I’ll be there on Thursday.
I should be there. There is a members meeting that night too. Having not driven the car, I’ll still offer the opinion that tires will be the best improvement and as I remember don’t go against the ‘cost’ for penalty laps.
We can put together some aero as well
Yeek. Done a compression check or the ol’ tablespoon of oil to see if it is rings or valves?
No racing experience and unlikely to acquire any in time, but I might could help out with the car and other prep.
Here is the catalog. http://www.240sxmotoring.com
Let’s make a wish list and pair it down per the budget and “rules”.
Tires and handling items top my list.
New rings if we’re feeling ambitious.
I think the current tires could go another 6 hours after being rotated, but they lack pace.
Will be meeting this Thursday at 7:30 to move the car and start looking for any worn / needs replacing / damaged parts.
We got the car back to DMS, it started up first crank from it’s home at offsite storage.
The compression check got 187, 170, 163, 183 on the cylinders, which sounds pretty good, so we will only be replacing the valve stem seals (without pulling head) to see if that solves the oil burning problem.
Out base model 240sx didn’t come with a rear swaybar, (the SE model came with a 15mm rear, both have 27mm front bar), so we will start looking around junkyards for a 240sx SE so we can get its swaybar for cheap or potentially just order aftermarket swaybars (questionable quality items can be found for cheap on ebay)
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I assume this was all dry?
Variation should be less than 10%, so that 163 at 12% is out of spec and skating on the edge of problematic.
A wet test would help determine if rings/cylinder work are in order.
Yeah that was all dry after the engine was warm. We can measure again next time both dry and wet. (adding Tbsp of oil into cylinder before cranking).
Will be meeting saturday 1pm to work on replacing the valve stem seals (parts wont be here until friday), I ordered the tools to use the method shown here to replace the valve stem seals. (Except to use compressed air and not a rope stuffed into cylinder to hold valves up…)
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I forgot to mention in last post that anyone is welcome to come help with the car or check it out, we unfortunately have a very limited number of driver spots for this race, but there are lots of things to work on and learn from.
We successfully replaced the valve stem seals without pulling the head, and it looks like we fixed the oil leak.
We were careful to be sure to mark the distributor and upper timing chain and sprockets to be certain we could reassemble everything correctly.
I did mess up by forgetting to put the car back in gear before applying the air pressure to the cylinder to hold the valves up. Since we didn’t have a regulator we were putting ~110psi into the cylinder, which is >500 pounds of force, which spun the crankshaft some. This cost us extra time when reassembling the upper timing chain to be sure we got everything lined up with cylinder 1 back at TDC.
The old seals were rock hard and clearly not good:
A couple videos showing how well the valve spring tool worked, prior to doing this reving after idle would produce a visible cloud of white smoke.
Will be meeting next on thursday at ~7:30pm to look over the ‘roughly oe equivalent to replace the worn out 200k mile shocks’ suspension upgrades we ordered. We also need to fix an exhaust leak and rattle and help insulate the drivers floorpan from the exhaust using some wrap reflective tape.
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Putting the timing at TDC will also ensure no rotation during such an operation on an engine like this one (4cyl, flatplane crank, where all cylinders are at TDC or BDC at the same time).
Good work!
We got in lots of parts and started installing the exhaust wrap and heat shielding to prevent the driver floor from getting so hot (there is also an exhaust leak between the exhaust manifold and downpipe that we will fix). Also started fabricating a ram air intake (I forgot to take any pictures)
Will be starting the swaybar and shock install this saturday around 1pm if anyone would like to help.
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Got the shocks / swaybars installed
Front bar, OE was 27mm hollow, to a 28mm solid
Will be meeting again thursday at ~7:15pm to finish putting the exhaust back together and completing the intake and cooling for the driver
No old style with a Louisville slugger? 
I’ve seen it done a couple times. Make sure to get a heat gun on the area for a good while first.
For this car hammering would probably have been just as easy, but it was pretty quick to use the fender roller, before:
After:
Also test fitted the new wheels and tires, we got a rough camber reading to see what we could get with just one eccentric bolt per strut(got -0.9 passenger and -2.1 driver), will have to go with 2 eccentric bolts per side to get to desired -2.5 to -3 degrees of front camber
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