6 October 2000
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Brake line clamps and throttle cable clamp for the front of the car. The brake line clamps have a rubber base to help eliminate noise from vibrations. |
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Here's a view of the throttle cable clamp on the engine. |
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The complete carburetor linkage and throttle cable. |
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When the suspension is at full rebound, the c.v. joints were binding so I had to add suspension limiting straps to prevent the rear trailing arms from moving so far down that they would damage the c.v. joints. |
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The radiator needs a fan or two and the fans need to be mounted on a shroud that will direct the air through the radiator. This is the beginning of the fan shroud. |
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Here's the radiator and fans installed in the car. The fans will be blowing hot air onto the gas tank, so I'll have to add a small piece of aluminum to divert the air away from the fuel tank. |
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Gotta get the coolant from the engine to the radiator. Here's a close up of the aluminum tube, mounting bracket and hoses needed to plumb the radiator. |
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Here's the alternator belt tensioner, a radius rod. A radius rod has heim joints on both ends and left-hand threads on one end, so when the rod is rotated, the length increases or decreases depending on the direction of rotation. In this case, it snugs the belt nicely. |
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A distrubutor is too tall to work with the weber carburetors, a more precise and tunable ignition is a crank-fire ignition. The unit on the left of the picture is the crank-fire ignition unit. It receives pulses from a proximity sensor and toothed wheel on the crankshaft and fires a spark to the appropriate cylinder |
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The highlighted area is the ignition trigger. Most new cars use a similar type of ignition with many coils and no distributor. |
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The distributor drive runs the oil pump, so I could not totally eliminate the distributor. The highlighted area on the left is an old ford distributor that I turned down in the lathe and capped off so it will run the oil pump. The highlighted area on the right is an engine mount that I machined out of a chunk of aluminum. Larger radius rods will suspend the engine. The rods are on back -order right now so the rest of the mount will have to wait. |
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One of the most challenging things I have done on this car is fabricating a header. The only headers available for a rear mounted pinto engine are high-mount, they stick up above the engine and almost 2 feet to the rear. Unacceptable. After much research, I decided on a step-header design. The tubes directly off the cylinder head are 1 3/8 inch diameter and extend for 8 inches. The second step is tubes 30 inches long and 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Here's the beginnings. |
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The tubes all have to be within 1/4 inch in length and extend from the head to the collector. It was quite a day of trial and error - it wasn't measure twice, cut once; more like measure 15 times, cut 3 times. |
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Here's all four tubes of the header welded and mounted on the car. |
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Another view - the radius rod that will mount the engine will go through the center of the header. |
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One more view. A supertrapp muffler will be added to the end of the header next week and sometime in the future the entire assembly will be coated by Jet-Hot. |