Projects Berkeley tune up In AK

Did you ask Rick at the ERC truck. He carries a lot of plugs and such.

 

Thank you all, we have been bussy so far finding mostly things the engine didn't like, but we turned a corner yesterday about lunchtime and the car is going faster again, not quite 147 Mph, as far as I know, that's the fastest it's been since it got this engine.

We have the car reconfigured so Pops can drive it, we're going out in the cooler air and see if we can get the other 3 Mph (we have a SCTA speed cap on this car of 150, because of the way we fit in the cage).

Denise, it was good to finally meet you too.

 

Pops was good enough to make a run Thursday morning, unfortunately the master switch took that opportunity to fail.

After we healed that malady, I made a 142 pass with an 8 Mph headwind.

We were checking the car after the run and it had oil in the aft 3 injector bells, we figured that much blow by was it's way of telling us 'stop'. So we did. It was likely for the best as after we took the body off there was oil on the battery, it's in front of the engine.

More after we get it home, chek and see what we can do for it to make it faster.

We are in Spokane (finally) so hopefully we can catch the last day of the Goodguys show.

 

Okay so I have some progress to report on the home front. (yes at some point I'll likely start a new thread for the '10 effort, but not yet).

We finally got caught up enough to do some work on the car today. Amongst other things we did a leakdown (differential compression test if you prefer) and a cranking compression test.


#3 (French engine so the 2nd one from the "front") had 78% leakage coming out the crankcase breather, but at least it mustered 155 Psi on the cranking test. Not quite so good when you figure the 2nd worst on cranking compression was 205 Psi.


Next we plan to verify where the ignition timing was set once we were done. It started going faster when we were pulling lead out, so we don't really know where it is now.

As it managed 142 Mph with an 8 Mph headwind (on it's last pass, as tired as it was) we figure the ignition timing has to be close to where it needs to be, so we are going to put some effort in finding where it is before we take it apart.

 

Erik - I've been so busy since I got back that tonight's my first look at this thread! Great stuff on here.
It was a real honor to crew on my favorite salt car with you guys. Thanks again. Erik and Sid are definitely a class act. They took excellent care of me and we had some fun adventures, too (like helping fire up Tony Nancy's 22jr roadster for the first time since
'61)...
The book's coming along good, Erik. But the publisher wants a book about station wagons first - so how 'bout running a wagon in 2010? Or we could just convert the Berkeley into a wagon...
Tell Sid HI for me!
Scotty

 

Sure, I'll tell Pops Hi.

Hmm, station wagon, I'm geussing that would put us in 'special construction', IIRC all the G Gas records in any of the special construction classes are appraching 300 Mph.

Hows about we try and get past 164 first.



Still tinkering, we locked the advance mechanism in the distributor and tried it with 34 1/2 degrees of lead. It seems happy there.

We are trying to remove the engine from the car, should have that out just a bit later today.

 

Hey Eric, any updates on the Bezerkly? Long time and just wondered.

 

Yeah, we just made the boat with it. (roughly 11 hours ago )


Short of it is, new safety structure, engine overhaul (rings, bearings, gaskets, vavles and seats ground... that's about it for that one).

New Racepack IQ3 dash (display and data recorder), better battery cutoff switch (old one failed, cost us a run in '09) and a remote cable to be able to charge the batteries without taking the top half of the body off.

I hope to meet the car in Tacoma, with all the menageri (tow vehicle and push car) the Week of Speedweek and trek over to the races.

Thanks for asking, with learining a new trade, and the thrash to get it ready for the races I haven't taken the time to post progress.

The only thing I'm missing is a throttle cable.

Yes, that's an important bit of kit (watching top gear, couldn't help it) but I have the dimmensions, and the cable housing finally showed up (aparently UPS had a mechanical in Portland OR, or was it Ontario CA, ).

So hopefully all I will have to do when we get there is install the roll bar padding and a throttle cable. (even with pre heating the padding, it wasn't going in right, so we figure on puting it in where it's warm, as when we did that last time, the same brand padding could be tied in knots, literally, here it just breaks when you bend it ).

 

Good to know you are on your way. Best of luck for some good runs. Keep us posted on your progress.

 

Erik, I'll be out at speedweek friday thru friday. As always, let me know if you need any help at all.

Tomcat

 

So how did it run?

 

We shook herdown at just over 100, by the last pass we got 140 (exit).

It took us a week to pass tech.

We will have to do something different for shade next year (as in having some ).

We now have a decent baseline, with more power potential when we add some compression and cam.

One thing I hope to change for next year is the transmission, being a powerglide there really aren't any gear combinations that are close enough for a smaller engine like ours.

I've been looking for a transmission that has closer gear spacing, and isn't huge.

While a T5 could work, it would be alot simpler from a shifter standpoint if we could keep either an automatic or use a manual that is equipped with a sequential shift mechanism (like a motorcycle, ratchet shifter if you prefer).

Which leads me to my next thought, the heavier road bikes have enough weight, power and traction (on pavement) that their transmissions likely endure as much load as ours would on the salt (the traction limit being the biggest difference).

I even see some of the aftermarket transmissions for those that seem ready made ratio wise (I really like the Baker 7 speed Direct, 7 speeds and 7th is direct drive).

Problem is most of them I see have the input on the main shaft, with the output on the counter or lay shaft.

That would work great in a bike where the primary drive is on one side and the rear wheel drive is on the other side of the bike.

However, if I were to line that up with a flywheel and put the output to a driveshaft, it would turn the wrong way (I'm not so sure the rear axle would lube right if we put it in upside down to compensate, or how much extra drag we would encounter driving everything with the coast faces of the gearsets).

Not that I've thought about that, much.

The other, relatively low expense option is to work out a shifter for a T5, I'm not too big on the overdrive, but I keep having this thought about how the 5th gear in a T5 is put in like a set of quick change gears in a sprint car.

I don't know if the drive and driven gears are the same spline on the shafts they mate to, but if they are it would seem a relatively simple task to swap them to make a reduction gear, insted of an overdrive.

Ideally I could split 3rd and 4th.

There are several different sizes of those gears, it would seem to be a not too unreasonable task, on that point.

But I have no idea if they are the same, I think the Ford spec gears are different, but I don't know about the others.

Then of course there is the whole issue of a shifter.

I would expect to have to use a short housing, like a S-10 or Jeep housing and fab a slip yoke support bearing / seal holder like the torque tube conversions mentioned elsewhere on the HAMB.

I don't need a torque tube, just a way to keep the fluid in, and support a short slip yoke (with rigid engine mounts, and rigid rear suspension, we don't need slip, just a bearing).

Ideally something with not more than 1.2:1 in whatever gear it may be before direct drive, however we get that.

But I'm out of ideas at the moment.

 

perhaps you could squeeze in a small auxiliary box containing a set of V8 or Midget chance gears to reverse the rotation of the drive and give you an easy way to change finial drive ratio. At cost of drag, space and money.

 

also remember when comparing trannys from road use to Salt, you cant just comppare HP to HP, as out on the salt you have constant loading and unloading as you skip across the salt, this causes MUCH higher loads on your driveline that just accelleration on pavement
Hans

 

Nice to meet you and your dad Eric. I was wishing I had brought my EZ up along to loan to you when I realized you didnt have any shade!

 

Good to meet you too Trent, yeah, we had planned to do something different than last time for shade and ran out of time.

Hans, that's true, some of the boxes I've been looking at have a straight cut gearset available specifically for racing, but I would prefer not to have to re-engineer the box to turn the right way for the axle.

Rich, yeah, I did have an idea of running a splitter like a brownie for a OTR truck.

I suppose if I could find a small enough unit, like the US gear unit for pickups and motorhomes.

I wonder if I could screw a couple together like an electric shift lenco, hmmm.

Of course there are those too, I wonder if they make one small enough?