It's been a while since my last update, so here goes. I did a bunch of driving around, cars and coffee, etc and now have about 3600 miles on the car. Overall it was working fine even in the crazy Texas heat this year. in Sept I decided to do a couple projects:
1) Swapped out to a Davies Craig electric water pump. This was partially because my engine revs to 8200 RPM which is not great for a belt-driven water pump. Also, it saves some space / cleaner belt routing. Kind of one of those "It's not broke, so I'll fix it anyway" projects.
It wasn't too bad of a project, but I really wish I had just done it when I built the car as accessing the pump while the engine was in the car is a major pain. I just posted a video of the process (link below).
2) I rebuilt my dry sump oil pump. The pump had been working fine (good oil pressure, etc), but I wanted to be safe since, even though it has relatively low miles, the pump is 8 years old and has a lot of dyno / track time as well. This was another of those "It's working fine, so let me take it apart" projects. I'm very glad I did, though because I found that it had major damage to the idler shaft, pressure gears, pressure regulator/end-cap, and pressure section housing. At some point, the idler shaft (which is fixed -- the gears rotate around it) broke its locking pin and spun, causing the damage. Shockingly it still worked fine even with that damage. $500 in parts later, I rebuilt it and it's better than new now. Video for this project will be up soon.
3) As a bonus project, right after I completed the above projects and had a great day of driving around / cars and coffee, I heard a tapping sound which soon turned into a metallic scraping sound (from the engine). I limped home and started a multi-week effort of tracking down what was wrong. I learned a hard lesson about the different types of solid roller lifters, and what NOT to run on a car that sees a good chunk of street driving. The lifters I had were designed for race motors that are always revving high so get a lot of splash oiling on the roller tip so don't have pressurized oil going to the needle bearings (I didn't realize that when I bought them). They also restrict the oil going to the pushrod / rockers / springs to avoid oil pooling in the valvetrain with extended high-rpm use. Those two things eventually led to one of the rollers failing (a few others were starting to go as well), AND one of the inner coils of a valvespring broke (presumably due to lack of oiling). Fortunately, my T&D shaft rockers were all still perfect. So I spent a couple weeks pulling the motor, heads, lifters, cam, etc. New lifters (the right ones this time), new cam (because the lobe where the lifter failed was scarred, new springs, and a bunch of other stuff. Fortunately, after popping the main caps off to inspect for damage, they were all perfect so no metal got anywhere it shouldn't. Of course, projects 1 and 2 would have been much easier with the motor out so that was just annoying.
I'm putting a video together for this one as well and will post in the next few days.
So the car is finally back on the road again and all appears to be working well. I just signed up for a track day at COTA on December 15 (which sounds so strange for someone who grew up in Chicago). That will be my first time on that track and 2nd track day in the SLC so I'll be taking it easy.
Here's the vid for the electric water pump install:
cbsaustin.com
