Building, racing, crashing race cars with the 750 Motor Club
Two quick things about dampers.
As the super-duper dampers supposedly being built by my friend Dave have never appeared, as it was becoming increasingly apparently that there’s no point relying on something made out of vapour and wishes I finally decided to go elsewhere.
Well, it’s cold anyway, especially in the wastelands of Mallory Park race circuit. We were racing there at the weekend, on Sunday, and I spent the Saturday morning fettling the Fury (having completely ignored it since Snetterton) and we set off for Mallory so as to arrive at about 5pm when they’d let us into the circuit. Mallory is unique in that you have to drive round the circuit (actually in the wrong direction) so as to get to the paddock. Hence, you have to queue up outside for ages. Continue reading “April is the cruelest month…”
The start of the race season is fast approaching, so I’ve had to spend a lot of the weekend fettling the Fury for the (J15-less) start of the season. The photo is of the end result.
This year doesn’t seem to have been exactly peaceful on track, does it? Especially considering the catalyst debâcle that’s still rumbling on underneath RGB. That lost me the first two races of the season and it all looked as though I was going to lose another one this weekend.
I knew it was too good to last.
I took the exhaust off again and, lo and behold, the cat is showing signs of incipient degradation. It’s got a way to go yet but you can clearly see that the matrix is coming to bits and there are various clearly hot spots which are just about to block up the exhaust.
To say that I’m hacked off about this is the understatement of the geological era. There must be someone whose legs I could rip off… I had had plans to do all sorts of clever things to the car this weekend. It looks, instead, as if I’ll be welding…
I got the exhaust back on this weekend, having had to modify the mounting slightly to account for the slightly repositioned can. You can see the “bright grey” mounting at the back of this photo.
Compared to the recent bout of doom and despondency, this post should turn out to be slightly more upbeat.
First up I took the remains of the shattered exhaust over to Andy’s and we welded in a new cat, as seen here. (I really need to get a TIG welder…) Apparently, the cat I had is one of the earliest batch produced by the company that Andy got them from and they now weld the cat canister into the housing. (If you look hard at the photo you can see where there’s some grinding on the top of the housing, this appears to be the end result of where a hole has been drilled through the housing and then filled with weld material after the cat was inserted.)
I’ve now had a chance to have a look at the cat rather harder. Of course, this involves actually cutting up my nice new Tony Law exhaust system which is a bit alarming. Here it is in the vice just as I set about it with a hacksaw.
You can see the lambda boss sitting here. When I took the lambda sensor out it was completely black, symptomatic, I guess, of the thing running incredibly rich and dumping carbon all over everything.
Well, that explains it then. This is the view peeking down the inlet to the cat. The cat is not meant to look like that jumbled pile of bits and pieces.
I got up this morning having decided that the problem was either a) something to do with engine management or b) a blocked exhaust. As you can see it was the latter. This blockage would have reduced the flow of gas through the engine which effectively is what was causing the rich mixture.
Here’s a little riff on the last entry. (See, instead of fixing the car I can play with the data logger?)