Building our Lemons/Chumpcar (Page 25/29)
DonP NOV 19, 11:33 PM

quote
Originally posted by Francis T:

If you let it cool slowly you annealed it; made it softer/removing some of twist or springyness in that section. If you quenched it, -cooled it quickly- you probably kept the spring in it but may now have a brittle area. Either way..... Good luck with it.
BTW do you have any plans for addressing one of the Fiero's major shortcomings for these long races; namely it's small fuel tank? With a required minimum of 5 minutes for every fuel stop You will likely lose at least a lap or two with every stop.



Thanks for the explanation regarding the heating and bending of the sway bar. We let the bar cool slowly on it's own. We read conflicting comments back when we did the bending. And decided to let it cool on it's own. If we did effect the springyness, I suspect it was countered at least a bit by using a significantly larger bar. As I commented, I cannot say if it was a good move or not. We changed so many things.

As to the fuel tank. At least we have the '88 tank which was slightly larger. I think that at the last race that lasted approximately an hour and forty five to fifty minutes. That was at the newly expanded Thunder Hill 5-mile course. LOTS of wide open throttle time. I would love to be able to run between two and five hours.... but our regulator seems to have some relationship to the average age of our drivers. We are leaving happy and tired.

The 5 minute minimum fuel stop is a ChumpCar thing. The last pit stop at Thunder Hill was with less than three minutes stopped. That was an all time best .. to this point.
DonP NOV 19, 11:46 PM

quote
Originally posted by FIEROPHREK:


I was actually wondering this as well. What kind of stint times are you guys able to achieve running the series1 3800sc? Im' going to be running a series 2 3800 na and am wondering if i'll be able to hit the 2 hour max stint time. Oh yeah I haven't said it yet but your build id freeking AMAZING!




Well, there's a Series 2 in the car now. The Series 1 we stared with didn't even make the green flag before detonating. I guess it wasn't as good a deal as we had hoped.

At the last race, the stock tank gave up between an hour forty five and an hour fifty. We haven't yet found a "legal" way to get more than an extra pint or two. And, short of trying a fuel cell, I doubt it will be messed with. It's too much of a safety and rules consideration and we wouldn't want to come down on the wrong side of that line. Depending on the track, you might get two hours. But we haven't seen it.

Which races have you run? I'll have to look for pictures in the galleries.
FIEROPHREK NOV 20, 11:12 AM
Don thanks for the info! I'm feeling a little better about the fuel duration now. My na 3800 should be a little better on fuel than your modded 3800sc. My engine is stock except for a short intake runner mod, a 3800sc throttle body and F-body iron manifolds.

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ARCHIES JUNK IS FASTER THAN SHAUNNA'S JUNK

12.3 is faster than a 13.2

DonP NOV 28, 12:42 AM
We were getting close to finally installing our front cradle into the car. But of course that just meant that we had other fitment details to consider.

Except for an undetermined (but very small ) number of '88 Fieros, none escaped the factory with power steering. I don't know if the few that did were all considered prototypes as mentioned on the forum, but there were apparently just a small handful. That meant we had to deal with plumbing the rack. Of course none left the factory with a supercharged 3800 L67 out back. So we were not constrained by thoughts of originality. Luckily, virtually every Park Avenue (the source of our engine) came equipped with power steering. So I ran out to the "Residual Parts Pile" out in the back and located the original Park Avenue power steering pump and brackets. Okay, that was fairly easy. Now to the rack end.

The 2011 Camaro rack that we used had two different sized fittings. The pressure port uses an 18mm x1.5 metric thread with an O-ring. The return port has 16mm 1x5 metric threads with an O-ring. But because the stock Park avenue hoses were something on the order of 16 foot too short, we needed to adapt to something else. Our choice was to adapt the fittings to a -6 AN fitting. That type of fitting can easily interface with a hose appropriate for the very high pressures encountered in a power steering system. A quick search online, and I was headed to Summit racing for the appropriate adapters. For the pressure side we used the Earls Performance part number 961956ERL http://www.summitracing.com...-961956erl/overview/ and for the return side we used an Earl's 961955ERl http://www.summitracing.com...-961955erl/overview/







Because of the extreme pressures that a power steering pressure side can encounter - often reported as well over 1100 psi - we chose to spend the bucks and use a high performance braided steel hose similar to those used on brake systems. Only bigger. For the return side, which faces significantly lower operating pressures, Rich chose to use aluminum tubing with -6 AN ends. The advantage of the aluminum tubing, besides the cost differential with the braided hose, is the ability to help dissipate heat. We had kind of a 15+' of radiator on the return side. What Rich found was aluminum tubing sold by Speedway Motors which is listed as fuel line. It also showed a 250 PSI operating pressure, far more than we expected to see in operation. http://www.speedwaymotors.c...-8-Inch-OD,1633.html http://www.speedwaymotors.c...-3-8-Inch,34353.html http://www.speedwaymotors.c...-3-8-Inch,34192.html






You can see here how we routed the hose and tube from the engine compartment. We used a short rubber hose on the tubing/return side to mate to the pump reservoir itself.



Rich used a couple ninety degree -6 AN couplers coming off the rack fitting so that we could use straight -6 an fittings on the pressure and return hose and tubing. That helped so that we were not faced with having to "clock" the hoses.

Next we were faced with adapting the rack itself to the steering column. In our case this wasn't too much of a problem as we were using a simple 3/4" heavy wall tubing and a couple u-joints. It would have been much more difficult to adapt to a stock steering column.





Now we had a choice to make. One were we had no real data to base the decision on. We knew that the Camaro rack was faster than the stock Fiero rack. That was one of the benefits we were chasing in adding power steering. But was it enough? Doug had an extra 1.5:1 steering quickener that we could add as well. Would the rack be enough by itself? Would also adding the quickener make the car unmanageable? What the heck, we didn't have to pay for it, so on it went. I believe we used a Howe steering quickener. http://www.speedwaymotors.c...36-Spline,24447.html











Since we were talking about plumbing, I'll mention that we found it best to re-route the stock brake lines. The stock lines attach to the original upper arms with a small clip. We could no longer do that as the mounting point was gone. And we feared getting into the relocated spring assembly.

The stock location



We made a hard line to move behind the upper control arm.







That white box ahead of the upper arm is the mount for our timing scoring transponder.
DonP FEB 14, 01:34 AM
Most of the front suspension construction was done prior to our outing at Buttonwillow. We really only had the finishing up stuff prior to installation of the front cradle. But, time being the constant enemy of the racer, we had to delay the installation documented above until after that race.

The other big task that became evident at the Buttonwillow weekend was the necessity of dealing with the cooling system. We had been using the Champion 3-core radiator starting at our first race. http://www.championradiator...ntiac-Fiero-radiator And that radiator had been fine with the original 2.8 liter. But, given the fact that we had not REALLY had a successful weekend with the 3800 SC power plant, we had no hard data on how well it would work over the long haul race weekend. Given that the track temperature was reportedly 150 degrees on that weekend, we found that the cooling was, uh, challenged. We had, as I mentioned earlier, installed the modified hood scoop from Paul "Tha Driver" here on the forum. http://angelonearth.net/customfiberglass/





Actually, Paul had modified his stock offering to enlarge the opening of the scoop.

The short story is that with engine temperatures hitting 230 and climbing when pushing it, the driver had to back down fairly regularly and let the engine temps become manageable. You know how hard it was to back off when chasing down a car that had always been untouchable at past events. So it came time to try to address that issue.

To this point, we had left the front bulkhead intact. And we had positioned the fiberglass scoop to drop down in front of the bulkhead. It worked okay at Sears Point. In March. With just a threat of rain. But when summer came roaring in, we needed some help.

The first step was to actually remove the bulkhead. From that point, we mounted the radiator and fan (we were and are still using the factory fan.) And the work started on routing the air directly from the radiator through the hood scoop. No more just relying on the air pressure to make it all work effectively.








You may note that we also removed the plastic tub from the front compartment.

Once we established the bottom-curving-up-to-form-the-rear-wall piece, we broke out every fabricators friend, cardboard. With the hood down and the rear of the shroud held in place contacting the fiberglass scoop, we made some cardboard templates to use in creating the side walls.










You might take note in the first picture of this series, we had already tried a kick-up in front on the scoop opening to deflect the airstream up and allow exiting air to move easier.

Once we had the templates made, it came down to transferring the design to sheet aluminum. Of course we also had to give some thought to allowing material for tabs and flanges. Gotta love those Cleco fasteners!





















Naturally the next step was to bring out the tubing bender.




We needed a brace, going between the two frame rails, with attaching points to provide support for the structure. Remember, the scoop needs to drop inside the shrouding as the hood comes down into position. And conversely, be free to move up and out of the shroud when the hood is raised. So, to this point we had no real support for the structure. And obviously we expected some serious force to be applied by the moving air. I'm sure Rich had no thoughts of bracing the front structure to replace the strength given up in removing the bulkhead.







We replaced the plastic tub with a sheet of aluminum to re-seal the front compartment. In this next photo you can see the new aluminum floor. In addition we creared some aluminum extensions coming forward to seal between the frame/cradle rails and the bottom of the shroud. this was to limit the amount of extraneous air allowed into the front compartment. That small aluminum angle piece - the shiny piece below the bar/brace is there to support the front edge of the aluminum tub pan. Without that, it would droop and we would lose some effectiveness.










Next we tackled some repairs to the cooling tube. Rich would only let me post this next picture if I blurred the repairs. The tubes need to have a ring bead to hold the hoses on securely. We had to lay down a welding bead.




We lacked the proper tools to put a real ring bead into the coolant tube.




Any sponsor donations gladly accepted.

Just joking.

Sorta.

At about this time, Brother and fellow driver Doug showed up with a couple new rockers. After the heating incident at Sears Point, we had some chatter to deal with.





Our next track day outing with the Reno SCCA guys took place at Reno-Fernley. The car felt FANTASTIC. The new suspension handled brilliantly. Cooling was a non-issue. Even with the relatively hard LeMons legal tires I do not think we could have made the car understeer. And this with 57% rear weight bias.

John Wood, the Reno-Fernley track manager and a former Porsche North America development driver/manager found it necessary to drive outside the track to keep some wild mustangs away during the event. He took the time to watch our car closely. His observation was that the car handled very well. But the rear looked " a little unhappy." that mirrored our observations. He told us of some of the creative engineering the Porsche teams did with their rear engined 911s, but none of that seemed to be practical for us.

Rich began thinking about the rear suspension and how it might be tweaked. Because he does most of his inspired engineering in the shower, he took several daily showers for the next week. And darned if he didn't find a simple solution.
KurtAKX FEB 14, 09:09 PM

quote
Originally posted by DonP:

Rich began thinking about the rear suspension and how it might be tweaked. Because he does most of his inspired engineering in the shower, he took several daily showers for the next week. And darned if he didn't find a simple solution.



And? What was the tweak?
DonP FEB 14, 09:16 PM
I'm currently writing up how we handled the rear suspension. Might not be able to finish and post until late tonight or tomorrow A.M.

Hey, someone was actually reading the thread! Thanks KurtAKX!
wftb FEB 14, 10:18 PM
I just finished catching up .One of my favourite threads and I wish Cliff would put you in the construction zone .Not only great entertainment for gear heads (I think women call us losers but who cares) but also lots of great how to and reference material .Great work , I always look forward to the updates .
ericjon262 FEB 15, 10:13 AM

quote
Originally posted by DonP:
Hey, someone was actually reading the thread! Thanks KurtAKX!



some of us are just quieter than others...

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"I am not what you so glibly call to be a civilized man. I have broken with society for reasons which I alone am able to appreciate. I am therefore not subject to it's stupid laws, and I ask you to never allude to them in my presence again."

"The day I tried to live, I stole a thousand beggars' change and gave it to the rich."
http://www.fiero.nl/forum/Forum2/HTML/119122.html

RCR FEB 15, 10:58 AM


Bob