An update!

What's happened since it looked like I opened the blog and then abandoned it? Well, many things. Including me rethinking the budget a little, and my friendly engineer looking at the back of the car again. Also, it turns out that auto boxes are a pain in the backside.

Let's start with the bad news. We're going to have to open up the gearbox to check that the sprag clutch is intact. It's the right thing to do, and a replacement is cheap, and has been ordered already. The garage are going to remove the gearbox, open it up and have a peer at the sprag clutch. If it looks fine then they're going to reassemble it and put the box back on the car. If it doesn't look fine, then they're going to put it all in a big box and wait. When the new part arrives it'll be fitted, reassembled and put back. Small question of who will do that, but we'll figure that out.

And now the good news.

Firstly, I can not say thank you enough to my friendly engineer. He's been chasing many avenues and forming and discarding plans at least a dozen times since this project was started. I'm well aware that basically I've bought the car and he's making it work.

What does this mean for the car? He's figured out how to put the original suspension back. That's a saving. He's found out what parts are needed for the propshaft and got those ordered, so reconditioning will happen soon. While he was looking at the suspension he also discovered that the axle was slightly off centre, so that's going to get lined up when the suspension is put back.

The dependancies there are actually very simple. The axle depends ont he suspension. Aside from that, there are no dependancies.

At the end of this round I'll have a known-good gearbox, a good driveshaft, the axle correctly centred, and the suspension working, which means the car is drivable again!

Once it's drivable, we'll look at what else might happen. Will it get caltracs and split springs? Will it get more power? What's required for those? We'll find out ... next time!

Stuff we know needs fixing

As I mentioned in passing in the intro post, there's a few things we knew needed fixing before I bought the car.

• The tyres rubbed if the back was low.
• It had been mini-tubbed, and as a result, the rear suspension had been .. er.. edited.
• It has stock heads on it, and so didn't make a lot of power. At all.

Once I got it home, it we also knew that we needed to check out whether the engine ran, whether the gearbox was intact, whether the diff is intact, and what happened to the driveshaft, and whether we can fix that or get a new one.

I got it shipped off to BTEC Racing, and my friendly engineer went to have a look, to find out if we needed to add a gearbox to that list. It appears (at this stage) that the gearbox is not making horrible crunchy sounds, when not under load. This puts new heads back into budget, which also means that I'll need a new carburettor. It appears that the exhaust system is probably not adequate for the expected power, and would be far too loud at that level, so that's on the shopping list, too.

On the driveway

IMG_1475, a photo by rikrose on Flickr.

The beginning!

Once upon a time, I went to the drag racing with some friends. They have a 1974 Dodge Challenger, in purple, and run it in the Pro/ET class. The drag racing is fun, and I've always liked the look for the early 70s cars. As I learned about the cars I was fairly certain that one day I would probably end up with one.

And then one came up for sale.

Predictably I bought it. Maybe it wasn't my best financial decision - we already knew it needed some work, but it was in budget, and it being a classic car I decided I probably wasn't going to lose out a huge amount, financially.

Unfortunately, the vibration in the driveshaft that my friendly engineer noticed on the test drive that I hadnt' spotted was, in fact, a little worse than expected. The car was 3 hours away from home, and at about 2 horus and 45 minutes into the journey home I was thinking: "Is it just my imagination, or is that vibration getting worse? I've been in the car a long time, and if it's gradually getting worse that's probably not good. I'm not far from home so I'll let people know in the morning. It could be my imagination - it is getting fairly late, but I'm sure it's getting worse". And that's when the driveshaft became disconnected from the diff. The engine hit 5000 rpm and stalled. Everything was silent, except for the sound of metal dragging on the road. At this point, I didn't know what what wrong, and so I selected neutral, and tested the brakes a little - they still worked. I decided to get off the road at the roundabout just ahead, and there I waited for the recovery people...

"Hello? I'd like to have my car recovered to home, please."
"What's the problem with it?"
"The driveshaft has failed, and the car can not move under its own power."
"How certain are you of that?"
"Well, I've just picked the driveshaft up off the road and put it in the boot, so it's fairly safe to assume that it's not going anywhere under its own power unless you show up with a drivesahft for a 1972 Dodge Challenger"
"We'll send a recovery truck out".

What an awesome first day...