FRANKEN-JAV… NASA American Iron AMC Javelin update

Posted on March 20, 2013 by asifnyc 4 Comments

It’s been a little over 2 months since I brought the Javelin to Evil Genius and now it’s back home. John took a total disaster and turned it into hope. I have a foundation again and can finish the job of getting this thing back to being a working race car. it’s so weird to have this totally intact race car from the doors forward and then have this mostly stock back half (except for the fuel cell mount). ALL the little things that were done at the back half have to be re-done. It’s like going back in a time machine to the way the shell was when I was first building the car. As much as this all sucks it is interesting to have a chance to re-think things and do some things differently. The list of things I need to do is long. I need to start picking away at this list and see how quickly I can get back on track. Here’s what needs to be done (not in order):

1. make a new battery mount. I had been using a small battery located in the trunk but am considering going with a bigger battery and moving it forward of the axle, in the back of the passenger area.
2. need do a bunch of misc. body mods like – pull the side trim, fill the side marker lights, fill the trunk keyhole, grind down a bunch of trim clips
3. repair the damaged rear spoiler and mount to trunk lid
4. repaint the interior, new cage bars, trunk interior and bottom of trunk lid light gray. I’m going to get a quart of paint mixed and borrow Jeff’s spray gun and try to do this in my garage.
5. redo the wiring to the tail lights
6. remount the accusump
7. weld brackets in the trunk opening to hold the trunk pins and drill holes in the trunk lid for them
8. one of the rims has a bent lip. I’m going to call one of those mobile wheel repair places and see if they can fix it.
9. one rear tire has a blister and the other was damaged in the wreck (had a piece of metal jammed into the sidewall, although it still holds air). So, I need to buy 3 new tires (I have one new, shaved tire already) and get them all mounted so I have fresh rubber on all 4 corners. I’ll keep the two front tires as spares.
10. get the exterior painted blue and have the yellow stripes redone on the trunk lid
11. get all the graphics on the back half of the car redone
12. need to get the car scaled and aligned

then there’s the stuff I need/want to do that’s not related to wrecking it.

13. I want to redo the way the front swaybar is mounted. it’s too low right now. need to figure out how to get the arm mounting point on TOP of the control arm (instead of on the bottom like it is now).
14. need to redo the front grill block off. basically I need to make one with no holes. I need to do this to try to keep air from getting under the hood and creating lift.
15. Al at Control Freak sent me 850# springs for the front (thanks Al!). I’m running 550# springs now and the consensus is those are way too soft. So I need to swap front springs. Also hoping Al comes through with a drop spindle setup so I can get the car lower.

there’s probably 50 more things but that’s the big stuff. Of course I need to nut/bolt the car again before I take it back on track. Need to see if there’s a track day I can shoot for to shakedown the rebuilt car and then see if I can make a race this year. Here’s some pics of how it looks back from Evil Genius.

FRANKEN-JAV

1974 Javelin, American Iron, Body and Paint

the long road back… Nasa American Iron AMC Javelin update

Posted on January 31, 2013 by asifnyc 7 Comments

So I had a destroyed race car and the back half of a rusty Javelin. But no idea what I was going to do with the whole mess. I talked to several body shops and emailed them pictures and got a bunch of SCARY guesstimates… I was kind of at a loss for what to do. I finally called John Pagel at Evil Genius Racing in West Sacramento. EGR are the guys who did the original cage, fuel cell mount, seat mount and pedal setup. I called to feel John out on how much it would cost to redo all that work on a new shell. John said send him pictures of the damage and he’d give me an estimate for replacing the rear clip of the damaged shell. After looking at the pictures a long time he gave me a ballpark figure but said I’d need to bring the car to him to get a more accurate quote. So I loaded up the car a couple of weeks ago and brought him the wreck. One of the many things I like about John is that he is a real optimist. He’s always positive. He said “we’ll get it fixed for you” and gave me a firmer quote which was pretty close to his initial ball park (and MUCH more reasonable than what the body shops were telling me). So I pulled the trigger and had them start. The next weekend I brought them the back half of the donor Javelin.

The guys at EGR have been BUSY. Here are pics of what they’ve gotten done. I’m still a long way from driving my car on track again but after seeing the pics John took of their progress I’m believing it will happen! Thanks EGR, you rule! Here’s a link to their facebook page that has more photos of the Javelin and other cool posts about the goings on at the shop: Evil Genius Racing facebook page

1974 Javelin, American Iron, Body and Paint

Field of Dreams…

Posted on December 17, 2012 by asifnyc Leave a comment

After wrecking the Javelin and banging on it to get it to be a roller again I had an idea of how bad the damage was and what I would need to repair it. Both rear frame rails were damaged/bent and of course the entire trunk structure (trunk lid, bumper, taillight panel, taillights, rear lower valence) and the drivers rear quarter were toast. I knew I needed either a complete new shell or at least the back half of one. I started scouring craigslist and a couple of cars came up but they either weren’t close or weren’t cheap. I finally realized I should call Rich at A&L in Sacramento. I didn’t think he had any Javelins but it turns out he did have a ’73 but he had just sold it to someone. He contacted the buyer for me and the guy (Don) had bought the car for parts but didn’t really need the shell. Problem is I wanted the parts I needed quick and he wasn’t going to be able to take the things he wanted off that quickly. After talking to Don we worked out a deal where we’d cut the car in half and I’d get the back half and he’d keep the front.

The first day we scheduled to meet to cut the car it was pouring so we called it off. Then I had the Chumpcar race. Turns out Don cut the car without me and then I finally went to pick it up on Thursday Dec. 13th. The car was in a storage facility and had already been cut in half. But it wouldn’t separate. After a couple of minutes Don realized he had forgot to cut the exhaust. Out came the sawzall and we took care of the exhaust. It was pretty easy to get onto my trailer with the electric winch. Then I dragged the whole mess to Jeff’s place and dropped it off… where I proceeded to get my truck stuck in the mud!!! Jeff had warned me but I got the truck/trailer into his field and got backed into position and dumped the Javelin off. Then when I went to leave I couldn’t get out. I guess the weight of the Javelin on the trailer was helping with traction but once that was gone I was just spinning. Had to wait until Jeff got home and fired up the tractor and pulled me out :)

Now I need to take the race car to the body shop, hear what the have to say and then bring them the back half to use as parts (if they say it’s fixable). Hopefully I’ll get it to a body shop soon but the holidays are coming so it likely won’t be before the end of the year…

Field of Dreams

Field of Dreams

Misc

Chumpcar West Coast Chumpionship Dec. 8/9 2012

Posted on December 10, 2012 by asifnyc Leave a comment

The Javelin may be scrap but I was still able to get one last weekend of racing in for the year! Chumpcar is the bomb and if you want to go racing relatively cheaply this has got to be your best bet (except for maybe go karts?). Anyway, this was the 4th event the Dirt Track Pirates have run. We started in June 2011 at Buttonwillow for a 14hr race and only managed to keep the car running for 7 hrs of it. Then we went to Fontana in October of 2011 and did two 7 hr races. We came in 2nd for both races! This June we went back to Buttonwillow for another 14 hr race. We finished 4th…

Well the 2nd place and 4th place finishes qualified us for this Chumpionship race at Sonoma Raceway (our home track). There were 26 cars competing for the Chumpionship and 56 cars total. The previous weekend had just poured rain non-stop but we really lucked out with dry weather both days. The format was a 12.5 hr race split into two days but it was ONE race so the winner was the one with the most laps over both days. Saturday we ran the NASCAR chute which was cool because I had never been on the chute before. Sunday we ran the carousel. Both days we did NOT run the full esses. Instead we ran the back straight and then the chicane to get back on track at turn 10.

The car was great and everything went pretty smoothly except for a couple of black flags we got for passing under yellow. Joe got one his first session and then I got one too. That sucked. Between those two black flags we probably lost about 3 laps. In the end we came in SECOND in the Chumpionship as well as 2nd overall. We were 5 laps down to the winners running a Geo Metro with a Hyabusa motorcycle engine! It was great to get on the podium but we’re getting tired of always being the bridesmaid. We really need to WIN one of these races at some point.

Here are some pics and I’ll try to get a video together soon.

ChumpCar, Racing

Last dance… NASA American Iron Javelin Update

Posted on November 19, 2012 by asifnyc Leave a comment

Finally got around to checking out the video/data from the last test session. This was the first time I had my Traqmate and GoPro camera running at the same time. After messing around with the Traqstudio software I was able to get the video and data sync’d (not perfect but close). Turns out I went about a half second faster than I had previously at Sonoma. That’s pretty encouraging since it was on the old tires I’ve been running since my very first test day with this car back in Nov. 2011.

So here’s a video of that fast lap; a 1:57.8. Wish I was working on getting the car lowered instead of working on dragging a wrecked car to the body shop to see if it’s fixable or a write off…

1974 Javelin, American Iron, Track Events, Traqmate, video

sifting through the wreckage…

Posted on November 12, 2012 by asifnyc 1 Comment

After a week of mourning it was time to drag my ass into the garage and survey the carnage… I had already borrowed and brought home Jeff’s Porta-Puller. If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically an hydraulic jack with a bunch of attachments used to push/pull body work and frames back into shape. I also went to home depot and bought a 42″ demolition pry bar, two 5 gal. gas jugs and a manual ditch pump. So I had all the tools I thought I’d need.

When the back end was smashed in it pinned the drivers rear wheel so it wouldn’t turn. Also, the passenger front tire went flat when it hit the curb it rode over. The trunk was bent and couldn’t be opened. And I could tell the fuel cell can was smashed in. The goal was to get the car to roll again and to get the fuel cell out. Joe had told me that if I get the fuel cell bladder out of the can and put it in the sun it would pop back into shape.

I started by getting the trunk lid off which ended up not being too hard. Then I got the battery and the taillight buckets out. before going any further I used the ditch pump and got all the gas out of the fuel cell and into the jugs. After that came the bumper. Getting that off was a real pain. I ended up having to grind down the carriage bolt heads on the side that had been smashed in because I couldn’t get to the nuts inside the trunk. Then I got the lower valence off. After that I used the porta-puller to move metal off the rear tire and my sawzalll to cut parts of it away. I also cut a bunch of the fuel cell frame out of the way. After about 10 hours of working (over 2 days) I got the fuel cell out and the bladder out of the bent can. And I got the rear wheel well clearanced to where the tire spins freely. Finally I pulled the flat front tire off and saw that the rim had been bent. but I put air in the tire and it holds air.

So, mission accomplished. I have a destroyed race car. but it rolls… now I’ll need to pull it out of my driveway and winch it onto my trailer and take it to a body shop to see if it can be fixed. If you look at the pictures you’ll see the drivers rear frame rail is gone from the wheel well to the back of the car. it was smashed into oblivion and had to be cut out. The rear frame rail on the drivers side is kinked. I’m going to start the search for another Javelin shell so I have parts for the body shop to work with. More later…

1974 Javelin, American Iron, Body and Paint, Wheels and Tires

When it all goes horribly wrong…

Posted on November 1, 2012 by asifnyc 13 Comments

So this will go down as one of the worst days of my life…

I get home from what felt like a fairly successful test session at Sears. The car’s in one piece, seemed to run ok, probably not any faster than it was but at least I seem to be over my distributor problem and I have a list of improvements I want to make over the winter.

I start unstrapping the car and as I release the last strap (drivers front) my world instantly turns to shit… The car starts rolling backwards (I live on a hill) and FALLS off the trailer and keeps going. I haul ass and grab the car and dig my heels in and try to slow it down but it just keeps gaining momentum. I hang on as it drags me along for a few seconds and finally it’s going fast enough that I know I just have to let go…

The next several seconds are agonizing as I watch the car go rolling downhill, backwards. I know there is no possible way this will end well. If it keeps going straight it will go right through a house at the bottom of the hill. Then at pretty much the last second the front wheels hook and it takes a hard 90 degree turn to the right (still going backwards) and slams into the side of a concrete staircase of a neighbors house…

I don’t know this at first. I can’t see the car. I just hear the sickening sound of the impact. Still running I catch up to the car and the rear is completely destroyed… I’m in shock and sick to my stomach. The next hour is a blur. The neighbors come home. I call a tow truck. We pull the car out (the driver’s rear wheel won’t turn because the rear qtr is flattened against the wheel). The tow guy is awesome though and we get the car on his flatbed and he drives it up the hill and helps me get it back into my garage.

Wow. It’s a miracle that no one was killed/injured. It’s also amazing that the damage to the staircase seems to be cosmetic. If it had hit any other part of the house it would have wound up INSIDE the house…

So that’s the good news. But, I’m CRUSHED :( if you’ve been following the blog over the last year and a half you know how much time and energy has been invested in this car. It’s such a huge setback and I don’t even know if the car is repairable… I’ll update more later but I need some time to decompress…

1974 Javelin, American Iron

Testing, testing, 1 2 3… NASA American Iron Javelin update

Posted on October 29, 2012 by asifnyc Leave a comment

Well I got the MSD distributor in and got the car running and set the timing around 34*. Then I had to figure out whether I was going to try to get a test in before the next race. Kind of last minute I decided to see if I could sneak into the test at Sears Pt. today (Monday). You’re supposed to call 48hrs before the test session to reserve a spot. But it was the weekend and no one was answering. I left a msg explaining that I wanted to get in for the afternoon session (1pm to 4pm) and left my number. Monday morning I got the call that I could come if I wanted. So I loaded up and headed to the track.

First session I was just feeling the car out. Seemed to be running ok. I had forgotten my lap timer so I didn’t know what kind of times I was running. My friend Matt came to help out and after my first session we re-timed the car just to make sure I was still at 34*. Second session I did another 6 laps or so. I was rev’ing the car higher with the new motor and at the end of the session I realized that I was bogging coming out of 6 and coming out of 11. I *thought* I ran the whole track in 3rd and 4th (can’t remember for sure, I’ll have to go back and check some videos). But I realized I needed to downshift to 3rd in turn 6 and down to 2nd in turn 11.

After the 2nd session I decided I wanted to see if my cool shirt setup was working. In a previous post I explained how I bought a little “cycle timer” board so that I could run the pump for say 30 seconds and then stop it for a couple of minutes and then repeat. The one time I used the cool shirt was at Buttonwillow in April and I didn’t have the cycle timer. I noticed that by the end of the race I didn’t feel like the setup was cooling any more. Not sure why this is but after mentioning it to Corey he said his switch allowed you to control the “amount” of cooling. After doing a little research I found out they sell a switch that does the cycling. But it’s over $100 for the switch! So I found this cycle timer kit for $25 and wired it up. Anyway, I got a bag of ice from the cafe at the track and got the cooler in the car.

Went out for the 3rd session and had a couple of clean laps, then I slowed to let a Ferrari by. Then I got back on it. But on the 4th or 5th lap when I got just past turn 2 I saw my oil light come on?! I’ve been plagued with oil pressure issues since day one and it looked like I was back to square one. The light comes on at 20psi at that’s where the gauge was. So I thought, well, it’s low but not zero and it was just for a moment, let’s see what happens. I did another lap and there was no problem until I crested turn 2 again and then the light went on again. And this time the gauge read almost zero. So I slowed up till the pressure recovered and cruised around and got off track.

At that point there was only about 20 minutes left so I packed up and headed home. I was running my traqmate/gopro camera setup for the first time (I ran the traqmate at Buttonwillow but it wasn’t connected to the gopro). I’ll have to load up the data and see what lap times I did…

1974 Javelin, American Iron, Track Events

Distributors 101… NASA AIX AMC Javelin update

Posted on October 24, 2012 by asifnyc 2 Comments

Ok, after the epic fail at Buttonwillow it was time to dig into the Javelin and figure out wtf was going on with the timing. I had the car dyno tuned before the race to make sure the engine was running good. And it did run good on the dyno. So what happened? Well, the guys tuning it actually had mentioned that they thought the advance was sticking or something (but they didn’t say “hey, your distributor is junk, change it). They pulled the cap, changed springs and I guess got it to behave well enough that it did a few pulls without sticking… Once I got on track and started beating on it though it just got worse and worse.

The only positive in all this is I’m learning a lot more about distributors. I pulled the distributor (it’s a Pertronix Flame Thrower) and immediately saw that the gear was chewed up :( When the motor was first disassembled after I blew it up, Rob discovered that the cam gear was really knife edged. but, he said the distributor gear looked ok… unfortunately I didn’t think to look too closely at the dist. gear before I put the distributor back in the car. So I can’t tell if all this wear is just from the little bit of running I did at Buttonwillow or if it was already worn some. Either way the gear is toast now.

I ordered an MSD distributor (because after talking to people about my problem everyone said “run an MSD”). Jeff also said I should just remove the mechanical advance and lock out the timing. So, my first distributor lesson was removing the vacuum advance, removing the mechanical advance springs and weights and removing the gear so I could rotate the shaft to lock the timing. I also installed a bronze gear on the MSD.

After all this monkeying around with the MSD I felt like I knew a lot more about what I was looking at. So I went back to the Pertronix and took a closer look at the mechanical advance mechanism. I immediately saw the problems. It was floppy and one edge of the center part that the weights rest against was worn. I could see how the weights were slipping OVER the center plate… so that explains why the timing was all over the map. I also realized that there were washers/shims missing between the distributor housing and the gear on the pertronix. There’s a good 1/8″ of up/down movement. The MSD doesn’t have this up/down play. After I got the motor rebuilt the Pertronix distributor was not installed, I put it in. When installing it I noticed there WAS a VERY thin shim on the shaft between the housing and the gear. It was so thin it actually tore while I was installing the dist. so I just pulled it out. I’m pretty sure the dist. is not supposed to have as much up/down play as the Pertronix did but I’m a little confused because even if the shim had not been damaged it wouldn’t have gotten rid of most of the play… my theory at this point is that the up/down play the Pertronix had caused the gear wear AND the advance issues. Like I said, just a theory. I did some research on distributor gear wear and found a lot of posts from AMC/Jeep people experiencing a similar issue. They talk about “cam walk” and there are a couple of options for preventing this. One is a plate that bolts to the engine block behind the timing gear and the other is a “cam button” that rides on the end of the cam gear bolt head and fills the space between the bolt head and the timing cover. None of this is supposed to be necessary if you are running a flat tappet cam (which I am).

So that’s the latest. The MSD is going in with a locked out advance and I’ll try to set the timing around 34*. Assuming I can get the car running well again I will try to get to a Sears Point test day and depending on how that goes decide whether it’s worth trying to run the last race of the year Nov. 10/11.

1974 Javelin, American Iron, Drive Train, Electrical

Race report Buttonwillow – NASA AIX AMC Javelin update

Posted on October 18, 2012 by asifnyc Leave a comment

Well, that was a total bust… The title of my last post was “back in game” but it looks like I spoke to soon. I spent the week before the race nut and bolting the car and cleaning it. Doing whatever I could to make sure the car was ready to go. Friday I got up and hooked up my new (used) tilt trailer and got ready to load the car. I bought this trailer from Tim Pinelli who was racing the AIX Outlaw series but has decided to move on. Loading on my previous trailer was a bit of a project. I had to drive the car up to the trailer, pull the ramps out and get them set up, crawl underneath it and hook a strap up to the front sway bar and then use the winch to pull it up. It worked but I was looking to make my life easier. The tilt trailer lived up to my hopes. I simply pulled the two pins to let the ramp tilt, went and got in the car and just drove it up. The one issue I had was deciding how/where to strap it from in front with the new set up. With the old trailer I went THROUGH the wheels. Mostly this was because the trailer was so short that there was not enough room to use a ratchet strap effectively. With the new trailer I was able to hook around the lower control arm. Everything looked good so I hit the road.

Stopped at the first rest stop on I5 about an hour into my trip. After hitting the rest room I did a walk around the trailer and checked all the straps. That’s when I noticed it… I had stupidly run the straps UNDER my front swaybar arms. These arms are steal and have a sharp edge. On the drivers side I noticed the strap getting all frayed and fuzzy where it passed under the swaybar arm. crap! I loosened up the strap and about 50% of the width of it was completely sawed through?! The other side wasn’t too bad. Luckily I had some other straps but they were much lighter duty straps. So I changed the straps so they went OVER the swaybar arms and then added the additional light duty straps I had. I then drove to the other side of the highway to the truck stop and tried to see if they sold straps like the ones I had cut… they didn’t. So I just had to get back on the road and keep my fingers crossed.

Got to Buttonwillow without any more drama and started setting up “camp”. Another reason I bought the tilt trailer is that it has a flat surface. The other trailer was open in the center. I bought a tent and set it up on the trailer. This meant I didn’t have to unload everything from the back of my truck so I could sleep in it. Setting up the tent went pretty well although the wind picked up just as I was trying to set up which blew the tent around until I got some bungee cords and lashed it to the trailer. The first night I didn’t use the “rain fly”. If you don’t camp (I’ve never used a tent before this weekend) a rain fly is a cover that keeps moisture/condensation from getting in your tent. Luckily Adam Ginsberg loaned me a monster comforter which kept me warm enough but without the rainfly the TOP of the comforter was damp in the morning… put the rain fly on for Saturday night and it was much better. No moisture!

Anyway, you probably don’t give a crap about the tent and want to hear about the racing. Well, Saturday morning I head out for the practice session. I was late to grid and when I did get out there were two local yellows for the whole session. So I never got a green flag lap…

For qualifying I went to start the car and had some trouble. It didn’t want to start. When I finally got it started I had to rev it to keep it running; it didn’t want to idle. So I get on track and the first lap I see the oil light come on. WTF!? So I immediately pulled off. No way I was going to take a chance blowing up this freshly rebuilt motor! Looking back I should have tried to look into the not wanting to start/idle issue. Instead I obsessed about whether to add another quart of oil or not before the race. Before I blew the motor I didn’t have an oil dipstick. Lame, I know. Well, when the motor was rebuilt I had a dipstick added. The dipstick said the pan was full so I shouldn’t have needed more oil (and I have a 3qt accusump).

For the race I had trouble getting the car running again. But I did get it fired and I got out on track. Within a few laps the car started running bad. It was missing and popping and back firing. I pulled the car off and parked it. Ughh… what now… After the race I got Mike Plum and Adam to help me. Everyone said the symptoms sounded like timing. So they rotated the distributor a bit and the car fired right up and idled nice. Huh, so the timing was off? Well they got a timing light and rev’d it up and set the total to 34* or so. Then we shut it down. Problem solved right? nope, I immediately tried to start it again and it wouldn’t. same shit. at that point I figured I must have damaged the distributor when I blew the motor and we didn’t know it.

Besides the timing issue the car was also handling terrible. It was understeering really bad. Well, after getting some dinner at the Agent 47 trailer (thanks for the awesome grub Corey!) I walked back to the car and noticed the driver’s front tire was FLAT… that explains the understeering. I did have one unmounted, shaved tire ready to go but the with distributor problem there was no point in trying to get it mounted…

So that was it… I hung out Saturday night, got up Sunday morning and headed home… here are some pics and video.

1974 Javelin, American Iron, Racing