More minor progress

Yesterday we had another mini work day, mostly focused around the trailer. We took off all the aluminum diamond plating to asses the rust damage and what cross members have been removed. We took a trip to a local metal supplier but unfortunately they didn’t have what we needed and the other stuff we could have used wasn’t cheap.

Oh well. We went to the junkyard since we haven’t been to one in a while and it turns out the pick-n-pull foreign vehicle yard merged with their american vehicle yard. Not really good, since it really shrank the selection down. Oh well. We bought a few things but what really helped us was being able to take apart a similar year 300zx valve train. We went home with our new knowledge and decided to just run our 300zx for a few minutes to get the lifters primed.

What originally plagued our car was some horrible valve ticking and bad misfire. It turns out the two were related as the valve tick is caused by the lifters being full of air rather than oil. After running the car for about 20 minutes the lifters were re-primed and the ticking and misfire went away, magic! The car fixed itself again! So at the very least we are good to go to run another Lemon’s race.

We also did a bunch of grinding work to prep the trailer but time ran out. No pictures because I didn’t take any, haha.

Back to basics

As you can see, the project-fate.net website leads back to this blog. This is because after seeing the website incomplete for so long I decided to just hide it away while I refine it. This blog has already some higher level of work done and at least it can be passed off as an acceptable website. I do wish to modify the layout of this blog but that can wait for now. As you can see I’ve sort of cleaned up this blog by adding breaks/jumps to each post which contained many pictures. Hopefully this will make it more friendly for those who have a slower connection or a monthly allotted bandwidth limit.

School’s been keeping me busy, and work and other aspects of life have been keeping the other members busy as well, so there hasn’t really been any work done. Tomorrow will *maybe* by a small workday, but all we hope to accomplish is to cure what ails our fairlady-Z: a potential oil clog caused by cupful of irish creme dumped into the crankcase. As always, more later.

EDIT: Right well today we had a small work meeting… really nothing got done. We swapped out the flat tire with our spare Q45 rim/tire but it turns out that with the spacer, the bolts don’t quite stick out far enough… good thing we didn’t have to use these spares during the race… it would have been all bad. We also tried to fixed the oil-clogging problem but no dice. First of all it turns out that one of the cylinders didn’t seem to be firing (which was odd because the engine seemed to run great during the race). Also now it’s really misfiring (can be heard through exhaust) as if one entire bank of cylinders aren’t working…
Oh yeah, the oil clog wasn’t really fixed. We have verified that oil is pumping into the heads and flowing back down fine, but oil pressure does not seem to be building up to factory spec levels, on top of that it’s quite slow. Short of pulling the oil pan it’s hard to say what ails the oil system. It’s making some nasty loud clicking noise, and seeing as these are solid lifters there’s no real way they could have gotten out of adjustment by sitting for months in a garage. I was going to post a video on a z31 forum but I feel that they are going to ask why a cup of irish cream made it’s way into the crank case.
This it looking like it wont be a cheap fix… Oh well back to editing the website!

Quick update

Okay no detailed pictures of the trailer yet, but here’s the ramps that were fabricated for loading on vehicles. The design was fine but the manufacturing process had multiple mistakes, but it should work. Picture after the break.

Towing rig

Okay we did have a meeting. It wasn’t a full meeting since half the team was not there, but we did get some work done. We’ve purchased a trailer which we are starting to re-purpose into a trailer we can use to tow our vehicles. More pictures and details later, as always. May take a long while…

Void of updates

Yes I know updates for Thunderhill 2008 were promised, but life’s been busy. In the mean time, there were a few updates made on Project-Fate.net so check that out instead.