Is that gasoline I smell?

 Drove the car to work yesterday, and while bombing down the freeway home I had the impression, as I have had before, that it was running rather rich. Subsequently a child by the school yelled at me that "the car smells really bad".  Rich, indeed, but it seemed to me that after fixing the filter, the carburetor is behaving a little more predictably, and I gave it a quick adjustment while it was still hot from the freeway. The mixture screw is out just under two turns, which seems right, but what do I know?

 Later today, I walked out of the house to get the mail and I could smell gasoline across the yard. There was a big puddle under the Spider, and on a quick look I found the fuel pump intake line had apparently cracked. Between this and the defective fuel filter, it could explain a lot, both the hard starting and the bad smells that so annoy the children. I just vise-gripped the line till I can repair it.

I decided to stick with the 13" BWAs on the car for simplicity and ordered a couple of new tires. One of the existing ones was a victim of the bad alignment, so I'll put the other one on the matching red rim I have for a spare.  

Intermovement

Now comes a period of inactivity. This weekend was a marathon but amazing things happened. The new control arms and tie rod ends make a LOT of difference, not to mention a proper alignment. It's a whole different car, no longer darting for the bushes when it sees a puddle, and it doesn't steer like a ship. It drives reasonably nicely and the new filter seems to have improved fuel flow. It seems to be running a little richer than before, so I wonder if the filter was always bad and I adjusted the carburetor with some restricted fuel flow going on.

Also the luggage rack got installed. I am not a fan of these racks installed on the Spiders, but they are at least slightly practical for things like a rally, and there were already holes in the boot lid for it.

I'll drive it to work this week and keep debugging it, but the front suspension and steering was a major tick on the to-do list. 

Threadliness is next to Godliness

New die arrived and the threads got cleaned up. Clean threads make a huge difference in one's quality of life.  

 While cleaning the forward stud, I realized someone else had had the same problem as I had with the aft stud spinning under torque. What I thought was a blob of tar or undercoating was someone's slag-weld job.

 

It's especially amusing because the forward stud is actually a bolt and you can reach the head of it pretty easily to hold it. Oh well. The lower A-arm bolted on with its shims, and then all the front suspension is done. (Recall I had done the starboard side previously, and due to my lack of skill it was a horrific job that I swore I would never do again, which is actually quite easy now. Don't be deterred.) 

A combination of a child, an old front tube bumper, and a couple of tires got me to the ~150 lbs needed on suspension preload, then tightened it all down. Glorious!

I noted previously that the car had become very hard to start and needed a kick in the bum from ether. This was unusual, as the carb rebuild is not very old, and it has started pretty quickly up until now. I cranked a while and then hopped out and began unscrewing the fuel line to the carb to see if it was getting fuel. As I jiggled the line where the (newish) fuel filter is mounted, it made some pretty jingle-bell noises. Since it's not even Halloween yet, I took the filter off and realized it had collapsed somehow and was not doing any sort of filtering at all, and potentially blocking fuel flow when the detached piece rolls around inside.

 

Replaced the filter (Autozone only had one carb filter in stock, which was eye-opening) and that seems to be better although we'll see what it does after sitting a while. 

A is for Aggravating

 I tackled the driver's side suspension. I did the passenger side a little while back, and it went okay. The replacement A-arms I got are not as good quality as the OEM ones, and the welding on the lower shock mount had failed immediately when I installed the shock on the passenger side. I had to jankily weld it up and while ugly, it's solid. 

 So, not wanting that to happen again, I preemptively booger-welded the lower A-arm, so it looked like the original and you can't tell which is which now.

Or maybe you can. At any rate, the grinder and paint make me the welder I ain't.

The top arm is easy, just remove the mounting bolt and the upper ball joint nut and pickle that baby off. This appears to be an original A-arm, as the ball joint is riveted on and the bushings are really trashed.

 Of course problems ensued on the last nut on the bottom one. The spring mounts to the body at top and the lower arm at bottom, so my method here is not to use the compressor when disassembling, but jack up the lower arm to relieve the tension on its mount to the body, unbolt it, then lower the whole thing down and pop out the coil spring from its remaining tension (for which installation is NOT the reverse of removal). The aft nut however had been really beat upon, and the stud broke loose inside the cross member and just spun with the rusted beaten nut. 

The stud has a round head which I presume is tack-welded to the inside of the crossmember, or possibly it was a bolt with a rounded-off head, but at any rate it was round and there was no way to get a wrench on it. I have a trashed flat blade I use for various prying purposes and I hammered that in against the round head, which did not work....at first.

The nut would turn about a quarter turn before binding again and breaking the tension from the screwdriver. Each time I hammered it again and would get another quarter turn. This went on for a while, but the pattern held up and slowly I got the nut off. This was a joyous moment as I did NOT want to start cutting things, which is always nondeterministic. 

Eventually I got the A-arm off, and it was in worse shape than the top.

That bolt, however, is in bad shape and I don't want to put things back together without trying to salvage it. I don't have a die in its 12 x 1.25 size to clean up the threads, so I downed tools and went off to the orangey-colored hardware store to get one. They did not have one - in fact they had almost no taps or dies, just a few sizes in a kit that was not desirable. I tried the down-low blue place next with no better result, and then came home in annoyance and ordered one online. 

I went ahead and replaced the tie rod ends (tagliando di controllo!) and with a few minutes left, screwed on the rear panels by the back seat that hide the convertible top windows when it's folded down.  

So next steps, clean up that stud, install the bottom A-arm, tighten everything down, and take it for an alignment. Aligning this car is dead simple, but it uses shims for the camber, slipped in on the lower A-arm studs which somehow always seems to confuse people. 

The car was in an accident in the distant past, and had a front corner sloppily welded back on. It's holding, and is nothing really structural but I might try my hand at hammering this even and welding it (rather more neatly than my own other attempt on the A-arm).
 

...To the Present Day, 8 weeks to Go

 So, with all that, the current state of the car is not bad. Brakes good, tires fair, as Charlie Ryan says. It runs and drives, burns some oil but not a lot (and in a most shocking turn of events, it doesn't appear to drip any at all on the garage floor). It has a lot of rusty sharp corners in the interior.

I actually have no idea how far this rally goes. On paper it's about  600 miles, but LeMons being LeMons, I expect a lot more. So I probably should change the oil, as well as:

1. Adjust the valves;
2. Fix a stripped rear lug bolt; 
3. Replace the rusted A-arms, tie rod ends, and get an alignment;
4. Seat belts might be important;
5. Fix the wonky right turn signal
6. and get tires. Here is a dilemma...should I swap the Biturbo wheels back on for 14" tires or stick with the 13" BWAs? edit: BWAs it is.
7. New front brake pads - edit: Had a look and they are in good shape. 
8. Fix and adjust clutch cable;
9. Fix broken passenger door handle, that would be inconvenient otherwise. It is now very convenient.
10. Replace cracked driver's headlight;
11. Do all fluids:
1. Engine oil is ok
2. Radiator probably ok but may flush it anyway
3. Steering box oil
4. Transmission oil
5. rear diff oil
6. Grease everything in sight
12. Repack front wheel bearings
13. New plug wires and dizzy cap;
14. Install driving lights - I have some spare Bosch driving lights off old Mercedes and I expect they will help a lot. edit: EVEN BETTER -STAY TUNED
15. Fix exhaust leak 
16. Clean the spilled oil out of the trunk (for weight savings, of course) 
17. Check the A-arm bolts
18. seat covers!!!!! 

That's all I can think of at the moment. Timewise, I've got maybe 4 good weekends before Dec 4, as the others are taken up. The A-arms are going to be hard as I have never found a good spring compressor for the small springs in this car, and I hope the local shop knows how to adjust camber with shims.  

 

edit: Now it has seatbelts!

 

Time Passes....

 After just about exactly 14 years and a bunch of cars and kids and life events, we got the yen to race again (or rather, stopped having to change diapers and realized we had some free time) and decided to try the LeMons Lone Star/No-Start Rally. We wanted to do MSR, but race prep has changed in 14 years and the rally sounded like a lot of fun - if you can't have the LeMons you love, you love the LeMons you have. Or make lemon hand grenades, or something. 

 Pondering this over the summer, we of course figured we'd bring back the 81 Fiat Brava from previous races, which we still have and which still runs. It's been parked in the yard, looming mysteriously in the background of pictures through years of family gatherings and kids' ball games. 

 

After a few seconds' worth of further reflection though, it was just about an insurmountable task to get the Brava titled and roadworthy in the time we had available (also it was never roadworthy to begin with). I started the process to get a title for it anyway, but in the other corner of the yard it was hard to ignore a 1978 Fiat 124 Spider that I had picked up as a rolling chassis for parts and which turned out not to be rusty enough to sacrifice on the altar of Mercury so that my other cars might live. 

It had turned into a sink for all the extra parts I had lying around, and, while still abysmally incomplete, I had to assess what I was actually able to do in the time I had. When I got the Spider (a sad story that I won't go into here), it was a stripped chassis - had the side window glass, the convertible top frame, a short block, and the transmission. 

Someone had started thinking about working on it, but gave up. I had a spare 2-liter engine from a long-departed 1977 Spider that someone had crammed a carbed 1980 engine into hoping to make it go fast. Sadly not only was that year about the worst year for horsepower (turning out a whopping 86 rampant Italian ponies) but the car subsequently only went fast right into the scrapyard.  The engine was also not in great shape, with dings all over a piston from where someone dropped a washer into the intake, but it ran and it was what I had. 

But then someone turned up a 1972 1608cc engine which seemed ok and was far better on paper than the 2-liter (also, it would fit without swapping out the subframe which was different on the 2L cars, due to the taller block). I jumped on this and hauled it home. 

Easy choice there, and we put that one in with the existing transmission and a 32ADFA Weber from the 2L engine. Bonus with the 32ADFA was an automatic choke, and I think I prefer mechanical secondaries over the vacuum-operated secondary on the original 1608 carb. 

We also painted the gas tank, for speed.

The engine turned out to be worn but ok, and it lit off and ran fine (for a while). The transmission that had come with the car turned out to be noisy. As it happened, it made far too much noise for the number of gears remaining in available to use, for sure. Second gear was conspicuous by its absence, but it was driveable with the high-revving 1608 and so I left it there while debugging the rest of the car. 

The debugging included hot wires grounding out, and the steering column falling off, but no permanent damage was done, and I obtained much satisfaction by fixing the brakes and lights (and generally tracing out the rest of the wonky wiring, much of which dead-ended into weird emissions devices that no longer existed). 

 

 

I swapped out the Maserati Biturbo wheels it came with to a set of BWAs I had (which as it happened was the reason I'd bought the 1977 donor car with the trashed 2L I was lucky enough not to have to use).  

 The 1608 then blew the head gasket (not original, as it happened...)

 ...but it's not super hard to fix on these cars, and fortunately it was not overheating, just making forbidden mayonnaise. So there did not appear to be any permanent damage. 

Someone had, however, dropped the head pretty hard on the locating dowel in the block. This just helps prove the adage that the worst thing about cars are the previous owners. 
 

I figured this wasn't much worse than the factory stamp in the mating surface, so carried on.

And here things stood in the summer, with 5 months to go.
 

 

And so it goes

It was a crazy weekend.

I left Austin about 7:15 Friday morning, and after some trouble with a slippy alternator belt on the Mercedes, made it to Decatur about 11:30.  We had intended to test the car on the test and tune day, but various little things delayed us and we got to tech about 3 PM.  Jay himself gave us the inspection (with a lot of raucous laughter in the background about how terrible the car was), and just then the car decided not to run. This generated even more laughter, and we pushed it away with a couple of tasks remaining on the tech sheet.

Unkinking a fuel line and installing a front exhaust mount got us through tech, and there was just less than an hour remaining in the day for testing. Collin took it out, made some laps, and came back saying the brakes were working, but that the car lurched pretty heavily to the left upon braking. This spoke to me of a seized right rear caliper, but not having any spare calipers handy we decided to run it as it was until Csaba could bring us a set.

Spank himself showed up in our space Friday evening and gave us a quick hand in fixing our kinked fuel line, for which we were grateful. Saturday morning dawned bright and cold, and we coaxed the car to start and then went off to the drivers' meeting. Then we came back, bundled Erroll into the car, and sent him off. I had literally barely walked from the paddock to the stands when word came over the radio that Erroll was coming back in. I ran across to pit lane in time to see Erroll drive into the penalty shed. I ran in and asked what happened  - he'd gone two wheels off through the mud, surprised by the lurch the car gave upon braking. Hay told us to take the car back to our space, wash it, and figure out what was wrong. We did this (the clay was like glue, all over the left side), then I got dressed and took it back out.

The brakes were pretty bad, but I got used to the lurch and just automatically corrected for it. The engine was running far better than it ever had, and had plenty of power. The car still rolled heavily in the corners, but once I got used to it I was able to hold a line fairly well.

I had been out about an hour when the brake pedal started feeling soft. Having experienced this in 2009 at MSR, I was a little tentative with it for a lap, and it didn't get worse. I did another lap or two, and again started feeling some variation in pedal travel, but found that after a quick pump they worked great. In retrospect, this was a glaring sign that something was about to go wrong, and I was in fact considering pitting to check things, but they were working and I decided to hold off and see what developed.

What developed was a short three-way battle between the Macaroni Mustang II, the white #91 Celica, and me.  I saw the Celica coming from behind, and on the back straight I managed to pass the Mustang (with a good deal of glee on my part, as passing is not something the Fiat does often). Then the Celica came flying past into the turn, and braked hard in front of me. I hit the brakes with plenty of room to spare, and the pedal went right to the floor without the least hint of resistance. I instinctively turned left into the turn to avoid the Celica, and the rear of the Fiat came out and smacked the Celica hard in the rear sending him into a 270 degree spin in front of me. He stopped facing right and I plowed into him with my remaining momentum.

We sat a few moments in shock, then he restarted his car and got back onto the track. I couldn't find the PTT button for the radio to answer Collin yelling in my ear, but I finally got the car started and trundled slowly off the track to the penalty box. I just let the car stall in gear, and Jay came out and yanked a piece of the broken grill off and offered it to me as a prize from the LeMons judges.

I drove back to the pits in first, at idle speed, and (thinking the problem was with our sketchy rear calipers) we disassembled everything and found them worn and grabby, but otherwise functional. Then we took off the front tires, and found to our horror that the left front inside pad had ground away to nothing, then melted itself to the piston which had finally popped out of the cylinder. The melted circle of pad is still stuck to the cylinder, as there was no way to remove it.

We replaced everything, and Glen took it back out after nearly two hours. The tire was rubbing a little on the smashed fender, but other than that things were better than we deserved.  Jonathan went out next, and got flagged for contact (which according to him was just a close pass but no touching), and they yelled at him and let him go after I promised to have the judges saran-wrap him to the car if he screwed up again (bear in mind this was our 3rd incident of the day, but really the first due to crappy driving). We had just pulled off when Judge Scott came loping back up and said that the Timing and Scoring people weren't happy with us, and perhaps we had better find a traffic cone and bolt it to the car (the so-called Cone of Shame). Collin swiped a cone, and after frantic searching for nuts and bolts, and borrowing a drill, we bolted it on and Jonathan went back out.

Not much time had passed when he got a little excited and went two wheels off again. He came in and before he confessed I loudly said,"Whatever he did, he's done!!!" He confessed, and Jay leaned on the car and said he was sick of seeing us, and to just change drivers and go. Judge John suggested it would behoove Jonathan to sweep the absorbent up off the floor of the penalty box, so he did, all the while being heckled.

Collin took the car out and no incidents occurred for the rest of the day. When he took the checkered for the first day, we brought it back to the paddock and checked the brakes, to find they had worn right down to the metal again, after only four or five hours of driving.

We didn't have much to do on the car Saturday night, so just had fun, and Sunday morning we got Jordan in the car. He drove without incident, and turned it over to Erroll. It was driving considerably better, and at noon Judge John took it out for a spin, which excited us as we thought maybe he was looking at it for the Index of Effluency award. There was also a pretty tight race developing between us, the NSF Barracuda, and the Macaroni Mustang II for the Class C lead. After noon we passed the Mustang to take second place, and were about 30 laps behind the Barracuda. However, the Barracuda kept dropping out for various reasons (brakes, chiefly), and we narrowed the gap to 19 laps on one of their big outages. We swapped pads after the judge drove, and were good to go for the rest of the day, but the Barracuda came back out and maintained their lead. I got back in the car about 3, and finished under the checkered.