racecar repairs

hey guys welcome back so we're going to do some work on the race car today we're still getting over Co but I think we've gotten past the worst part now actually I can't say I feel fantastic but way better than a couple days ago so things finally getting better hey guys welcome back so we're still getting over Co so this ain't going to sound perfect but anyway we feel better than we did we're going to do a little work on the car today I can't sit around the house all day it drives me nuts so we got our new radiator you can see our old one we told you the front end caught a while back and we twisted our radiator and the front support that holds the radiator and we messed up our bumper we got some stuff to fix for sure but we did get a new radiator one of the cool things we did when we designed this we used a Honda Civic radiator so these things are cheap and readily available so that was like $60 something dollars off Amazon delivered in a day or two so that's all awesome hopefully it just drops right in with a minimal effort let's hope I do think I modified this slightly like I I knew I did a little bit but it wasn't much so hopefully maybe an hour of work and at that point it'll go in let's fingers crossed at least that it's something like that so the plan is we're going to drain the coolant which is just water so that's nice so drain the water pull the radiator and uh get to work I will show you one thing so obviously this stuff's low but you can see the water pump's low too I I wanted it to be low because you know it's a water pump right you don't want it to have to lift water on the section side but it's a little too low so we're going to change that as well while this is apart one thing I never did this pipe here see if I pull on it the pump moves we had considered like bracing this but the problem is the engine moves so I was a little hesitant to do that but I don't know we'll see we're we're probably going to do something with that that'll be towards the end because the radiator is actually supported by the bumper which isn't on here cuz we damaged the bumper too so we got to hopefully be able to fix that I know it's bent something's bent cuz it doesn't fit right hopefully we can bend it back and uh get it back on the car I hope cuz I really don't want to buy a bumper so we're going to try to fix that and then uh once everything's where it goes we'll probably deal with that last but I do want to try to get that water pump raised a little bit so uh hopefully it doesn't catch coming on and off the trailer all right well we're going to get to it all right I thought I'd show you guys this since we got it on the lift I can show you some of the Carnage so starting with the bottom see how that's got like a curve to it so if we go to the middle this is where the kind of the point is and you'll see that's what caught so this thing actually bent that steel washer grabbed that and just rolled all of this yeah well yeah that's how hard it pulled it broke the mount off so as you can see it just tore it off the radiator but when it did that it pulled my radiator forward let's see if I can show you yeah until it hit the fuel cell like that so that's there you go that's kind of what happened this broke throw that down for a second I had bent this back a little bit you can see it had folded here when we come over here it looks worse cuz I haven't really in this spot yet yeah you can see it buckled so for now the plan is get this radiator out of here and we're just going to bend this aluminum piece straighten it out and hopefully rerun it I hope because that's going to suck to remake otherwise but uh we'll see I don't know how hard that's going to be to straighten but really it don't have to be perfect for what it is so hopefully we can save it and man I hope I can save this shroud because that took a lot of work to make that thing sucked uh and we're going to deal with this like we talked about all right all right guys so we got the Shroud off the old radiator it's mostly okay it was twisted a little bit but we kind of Twisted it back not the radiator the Shroud the radiators scrap and there's good news and bad news so the Shroud is going to be reusable but if you look here these mounting holes are way off and uh basically the QC or consistency radiat to radiator just isn't there on this cheap radiator so the Shroud fits the radiator pretty well like that part seems to be okay and if you look here you can tell that's not correct it fit perfect on the other one so that's not too hard to open that up if we suspend it over here do the same thing again you know we're going to have to open this up to get clearance not too big of a deal and then if you look at these mounting tabs I mean these are like way off so so anyway so what I'm thinking all right here's the deal there's a couple ways I could fix this I could cut this off move it and try to do that but that's it's going to require welding I could cut these off the radiator well I'd have to grind them off make new ones then weld those to the radiator that sucks cuz now I'm welding and grinding on a radiator I don't really want to you know cuz again even even though I can do that if I have to replace this radiator again they're going to be in a different spot again and I really don't want to weld cuz I don't know it looks like they welded it so maybe this isn't bad but I don't have any 6061 I've got like some 5,000 series or 7,000 series that welds like so I don't want to do that uh for this part so what I'm thinking and it ain't going to be quite as pretty cuz my old setup on the old one these don't fit anymore but if they did I'd made these spacers that actually looked really good when it all went together but anyway what I think I'm going to do that'll be lightweight and uh like a good compromise is just make like a U-shaped aluminum piece it'll basically just be a flat strip of metal with a hole on each end and it'll go like across up and across and you'll have a bolt that threads into this and you'll have a nut and a bolt that goes right here which I don't love because you got to hold the nut on one side and put the bolt in on the other it's a little ghetto and it won't look as cool as my little spacer method but these little pieces I'm talking about these are super easy to make and uh I could Flex them and bend them so like the next time my radiator you know if I have to replace this again and now they're quarter inch the other way you can just bend the little tabs around and it'll work so it's not it's not beautiful but it's functional and you think about you know this whole thing weighs like I don't know 6 or 8 lb so each each one's got to support like 2 lbs so these don't have to be super strong you know yeah car sees vibration and all that but I just got a feeling that I can do this and it'll work so I think we're g to try it because it'll be uh it'll be well literally flexible but it'll be flexible literally and figuratively because I can make it work now pretty easily I don't have to weld anything don't have to modify this stuff either and uh if I ever change radiators again it won't be too hard to adjust or remake those if they need to be remake you can see here that slight Gap cap that's how much the Shroud got Twisted it's barely Twisted but it is Twisted a little but it'll pull right down when I get the straps in so anyway I think that's what we're going to try other than that basically I'll just pull it in with those little U straps and then we got to open this up some so the hose fits and that's probably it I think that's what we're going to do okay so we got our radiator put back together so here's what we did we made these little U brackets like we talked aled about it was pretty easy we just winged it didn't do any measuring just guessed and bent it until it fit those are pretty nice and they're definitely easy to bend so I should be able to just adjust those if I ever have to change the radiator and the mounts are different so that worked fine and it's actually rigid so not worried about that we opened these up like we talked about we just marked it and wallowed them out a bit so we got plenty of room to get our hoses on and another thing you'll notice we marked all the bolts now we actually did this on a lot of the engine I'll show you that in a second I kind of love this cuz we're about to go racing like understand we got to do the side windows and the windshield and the side windows I modeled them and ordered them to be like laser cut or something and the windshield I'm getting blanks made and I'm going to cut them out myself cuz I couldn't afford their time and Lead their price and lead time to get them cnced so I'm going to do them myself but anyway that and door handles and we're going to the racetrack so time to do our nut and bolt so all of the these you'll see like for example oh let me zoom in a bit so right here this is a lock nut threaded into a bolt what I didn't do was Mark this because technically the bolt and The Nut could stay together but the assembly could rotate and it would look like it loosened but it really didn't what you really want to do is Mark the nut relative to the bolt so you'll see where we have a nut and a bolt actually that's what I did now this is the bottom of the radiator and you can see I marked everything to where if you're under the car looking up you can see all the marks you'll notice you know like here's the little petcock these bolts those nuts and bolts our fan even up here from a bottom view you can see these marks so I tried to Mark everything in a way that it's easy to inspect because that's kind of the whole point of marking stuff is I can just do a visual and know that all the bolts haven't moved so anyway that's pretty cool oh I guess the last thing we did that I forgot to mention these little things I uh I use bolts so I had to drill and tap those to get those ready and that should be it that piece is done and here's our crossmember we straightened it out it's not perfect but I tell you what from this far away it looks fine uh boy that took a lot more aluminum is hard to bend uh bend it back let me say it like work hardens and it's just a pain so anyway we straightened it out it's going to be fine but that did take some work all right so so check this out we started doing our nut and bolt marking so I'll just kind of go over everything there's our VVT there's our exhaust cam some water inlet stuff down there that's our uh electric water pump bracket you can see those timing belt tensioner and idler and water pump bolts and that pipe bolt coming down to the oil pump we Mark those here's our crank uh mandrel oh I I forgot to mark these I'll go back and do those in a minute we also did the pulley even though it's welded just just to be sure if it ever slips it's got a mark there's our bolts for our mechanical fuel pump all that stuff's marked Let's see we did our steering rack got those marked and again everything's kind of done to where you can visually just zoom out and check here's our blo valve we got marks so we got the bolts and we also did the banjo because I've seen you know not lately but I've seen banjos back off before and they'll like look right but if you turn them they wiggle and you got a boost leak and if that's a waste gate or a blow that can cause other issues so we marked the banjos now our turbo this gets hot I don't know how many of these marks are going to last with the heat the CH stuff will the stuff on the turbine probably not but we marked it anyway got our blo valve bypass cuz the one from the efr is really not big enough you got to have an aftermarket one did our little vband or whatever that thing's called over here on our external gate funny enough so I'm marking bolts this is one of the reasons you do a nut and bolt check look down there I'll zoom in there's a bolt not a bolt so that's going on the list of apparently I'm missing a bolt so we got to get that it'll work with five bolts but uh it should have six so we'll get that fixed got some marks in there like I said we just did whatever we could here's our uh where our coilovers go we Mark those uh let's jump to the fuel system so yeah so here's a fitting like a this is a cap so this comes off and you can hook the uh vent which is right here so it's either capped or vented but this one down here is a little different so instead of using I'll show you so this is like a red pen and white pin depending we use different colors depending what we're doing we also have this one which is this is like uh you can tell if it's been taken apart yeah here it goes tamper proof indicator paste this is what like oems used to put on cars they probably still do but like 20 years ago where if you messed with it they could tell uh made by diim anyway we use that in some places I'm trying to I figured more critical stuff so like here's our fuel cell we used it here so if you get up in there you know it's like a liquid and it cures it's kind of it's not an epoxy but anyway it sets up and like I said you can tell if it ever moves so some spots like these hose clamps we did that on those snuck it in on some hose clamps over there and then here's our throttle body we just Ed like red paint let's jump to the fuel system so here you'll see that this is anodized red so I tried putting red paint pen and it you can't really see it very good so I switched to White so we used red or white depending on the background colors whatever made sense here's that crossmember we just straightened out we got those marked uh let's see here's some more fuel stuff so like here's the fuel coming out of uh this is fuel going into the tank right here so we marked it all the way across and then here's the fuel coming out of the tank same thing all the way across so anyway there our steering rack on that side more fuel mounts bolts for our bracket just anyway we just turn around marking a bunch of stuff but for me this crap's important because when you're racing I want to be able to pop the hood and give it a once over and just know that hey nothing moved because if you've ever seen a video or in real life you've seen somebody that you know had a bolt come loose and cause a problem well the thing is is when you saw that it caused a problem it was probably loose before that so at least this way you can do a visual and go hey that's loose and then you know that you know you need to go look at that and fix it we got these throttle body bolts marked throttle body bolts marked I'm actually worried these may come loose I did this on well I don't want them to come loose on purpose but this is not solid mounted this has a piece of silicon here and then under the heads of the bolts has rubber uh this is for vibration isolation and this works so on like a BP uh if you grab the throttle and rev them to like 8,000 you'll like let go of it they'll vibrate so hard it'll hurt your hand uh especially if you go to like 8 or 8500 it's just these motors vibrate like nuts this works I put this on here you can rev it all day you hardly feel it I mean you feel something but it's like 1/10th of or 115th or something I don't know I don't have a accelerometer on it but holy rubber isolating that really really helps so to me I got a feeling this will like protect that throttle cuz I've broke one of these before uh so that's why we did that after I broke one I got lucky I didn't destroy an engine but I did have a throttle hang so when it broke on me it hung at the drag strip so I crossed the finish line and this car traps over 100 mph in the eighth so I cross the finish line and I let off the gas and it's just Full Throttle in third gear which is Top Gear in this car and it was running 400 at the wheels back then a real 400 and uh luckily I've practiced for this so back when that happened I know we're getting sidetracked but I can't help it but I had practiced this before it ever got stuck I'd practice like hey what happens if it you know if this if you ever have a stuck throttle I had practice so back then the car had like a full interior but as soon as I realized what happened I would say probably within 3/4 of a second I had the key just off it was muscle memory I'd practiced that probably 300 times just practice like sit in the car and you know hey throttle hang boom hit the key and so my my routine is always two things you turn it off and then you go to neutral in that order kill the engine first then go to neutral if you go to neutral first you may blow your engine up uh or what if it doesn't go to neutral so if you kill the power it should be off so that's what I did I went boom kill throttle and then uh went to neutral and got on the brakes and I was fine I was a little fast at the end of the track but it was was not a problem I also got on the E bra then too that's something else I'd practice anyway stuff like that you want to practice before it happens so you know what to do in the event you don't want to be figuring it out the first time okay anyway back on subject I'm really liking this it's starting to look like a race car this is to me how stuff it's not put together all the way but this is what a race car should look like you know so I like having everything marked you can check stuff real quick here's our fuel rail down there same thing we got the permanent indicator one on so we haven't done every bolt uh I didn't do the inch manifold bolts I didn't do the valve cover bolts I've never actually had those come loose and especially on like the valve cover it's got a rubber gasket holding it down so there's so much vibration isolation you know that it's like a rubber the rubber is like a spring so it's like a spring and it is a dampener and it is a spring so it is a spring and dampener it really keeps those bolts from coming loose I've never had one to come loose ever so I really don't think it's necessary to do those I may do them anyway but for now I haven't uh anyway cool we got all well we got a lot of this marked not everything but uh as you can see we got our crossmember back in looks pretty damn straight if I'll man you bet anything on camera if you get far enough away looks good so that's nice it's not actually perfect but boy it looks good on camera this is ready to go so we're going to drop this in the car and I don't know it may work a little bit more but it's getting kind of late so probably going to go to bed soon so I guess that's going to wrap this one up but uh anyway hope youall enjoyed this and till next time y'all take it easy we got it put back together yeah

Channel: Patrick Cowan Jr.

Views: 553

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Id: OKkNw64NOCU

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2024