Keep your eyes on the road your hands upon the wheel...

No oil leakage. No water leakage and with a well working engine management system, we felt that it was time to take The Beast for a spin today.  

Sorry for the film quality, we just want to share our fantastic experiance.

Free you mind and your Ride will follow...normally.

As we're now in the jump-in-and-drive-mode, with our Landspeed racer, I came to think about this amazing moment, when you after weeks, months, years, sometimes decades move your hand towards the starting key and seconds later you hear how the solenoid complete its mission and the engine magically fires up. 

Seconds after first start some weeks ago

With engine running on steady rpm, the heart pounding like hammer, the nerves tensed like piano strings and all senses fully alert you and your ride roll out from the garage/workshop/basement.

Every vibration is felt, every misfire is registered and the muscle control is close to perfect. The tip of the right foot keeps the engine at a nice rpm over idle while the same heel keeps vehicle from flying out on the street before you're in the mood for that.

Simultaneously, the left foot is getting to know the clutch force while the right hand desperately is working with the gear shifter. Who's driving? Well, that task outsourced to the left hand...

At this point in time, with the eyes like billiard balls fixed on oil pressure and coolant temperature, the nose is not used for breathing anymore its only there to register fumes from oil, gasoline (or diesel).

First 10 second is painful, the following 20 can not be described as relaxing either, but then, after approximately half a minute, with the engine still running, happiness in its purest form arrives. 

Peace of mind... while the road or race track awaits you.

Oil fountain found

Ok. The sun is shining and our race car runs and everything works fine, well nearly everything....there is this oil leakage, which is like a stone in the shoe, you can walk, but it hurts a little. For a while we ignored the problem but eventually we started to analyze where the leakage came from.

By using fancy digital optic equipment, we found a small oil fountain from the connection between oil sump and bed plate in the area close to the oil pump.

But how difficult can that be? Just remove the oil sump and correct the error! Now this operation wasn't  as simple as one could imagen, since the oil sump is part of the rear face of block, which means that the transmission had to be removed. And the propeller shaft, but first of all the transmission tunnel had to be taken out...etc. etc.

Ragnar, Anders and the precious one-zillion-bolt-screws Volvo 960 oil sump.

 Here's the oil sump. But what was really the problem?

This was the problem. Around the hole to the left, there should be an o-ring (assembled in the bedplate). And there was none. Who was to blame? Who assembled the engine? Never mind....it's ok now. I've heard that it's only human to make errors.

Fast and Furious Transform



The headline should not to be mixed with Fast Fourier Transform, instead it represent what happened when we quickly assembled all the sheet metal on our racer and transformed from a Mad Max alike contraption...

...to a wild looking Amazon. Yes, it runs and drives.

No, we're not ready. Yet.

 

Fountain of oil.

We had a bad oil leak.  We thought it came from the adapter from the engine to the oil cooler hoses.

So we made a new adapter.  Not only because the leak but also because the original adapter had a thermostat we wanted to get rid of.

The installed adapter looks like this:

It's the squarish shiny piece in right in the middle of the picture. 

The bad thing is that it continued to leak. And it is close to impossible to get to see were from the oil is coming.  At a first look, it's comes from the flange between the engine and the adapter.  But after thorough cleaning, and squeezing someones head into position, close to the fan belt, while an other one started the engine,  it was indeed possible to see that adapter was NOT leaking.

However, it was still impossible see the actual leak.

But, a $50 high tech USB inspection camera from Biltema, made it possible:

Sunny Speed Shop Saturday

There's something special with a street Brunch outside the workshop together with friends. Creative ideas and dreams are mixed with coffee, bread and, obviously, a grinding machine...

At this point the atmosphere was relaxed.

We were surrounded by nice cars in different shapes...

...from different decades. 

So far, so good. But why does Kalle look so concerned?

 

Not only Kalle, also Cina and Ragnar has got a touch of garage depression. Dangerous stuff. Again, why? No spark. The lack of spark triggered The Gloom. 

What to do? Send in P.A. The Electrical Engineer with all his instruments and schemes. Problem solved! What it was? We needed to press the throttle slowly up and down one time. That's all.

On the road again...

 

Good things happen !

We have been working with getting to the next level of engine calibration.

So far it has just been work leading us in to a series of issue and fault tracing of course solved one by one and ticked of from the list. Oil leakage, Water leakage, no connection, .......

After a while and in combination with Holley tech support we came to the conclusion that there was something wrong the Holley EFI unit, in short the ECU didn't detect and start the lambda sensor 1 and due to that we didn't get in to adaptation.There are two ports for lambda, if nr one is hesitating nr two hesitates also.

Here the good things start to happen, Holley offers to send us a new control unit based on our mail dialoge combined with log files.

The arrived new ECU !

Whats good with this you ask? Well as we see it this is the difference between a Customer focused service minded American Company versus a suspicius worried not customer focused company where you have to send in the hard ware to the tech center for analysis and a possible response we can't detect the problem and if there is a problem it's probably due to your installation .....

Ok we are serious and have not messed up the ECU, two in the team work's daily with engine management and soft ware, know the drill and have the competence. But you should know that we didn't have to use that specialist twist  it was enough with normal mail conversation doing the extra tests making sure that cables connectors etc are OK and send the requested logg files.

It's a pleasure to work with service minded competent companies which is exactly what we aim to develope Salt Slush Racing into. Kind of a promise and our twist of the golden rule found in almost all "religions" starting already by Confucius around 500 year's before Christ.

Anders connected the new and spot on it started toe talk and heat up the Lambda sensors !

Reving and geting to the next level still a lot of work and it's getting HOT very HOT .... we are going for 10 to 20 times more power... so now we continue to solve issue by issue....

Was it a miracle ? No it was good customer support and service ! THX !