Karting = Life Lessons (part 2)

Sunday, or race day as it's more properly known started early. I don't even get up that early on weekdays, nevermind Sundays. Schedule was:

Registration by 8:30am, "pit" setup soon thereafter.

Practise session at 8:40am

Driver's meeting at 9:30am

Race start 12:50

Race end 2:20

First hiccup was the cancellation of practise session. This negates any possible setup and the chance for Jim to get familiarised with the kart. The race start time also got changed to around 3:30. Now begins the long wait. There was a lot of this going on:

That is, fiddling. A lot of fiddling, taking the time to change the oil, doing maintenance, sprocket setup, fixing the million things that always break on the kart. I think the list of things we did went something like this:

• Pull engine
• Remove clutch
• Clean and deglaze (score) clutch
• Replace clutch
• Change drive sprocket
• Change axle sprocket
• Modify chain length
• Fuel pump rebuild
• Replace fuel hoses
• Change oil
• Replace engine
• Remove carburettor three times to repair throttle linkage
• Re-adjust throttle cable and pedal stop
• Clean kart
• Nut and bolt tightness check

Of course, come race time we completely forgot the basics, like check tyre pressure and check our combined weight average! We got to watch some of the other classes race, including Juniors, who are completely nuts and are as aggressive as you would be playing Mario Kart.

Our driver order was Eric then Jim then Myself, with each of us doing 30 minute stints. This seemed like a lot to me, especially since I found 12 minutes to be long during practise. This did however optimise our driver change time, so I didn't argue too much as decided that I should suck it up!

3:40 race starts! Everything seems to be working, although Eric was visibly not happy about his setup.

Eric (#22) dicing it up!

Just as we are about to signal him for the driver change, he misses a turn and end up in the field adjacent to turn 1. Turns out that the left front kingpin bolt decided to shear, leaving him with no steering. (Conspiracy theorists suggest that the bolt may have actually broken during his excursion, but no proof of this is known to exist...). We are out of the running, Jim not even having had his chance!

The race was red flagged moments after our kart failed due to a pretty severe crash near the start line. One of the flagsmen got hit in a rather nasty set of circumstances and the race was cancelled. I am told he will be fine, but the experience was not pleasant for those involved and I'm sure the clubs and organisations involved will have many a debate on how to address the situation.

As far as I'm concerned, the day's events are part of the game, accident included! This certainly puts a lot things into perspective for our Lemons endeavour. It's good to know that our team can handle our fair share of mechanical failure, which is going to be likely! It's also good to know that we can work together, not only in the "shop" but also at the track. Our crisis management is decent and every member can keep a positive attitude when things go awry, which they inevitably always will!

I'll end this post with a few gratuitous shots of Greg's team doing awesome:

Lee(#41) passing on the outside!

Lee (#41) in a nice sandwich

Karting = Life Lessons (part 1)

As some of you may recall, Eric and Greg are the more competitive members of the Metroneige team, as far as motorsports are concerned. Both are active members of the National Capital Karting Club, competing in the Senior Honda class. As such, they have both decided that Jim and Myself suck at driving and need to learn before we get ourselves to an actual Lemons event.

Needless to say we had a few rental days during the year, in what is essentially a fully bumpered version of a box stock Honda kart with crappy tires. I've found these very instructive, have learned a lot and had tons of fun!

Rentals at the Quyon track

Then came the request from Eric: "Hey, why don't we form a team for the club's Enduro race". Simple format, 90 minute race, multiple drivers, one kart. What could go wrong?

In true team spirit, Greg decided to form his own team, because he actually had a chance at a decent showing. He promptly joined another competent driver (you know who you are!), made some good setup decisions and armed his team with sticky tyres of questionable lifespan... They "ended" up in 6th out of 25. More on the finish later.

Greg and his superstar co-driver

Here's the rub, Jim and Myself have never actually driven a proper kart before, nor have we even seen the track we're supposed to race on. Frankly, although Jim did decent on the rental karts, we didn't stand a chance! With an anticipated 25+ karts on a small track at the same time, we really had our work cut out. Compounding the problem was trying to get some practise before the Sunday race...

I ended up getting a few sessions on the Friday prior to the race, using Eric's kart. I say a few because the track opened late, we had several mechanical issues to resolve and generally my not having a clue. I think I faired alright, considering it was my first time, there was a giant puddle blocking half the track in turn 5 which scared the crap out of me and generally adjusting to the speed.

Jim on the other hand couldn't make it to the Friday practise, so went to the Saturday practise. Of course I forgot to mention that I wasn't there, nor was Eric. So he got to try out other karts, which, in hindsight, was MUCH better than nothing.

Tubing!

Quick update,

Our local metal supplier had a customer appreciation sale, 20% off. It's a good time to pick up our rollcage tubing then. It's 1.75"x0.095", all 140 feet of it.

Here is Jim using his ninja moves to unload the truck.

Here again is Jim using his ninja moves to move the tubes up in the attic for storage.

Last interesting little note, the tubing we bought appears to be made in India. I find it hard to believe that the economics for steel are such that the cheapest source is halfway around the world!

Back on all Fours!!!

I will let pictures do most of the talking on this one, mostly because I cannot explain this elegantly. Not that there is anything remotely elegant about this.

Here is it in all of it's glory, for you skeptics out there, notice the rear bumper and the blue colour in that area.

The back wheels are roughly where they ought to be. We extended the wheelbase by about an inch, the reason being that it made our trimming job much easier. Besides, I don't think it will hurt the handling...too much.

Of course there is still the issue of four wheel steering that we don't need for the race. It does make it very easy to manoeuvre the Metroneige around the yard, so we may keep that feature for a while. We're not quite sure how to remedy to the problem just yet, but I have a few ideas.

For those of you interested in how it's actually holding up, There's a floor extension and side panels welded in. These panels were cut out using paper card templates, trimmed to fit and then screwed into place using good old self tapping sheet metal screws. Once every piece was in position, they were welded using plug welds (a.k.a. rosette welds).

Not everything is fully welded in yet, the floor piece needs more welding and some patches. We're gonna try to get access to a lift to make this easier.

There is still lots of work to be done to the shell to get it ready for the engine transplant, including:

• Finish rust repair
• Welding in floor panel completely
• Gussetting/reinforcements
• Paint, since winter is gonna get here much faster than we think!

Measurements, Levelling and Patience!

A lot of progress has been made since our last update, I will try to go over it chronologically.

At the end of our last update, I spoke briefly about the difficulties of splicing together two large hunks of metal in a "measured" fashion. Simply moving stuff around is labour intensive due to the mass and shapes. Compounding the problem is our fantastic garage floor:

At this point, we had to give the entire assembly a good once over to make sure all the critical areas were properly ground to bare metal, since access may become more difficult later.

Now the measurement fun begins: The red Geo shell needed to be levelled. We chose two reference lines, one being the topmost of the front shock towers and the second being what's left of the lip where the rear seats used to be. We used a lot of spirit levels and a digital protractor to get everything squared within 0.1 degree (apparently...). Having a lot of hands on deck was very useful for this, as it is a trial and error process.

• Move jack
• Lift car
• Shim jackstands
• Drop car onto jackstands
• Measure alignment
• Repeat

And given about half a day, you end up with this:

Which looks completely unimpressive to the untrained eye. To us however, this was a triumphant moment.

This neatly brings us to finding and marking the centerline of the car. Remember those ancient Egyptian tricks I spoke of last update? Well they came in handy as Eric demonstrates the modern version of the old plumb bob using the nylon string+big socket combo.

Something similar was done to mark the centerline of the Firefly's subframe. Then we lined up the two halves at their respective centers and tacked it in at the shifter and we pinned the back in place using sheet metal screws.

Needless to say that ALL alignments were checked and rechecked at every step in the process. I'm not quite sure how straight the car will actually be in the end, but I think it will be good enough for it's intended purpose. Only a decent alignment will tell. Nobody said this was a good idea...

Work Weekend!! Day 3 (Creationism)

Day 3

Sunday picks up where Saturday left off, with more noisy cutting and grinding. I would like to take the time to really thank Eric's neighbours for their tolerance and patience!

Some things are best removed with the Sawzall (whose proper name is reciprocating saw, before the Milwaukee Tool Company complains). Yesterday, you saw the car up way high on stands and blocks, we figured the easiest way to go about trial fitting is to lower the Geo onto the new rear end.

Here you can see it's getting close, but there is STILL more trimming needed. Another clearance issue becomes apparent, the shifter location. Let me re-iterate on this a bit, we don't count on being able to use the shifter while running, but it's still needed for gear ratio setup, and the all important reverse gear! I can't speak for the others, but I know I will most definitely need that on the track.

Wheel placement is also at play here: it needs to go where the rear wheels used to be! We are trying to increase the wheelbase slightly, since it probably can't hurt!

After three days worth of work, IT FITS!!! Everything clears nice and tight. I have to thank the original Suzuki design team for helping us, it seems that the angle the body tapers (viewed from top) is the same front to back, which made life much much easier. Also note how we were able to preserve the small beam where the hatch latch goes, and that the bumper is where it should be.

From the inside, you can just about see where the shifter ends up. It's not in the best spot in relation to the seat but you can operate it. You can also see the rough cutout for the snowmobile engine. It will probably go much lower, but for now this is all we could cut without going through the (rear) steering rack mounts.

I think it's maybe time to start talking about structural integrity for this lot, so forgive my ramblings as I try to put this into words. What is key here, is tying the firewall from the Firefly (highlighted in baby blue, ha ha) to the rest of the Geo (in red). First will be joining everything at the floor. This involves tying the floor mounts from the blue bit, into the box section from the red bit. We plan on doing this with a clever box beam of some sort, using some scavenged door crash bars from the Firefly.

Next will be tying up the sides. We want to blue bit on the right to mate nicely to the B-pillar from the red car, and back down to the floor. This I think involves some kind of sheet gusset, going from the side of the blue firewall, to the red B-pillar (at the door), then back down to the floor. The end result of this should like (VERY APPROXIMATELY) like an F1 tub. Yes ladies and gents, I am making an F1 reference on a Lemons project.

Of course, we'll have to accomplish this while measuring and aligning both axles so we end up with a straightish car, while working outside on a soft and uneven dirt and mud surface using basic hand tools and measuring equipment no more sophisticated than the ancient Egyptians had... Of course they did make some pretty cool monuments

Work Weekend!! Day 2

Day 2

Saturday was spent cutting, a lot! We used a few different methods for this, first being the sawzall. Everybody goes on about the sawzall (with the appropriate blade of course) being the weapon of choice for cutting through a car. We also tried the more traditional grinder with cutting wheel, which seemed to wear through very quickly, and with a diamond tipped wheel. The same kind typically reserved for cutting tiles or masonry. This did a fantastic job when cutting through a single layer of sheet, and was easier than the sawzall when it comes to accuracy.

Step one was to make some cardboard templates, to give us a rough idea of what needs to go and what needs to stay. We are trying to keep the outside shell of the car intact, to preserve the appearance of a "normal" Geo. Of course, the plan is to go by trial and error, so we cut up enough so that we think we can get the Firefly part into the Geo, try it, fail, then cut some more... In order to ensure a good fit, we had to do this a lot.

Yours truly, now standing in what used to be the rear subframe. Interesting to note that Geos don't actually have subframes that you can unbolt as such. Everything is welded in, which is great for lightness, but bad for rust. In this case, all of the structurally important boxes were corroding from the inside.

After a few hours of trimming off the back in chunks, you end up with a fair sized hole, which is getting pretty close. The goal here was to be able to wheel the Firefly subframe under the Geo, to physically match things up. You can also see that we left some of the box section (I guess you could call it some kind of beam) that extends aft. The intent here is to use it to tie things together, but we have zero idea on how long this part needs to be.

Finally, after a day's work it sort of fits. In reality, the Geo is jacked up WAY high, as high as the 5-ton jackstands will allow: This makes the roof a few inches taller than a Suzuki SX-4. The major clearance issues to be solved tomorrow are:

• The length of those boxed sections I mentioned earlier
• The bottom corners of the fenders, by this I mean where the bumper used to be.
• The inner fenders need more trimming.

And on to day 3!!!