Metroneige - Half the strokes, twice the car: April 2010

No exciting pictures worth posting yet, there aren't too many VISIBLE changes to the untrained eye.

Work continued last weekend on stripping the Geo to a bare shell, we managed to remove the engine, fuel tank, hoses, piping, wiring, etc. etc. Who knew there could be so much crap in such a small car? What was left once the dust settled are shoddily repaired (by previous owner) brake lines, steering components and suspension. Speaking of brake lines, the plan now is to route the rear lines inside the car, since we're gonna have to re-engineer the brakes anyways.

I apologise if this part is unclear, I will get pictures later:
One issue of particular note was how to remove the drive components from the front uprights (also known as knuckles). Typically, you have one half of a CV joint sandwiching the bearings together, where the assembly is held in my one big nut. You can see that nut if you pop the hupcaps on your FWD car and locate in smack in the middle of the wheel.

Our solution is to take apart the CV joint and leave the outboard portion of it in the upright, and tighten the nut back down.

The team is still having internal debates on how to proceed about the subframe transplant from the Firefly to the Geo, although this is slowly getting resolved. This is a somewhat iterative process and makes for lively debates. We have measured and theorised much about possible ways to go about this, but I dare say we have tentatively settled on a possible method to maybe go about doing this... Stay tuned on this issue for more, since it's a vary hand-wavey argument, I will simply show you pictures of how this gets done, rather than confuse everyone to death with words.

In parallel to this, we have a plan of attack to deal with rust: Re-use as much sheet metal from the parts car to repair the rotten sections on the Geo. Bonus sheet metal to be found in the trunk where we're going to cut to put the engine in!

Last weekend was quite a busy one in terms of the Metroneige. Monday the Metro was stripped clean and I must say that I'm sad that I missed out on it. Tomorrow we're going to be giving the Firefly the same treatment so stay tuned :).

Now, the most important thing that happened last weekend actually happened on Friday. Good Friday was good to us in the sense that we decided that it was about time to try to get the heart of the Metroneige up and running.

The two days prior to this were spent in preparation of the coming event. In simpler terms, I spent the 2 evenings in my driveway with my rotary tool and the exhaust manifolds. After all, what kind of gear heads would we be if we didn't port and polish out the stock welding blobs from the inside of the manifolds. Basically, a few stone grinding bits and several hours later, I managed to remove as much as a full 10mm of weld-blob-obstruction from some of the inside seams. Unfortunately I forgot to take before and after pictures of them, but trust me, they look really smooth now.

So Friday morning comes around and we're all set to meet up at Burger's place and assemble this beast. Thankfully today I didn't forget the manifolds at my place and have to turn around and get them. For once, I was the first to arrive and I had to wait for everyone else to show. Shortly thereafter everyone else arrived and we got going.

We started out by looking at our tangle of fuel pumps, brittle cracked fuel lines, and other sad looking equipment and we decided to forget about it all for the time being. I brought some spare karting fuel line with me "just in case" and we set to work getting each of the 4 carbs plumbed. While this was going on, we mounted the exhaust manifolds. Once the carb plumbing was complete, we installed the air boxes and then set to work sorting out the mess that we call the wiring harness.

Now, having never seen this thing fully assembled, and having a terrible wiring diagram to work from, we had to guess what was what by where it was supposed to fit into the different dash and shroud pieces. We also had to guess how to connect our 2nd ignition coil since it's the wrong model and is actually backwards to what is supposed to be on the engine. Once we got all that stuff figured out, we set to work trying to figure out how to turn the engine on and off.

This is where the funny part comes in...

So there's this key thing that looks very similar to the key slot on your car's ignition. This whole contraption sits in the dash and appears to have 3 settings (accoring to the label around where it sits). The settings are "On", "Lights", and "Off". Sounds pretty standard right? Well we don't have a key and so the whole thing is locked. We do the manly thing and rip it apart to figure out how it works. Inside is this backing plate full of copper contacts and a piece that turns that also has copper prongs on it (to meet the contacts). We eye the wear lines and take a guess at what "Off" is. I pull a plug out and hold it against the cylinder so we can check the spark.