'85 Merkur XR4Ti Rally Car

In reply to AdventurePiggy :

your photos are not appearing. I load straight from my computer, no cloud host necessary.

TurnerX19 said:

In reply to AdventurePiggy :

your photos are not appearing. I load straight from my computer, no cloud host necessary.

Thanks for the fix! I like to see what I missed.

Congrats on a well-built and driven car! Sounds like the work paid off. 

I still need to come out there and crew for you on one of these. Or maybe just thrash around in the garage and replace front brakes while you swap an engine. 

In reply to Robbie :

Thanks!  I'm sure we'll have an event out your way you can crew for, although on the garage front- I keep kicking around the idea of having a GRM weekend where a bunch of people come over and we can "parking lot build" something in the shop.  I've got enough old/bent Merkur parts (plus a shell) to make a challenge car, provided we could FMV everything...

In reply to Robbie :

In the future, if you can get as far as Ann Arbor I’d be happy to have you ride with me to an event.  Amtrak maybe?

irish44j said:

Gaunt596 said:

 I honestly thing them going to SCCA as a sanctioning body has done them a lot more harm than it has good.... 

Not much choice, Rally America doesn't even exist as a sanctioning body any more and ARA doesn't do rallysprints, I don't think. 

All that said, I'm fine with a bit of amateurness at WMWR. The entry fee is substantially less than what it was as a RA event. SCCA does a good job of subsidizing costs for its big member-base. Would probably be double the price if NRS or ARA took it over. 

I wasn't aware that SCCA itself has much to do with how WMWR is run - just the sanctioning/insurance. WMWR is basically run by the same local organizers who run STPR (which is ARA/ex-RA). 

note: I'm not some big SCCA defender. I actually dislike a lot of what SCCA does. I'm basically just curious as to what SCCA is/isn't doing that they should be (and since I know the national director for rallycross/rallysprint for SCCA, I could talk to him about it). 

I think the spectator jump is still a big pain point for a bunch of people, I can agree with no jumps for rallycross, considering most of those cars aren't caged... but once you start requiring a roll cage I see no valid point about not having moderate jumps at speed. 

Gaunt596 said:

irish44j said:

Gaunt596 said:

 I honestly thing them going to SCCA as a sanctioning body has done them a lot more harm than it has good.... 

Not much choice, Rally America doesn't even exist as a sanctioning body any more and ARA doesn't do rallysprints, I don't think. 

All that said, I'm fine with a bit of amateurness at WMWR. The entry fee is substantially less than what it was as a RA event. SCCA does a good job of subsidizing costs for its big member-base. Would probably be double the price if NRS or ARA took it over. 

I wasn't aware that SCCA itself has much to do with how WMWR is run - just the sanctioning/insurance. WMWR is basically run by the same local organizers who run STPR (which is ARA/ex-RA). 

note: I'm not some big SCCA defender. I actually dislike a lot of what SCCA does. I'm basically just curious as to what SCCA is/isn't doing that they should be (and since I know the national director for rallycross/rallysprint for SCCA, I could talk to him about it). 

I think the spectator jump is still a big pain point for a bunch of people, I can agree with no jumps for rallycross, considering most of those cars aren't caged... but once you start requiring a roll cage I see no valid point about not having moderate jumps at speed. 

IDK, you mean spectators or competitors? If the latter, I think you'd find a pretty even split among who "like jumps" (mostly the people with real rally suspension) and who doesn't (people with stock-ish suspension that gets blown/ broken doing big jumps). I like jumps as much as the next guy, but not in my car. We brake-check the "big jump" at STPR and don't get much air. Same with the big jumps at Black River. 

We had the "big jump" at WMWR in 2017, where Rob Pepper broke his Porsche suspension going HUGE on it. I will say that there were no more spectators standing there that year than this year. A lot of my friends who spectatetd this year said the pin-turs were fun (and hilarious) to watch. Looking at the cars that entered this year's event, the only driver in the group that would have "gone big" on the jump is Chris, by my guess....

Jumps are awesome if you have Reigers or fully-built rally suspension. Jumps are a good way to end your rally, otherwise ;)

Checked over the car, and there were two things loose- wastegate actuator locknut (applied loctite) and, somehow, the distributor cap.  The rotor actually cut a little groove in this contact but it still ran pretty well!

Having replaced the cap, rotor, and spark plugs, it runs better but I think the injectors are probably having issues now that we've really beaten on it.  I'll try to find decent replacements for them.

The list of other things that seem worth berkeleying with is wonderfully short: we need to relocate that fuel switch, make a better fuse for the intercom, maybe rebuild the shifter, maybe see if I can find a way to get more rear brake bias, and for my own interests I'd like to take the coilovers apart and mess with stronger helper spring setups since ours appear to be worn out and get "stuck" as soon as there's a little grit in them.  

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ said:

Checked over the car, and there were two things loose- wastegate actuator locknut (applied loctite) and, somehow, the distributor cap.  The rotor actually cut a little groove in this contact but it still ran pretty well!

Having replaced the cap, rotor, and spark plugs, it runs better but I think the injectors are probably having issues now that we've really beaten on it.  I'll try to find decent replacements for them.

The list of other things that seem worth berkeleying with is wonderfully short: we need to relocate that fuel switch, make a better fuse for the intercom, maybe rebuild the shifter, maybe see if I can find a way to get more rear brake bias, and for my own interests I'd like to take the coilovers apart and mess with stronger helper spring setups since ours appear to be worn out and get "stuck" as soon as there's a little grit in them.  

Injector dynamics. Probably the best bet for price/performance

Pulled the old fuel injectors- they look pretty crusty and one of the nozzles disintegrated upon removal:  

Installed new injectors, and the car ran much better... until the dreaded stumble returned 

Figuring it was the distributor drive again, I pulled it and here's what we have:  

Looks pretty good but I can see some wear.  Going to make a thread in the main forum to try and figure this out.

Update- old distributor has crazy radial play.  Swapping to my spare distributor fixed the problem completely, so it was either a worn gear (unlikely, looks pretty good still) or the radial play (.050"+, most likely our culprit) berkeleying things up.  I'm going to order shims to see if I can correct the problem, I think the distributor is cramming the gears together too hard and putting stress on things that it shouldn't.

So putting the fancy (bronze) drive gear into the spare distributor did the trick?

Reading your other post, it sure seemed like there was a fitment issue going on since you saw crazy wear on multiple drive gears.

In reply to paranoid_android :

The spare actually already had one on it.  As far as I can tell, the gear survived on the worn out distributor- I'm going to talk to Esslinger and see if they have any input on why it used to eat gears, and now apparently eats distributor bushings.

Looking at the previous distributor again, I discovered evidence that the gear was being pinched by the distributor housing (look for the recessed groove in the distributor where the gear was eating it):  

So I popped the distributor out again, and soaked the gear in oil for 24 hours in case that's a thing that matters:  

Then applied a shim:  

Then reinstalled and timed the distributor (which I'm getting really efficient at) and went for a drive.  Car feels good, time will tell whether this has fixed the rapid distributor wear we saw with the previous bronze gear.

In other, vaguely related news, Chief had a bit of an incident with a kamikaze deer hell bent on taking out the trans cooler:  

I looped the lines to get it home, then took the opportunity to go bigger with a well reviewed parts store cooler:  

With some chopping of the OEM lines, we now have an "HD" transmission cooler:  

And back together with a few more zip ties than it previously had:  

Topping it up, it appears to have lost 6qts of ATF limping home but seems to be behaving now that everything is full.  I'll have to fix or replace the mounts for the LED driving lights since the deer took those out too.  This is the second deer Chief has taken out, the first did no damage- they appear to be honing their technique, I fully expect the next one to make a serious attempt to incapacitate the truck.  

I've had two close calls with deer while towing the rally car (one of them missed me and hit Jason's then-brand-new Tundra towing one lane over). Whenever I get off the highways and I'm towing, I'm constantly scanning now.

Surprised Chief doesn't have a bash bar in the first place. Figured that would be standard issue for emergency vehicles. I keep considering adding one (or a full steel bumper) the more I see deer in every place I tow to go rally...

The deer population in our area is the largest it has ever been. Still too many do not understand how to cross a road, but clearly the more we hit the smarter they are getting. Many more young ones get hit than adults, good for them, bad for Pennsylvania ecology. Talk to the knowledgeble DNR folks and they will tell you the deer are destroying the forests, as well as our vehicles.

In reply to TurnerX19 :

Yep.  I remember riding mtn bikes in the Wissahockon years ago and how the deer were decimating the undergrowth until the parks dept started a controlled culling program.  There were protests, of course, but the following Spring, the woods looked a hell of a lot better.  I believe it's been a yearly thing ever since.

Knowing the Quakertown area fairly well, hitting a deer is not a case of "if" but "when".

I have had multiple cases of the distributor gear slipping and shearing the pin.   Have you ever had this problem?   

We have since figured out that we should go back to a stock oil pump as the root of the problem.   Warming the car up longer seems to help also.

Is a spiral wound shear pin stronger than a split roll pin for the dizzy drive gear"?

In reply to akylekoz :

Yes, that was happening consistently with the stock oil pump on this engine.  This is the kit we use now:  Esslinger billet distributor drive.  It seems to have successfully solved the gear (now billet steel on bronze) and pin (now 3/16") issues and moved the focus onto the distributor- distributor housing alignment and bushings are now the weak links, which I am hopefully solving.

I fixed our All Wheels Driven sticker with a mailbox number:  

Hopped in to go for a drive and the brakes were spongy again.  Also, the parking brake stopped working.  So I came up with a bleeding arrangement for the rears which let me get the bleeder nice and high to prove to myself that I wasn't just dealing with poorly oriented calipers:  

After much bleeding, the brakes are now... even softer.  I think these calipers are messed up.  I ordered another pair, they're cheap and at worst I'll have spares.

lol at the "2" sticker. Just the other day was out working on the car and thought about taking the All Wheels Driven sticker off and then though "I should just scribble "2" on there with a marker...

Brake berkeleyery continued!  First, I swapped the rear calipers, which achieved nothing.  Then I went after the proportioning valve, and added a residual pressure valve as well in case that meant anything:  

Installed:  

That also had no real effect.  So, as a last ditch effort I changed the (relatively fresh) brake pads.  Old and new:  

Inexplicably, that seems to have fixed it.  Apparently, if you're using Thunderbird brakes on an XR4Ti, this is enough pad wear to reach some sort of detent in the calipers and prevent your brakes from working:  

OK then.  Whatever.  I guess I'll just change the rear pads after every event.  Dumb.

alternately, you could use the backing plate of the old (red) pads as a spacer behind the other pads, once they wear down to the point of detent, in order to get more life out of the worn pads. 

In reply to irish44j :

I know.  Cheaper, but still dumb...

Next time I prep a rally car I'm not using any of these lame "common upgrade" parts unless I can find someone successfully racing on them, or do the math and make the adaptors myself.

I’m finding that out with some stuff on my car also.

Yes that will work just fine till you take it on the track and it overheats. That’s when you find out the folks you’ve been trusting have never actually been on a track.