Truenotch's BEAMS AE86 racecar

[Truenotch]

[Truenotch]

My scanner sucks, but here's another pic from the classic meeting:

[Truenotch]

Completed airbox and front panel. I put it back on the dyno today and the inlet air is a lot cooler now. Inlet temps sat at around 20 degrees throughout the whole session and it's made the mixtures a lot more predictable.

It's still not pulling the numbers I'd hoped for, but we've got the power and torque curves looking good. It pulls nicely to 8000rpm and starts to flatten off at 7500 or so... NEEDS more outboard injection .

Final figure today was 137kw / 184hp at the wheels with a little bit more timing to come in the top end.

It'll get one more run in the morning and then is ready to race! Bring on the weekend.

[Truenotch]

It was so much better this time! Managed to drop my PB lap time by 3 seconds down to 1:17.9 and there's still more in it.

Here's a vid of a few close calls:

Race one:

I sat out race three after finding a couple of decent cracks in a front brake disc - it probably would have been fine, but I didn't want that on my conscience while racing.

There's extra time in the setup and I had niggles with play in the LF rack end and the LF wheel bearing kept coming loose, so I would have had 5mm+ of unwanted toe movement at some points! I reckon there's half a second there and more time once I'm used to the car again.

Stoked the car is going good, but now gutted that I've booked a one way ticket to Australia . Who's got a sweet job for me in NZ so I can do the 2012 / 2013 season of SS2000?

[Truenotch]

Race two:

Couple of shots thanks to Bwarp:

[Truenotch]

Couple more pics:

Took it racing again on the weekend and didn't go as fast, but was still recovering from some disease that Hamilton gave me (you spend one night in Hamilton...) so am still happy. Vids to come.

And I managed to find a sweet job in NZ, so am no longer moving to Perth! That's a bonus in my books.

[Truenotch]

Sorry for the camera angle. Here's race 1:

[Truenotch]

More vids and a few pics from the weekend:

Broken lever... Whoops! Will weld that better next time...

Few things to tidy up before next time but it's coming along well.

Oh, and my outboard injection kit arrived yesterday

[Truenotch]

[Truenotch]

So a bit more info on last weekend:

... It was unbearably hot! (unusual for fielding) with ambient temps around 30' and in car temps up over 40! This was sapping horsepower and brainpower bigtime, but we all had good fun... According to my lap timer, I was reaching the exit of the hairpin up to .9 of a second faster than I have before, but that advantage disappeared (and then some) after the two big straights that follow.

Now I know there's more time in it, so it's a case of fine-tuning and hoping for the right conditions from here on.

More pics:

Write up: http://pitcrewdesign.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/the-end-of-the-road-for-twenty-twelve/

[Guest Truenotch]

This was at OS Nats on the weekend and I ended up taking about 6-7 people for rides. I hope you all enjoyed it . Rookie Dave drove it... He's the only other person to have driven it on the track since I've owned it. Quite cool to see it from the outside for once!

I've still got a few things to work on. The brake discs are very warped (they were new 2 meetings ago) so I think I need to invest in higher quality rotors next time (a skim will do for now) and it needs an extensive wheel alignment. The steering felt dead and heavy compared to normal and it turned left much better than right. Combo that with the need to finish my ducting to the airbox, add some form of air filter and fit up my splitter... There's always more to do .

Here's a pic from Richy with Dave at the reigns:

[Truenotch]

Had a bit of a play with my new wheels (ex VG) and new-old-stock 225/45/15 RA1's: 

 

Potato phone pics, but you'll get the idea. I added an extra 25mm to get them sitting right. 

 

[Truenotch]

Still playing around with this as often as I can. Bought a different seat of Brad that holds me in better and stops fatties from being able to drive my car (even more so than the old seat). 

 

Also added new rose joints / pillow balls to the lower arms and tophats as they were starting to get loose and had a serious fiddle with my pedal box to try and sort issues I'd had at the last visit to Taupo. It's still not right in the brake department, so I'm going to switch back to my old pads and see if that solves the problem (fronts are pinchy and the squeal never goes away, even when the brakes are hot). 

 

FAKE WHEELS: 

 

The diff is all rebuilt (thanks to 10-5's old man!) with a 4.778 ratio. I can now start in second gear and it's revving to ~7500 in 6th down the back straight at Taupo   . It'll get to a higher top speed when I get there on a dry day with slicks. 

 

I still have a worrying driveline vibration that is getting on my nerves. It becomes quite scary in 6th gear (becomes a whirr). I'm going to try adjusting the 4-link to add angle to the UJ's as a first test (they appear to be almost straight) before talking to the driveshaft man about going to a 2-piece. 

 

Here's the footage from Taupo: 

 

Next on the list is building a sidepipe exhaust. I've got my new muffler and a 3" combo bend thanks to eke_zetec... The muffler is quite small, so I think it'll be quite loud! 

[Truenotch]

Finished my new exhaust today - 3" side pipe with one straight through muffler (glass packed). 

 

 

The rear edge of the muffler is now the lowest point on the car at ~70mm. 

 

Which means the rear end is empty, so I've got the option of adding a rear undertray for extra aero points. 

Now all it needs is a wash, a new set of slicks and an alignment before the first round of SS2000 this weekend. Choice! 

I had a chat to my driveshaft man and he's given me ideas for how to make the 2 piece. He has a hefty aftermarket hanger bearing and suggested mounting it slightly further back than the factory location. That's the next job after labour weekend as it needs to be sorted before Pukekohe in November!! 

 

[Truenotch]

[Truenotch]

This weekend in Taupo was a fairly successful one for Team Beams. I entered the first round of the SS2000 summer season, finally... I've been intending to enter SS in this car since I got it in 2007. 

The weeks in lead up were busy, as I had to make a new exhaust, sort some braking issues, fit brand new slicks, finish little things and do an alignment (thanks Japawagons). 

It was an interesting weekend and Taupo's weather is always iffy on Labour weekend. It was fine for Qualifying and race one on Saturday and I qualified 8th overall with a time of 1:43.79 - 5 seconds faster than last time I was there. New slicks rule!

Race one went quite well and I finished in 7th, but there was a bit of drama with an RX7 that tried to get past and then stopped in front of me... I wasn't able to stop fast enough and he ended up backwards. I then lost my RF flare and the front bumper sagged back into my tyre on left hand turns, making it a tricky last lap and I ended up losing a spot to a Civic. My best lap came down to 1:43.3, so I was pretty happy, even in spite of the damage. 

At days end VG and myself went for a romantic walk around the track to try and find my flare, but it appeared to be long gone... having the top of the wheels covered is a requirement, so a bunch of us headed to Tomstament's house to work on making a new one. 

We used the LR flare to copy as it has a similar shape to the RF, gathered together some fibreglass gear and set to work. Thanks to slacker.cam, Rookie Dave, Testament Tom, VG and Touge for helping out/standing around having a giggle. 

This is what we ended up with: 

It was still soggy and floppy on Sunday morning, so I peeled it off and re-layed it on top of the LR flare with a layer of gladwrap to stop it from sticking. After an hour or so in the sun it started to set and I was able to tape it on . 

Race 2 was awesome fun, it started out mostly dry and everyone was on slicks. By lap 3 it was spitting and started raining shortly after. Slicks in the rain are a challenge, but it's a lot of fun! I did my best from a handicap spot of 16th and ended up in 9th after a healthy helping of skids. 

 

Everyone was confused for Race 3, as the track was quite wet 15 minutes before the race started, so everyone was tossing up whether to use slicks, semis or full wet tyres. I chose semi slicks as a safe option, but the track was basically dry when we hit the track - I instantly regretted choosing semi slicks for the longest race of the weekend (10 laps). I had an awesome battle with a Civic that was on full wet tyres - he slowed up from about lap 4 onwards as his tyres were turning to goo, but I still wasn't able to find a way past. I was right up his date until the last lap and decided to make a lunge in the last two corners... But my tyres were too gooey, so I ended up sideways through there instead . 

Fun weekend all in all! I'm looking forward to getting to Pukekohe for Round 2 in Mid November. There's a list of things to do, including a new driveshaft, more rose joints, fiddling with the brakes and a few other minor things. 

Vids to come! 

[Truenotch]

[Truenotch]

This year was always intended as a development season, but I didn't intend for things to go as badly as they did. After a reasonably successful round one, we headed to Pukekohe for the second round in November. I had enlisted rot808 and retep130 as pit crew with rotorhoe as a promo girl for the weekend, so it's understandable that I expected the weekend to be a roaring success.

The first race went OK on Saturday afternoon. I'd qualified fairly well in 7th (middle of the pack) and the car felt decent, so away we went. All was peachy until about half way through the race when it started missing up high in the RPM, like a limiter, and that limit lowered throughout the race... Hmm... I worked my way backwards and drove through to 9th.
 

Then my LR brake pads fell out completely. The jarring of the bumps at Pukekohe must have rattled the retaining cap screw loose and the pads disappeared as I slowed down around the sweeper AFTER the chequered flag. Strange issue, easily fixed with another pair of pads and some wire from a crappy toyota hose clamp.

We arrived the next morning with a fresh set of coil packs and a few other bits to fix the car - only to find this... I think the guys were giving me a hint about how loud it was!!


So we got it fixed and had the car ready for the handicap race that morning, but it all the fuss we didn't spanner check the new exhaust.... As I sat on the dummy grid the car was alarmingly fumey, so I got drunk peter to pop the bonnet and check whether the extractors were still bolted to the exhaust.

The answer was "barely". The flange had come loose and now only had one bolt holding it there... Which was about half wound out. I made an executive decision and decided to just go anyway as we didn't have time to tighten them up.

If people thought my car was loud before, they were in for a shock! I did a few laps with a fume filled, rattly, loud car and then the exhaust fell off completely on the front straight past the pits. Luckily it slid gracefully down the grass on the outside of the track and didn't cause a kerfuffle. I kept racing, ears ringing, and pushed on to finish the race.

Las lap coming out of the hairpin the car was running fine, then the fuel pump blew through the second to last corner... I coasted to a halt about 100m from the finish line. The worst part about that is I would have finished 3rd if it wasn't for the car stopping! Damn.

 

We replaced the fuse and got it running again, thought about putting the exhaust back on before hearing a grinding noise from the clutch area... The release bearing had seised, spun on the carrier and dropped onto the input shaft of the gearbox.

Weekend. Over.





The bearing died in a big way for reasons that I'll go into in the next post... Long story short, everything was wrong, which caused the bearing to be under load all the time (as well as being the wrong shape and width of bearing), which resulted in an epic failure.

Unfortunately my fancy ORC clutch is a Japan only unit, so I had to order quite a few "overnight parts from Japan". 3 months later I had some form of result.....

 

[Truenotch]

Added a couple of videos to the post above. 

So we left Pukekohe with a fair bit of work to do... And I spend most of November and December ignoring it as the list was very long and I needed to get a pile of parts from overseas (ignoring it was the wrong move). 

First up, clutch parts!

Since my bearing had spun and took half the carrier with it, I needed to find a new release bearing and sleeve assembly. The ORC clutch I use has a specific bearing and carrier that can only be bought from ORC in Japan, so I got stuck into some research. 

ORC only list one kit for the Altezza - the "309 series" - so that made my job easy. I ordered the required parts through an NZ based imported and waited.... For a while... The parts were supposedly at the DHL depot in Japan within a week or so of my order being placed, but the parts didn't end up arriving for another 3 months. And they were wrong. 

The "release bearing and sleeve assembly" was just a release bearing (an understandable mistake) and the replacement clutch disc I'd ordered was 25mm smaller than the original. Great. By this point the car had been off the road for a long while and I'd almost given up hope. It turns out my clutch kit isn't listed on the ORC website. 

So, with regret, I missed the Manfeild round and sat waiting for the release bearing and carrier to arrive. 

 

There wasn't enough time to order another clutch disc before the final round, so I decided to use the smaller 200mm plate as it allowed the clutch mechanism to work properly. 

 

At the top is the custom disc I'd been using - this was too thick and meant we had to space the outer plate by 3mm. So the issue was caused by the whole assembly being too long - the plate was spaced out, the bearing was about 7mm thicker than it should be and was flat-faced not bullnose - those factors combined to cause the failure above. The clutch was never disengaging properly and the bearing would constantly run under load. 

 

Moral of the story? Always measure other people's work and double check their choice of parts before they get installed. This had been an issue since I put the car together in 2011. 

[Truenotch]

I set about doing a few other jobs while waiting for clutch parts to arrive from Japan - the list wasn't too bad: 

• Replace all spherical bearings
• Replace brake pads
• Fit flashing rain light
• Fix brake light wiring/switch
• Fit clutch bits 
• Fit gearbox
• Fit 2-piece driveshaft
• Clean it
• More things I can't remember
• SKIDS

The spherical bearings also had to come from overseas as no one in NZ stocks a decent range of PTFE lined Metric rod ends. Summit racing saved the day in the end, but I had to wait extra long for the M12x1.75 left hand thread rod ends to be made. So I left the 4 link rose joints as they were and replaced the front ones. 

I'd been replacing joints in the front end of the car in hope of stopping the steering shake that the car had developed under brakes.... And I found the issue while I was replacing the LF castor arm spherical. The castor arm bracket was missing the two bolts to the chassis rail, leaving it with only a small tag to the radiator support. 

The castor arm was able to flap in the wind (I suspect it's been like that for quite a while). Up, down, left and right. Found it!

We had the car "done" for the final round of SS2000 in Taupo over Easter weekend and it felt a shitload better. There's still a lot of work (mostly maintenance), but it's made a few steps in the right direction. I'll be doing more development over winter and aim to do all rounds next season with a top 5 finish or better. 

Here's footage from the VERY wet meeting that was Taupo. This race was finished under safety car after a downpour turned the clubrooms end of the track into an extension of the lake. Note the better sounding exhaust and lack of harmonic vibration at high speeds - two things to tick off the list! 

Oh, and skids.