Scuderia Limoni

Well we finally got enough of the car together and working well that we decided it was time for a test drive (and with more than a week to go until the race!).

We trailered it over to a local decent sized parking lot and around 6:30 PM after a good portion of the cars had left started taking some test runs. One of our documentary friends was on hand to capture the first test runs for posterity (and hopefully their film…). Things went well, the car was running well and the exhaust was not very loud at all, in fact it sounded much louder in the car than out of it. Should pass the db level check with no problems!

The steering was a little heavy so we will have to play with the alignment a bit but changing to the normal wheels instead of the wider race wheels will help some too. The engine fan was occasionally making some bad noises so we will probably swap that out for a spare. The ultra wide rear view mirror is almost useless…the roll bar takes up a lot of the rear viewable area so it looks like we will have to put the side view mirrors back on.

Lon had brought his new driving suit along to make sure that he could actually get into the car while wearing it without tearing it.  Glad to say that that test was a success too :-).

All in all a very successful test, found a few issues we need to deal with but nothing really bad.

Here’s a link to a movie of the test drives:
http://www.alfamilano.com/Lemons/Lemons_Milano_Test_Drive.wmv

Me and Greg on a test drive

Brian and Greg just about to head out for another test drive

Lon cooling down after his smoking hot test drive in his new driving suit and shoes!

Brian just about to take our documentary camera man out for a spin

We made a ton of progress this session knocking things off the to do list!

While I was changing the spark plugs Greg was hard at work (for once) finishing up the graphics on the car, looking quite professional now! A couple sessions ago we decided to redo the door graphics so that they would be easier to see so Tom & Greg painted a white background on the doors and hood to provide a better backdrop for the applied graphics, came out nice!

Greg finishing up the graphics

Additional hood graphics

Our redone door graphics

Our bumper motto, fitting for an Alfa!

During a couple sessions we were talking about various racing movies and our favorite lines and one that we thought particularly appropriate was from Days of Thunder…”Drive Through the Smoke” being that this is an Alfa (my Verde is up to two packs a day ). We asked one of Brian’s daughters to paint the quote on the rear bumper. Came out real nice, we might take some grief because of the addition she tacked onto the end of the quote :-).

While Greg was working on that Tom, Lon, and Brian were working on getting the fire extinguisher bracket and seat belt harnesses installed. The fire extinguisher bracket was installed on the transmission tunnel for easy access. I had made some mounting plates for the harness bolts out of some sheet steel I had lying around from one of my welding projects as we couldn’t find any of the minimum required size 3 inch washers locally, they did the job nicely. Now it is really starting to look like a race car!

Tom completing install of fire extinguisher bracket

Seat belt harness installed

While we had the car back on the lift so as to be able to drill the holes for the harness and put the mounting plates in I started working on the exhaust leak between the manifold and down pipes again. I had looked through my spare parts stash at home and found a couple more manifold gaskets that we thought we try between the side exhaust down pipe and the manifold to see if that would fix the leak. I took the whole thing apart (again) and put the new gaskets in and then put everything back together again and…….the leak was still there! Looks like one of the studs coming out of the manifold has most of its thread rusted away so I just can’t get enough bite to close up a little gap. It is runnable the way it is but I’d really like to get it fixed so I’ll be digging through the spare manifolds at home to see if I can get the studs out to replace them with a new set of studs (like I did for the drivers side manifold). The only problem is that the studs have a tendency to weld themselves in and shear when you try to get them out, I’ve got at least 3 or 4 like that in the parts pile. Time for lots of penetrating oil and heat along with a delicate touch!

After his grueling graphics session we find Greg in his traditional perch…

Greg in his usual perch…

While the car was still up on the lift we decided to drill the initial pilot holes for the rear brake cooling ducts just above the rotors. Once the car was back down Greg got up out of his chair (!) and tied off the the dryer hose for the ducts to the roll bar, still need to finish up the attachment to the floor. Due to the coolness (pun intended) of the install we figured that AutoDelta would be proud to have their name on our mod!

One of the brake cooling duct hoses

While he was working on Brian, Lon, and I were trying to figure out why the fuel gauge wasn’t working. At first we suspected the sending unit but Brian had two in his parts pile and when we hooked them up to the harness and tilted them back and forth (to simulate empty and full tanks) they didn’t register on the gauge either. I had also brought along another instrument cluster that I had in my parts stash that I know worked fine and it was also not registering the fuel level. We spent some time trying to figure out exactly how the wiring worked using a volt and ohm meter but were having problems, didn’t seem to be working as we expected. We knew exactly which wires (purple and purple with black stripe) we were dealing with and decided to trace the routing one more time (goes down the passenger side for some strange reason) only to finally find that one of the wires had been cut in half! Once we spliced it back together we had a working fuel gauge again!

While they were getting the wire spliced back together I worked on putting the dash back together.

Dash back together

Fuel gauge working again!

Almost forgot! We were trying to figure out why the car was running somewhat rough and had a tendency to die when the gas was hit so pulled off the air flow meter to see if we had forgotten to take out the screwdriver that we were using to force the fuel pump to be on without cranking the engine. Well, the screwdriver wasn’t there but Brian said the air flow meter flap seemed to be dragging on something so I pulled it off and cleaned the gunk out with some electrical cleaner and there was still a metal on metal scraping sound when the flap was pushed, not sure how that happens, did an elephant sit on the housing or something?!? Luckily I had brought along a spare so we put that on and started up the car and it was a night and day difference! Running nice and smooth now!

There were a bunch of other things that we also got knocked off of the the to do list:

Checked the cap & rotor - Not in the greatest condition but no worse that the used emergency spares I had in the trunk of my Verde so we just cleaned them up with a wire brush and put them back on.

Check alternator - Just wanted to make sure it was putting out more than 13.5V when the car was running.

Install rear view mirror - We couldn’t use the stock rear view mirror because the roll cage was in the way. Brian had one of those three foot wide rearview mirrors laying around so we installed that.

Install roll cage padding - Got that all installed.

Fix air box mount - One of the air box mounts, rubber mounting with two studs in it had sheered in half. We didn’t have spare (and couldn’t get the original off anyway) so we nano glued and safety wired it back on.

Get upper radiator hose away from fan frame - Not sure why the hose was touching the fan frame as all these parts were stock but we didn’t want it rubbing so we trimmed a little off the hose and pushed it farther onto the thermostat housing and that did the trick.

Safety wire the oil filter - Didn’t want to take any chances that the oil filter would spin off (Brian being anal!) so we put a large hose clamp on the filter and safety wired that to the old A/C bracket mounting point, there is no way it will spin off now!

Clean up engine bay and interior - I used compressed air to blow all the hidden leaves and other crap out of the engine bay, the air was quite thick with dust and junk for a while!

At this point we decided the car was ready for its first real test drive so we decided to do it the next night in a local parking lot after most of the cars had left for the day.

We got a bunch of things knocked off the todo list this session!

First up was to replace the drivers side exhaust manifold that had one of the studs broken off of it. I happened to have a spare at home and found some nice new studs to put in it. With the power steering pump and ABS stuff out of the car it was a nice quick job to swap out the manifold. Turns out it was missing one of the nuts already!

While I was working on that Brian was wiring up the backup fuel pump to the defroster switch in the dash. After messing around with it for a little bit it finally started working perfectly!

Brian wiring up the backup fuel pump switch

Once the switch was working we lifted the car back up and started working on the mean looking side exit exhaust. Gene, one of our AONE buddies stopped by to help out a bit so I had him help me get the down pipes connected to the manifolds. On the first try we realized that the stock downpipes have an extra spacer that the new pipes didn’t so we ran out of thread on the studs before the pieces were tightened enough. We couldn’t find anything to use as spacers so we just used a stack of washers on each stud and were able to get things looking nice and tight. While Gene and I were working on that Tom was fabricating a bracket to allow us to hang the rear of the side pipe to the stock Milano hanger.

Tom explaining the finer points on making an exhaust bracket…

Tom got the rear of the exhaust hooked up with the new bracket and we started up the car to see how it sounded. We were worried that the side exhaust would be quite noisy and that we might not be able to use it. Turns out it actually sounded a little less noisy than the stock exhaust (even with the obviously loud air leak at the manifold connection)! Not sure about under full throttle though, we’ll have to check that out. We had to take everything apart again to try and see if we could fix the air leak. It looked like only one side was noticeably leaking so I pulled enough of it apart to get at the little wire rings used to hold the spacer on (stock) as we thought they might be preventing the seal, we also noticed one of the washers was bent so obviously dragging on the pipe. While Brian filed that down, Gene and I worked at getting the little wires off. After that we got everything back on and tightened down a couple more turns and the leak was noticeably reduced, although not completely eliminated. I’ll need to source some gaskets to put between the downpipes and the manifold spacer to try next time. Anyway it was quiet enough for now and good enough for a road test.

While we were working on that, Tom was working on better securing the fuel lines in the rear. He used some metal strapping and securely attached them to the underside of the car.

Meanwhile, Brian and Greg were working on flushing the brake system with some new ATE Super Blue. Greg was sent up in the car on the lift to do the pumping while Brian was underneath doing the bleeding. That went smoothly except for one bad front bleed screw which was soon replaced. Greg was enjoying just sitting around again! After that was done it looked like I had done a good enough job on the rear calipers that they didn’t need any adjusting (ahem).

Greg sitting around again…

Once the brake bleeding and exhaust work was done we were able to lower the car (and let Greg out) and get on with the final few tasks for the evening.

I had brought along my helmet so we could check clearance while sitting in the Recaro seat (my helmet is the biggest, more room for the enhanced brainpower!). I wanted to do this as my helmet hits the roof in my Verde unless I lean the seat fairly far back, which we cannot do due to the rollcage in the Lemons car. Turns out with the sunroof junk removed and the headliner there is at least an inch of headroom even with the seat in my normal driving position!

Testing head room with helmet on, Tom doesn’t like the colour of my helmet!

Once we had that verified Tom and Greg got to work on the “bodywork”. Tom was shaving down the expanding foam to the contours of the body while Greg was cutting out the masks for painting some additional numbers on the car. Tom got most of the foam nicely sculpted and then painted it black, you almost can’t tell it’s there :-). Meanwhile Greg finished up the sticky backed masks and the applied them with some help and then painted the purple base coat.

Tom doing some body work

Applying the mask for some more number painting

While they were working on that Brian decided to screw down the brake cooling air vents.

Brian looking pleased after screwing the air vents

While that was going on I decided to try and repair a couple of the Bosch connectors attaching the wiring harness to the sensors on the thermostat. All that needed to be done was to replace the plastic connector part. The pins are held in to the connector with little metal tabs that can be pressed down with a very small screwdriver which will allow them to be pulled out of the connector. We found a couple connectors on spare wiring harness so I pulled them off and was able to quickly replace them on the car.

Another thing we had noticed was that the fuel gauge did not appear to be working so Brian grabbed a couple senders and tried them out but there was no change in the gauge so we determined that it was probably the gauge. Brian pulled apart the dash and got the cluster out so we can replace it with a spare cluster I’ve got in my parts stash.

Dash and instrument cluster removed, this is forward progress???

That about wraps it up for this session, all in all a LOT of progress!

No pictures again this session, sure makes for a boring read!

This session we had two primary goals, fix the dang primary fuel pump and get the brake pads changed. Lon was tasked with replacing the primary fuel pump (we had verified that the wiring was all correct and there was voltage at the pump), Brian was to do the front pads and I stupidly took on the task of the rear pads. We also decided to pull the exhaust so we could see if the side exit exhaust Brian had laying around would fit. Greg was going to touch up the paint on the car numbers and help out with the exhaust.

First we rolled the other cars out of the barn so we could get the Milano up on the lift and we were finally able to do so without using the board across the front! We put the front lift arms under where the front of the roll cages bolts into the new floor patches and it works great!

Lon got working on the fuel pump and after some hassles with the mounting brackets got the broken one out and the “new” one in pretty quickly. While he was doing that we decided to change the tranny/diff oil while the car was up on the lift so Brian started working on that. Once that was complete he was able to quickly get the front brake pads changed (the easy ones!).

I started in on the rear calipers and realized that I had left my “how to” printout from the alfagtv6.com tech articles on my desk at work in my rush to get out so had to puzzle it out how they worked again. The caliper pistons weren’t moving much when using the adjusters but I was able to get them moved just enough to eventually beat the pads out. Once they were out I wasn’t able to get the pistons to move so had Brian push in on one as hard as he could with his finger while I fiddled with the adjustment nut, something finally gave and it moved all the way in with a gurgling snap, good, only three more to go! Brian then went to work with Greg on getting the exhaust out. I managed to get one more piston most of the way in on that same caliper but could not get the inner on the right side to move at all. Lon came over and we put a box end wrench in there and he applied a lot of pressure while I messed with the adjuster and he got it to move all the way in. I tried the same technique with the right outer and it finally moved and with a loud splat shot a bunch of break fluid at my face :-(. After some more fiddling and cursing I was finally able to get all the pistons in just enough to be able to easily slip the new race pads in (Carbotech from Andy at Performatek).

While I was fighting with the rear brakes Greg and Brian were working on getting the exhaust out (except for the manifolds). The muffler came out about as easily as I’ve ever seen one come off as did the center resonator. The catalytic converter was another story though. The nuts holding the down pipes onto the manifolds looked rusted on so some penetrating lubricant was sprayed on and let to work its magic for a couple minutes. As soon as I heard Brian say “Wow! The nuts on the passenger side came off easier than any other car I’ve done this one” I knew we were doomed! Sure enough, both nuts on the driver side were rusted on and one of the studs snapped while trying to remove it. The other nut was in bad shape so that it wouldn’t hold a socket on it so we could just break the other stud. Brian had to resort to grinding the nut off. Of course the spare manifold that he had had one of the studs broken off as well! Later that night when I got home I checked my stash of manifolds and out of the three spare sets I have only one had didn’t have broken studs in it, in fact it had none at all, I managed to find a decent pair in my nuts & bolts stash so we should be all set for replacing the manifold in the next session.

The good news is that it looks like the side exhaust should bolt up fine, we will just have to fabricate a bracket to hold up the rear.

As we were putting stuff away for the night Greg started doing some of the paint touch ups to the numbers on the doors. While he was doing that I jumped in to verify that the new fuel pump was working. The car started right up and seemed to run well, I didn’t leave it running long as with no exhaust piping in it was rather loud and I didn’t want to piss off the neighbors!

The priorities for the next session:

- Replace drivers side manifold
- Install side exit exhaust
- Bleed the brakes
- Wire secondary fuel pump to switch in dash

Basically we need to get the car “roadworthy” so we can take it out and make sure it runs consistently for a couple hours at least!

We were getting a little nervous not having a running car this close to the event so Brian and I decided to put in another work session this week. The main goal was to finish up the water pump install and get the car running again.

We decided that we wanted to flush all the chocolate milk from the engine (see Chapter 11) with some different oil but didn’t want to waste new oil on that task. Turns out Brian’s last acquisition (’83 Spider) needed to have its oil changed and was on the lift already so…

I drained the oil from the Verde, and as expected, the rest of it looked as bad as the stuff we sucked out of the heads.

The drained chocolate milk, I’m about to taste it to see if it really is

We were going to dry to drain the oil from the Spider directly into the Verde to save a step by rolling the Verde under the Spider on the lift but (fortunately for us) the Verde’s hood was in the way so we drained it into a bucket instead.

About to drain the Spider oil

Once we had the Spider drained (and I had walked through the dripping column at least once) we funneled it into the Verde. Now that the oil was all set I put the belt cover back on and reattached the alternator and while Brian cranked down on it to stretch the belt I tightened up the last nut.

Rather than spend the time to hook up the cooling hoses and fill the system with water we decided to see if it would start. I tried cranking it and it was turning over fine but the battery was worn out from the last time we were working on the fuel pump so it was dead after only two tries. Brian dug out a spare and attached it with some jumper cables and it started turning over nicely, only problem was it wouldn’t start. We figured out that the main fuel pump was having a problem AGAIN! Brian hot wired the backup fuel pump and still no dice. Then I remembered that Lon hadn’t attached the coil wire to the coil when he put the wires back on! Once that was reattached the car stumbled to life briefly. We were having problems keeping it running for more than a few seconds, idling did a little better but every time I stepped on the gas it would die. Eventually it stopped starting and I figured it was flooded. I tried cranking a few times in flood clear mode and it started catching a little bit but wouldn’t start. We were getting quite frustrated and about ready to start kicking things when I had an epiphany…I got out and disconnected the cold start injector theorizing that it was continuing to run and flooding the engine. After a short flood clear crank the car coughed to life and the engine was running great!

Now that we had fixed that problem we wanted to get the car up to temp so first I put the coolant hoses back on while Brian got some water to put in (not allowed to use coolant during the race) and it short order we had the system filled and the engine warming up. It took a while but eventually we saw that the thermostat opened when it was supposed to and that the electric fan came on shortly thereafter. Alright, looking good!

After the engine got up to temp we shut it down and drained the used oil hoping to not see coolant mixed it with it that might indicate a head gasket issue. It came out looking just like it went in, dirty but coolant free!

Brian changed the oil filter and we put in fresh oil and were done working on the car for the day. Some good progress!  As we were looking over our handiwork I noticed some smoke coming from the area of the driver’s side exhaust manifold, initially I assumed it was just a small oil spill burning off but upon looking closer it was a smoldering mouse nest!  We didn’t want the car to go up in flames so Brian quickly started picking the stuff out.  We were laughing about it as he picked out the last piece and didn’t notice that it had dropped out of the grabber tool he was using right onto the manifold pipes!  I looked back and noticed that the smoke hadn’t actually stopped but had gotten a little worse!  Brian grabbed it off in time and when he dropped it on the ground we could see the red embers in it, close call!

All back together with a new water pump and timing belt

The roll bar padding showed up in a HUGE box yesterday and today I got a nice surprise at work when my new driving suit, shoes, balaclava, and the seat belt harness showed up a lot faster than expected from SafeRacer.

Our next session is on Monday. Priorities are to fix the primary fuel pump, wire up the backup to a dash switch, and replace the transmission fluid as well as a bunch of other little things…

We are getting close to race day…too close! The number one priority for this session was to get the water pump changed and try to get the car back to a running state.

Brian and I decided to start this session a couple hours earlier than normal to try and get a jump on the water pump R & R. To try and save time we decided to lock the cams together to prevent them moving when the belt came off and to try an remove the pump without removing the tensioner (original hydraulic type) to keep from having to pull off all the stuff to be able to take the cam covers off. We cobbled together a method of holding the cams in lock using on of the Alfa special tools in conjunction with a c-clamp:

Trying to keep the cams from turning…

It worked surprisingly well! I soon learned that you can get all the water pump bolts out except for two without removing the tensioner which of course did us no good. After unbolting the tensioner I cleaned the grime off from around the water pump and removed it, was the easiest one to pull off that I’ve ever done. Most are stuck on quite well with RTV, not this one! It basically fell off as I removed the last bolt. I cleaned the remnants of the old gasket and RTV off of the block and then had Tom put a light coating of RTV on the new gasket so I wouldn’t get it all over my hands and pick up all sorts of crud while trying to get the pump back on. The new pump went on without a fuss as did the tensioner. The new belt gave the usual grief but I eventually got it to slip back on and we decided to turn the crank pulley to do the obligatory two revolutions of the engine to get the tensioner to seat properly instead of putting it in 5th and pushing it as the service manual recommends. About halfway through the second revolution we figured out why they recommend that! As I was ratcheting back the ratchet for another pull, the left pulley rotated counter clockwise and jumped a few teeth. As expected within the next quarter turn a valve came into contact with a piston and we knew for sure that the belt had jumped, now we were forced into pulling the cam covers off.

While not helping me with this mess Brian and Lon were busy installing a small compressor (it looked bigger in the catalog!) in the trailer that would give us at least enough air for filling tires, possible for running some air tools for a short time if we put in a supplemental tank. The mounting required fabricating some custom mounting brackets and drilling holes in the side of the trailer. Brian couldn’t bear to drill holes in his trailer so he made Lon do it! They got every mounted and looking nice without much fuss.

Meanwhile Tom and Greg had finally strolled in and got right to work on getting our number (69) painted on the side of the car. I had printed out some 13″ high numbers which Greg cut out as part of the template. We had a rather rude version of our car number that we wanted to use that had been created by one of our more artistic AONE (Alfa Owners of New England) club members which we felt would have fit in to the spirit of the 24 Hrs race nicely but while the organizers liked it, they said that the corner workers would complain because it would be hard to read easily. So we decided to just go with black numbers in a white circle (just like Herbie the Love Bug). Since the car was already black the plan was to mask off the circles then use some stick glue to temporarily glue on the cut out numbers and then paint white over the whole thing. Greg (having some paint experience with model trains and such) recommended using some primer first to seal the edges of the masking to prevent runs. Once that got dry enough the white paint would be applied and after that dried some the numbers would be peeled off. The results were great!

Masked off and primed

Completed number, looks great!

The camera man working on the documentary showed up again and shot some more footage and asked a few more questions on camera. He didn’t stay as long this time, maybe we were more boring this time!

While I was busy working on getting the cam covers off Brian was doing some more body work with some Great Stuff. This time he got the version labeled as the “Big Gap Filler” instead of the regular stuff. The can says it is great for plumbing and HVAC, they neglected to mention auto body work! The plan it to fill a bunch of the holes with it and then to shave it down to the body contours and paint it black. A couple of the areas needed some temporary support to keep the foam from just falling out so he used the leftover screen material that we had used for our front grille.

Meanwhile I had gotten the cam covers off and we were greeted with the site of what looked like chocolate milk in the galleys. We REALLY don’t want to have to pull the heads and do the head gaskets so are really hoping that this was merely due to condensation and such for sitting for so long… We used a Mityvac to suck out all the fluid from the galleys and pressed on. We went with the service manual method this time. I had painted a while stripe at the Punto mark on the crank pulley and Lon, Tom, and Greg pushed the car in 5th while Brian and I watched the mark to get a few revolutions. Finally the cams, crank, and distributor were all aligned properly and the tensioner snugged down!

Cam covers off

By this time it was getting quite late and we were all tired so I worked as fast as I could to put as much back together as I could before we quit for the night. Managed to get the cam covers back on and while I was cleaning up the thermostat prior to prior to reinstalling it, Lon put the cap and wires back on. I then got the thermostat installed and the air box back in and then it was time to quit.

Didn’t have any pictures last time so couldn’t show the new stylish air vents, here’s a shot of one from last night:

We’ve decided that it is time to increase the frequency of our sessions at least until the car is running and the other important bits are done. The #1 priority for next time is to finish up the water pump/timing belt R & R, change the oil, filter, and plugs, and then make sure the car runs again!

No pictures this week, we all forgot our cameras.

This session we got a few things done, nothing major but continued progress. First up was getting the final install done for the rollbar. We had picked up some new longer bolts to allow us to get through the 3 layers of metal where it bolts into the floor. Brian and Greg cranked away at that and quickly had the job completed.

Next up was to get the seats back in. I brought my tap and die set so we could clean up the threads which was done in short order and the drivers seat was back in with no problems. The passenger seat needed to have the outer adjustment knob removed before it would fit as that was jammed up against one of the roll bar tubes.We had decided that it would be a good idea to have some supplemental cooling for the rear in board brakes so we picked up a couple dryer vents at the local hardware store. Tom & Lon were working at cutting some holes in the roof to put them in. The got stumped trying to get Brian’s jigsaw to work with the available blade selection he had and so went upstairs to the bench grinder to modify one to work. Without telling them, Brian went at it with some tin snips and cut out some pretty decent holes. We then pushed in the vents and waited for the dynamic duo to reappear. They eventually gave up on the blade and came back down in defeat and it took them a few minutes to figure out why the rest of us were rolling on the floor! Now with the vents in it looks a little like a Lamborghini Countach! Or at least after they were painted black… We’ll have to finishing the plumbing part in a future session.

While that was going on I was diagnosing the squealing sound the engine was making while running. Obviously we would need to start the car for me to do this and of course it was having a starting issue again! I asked Tom to feel the fuel pump as I tried to start the car to see if it was alive, it wasn’t! Brian and Lon then hotwired the backup pump directly to the battery (it was not wired into a switch yet) and the car started. They then disconnected it from the battery to see if the car would die and it….didn’t! Sheesh!

Anyway, we left it running and I started listening to the alternator and water pump with a mechanics stethoscope. As we expected, the water pump was on its way out. After I got enough of the front torn down to get to it I gave the water pump pulley a wiggle and it had the worse amount of movement that Brian or I had ever seen! I stopped short of pulling the timing belt off as we couldn’t remember the easiest way to lock the cams together to keep them from turning and it was getting late. So now we again have a non running car…which is giving Brian fits as it is in the way of everything else in his barn!

The shipping company for our AutoPower roll cage called me on the morning of the 8^th to tell me that the roll cage would be arriving the next day. Of course that was the only day that week I’d be out (up running the COM track event at NHMS in my Verde!) so I had to scramble to make arrangements to make sure someone would be around when it arrived at our work locations shipping dock. Luckily Brian was going to be around so the delivery went off without a hitch.

Due to conflicting schedules we decided to have two sessions this week. On Wednesday Brian, Lon, and Tom would work on finishing up the fuel system and painting the roll cage parts. On Thursday Brian, Greg, and myself would get the roll cage installed.

When we were last mucking around with fuel system, we had gotten the dual fuel pump setup installed (for redundancy) and had replaced one section of the steel line going between the pumps and the fuel filter. Upon starting the car we discovered that another part of the steel line had cracked (they were quite rusty and decrepit) so we decided that it would be safest to completely replace both steel lines. Tom and Lon did a great job replacing them and after some initial struggles got the car back up and running.

While they were working on that, Brian laid out the roll cage pieces and prepped them for paint. The nozzle on one of the spray paint cans had come off so Brian was trying to fix it. They say you learn something new every day…Brian learned to make sure that the nozzle is not pointing towards your face when trying to put it back on after ending up with a chin full of red primer!

The goal for the second night was to get the roll cage installed. Turned out is was a straightforward task. AutoPower does a great job making the cage. There are six mounting points where the cage is attached to the body, the rear wheel arches, on the rear floor pan up against the riser that the seat cushion sits on, and in the front floor pans right where I had to weld plates to cover the big holes. The rest of the pieces are joined together with short sleeves in which holes are drilled and bolts used to keep them together. Once we figured out which pieces went on which side the rest of the assembly was easy. We did learn that it makes it a lot harder to get the slip joints to slip if you paint the joints! A wire brush and some white lithium grease solved that problem quickly. Drilling the holes for the mounting points was almost distressingly easy for the 4 rear mounting points. When I got to the front where I had welded in the extra plates it took MUCH longer (satisfyingly so!) to get through the three layers of metal, probably going to be the strongest mounting point. Good thing too as both of our front side jacking points fell off due to rust through in one of our first sessions so the combination of welded in plates and roll cage should allow us to use those areas as jacking points again.

Once we got the cage in we noticed the problems with painting in less than ideal lighting conditions…many missed spots. No biggie though, since we don’t have an interior to worry about or mask off we just sprayed away to touch it up!

The roll cage parts after initial painting

Greg drilling the last hole to complete the install

Greg The installed cage prior to touch up painting

We’ve been making very good progress on out to do list. Not too many things left to do…

• Replace all the fluids
• Buy and install seat belt harness
• Buy and install window net
• Put seat(s) back in
• New race brake pads
• Rear brake cooling ducts
• Repair the broken Bosch connectors
• Install side exit exhaust
• Timing belt/water pump/tensioner service
• Other stuff we’ve undoubtedly forgotten!

Figured I’d better start updating our progress the day after so I don’t forget anything or get it jumbled up…

I was notified by IOPort Racing that our Autopower roll cage was shipping out on July 1! The biggest pain with these things is that they ship freight collect so it can be somewhat of a hassle. You don’t know exactly how much it will cost until the trucker actually shows up and you have to pay him, not the vendor. The estimates are in the $150-$200 range. There is also no shipment tracking so we don’t even know what day to expect it. I had it shipped to our company’s address as it is cheaper to ship to a business address with a loading dock but that also complicates it as we’ll have to drop everything and drive over to the loading dock when he arrives to inspect it for damage and then pay. Hopefully one of us is in the office whenever it arrives!

The other interesting thing that happened this week is that we were contacted by a producer who is working on a short film about the race. He wanted to document some of our progress! We invited him over for our weekly Wednesday night session.

The first order of business was to finish welding up the patch plate for the driver side rocker panel area as the car was currently off the lift (the lift arm was in the way preventing it from being finished). To give me some room we rolled the car up on some ramps and I finished up the welding while Greg was shaping and grinding the patch for the passenger side rocker (and under the floor).

Not much room to weld under there!

Here’s a movie of Greg using air chisel to remove the sound deadening material from the back of the door panel we are using for the patch.

While I was working on getting the welding finished up so we could get the car back on the lift the rest of the team was hard at work (as usual)!

At least they saved me some!

After we ate we got the car back on the lift and right after that two guys from the film production crew showed up. They hung out for an hour or so, interviewing us on camera and asking lots of questions on where we got the car, what we’ve been doing to it etc.

Tom getting interviewed by the film producers

While the film guys were wandering around the barn I was welding in the passenger side patch. This one was much easier than the other side as the lift arm was mostly out of the way. Once I was done Brian gave the patches a quick coat of primer and black paint, makes them look much nicer (and helps hide my ugly welds)… On both sides you can see there are still a rather large pieces of the rocker missing but we mainly wanted to get some extra support metal in the areas where the roll cage would be bolting in so we didn’t bother with the rest. Maybe later if we have some spare time.

Driver side rocker/underside patch

Passenger side rocker/underside patch

Meanwhile Greg & Lon were upstairs trying to swap some tires. The wheels we got with the Verde looked OK but all the tires were dry and cracking. I had some decent tires I had swapped off of my Verde for some higher performance ones in my shed so I brought them along. Brian also managed to dig up another 3 decent wheel/tire combos from the parts stash. Lon and Greg’s task was to remove the bad tires from the wheels and put the decent set back on using Brian’s tire machine. It takes a while and lots of trial and error to use is correctly but eventually the tires we swapped and another item checked off on the todo list!

Greg working hard at the tire machine

As you might remember from a previous installment, our original fuel pump died while we were trying to autocross the car at the AONE autocross event. Rather than simply put in another fuel pump we decided to add some redundancy to the system by plumbing in two fuel pumps in parallel. One would be powered using the normal activation circuit and the second by a switch on the dash. Tom was running point on the plumbing portion. He got the two pumps mounted nicely and assembled the fuel line and various connectors to plumb it right. He got it all assembled and we decided to do the leak test. I tried starting the car and they started yelling to shut it off as fuel was spraying out at a good clip! To make it easier to work on we raised the car on the lift again (had lowered it for the first start test) and they moved a couple clamps around. I climbed up into the car and gave it another try. Now that leak wasn’t leaking and the car was cranking but not starting so they continued to mess with things and still nothing. Finally we decided to put some more gas in the car (duh!) and that did the trick, the only problem was another stream of fuel started shooting out!

How many Lemons racers does it take to fix a fuel leak?

Now we had Tom, Brian, AND Lon all poking around down there looking for the leak. Turns out one of the metal hard lines had cracked probably due to a combo of rust and getting moved around a bit. We decided to cut out a section of the metal line and patch it with some fuel hose and were trying to figure out the best way to cut it cleanly. Lon suggested using the cutoff wheel air tool. Some of us though he was nuts to want to mix sparks and fuel so Greg got ready:

I decided this would be too good an opportunity for carnage to miss so I grabbed the camera again and decided to put it in video capture mode: Cutting the fuel line ,unfortunately there was no show…just a lot of sparks and a cut line. We got the patch hose plumbed in and the result was a running car again! It runs again

Unfortunately after a couple starts another piece of the hard fuel line started leaking again so our next project is to completely replace it with new hard lines (along with lots of other check list items to go). Hopefully we will get the roll cage in time for the next session…

Last time, we made some patch pieces for the rust holes in the floor pans out of some old Alfetta door skins. I finally got those banged into shape and welded on, so now we don’t need to worry about our feet hitting the pavement! Brian painted them, so now it looks almost stock (yeah, right!).

Me welding in the floor patch

The finished floor patches – not concours correct but they’ll do!

Tom used some heavy-duty screen to fabricate a new grill to keep the flying bits from other cars out of our radiator—looks mean! Lon worked at getting the seats back in and some new brake lights installed using a cheap trailer light kit from Harbor Freight. Brian and Greg spent some time trying to get a nice side exit exhaust setup on but this was foiled by the lack of front jack points (the board across that we were using to put the front part of the car on the lift was in the way) so they put the stock exhaust back on. Brian spent a little time on a new paint scheme for the car. Once that was done, the car was ready for the autocross!

On the morning of the Autocross, I met Brian at Nashoba early so we could get things set up before folks starting arriving. Brian backed the LeMons Verde out of his trailer and we used it to carry the piles of cones around the course—so far, so good! After we got the layout set up, I decided to take it for a more spirited run around the course to try it out. The first thing I noticed was that the steering wheel cover made the wheel way too fat, so that was going to have to go. Next, as I pushed things a bit, the engine would stumble and hesitate in the middle of the RPM band, but it was fine and sounded great at the high end. I went to take the first sharp turn and car didn’t want to! The tires were complete junk—no grip at all! Luckily, Brian had decided to bring along a set of his 15” wheels with race tires on them so, while we continued to set up the rest of the autocross stuff, Tom swapped wheels on the Verde.

Tom and Brian were going to run the autocross in the LeMons Verde, while I would run it in mine and then try the LeMons car again when we got to the fun runs at the end. We were running two groups in the event and we decided that the first group would get two runs each. Then we’d switch groups, they’d get their two, then back to the first for their final three runs, etc. Tom was in the first group, so he took the LeMons Verde out for his two runs. After the runs, he said that the brakes were really dragging a lot but that the tires felt pretty good. He and Brian decided to try to bleed some pressure out of the master cylinder to see if that would help the brakes, so they shut the car down to do that. Once that was accomplished (it didn’t fix the problem; turned out that our pedal installation wasn’t quite perfect and the brake pedal couldn’t disengage all the way), Brian went to start up the car again but it wouldn’t light. After some dinking around, we determined that the fuel pump had decided at that moment to pack it in and we didn’t have any spares with us (I wouldn’t let them take the one off my Verde!). So, after a measly two runs, the LeMons Verde was down for the count, although it was far better to have it happen here than in the race!

The first official autocross run – new Italian paint scheme and race tires!

We took a few weeks off after that and just recently started making progress again. Brian and Tom swapped the bad fuel pump for a spare and that fixed things, so now they are working on plumbing in a second pump in parallel to give us a better chance at avoiding this issue again. While they were working on that, I was working on a patch panel to cover up the gaping hole in the driver’s side rocker panel. I got as much welded in as I could, but we’ll need to take the front of the car off the lift arms to allow me to finish it.

On June 16th, we FINALLY got notified that our entry for the race was officially accepted! Woo-hoo! Now we have to get cracking and get our roll cage ordered, as well as the harnesses and all the other stuff we didn’t want to spend money on until we were officially accepted.