Rags lives!

Got the motor running last night. All the problems that I have been having; slow cranking, fire in the distributor, intermittent spark; were all due to...... engine was not earthed! Yup, stoopid me forgot to ground the engine.

I was hooking up some safety wire to run the 3 chokes when the wire started to glow red when it touched the body. So I hooked up a grounding strap, and the motor fired and ran within a 1/2 a revolution. 100 lbs of oil pressure, perhaps a little high and I should check the oil pressure release valve.

Motor sounds awesome. Ran it at around 2000 rpm. Plugged a few leaks while it ran. The GP3 is a nice sounding cam. Played with timing. I set the roller rockers per the instructions (17 thous on inlet, 19 thous on exhaust), but they sound a little noisy to me. The head is getting a lot of oil.

I'm going to have to strip the carbs. I pulled the plugs and 2 of the plugs (Champion RNY7C) were wet (not from the same carb, so not a float bowl problem?), and the other 4 were very sooty. Curiously, the header from one of the wet plugs was hotter than the others. Thats bizarre because I thought that the hot header would have been due to a lean condition. So I think a carb teardown is in order.

I'm going to run stock plugs (Champion NY9) as well, just in case the cold plugs that I was using were not correct.

I have a sound file of the unmuffled beast running. I'll post that soon.

Oil, coolant and gas lines are done. The gas line was a challenge as I did not want to route the 3/8" line up the spine of the car, alongside the exhaust system as was done by the factory. Wanting to keep the fuel cool, I routed the line under the car away from the spine. This was a little more trouble than expected.

Next up is the mufflers and electrical system.

Roll cage and corner weights

Roll cage is done. A real work of art having to fit in the small cockpit, under the Surrey top, and clear the old Porsche 914 race seats. Need to clean up around the welds, a little plastic work to smooth the finish (and hide the dents in the tubing from the pipe bender, and paint. I can now put the car on a lift, jack up 1 corner, etc, andf have the doors open and close. That should make the chassis stuffer.

At this stage I also measured corner weights (with no interior, no battery, no bonnet, no driver, no fluids. While it may seem premature at this stge, I wanted to have a baseline so that as stuff goes into the car, I am forewarned.

LF: 479 lbs RF: 494

LR: 430 lbs RR: 435

Total weight at this stage is 1837 lbs, a little heavier than I wanted. I'll be lucky if the car weighs in under 2100 lbs when complete. The weight over the RF I ascribe to the Webers.

Still a long way to go.