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It looks unfinished to me. Like they polished some parts to try and make it look done.

Additive manufacturing is ideal for pipes though. Pretty sweet.

Any time you get near the salt it's best to use something you you don't plan on owning.

I've spent my fair share of time at Mid Ohio over the years. I have never made vintage days. My one buddy always camps and invites me every year. Maybe this year I will try for it. It's the week after the vintage grand prix in Pittsburgh, those two weekends usually overlap.

Parallel thinking? Is that the term?

We struggle with fuel economy with the car. The 5 gallon fuel cell is barely enough to finish a half hour session. I think we calculated like 7mpg. So larger jets could be a problem there.

I talked to my dad after that last post, and without any prompting he says that we should pull those red filters and go up a main jet size. I about died. He's waiting on parts for the van so maybe he will do it before the test on Wednesday.

You are correct. I know many have experienced this in other scenarios too. We tried the car without the red pre filters and sure enough it went lean.

The truth is that we don't see enough track time to chase these types of things. Usually encountering other failures that distract us from really tuning the car and engine. Such is life in grassroots motorsport.

When I was driving professionally and we had mechanics and engineeers etc., the expectations were much different.

I finished prep on the car Saturday and it was ready to load. After testing the van while towing the trailer we decided to postpone our test at Nelson's until next week. I was watching the data on the transmission temps and when the torque converter slipped for any period, temps would climb pretty quick. This is with additional cooling we added since my last post. In my last post we noted high temps without the trailer. The additional cooler meant normal temps sans trailer. Then we tested while towing and found high temps again.

We have a lot of hills to climb in our region. Luckily we had penned in this coming Wednesday the 25th as a potential backup date. Hopefully the weather is good. The van should be ready. I am fairly confident the new cooler arrangement will solve the over heating issues. We should have it together today or tomorrow.



Bonus shot of the Mini. It hasn't been outside much. This is a project for August. It hasn't run much since we did the standalone ECU. I am looking forward to it. Maybe my dad will get the new composite hood painted too.

I run mine very much the same as Mark, specifically his second photo with the FZR upper looks nearly identical to how I run mine. It would be cool to machine a plate style upper triple, could drop the clip ons some but still have them high-ish. Maybe I will do that once we get through the race in July.

I stuck with the FZR stem but I shortened it. I converted to tapered rollers to accommodate.

I have a fzr front end in my RD as well. I stuck with spokes. It's an easy conversion and well worth it.

I do the GT750 heads on the mill, the hardest part is fixturing them. Never met two of them that weren't fairly different. Not sure on the head you have, but it's certainly possible to do heads on the mills.

Yeah, I have been following. A friend of mine is over there spectating. I can only imagine he is totally bummed that sidecar is cancelled. That's all he ever wants to talk about. Which I am fine with, but he's there for it.

Center cylidner a little smokey after CC it with the Marvel. Not too shabby for first real fire up after the slumber.

The van is together and working. Transmission temps are a bit high, we think it has about half the amount of cooler it needs.



Had the PCM up checking those temps on a drive for dinner.



Made a tool to adjust float height. Instead of a standard needle these use a ball, this is intended to handle the mild fuel pressure that the fuel pump supplies. Setting float height was tricky and the old float arms were pretty worked over. We got some new ones, then with this jig were able to get the float arms within like +/- .004". Not sure this will help much of anything, but it's a thing we did.



Oh, and a semi-aero camera mount. It looks better than the old one. That's the biggest improvement.



We are well on track for the test on June 15th.

Torque test channel did some tests on numerous real and fake plugs. Was pretty interesting. Some of the knockoff ones are just as good. Some aren't worth the box they ship in.

Well boys, the band is back together. And by that I mean, Mom's bout with cancer is over and my divorce is finalized. So my father and I are free to ignore the real world and indulge ourselves with 2 stroke powered race cars.

We have slowly been working on the car in the background, but with life getting in the way, things were slow. Probably the the biggest update was the rear brake.

To save you from digging through the thread, failing brakes on the street course was a common theme for us. We think we narrowed it down to pad knock back on the rear caliper. The single rear rotor had a lot of run out, this knocked the pads back, meaning a long pedal. To prevent the inconsistent pedal I would touch the brake pedal well before the brake zone to return the pads to the rotor and get the pedal feel I desire. This generated excess heat at single rear caliper, boiled the brake fluid, and meant that it was difficult to achieve proper braking pressure at the front due to the balance bar. If you are familiar with how a balance bar works you probably understand.

Beyond that, we made yet another head. I, like a fool, didn't get a picture of it. It has a nice toroidal combustion chamber. We went slightly large on volume, squish came in at .032" with a .035" gasket. It should be a cool runner. I'll check squish again after a heat cycle and retorque.



We have better tires lined up. I am working on licensing. The plan is to get a test in mid June, a month away. Then off to PVGP in mid July.

Paper gaskets?