How To Build A Rally Car

[altezzaclub]

Well, the workshop was humming on the next trip up. A couple of 50,000Lumen LEDs gave us general light over the whole area, and it filled with KE70s.

We reckoned on a new dash cluster as we have capillary oil pressure and water temp, an ammeter and a 6" tacho...  So I was cutting plastic.

Cainy bought his wagon around to sort out the three 4AGE inlets he had, none of them good. This one with the side welded up and shaved became the one, even if it has TViS disconnected. So it needed a vac source sortout  and some new fuel lines.

Lewis was about to throw his 4K motor out and either fight a 4AGE in or just swap to another 4K. As it turned out, it just needs a head job due to a lack of skim after the last head job when it overheated.

Meanwhile Steve & I couldn't get a handbrake cable setup to fit the rally car!  Neither KE70, Corona or Celica hybrid made any sense, and in the end we took the last useful thing out of the parts Celica in the paddock.  We just picked it up and stuck the bumper under one side, then sent Callista under it to unscrew the cable as we figured she was the most expendable  and beside she wouldn't be able to lift the car back up if it fell on Steve!

Next trip should see both KE70s sorted and running, and back into rally car wiring. Some side attractions like fitting the top back on the 22000L water tank and then framing over it to hold the lid in shape just never got photographed, same with the new 45deg bends in the braided brake lines. Maybe next time...

 

[altezzaclub]

Well, time flies...  A couple of trips and the rally car is just like it was, although we tacked in a diagonal brace into the main hoop, not needed by CAMS but AMSAG wanted it.

So...  my Hoonicorn was excess with both The Girl and the wife buying new cars, so I sold that to a guy up on the Gold Coast for $3000. We drove it up to Ipswich and handed it over, then drove to my rental in Kingaroy where a big storm had blown the garden shed over a month back. It was two ordinary sheds joined end to end, and abysmally made as most these garden sheds are. Some steel from Bunnings and 250rivets sorted that out, and a couple of days later we drove back through 500km of smoke to the farm.

Steve's daily, Mao, had dropped the exhaust when he was a control on an AMSAG event down on the coast, so we put that on the hoist and re-made it all. The new sliders are great for tight spots in a workshop, I just need to modify them when I get time...

Then Steve decided to raise some cash by selling the Beige Bomber. It had been sold and re-bought back a few years later to a mate of his, and then it was the company car for Strathaven Organics for a year. I spent a week cleaning it up and he sold it to a guy in Sydney for $4000.

From there I came home and will join Mr Rural Fireman towards the end of the month for another couple of weeks.  Maybe we'll even get onto the rally car! Hopefully the fires will have burned out by then!

 

 

Edited November 17, 2019 by altezzaclub

[parrot]

I was wondering if you were affected by the fires, but do realise NSW is a big place!j

[altezzaclub]

Yeah, there are lot of enormous fires around, but they are on Govt land because its never looked after. The farms won't burn, the trees are in isolated pockets and the dry grass is 10mm high. There's just no soil moisture or green plants, so there's no water to absorb the heat and make it difficult to burn. Same reason the summer is early, a drought means no dew so the earth heats up more and faster each day.

One more distraction I forgot about was making the tractor narrower so the rotary hoe would dig up the wheel tracks. We carefully took the umpteen hundred Kg wheels off and turned them around so the rim was outwards, but one fell over.  I'm impressed with the engine lifter, I thought it would break!

[altezzaclub]

Back up again for the last trip of the year-   Plenty of distractions..  Steve picked up some car or other and the trailer was swaying, it only needs a full tank of gas or luggage in the boot to make it tail-heavy. We figured we'd move the spare wheel from the back where it was on the tipping up part, to the front and put it on the non-tipping part. The problem with this was the lack of weight at the back overall meant when the KE70 front wheels got 1/2way up the ramps they tipped the frame down and it rose up at the back & hit the sills in front of the rear wheels.

As it turned out, with the spare moved forward the tipping problem seemed no worse, but the stability should be better.

It hasn't carried anything yet, so its all unproven!

Jimbo presented another distraction, the door handle packed up completely. The door came off & I welded a couple of little extensions on inside that made it work, but the winder was shagged as well so Steve ordered a new one.

Amazingly they are still available and not expensive. I looked at making a KE70 one fit, but they are quite different!

Steve's GF came down in the teal Corona Wagon with a leaking rad. Kickn5k talked about them failing here-

and this is the first one we've had go. I've got one in the The Girls KE70, Mao's old one went into the rally car and a new one went into Mao, and Steve's Landcruiser has one, so there are 5 running around here. It was leaking from the top tank just in from the outer edges-

and it looks like the core isn't sealed to the top tank.

Hopefully that's the only dud. He just bought a new one and we fitted it.

We finished mao's exhaust, a flexible joint at the extractors-

and solid mounting all the way back. There's a strip of inner tube between the pieces of old KE70 jack we cut up as mounts, anything so it doesn't drum through the car.

Then we did the same on the rally car- The old system from the Celica was made to fit, jammed up hard on the body. I put a very front mount on to take weight off the flexible joint and let that be flexible.

The rest is like mao's

except the rear had the fuel system right by it...

 

which was solved with a bit of asbestos sheet lying around

We didn't set fire to anything and its all in place!  A win!

[altezzaclub]

We pulled the cage out and welded in the extra couple of bars. Josh lent us his bender so we could raise the bar above Steve's head.

That worked OK and it was ready to go back in-

Its all in now and done up-

but not without excitement as we have a hole in the bottom of the sill at each foot for one bolt, and we lost a socket up in there..  it soon rolled down to the next hole-

We had a slow leak in the SamQ unit on the back of the head and finally took it off. The seam in the O-ring was weeping, and Sam said he's had a couple so changed O-rings. He sent a new styled one out straight away at no charge.

We needed roof vents and as the Celica had crushed the old antique Valvoline can we used, I grabbed the nearest tins to replicate it.

All this was while New England was still on fire, Steve would rush off now & then to fight fires..

 

[altezzaclub]

With the cage back in the dash could be re-fitted, and I started on the Terratrip wiring again. This was all fine and we had bench-tested the new probes 6months back, but it wouldn't count! Turns out the probes are directional in wiring, a +ve and -ve so to speak, and I had, by luck, got both of them round the wrong way!

That's all tidied up and working now, but before then we thought we'd try the Terratrip unit in Mao, where it had been used before we fitted a new connector on it. Of course modern connectors are for very small wires..  so we might have to go over Mao's wiring again..

Now, some people believe that you can tie a nail onto a piece of string and drop it down a  length of poly hose, then pull an electric fence wire through, so you can lay it on the ground between fences at gates... When this didn't work we did try blasting it through with the 12V air compressor & a tissue.  It worked 'in the lab' for 2M, but when we were out with a 70M length of poly and straight in with the fence wire it didn't work at all!  Damm, another great idea down the drain!

So, time to head home..  Now, what could this road "worker" be doing?? He used to hold a lollipop and turn it around as soon as the opposing traffic had come through the road works...  Now he sits here watching the cars as the new traffic lights hold us up for AGES after the opposing cars have gone, as they're on a timer!

A lot of people need to be fired if Australia is ever going to get more efficient!!  This fascination with OSHA and safety could handle a big wind-back too!

[Big G]

Use a vacuum cleaner and a deflated party balloon tied to survey string as the first draw wire. It works for miles.

[altezzaclub]

Love it!!  Of course, a vac sucks better than a 12V compressor can blow, its all about volume more than pressure.

Next time!

[corollaart]

Hi Keith and Steve

Looks like your making some progress on the car,which is good news ,this thread started near 6 years ago 😮.

Distractions of farming!i guess 😊.I agree with you on the ohs over kill ,it takes a week to put there bloody sighs up!!geez

keep up the good work rob

[Boosted]

On 12/18/2019 at 7:12 PM, altezzaclub said:

<snip>

So, time to head home..  Now, what could this road "worker" be doing?? He used to hold a lollipop and turn it around as soon as the opposing traffic had come through the road works...  Now he sits here watching the cars as the new traffic lights hold us up for AGES after the opposing cars have gone, as they're on a timer!

 

A lot of people need to be fired if Australia is ever going to get more efficient!!  This fascination with OSHA and safety could handle a big wind-back too!

In WA they've figured out there's a risk of dehydration and sunburn if you're standing outside holding the Lollipop. So the lollipop person sits in the aircon cab of the cruiser and presses a remote button to switch the sign back and forth .... Progress !

[altezzaclub]

Just to keep my hand in before I head back up to the farm I dropped around to Josh's to give him a hand on the Evo3 after he lost brakes on the Armidale rallysprint last year. After going up and over a bank at high speed it needed a new front. He had the motor out so Monday I unstitched the front and cut out some of the nav side chassis.

Today we dragged the spare Lancer around and I dropped the motor/gearbox/K-bar out with the help of his brother Matt, sitting here in the Rolla that Josh is putting a cage in for a customer.

 

With the mechanicals out we unstiched the front again, and by tonight had it sitting in the Evo3 waiting to be welded.

I might get another day or two in before heading up to the farm this weekend. We're aiming on having both cars in the Orange Rally in a few months.

[altezzaclub]

Another trip in Feb showed more reasons why the rally car isn't built!  A flush of enthusiasm bought in an elderly rusty campervan, although in reasonable nick for its age. Registration prep took the first week, fixing small shit and changing all the oils.

The expensive part was between all the new steering joints underneath, the cross link that came in at $300!  Toyota use forged ends for the balljoints and just weld different length pipe in between, but nothing on any of the other farm utes/trucks was this wide. We figure the previous guy did it all up but finally balked at this one. Apparently only three in Australia..

With that on the road the next was the Hilux ute, something to nip onto town with when we needed a large something else picked up. The previous owner had completely ruined the paint with a closed-door closed-eye respray in black and white, and Steve wanted it back to original.  We took the tray off and Cainy set to cleaning the paint off that-

I set about panelbeating everything & Steve cleaned the paint off the cab.

Although quick, somehow a flapper disc wasn't the way to go...

After a day or two I realised the front wasn't really connected to the chassis in any meaningful way..

and the floor was almost ready for Flintstone power!

It was at this time the Hilux was demoted to 'unregisterable farm ute', so it ended up with a freshly painted tray, a clearcoat cab, mongrel guards and a new rust-proof battery tray!

 

Edited February 18, 2020 by altezzaclub

[altezzaclub]

By then Louie had arrived to continue the battle with his KE70, he'd driven it into the ground and the list was long. The biggest was a blown head gasket & a completely collapsed rear uni in the driveshaft. A skim sorted the head out-

Then it was worth porting the intakes to match the gasket-

and we pulled the block out to tip it on its side and scrape all the rust & scale out. As usual, over half a cup of crap was blocking #4 water jacket.

The biggest problem was matching the manifolds to the head, the intake/exhausts were not flat and the manifold gasket wouldn't last long. We tried three manifolds, all of which destroyed the hotspot bolts when we tried to take them apart, and finally the 4th pair were OK. A couple of days and it was running, so now it awaits rust work.

Of course there was a stack of other jobs to do, like once again re-welding the farm bike's stand with yet another improved design. The last one must have done 4 or 5years, we'll see if this one is better. 

The Woolshed tanks ran out of water, which means the caravan did,  as the gutters went downhill and then up to them. So we got in behind the tanks and jacked the whole wall up on its rotted post. A few bricks and some timber re-aligned everything and now it actually catches water.

After that we finally did some work on the rally car for a few days. The trip up next week will be the big one, there is a rally sprint in mid-March, and the car doesn't look any different from its last photo!  It does have sill jack mounts and a motorised Mercedes stick jack, and a manual switch with a warning light for the electric fan, but not much else!

 

 

Edited February 18, 2020 by altezzaclub

[altezzaclub]

Well, I'm heading back up to the farm tomorrow, but yesterday I popped down to josh's to give him a hand with the latest race car..  With the Evo 5 running in the top 5 of the Whiteline Sprints, the Evo 3 with a new nose awaiting assembly and being bored with the Skyline drift car, he needed something new to do.  An almost-free rustbucket of a KE70 with all the flatty front removed was the job! 

When I arrived he'd just welded the diff & was extending the LCAs.  We added 25mm there, then cut the tie-rod ends and did the same. Then he cut the steering arms and took 10mm out of them.

While he was welding I took the rear springs out...

This gave an acceptable ride setup...  Don't worry about our wing, we'll finish that later.  Love those 5.5inchx13s!

He'd aquired a Ford Falcon carb and figured a 4L setup will run on a 1.3L.  it took a lot of fiddling to get the throttle cable fitted and working, and get the idle under 3000rpm-

We took it for a test down the bottom paddock, where it died of course. Eventually we pushed it back up with a bobcat and pulled the carb to pieces. Having solved that we took it down again whereupon it died again!  This time we pulled it back up with the ute and checked the fuel pump as well..   Today he's buying an electric pump and hopefully its ready for a thrash in a gymkhana sometime!

We did spend an hour welding mods onto an aluminium sumpguard Steve was given by a guy who had it on an Escort. We're trying to get away from having vertical bolts up from underneath.  That goes up with me tomorrow as we need the car ready in a couple of weeks for a rallysprint as a test before the Orange rally. Josh's Evo3 is on the same timetable..