

 

3rd section... not so hot !

 

5days later, we have seen all the problems of a 50+ year-old farm building.. We're about at the very worst point now, so it is all re-buiding from now on!

 

Rally car?? Dream on!

[love ke70]

HAHAHA, I think you enjoy this more than the rally car half the time anyway!!

[altezzaclub]

Lol- You're right I think.. Although we did look at the rally car!! just looked...

 

We just got the mezzanine decks tidied up before I had to head back home, so Steve can continue to clean up in there and start loading stuff back on it. Then to empty the 'tank shed' into this one, wait 'til you see the photos of that place!

 

That middle stump in the front we pulled out completely & chopped a longer one off one of the big beams. When we dug the hole out it was sopping wet, you could dig the soil with your hands. I think this really wet winter is causing a ground-water problem, and a few of these in the last 50years has done the damage we see.

 

Plus farming stuff getting heavier as more steel gets used and the loading on the mezzanine got way way past its design limits.

[love ke70]

haha I love this sort of stuff, as I make more money running my business our plan is to keep buying bigger and further out of town until we have something like this to play with full time and not have to worry about money anymore. Very envious of this sort of stuff, its all an adventure :)

[Western Revheads]

just read the whole post, all 5 pages hahaha, looking forward to reading more.

[love ke70]

Now read the "how not to build a rally car" thread, it is just as entertaining! haha

[altezzaclub]

Yeah, I would've been up there but the tenant in my rental here told me she was leaving & I'm buried in house renos atm. Taken a couple of weeks after lifting the carpet & realising the house has wonderful T&G flooring underneath to get this far. I'll do the hallway myself and get new carpet in the rest, its just so much sanding!.

 

Steve has a couple of operations on his wrist to recover from, it wasn't healing straight, but we'll be right in a month.

 

This coming week is WRC so I've finally accepted Pete's invitation to go up and watch it from his chopper. Its the last rally for VW, after this the world champion is out of a job!

[love ke70]

Hey! Where is my invitation to watch the rally from a chopper?! hahaha.

 

I am a chippy by trade, it is such a shame how many disgusting carpet and vinyl floors are laid over solid tongue and groove floors and they just rot away underneath! :(

[altezzaclub]

Well, got the rental finished enough to rent and headed back up to the Woolshed..

 

Finished fitting a new heater to the Hoonicorn KE70 and swapped that for the Girls KE70 as a daily. Back to a 4K from a 4AGE..

 

We finished the mezzanine, loaded the shelves with timber and packed a few more KE70s in there.

 

Then the next distraction was the car trailer that Pete had bought for us. It suffered bad design from the day it was built in someone's back yard, and also suffered bad engineering from someone learning how to weld as they built it! Anyway, we chopped and changed it and re-welded bits of it, and its rego's and in use.

 

Its up for sale, $1500 rego's with new tyres, as we want to swap a trailer that will carry a landcruiser for a trailer that will only carry KE70s, so maybe 1200kg max load. Torn between buying something that will do the job, or building something that will be superb at that one job..

 

I'm back in Orange for a month, then hoping to hit the farm in mid-Jan. Steve has the last cast on his wrist so things will accelerate!

[altezzaclub]

Such optimism! Of course we're buried in distractions as usual, and the more time goes past the more different cars need work!

 

We did up both Coronas and redied them for sale. Last weekend it was off to the Moonbi Swap Meet for a test run and they both went great! If you want a nice RT throw a couple of grand our way!

 

Then because Steve had aquired another AE71 wagon we needed shed space, so the Cedric was moved to the lower farm.

 

All went well until he crested the steep drop to the driveway and when he changed down there was only a box full of neutrals! He bled off enough speed and coasted into the driveway, and we avoided mentioning it until Pete said we'd better put the truck away before it rained.. Turned out a selector shaft had jumped off, so it was soon fixed.

 

Of course we needed to clear room for it in THAT shed, so we used the tractor to load old machinery up on top of 44gal drums, then dragged them into place with a chain through the 'window'.

 

Then we loaded half the drums into a disused stable. Once we found what the rabbits had done to the dirt underneath we used the tractor to level the ground, and then IT died! That was the fuse to the fuel pump relay, so easily fixed again, although I don't know why it blew.

 

Finally we had the space for the Capella, and spent an hour or two trying to get it on 4 inflated tyres. With that moved across the shed we unloaded the Cedric. Of course its battleship length jammed the tail in the dirt going down the truck ramps and it all turned to shit as usual. In the end we had it all arranged.

 

Today was all day to put a new radiator & alty in Mao the KE70. Not quite done, and after that will be the leaking axle seal on the Landcruiser.. after that is a very smart KE70 to re-motor and sell, and THEN we might have space for the rally car!

Edited March 14, 2017 by altezzaclub

[altezzaclub]

OK, Mao finished, more or less, John Deere 140amp alty drop straight in, new rad and electric fan with better air flow and a general straighten up of the front end.

 

The Cruiser is filling up the workshop and we're learning how to pull out rear axles..

[love ke70]

I love these updates, keep it up :)