First of all when I arrived to work on the car my dad was already hard at work getting the motor in the car ready to pull off the head. This was exciting as we have yet to look any deeper in these motors then under the valve cover or the timing chain cover. We were not sure exactly which versions of the 1500 motor we had, all we knew was they were North American smog motors because we ripped off the smog equipment and plugged the air holes in the heads ourselves. When trying to finally lift the head off is when we hit our first snag. One of the studs was heavily rusted to the head and it took some PB Blaster, large flat head screw drivers, a crowbar, a hammer, and some serious torquing with vise-grips to break it lose.
With the head off we saw rather clean piston heads and smooth cylinder walls, this motor was in really good shape, but sorry I forgot to take a picture. It seems we really scored with the two complete rat infested rusty Spitfires we purchased for $500 off a guy as we got this motor out of one of those cars. He told us he was once building them with his twin sons so both were being built to run, but with how life works they ended up almost finished but were left to rot away for years in the yard. He was very pleased to sell them to us knowing they would be used to race. The other one of these cars we have yet to look at besides starting the motor and with what we have got off the first one so far; good motor, good transmission, good diff, spare axles, etc... I am betting the drive train will also be in pretty good shape but we wont know until we start it up again and pull it apart next weekend.
We then rolled the motor out of the shed that came in our Spitfire originally and pulled the head off it as well. This motor got us through a full 14 hour race but had very low power.
As we expected it was not in that great of shape, we could feel a ridge inside the cylinder walls and the pistons heads were not as clean. We then got to the reason why we were so interested in pulling the heads, were these the lower 7.5:1 compression motors or the higher 9:1 compression motors. From our first guess we thought the original motor was a 7:5:1 and the motor we currently had in the car was a 9:1 because it felt much stronger. Both motors obviously had the dished pistons and, with a chem lab looking device my dad borrowed from Spank, he measured the volume of the combustion chambers with mineral oil and determined they were stock for the 7:5:1 compression motors. So we have been running the slowest 1500 motors made for the Spitfires. We just saw a boost in power do to a lucky find motor, a used webber carb, and repaired busted headers we bolted on all which cost next to nothing. Very cool and now we know what we are working with.
We then pulled the front springs off the car to cut them because the front end sits a little higher then the rear. This is do to the spacer we put under the rear transverse leaf spring to give us more camber in the rear last year before the Arse Freeze Apalooza @ Buttonwillow. We only need a slight drop in the front end to balance the car and spending money on new springs or fancy adjustable shocks just would not be very cost effective. So out came the cutting tool for some high tech custom ride height adjustment.
About one coil was cut off on each spring and back on they went still smoking from being cut. We checked using the very sophisticated methods of eyeballing from a distance and how many fingers can be fit under the front and the back end. It seemed to be almost perfect with very little effort and only the cost of wear on a cutting wheel.
Next came the brakes and I expected we would be changing the front pads, the rear shoes, rear drums, and the bleeder valves. The front bleeder valves were jacked up really bad and one was stuck some how after bleeding them at the last race.
So we replaced all four bleeder valves at a costly $15. Now I do not have a picture of the pads and shoes but after three full endurance races, they looked almost new. The Hawks black brake pads are awesome, they give us plenty of stopping power and are showing great wear life. They will last us at least two more full races at this rate, and most likely more. Things are shaping up to be a lot less costly then I thought, as we were able to put the new pads, shoes, and drums back in the shed and wont be needing them yet.
A good solid day, hopefully the remaining work we do before Infineon goes as well.
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