Truenotch

Coming up on this season of Markku's Driveline Adventures: J160 Gearbox disassembly. For the last few events, I've been really struggling to get gears. Particularly getting down into 2nd, but it's also been crunching up into 3rd and 4th. Missing 2nd gear and then bogging through 3rd lost me a few a positions at the last round of racing at Highlands and I was getting super frustrated trying to find gears, so it's time to sort it out! I have a spare gearbox that I swapped out after it started to get rumbly at oldschool nats 2015. The plan has always been to rebuild it so I have a good spare, but it hasn't been an important job until right now 😅 So I downloaded the full J160 service manual and proceeded to pull it apart. You can download the full PDF from SQ Engineering (at the bottom of this page: https://www.sq-engineering.com/tech-articles/wiring-diagrams-and-diagnosis ). As I was taking things apart, a few little bits appeared from the oil. I think these are piece of bearing cage... Once I got the counter gear off, it was pretty easy to see where the rumble came from: A few of the rollers had completely fallen out of the bearing and it's chewed up the counter shaft. The rollers run directly on this surface, so I think this shaft is toast unless I get someone to hard face weld and machine it back to size Note to self and everyone else: if your bench has holes in it, put a layer of cardboard down! It take ages to find a roll pun when they fall down there! I think the shaft is too far gone, so will get Dad to raid my parts gearbox in Palmy for a counter shaft and a couple of other bits so I can get the box rebuilt in time for the next round of racing on Feb 28th. Having a parts hoard comes in handy sometimes [often].

Waikaia's Saturday night, right? CBK to go in on a cabin at the campground and meet you there on Sat night. Can you please add dates to the itinerary @RUNAMUCK.

I'd like to, but I need to ride to Waikaia (170km) before 8am Sunday morning and ride back to Queenstown from Fairlie (300km) after the finish. It's a marathon on the XR, let alone a 100cc pre-mix 2 stroke with no support vehicle or lights.

Big block needs a bunch of things for a WOF. I'm racing on the Saturday, so the plan is to do a dawn raid on the XR to meet you all at Waikaia on Sundee morning. But if I don't get it fixed in time, old trusty is waiting in the wings...

Haha, hell yeah. Build a trailer for the 212 postie and chuck a couple of spare engines in it

Correct. The basic NCRCA has a set of through holes and a set of threaded holes to offset the balljoint and steering arm by your chosen offset. With the "Evolved" ones, you can use either the through holes, the threaded holes, or a combination of the two to cancel out the factory ackerman: I reckon you could design a custom version of the evolved style with extra offset, then make a new steering arm (or swap the arms from side to side?) to account for the rest of the difference you need.

What's your scrub radius like at the moment? The cheapest and easiest thing to try would be adding a negative camber RCA to give you room to have the ackerman set up in the opposite direction. It'll make the steering a bit heavier and the tyres will scrub over a bigger radius, but it'll be way less engineering than anything else suggested here so far. You could actually make custom RCAs that only pivot one of the bolt holes if you wanted to - that way you get ackerman adjustment and don't move the balljoint as far as you would otherwise.

If you hang around until the next weekend you could watch the best classic rally in NZ.

Churr. I'll do some planning and will try to get down to Waikaia with the MX or XR by Sunday morning.

How realistic is it for me to join in on Sunday and Monday? I'm racing at Highlands on the Saturday, but am keen for hoons.

Those are good numbers for 91 octane! How come you didn't run it on 95 or higher? Looking forward to seeing this run on Saturday btw.

Haha, for real though, the data says so. From 3.4 seconds faster back to 1.4 after the mistake:

It has a grumpy 13B. I would have beaten him if it wasn't for my lock up.

It has an EJ25 turbo in the back like a Porsche Cayman.

So that brings us to Coronet Peak Hillclimb Weekend. Hard to believe it's been a year since the last one! @GARDRB, @Roman, @Rhyscar and Josh flew down from the North Island for a dirty weekend in Queenstown supporting me and apparently driving my Legacy through terrain most people would think is impossible for that kind of car. I really enjoyed having people in town for it and they seemed to enjoy themselves too. I'm very keen to push for an OS weekend in Queenstown for next year's hillclimb. We kicked of with the car display on the Queenstown waterfront. Old mate from Luis Vuitton wasn't stoked about having riff-raff out front, but we had a permit so he can GTFO. Then we mucked around for a while, did scrutineering and had devil burger for dinner after 10pm. Check out this weird creation that was at scrutineering. A Smart car with crazy aero and a 1650cc+ modified Hayabusa engine. Competition in the 2L class was pretty tough this year. Brad Rule entered in his impressive K20 EG Civic and Andrew Gibson brought his K20 Lotus Elise along. Both cars had a power/weight advantage over me and I was sure they'd both be a few seconds up the road. Brad's Civic has a very spicy K20 that is rumoured to be from Reg Cook's Nissan NX Coupe land speed racer. I pitted next to Martin from HPA. We'd got him ready for the hillclimb and it was his first ever motorsport event! Pretty cool that he could get started in the wild little widebody B18C City: From there it was into the runs. I had 3 runs with a mildly moist run in the middle of the day. My times were looking good leading into the last run of the day. In the last run of the day I was on for a blinder! My lap timer said I was over 3 seconds up on my earlier run... When I struggled to get into 2nd gear and lost at least two seconds at the tight hairpin. Gah! Here's the video: It was still my fastest run of the day and now I know there's at least a 1.36 in the car next year.... The 1.38.3 sat me in 2nd place behind Brad's Civic and in front of the yellow Elise. The whole day was another great one yet again and I'm stoked to have been involved with organising it this year. ... Oh and after all of the time we spent together over the weekend, this is the only pic I can find that has all 5 of us (you can just see the top of my hat behind the car). Who's coming next year?