|
Several discoveries since last post. First, it seems that the 1.0 l flywheel has this really gross extra mass in a flange at its circumferance. No doubt put there for making it easier for Granny to drive the car, but the saying is 1 lb on the flywheel is like 5 on the chassis, and extra mass at the end of a rotating crankshaft is in general a bad idea. Weight being the enemy, I figured to machine it off, but the flywheel is just a little too big for use on my buddy's lathe. THEN I was advised by 3Tech that the 1.3l flywheel is a bolton, lighter, and takes a bigger clutch. Trip to San Antonio, get the flywheel, run it by Dennis' and have it resurfaced in exchange for the earlier resurfaced flywheel (Thanks, Dennis, but I am still a little red under the collar about the 25% bump on the machine shop ticket). Get a new clutch exchange from Van's, and on building the engine discover that Van's clutches are no longer Aisan, but are some semi-solid piece of digestive endproduct from China, and don't fit quite right. Looked like a decent enough clutch otherwise, but hell, if I want a Chinese POS clutch for cheap, I'll buy one of the $25 numbers off E-bay. Vans is still working on a clutch, should have it tomorrow. Good news is that the clutch disc is something like 15% larger in area, so this might mean that I will never have to do a clutch on the car, provided I don't lend it out to bozos who can't drive a stick. Done that before.
Additional delays due to missing hollow guide dowels lost in machine shop. Seems to have gone missing a couple of the cam tower bearing guide dowels and the cylinder head to block dowels. Lesson learned--much as you yourself are responsible for wiring together all the parts that go into a cleaning tank to where they don't get lost, you yourself are responsible for pulling all the hollow dowels on every part you send to the machine shop. Pull all the sensors, too. Whatever the aggravations are in the yanking and wiring together and sorting out are, they are less than the aggravations caused by arguing with the machine shop and waiting on them to make things right, which of course occurs on their schedule, not yours. For those of you who don't know the trick on pulling hollow guide dowels, which tend to be a royal bitch to pull at times due to electrolysis, what you do is go off to your drill index and find a drill bit that is the tightest fit possible inside the dowel. Hold the drill shank in the dowel, grab the dowel with your Vise-Grips, and twist and pull. Having the drill bit inside keeps you from crushing the guide dowel, which will likely as not happen if the thing is any stuck in at all. Any Vise-Grip hickeys on the dowel can be polished off with sandpaper.
Finished up the foamin, finally. Used a total of 22 cans, of which 1 might have been the total weight of leakout and wastage. Maybe 1 1/2, counting some interesting spoogeout that occured from the sills into the rear quarter cavity. Facts of automotive life concerning small cars is that they all suffer greatly from too much cost engineering, as they all are loss leaders, sold at a loss, by the Big 3. Ford has never made a cent on the Escort, GM's J-bodies all are money losers, and word I hear is that contrary to the PR when it came out, Chrysler loses money on every Neon. But every Escort sold allows the sale of an Excursion without paying onerous EPA mileage penalties, and the SUV's and giant pickups are so damned fat that there's quite some room for continued losses in small cars in Detroit. A small car nowadays simply has smaller parts, not fewer parts, and it just doesn't cost that much less to manufacture than any other vehicle. First round of import cars--Beetles, for example, that wasn't the case.
This leads us, the automobile-y knowledgeable, to act on our car projects to correct as best we can the engineering deficiencies when we decide to do a car project. On this beast, all the early substandard brakes and suspension have gone away. Bigger wheels and tires, to where the thing will be an actual four passenger vehicle--Metros aren't, not in my book, not from how they squat down and dogtrack going down the highway with a full passenger load. Correct NVH deficiencies--foam and bedliner paint--Detroit has the general idea that if you buy a small car, you deserve a tinny and noisy drive. Once I finally get the thing running, it'll be interesting to see how much results my efforts have yielded.
I'm curious to the extent to where I went by UT's automotive engineering Friday drinking gettogether and talked to a couple of profs I know slightly about it. They seemed interested some in my idea to instrument up my car and a comparo vehicle or two--say a stock MK2 and a stock MK3--and looking at the results. Braking, handling, and noise levels are the investigatory targets. Library research in the SAE archives concerning use of foam in vehicle body cavities is interesting, but is lacking in actual vehicle test results. Foam of course blocks noise transmission down the cavity itself, but how much noise reduction this actually yields doesn't seem to be investigated, probably on account of the difficulty and variances that exist in different vehicles. There's also a documented benefit caused by increasing structural rigidity and a consequent reduction in low-frequency noises due to reduction in body flex and boom. The places where it did the most good aren't necessarily the intuitively obvious places, either, near as I can tell from the limited literature--Chrysler foamed up a Cherokee BIW (Body-In-White) and found the most benefits coming from the areas in the bodyshell aft of the rear axle. No SAE data to speak of on chassis rigidity yielding handling benefits. There is definitely a call for some vehicles to get foamed and instrumented and tested--no one ever seems to have done the actual fieldwork. I suspect that Detroit et all are not too enthused about foam in general on account of the problems it causes in the paint process if so much as a single speck goes astray onto the body, and there's also the time factors involved in foam curing, even for the two-part catalyzed stuff, which would distinctly cause problems in current assembly line operations. Nevertheless, Lexus, Infinity, and now Ford (F-150) are using foam to some extent or another in their vehicles for NVH/structural reasons .
Will it happen? I was advised by a buddy of mine, ME PHD from there, author of the only real invention UT's ME department ever made, that they might be curious, but they aren't going to be curious enough to do anything unless I give them money. He thought that $5k should get their attention and a grad student for a semester. UT's motto really should be "Money Talks", as opposed to the Bible verse about the truth setting you free. I'll see what I can do. It is worth doing. I have already given UT enough money in my life for the useless liberal arts degree I got from those wankers to where I am not going to give them any more ever. But the ME profs are a good bunch, so something may happen. Will keep all posted.
Tried installing the one true piece of go-fast excrement I bought--the front suspension brace I bought from Turbinetech. Didn't fit. Much communication with Jess in Quebec, which all went well, and the upshot is that there seems to be something wrong with the distance between the two front a-arm to body attaching bolts. It is off by 5/8" from what the suspension brace says it should be. Factory manual does not give a dimension for that distance--Thanks GM!--and the illustration in the GM factory manual for body dimensions is a true atrocity of CAD and cheap low-budget printing. Thanks again, GM! I suspect that either the car hit a good sized pothole or was simply built wrong. I'd go with the latter. Looks like once it is up and running it is going off to Ed's Frame Shop for an alignment and bend back into place. Another unplanned expense, one that ironicallly if I hadn't bothered with the improved and better part one I may have never found out about. One thing about running a vehicle thru a good repair facility's frame machine after a wreck--sometimes it drives better after than before, as a good frame man can do a better job than the assembly line does on getting everything in alignment. It does cost, though.
Last edited by Dan White on Tue Nov 08, 2005 4:47 pm, edited 2 times in total.
|
Login
Register
Gallery
FAQ
Search
