Tuesday, January 25

Teardown

We were back at the shop last Wednesday tearing into our spare m20 from the parts car.



While Jay took care of the teardown, Jason was busy pulling our front brake calipers for a simple rebuild.


Once the brake calipers were out, we pulled the old rubber seals out, they were in pretty bad shape on the driver's side. fortunately the calipers and pistons looked pretty good. Bartley soaked/cleaned up the pistons and calipers, and then we put everything back together.





Once we had finished tearing down the parts motor, we moved on to the original motor that had been in the car. We knew we had blown the head gasket, but we were curious as to what else was going on.


Well,  when we pulled off the valve cover we realized where the strange noises might have been coming from…
 
At some point on race weekend, we broke one of the rocker arms.



I really wonder when this happened. My guess is that it might have been on our last drag run, but what are the chances of this happening at the same time as blowing the headgasket?

Talk about a blown head gasket! 21psi FTW!


As we inspect things a bit closer, we also found that one of our valves had kissed the piston....


Looks like either some detonation occurred, or something got sucked into the motor.

All I know is that the m20 is a strong motor, for it to have this many things going on with it. I'm certain they didn't all happen at once. Its amazing that the motor was still strong enough to give us the 2nd fastest autox time, and a 12.3 1/4 mile run.

This Wednesday, we finishing rebuilding the rear calipers and start putting things back together.

Monday, January 10

2011 work begins on the race car.

The past 3 months have flown by. We have all been super busy, Jimmy was busy preparing for his big move to Chile. I bought a house back in Aug, and with all the house remodeling going on, the car has been sitting, collecting dust since the event.  Now is the time to get the car prepared for the 2011 Ultimate Track Car Challenge. Jay and I got together this past Wednesday.
I started by putting the car on jack-stands, and pulling the drive-shaft.



The driveshaft center support bushing and guibo both look good. I just need to get some new bolts,
I'm creating a list of all the parts we will need to swap or rebuild in order for the car to be safe.

Jay pull the Holset HX35 from the Manifold while I pulled the wiring harness.



We drained all the fluids, pulled the radiator and all the intercooler piping, turbo and all wiring.


The motor ready to come out.


Since we didn't have a load leveler, we had to get under the car and pull the transmission off before pulling the motor, otherwise we wouldn't be able to angle it enough to clear the firewall and radiator support.

Between the two of us we were easily able to pull it out.


Clean engine bay!


This week we pull the motor apart to check the headgasket.