Zink Formula Vee

In reply to TurnerX19 :

Yeah, they pretty well proved the point in that last picture.

Nice work, guys!

Carl Heideman said:

Chassis is painted. 

Pictures must be out of order- The grey paint turning the dark hair of the painter gray?

In reply to twentyover :

Haha. For a long time everyone thought I was way younger than I was.  I got carded well into my thirties. Then the gray hair changed that. I'm trying to remember when you were at the shop. Was I young or old? I think I turned gray and got bifocals all at once. 

Think I took the metal welding class circa 2007, then Tuning for Speed W/ Twist a couple years later. In the early teens we saw each other @ Gingerman@ a vintage race.

We have dyno time Friday and we're in great shape to make it.

Jack moved the pedals forward as his new seating position puts his feet a little closer to the front.

Meanwhile, I put the wiring back in. I also removed a few of the wires that were not VW colors (supply chain problems last year) and replaced them with VW color coding. A 1970 Beetle wiring diagram works for this car if you ignore the lights, wipers, radio, and horn circuits.

I will put tape over the terminals after it's all tested.

And Jack made a 3rd tail over the weekend, this time in black gel coat. We think we'll be able to sand it and buff it to a nice gloss. We do have time to paint the body but aren't sure we will anymore. The black is growing on us.

We should be able to fire it up tomorrow night and buzz it up and down the street.

Down to brass tacks:

Finished some details with the wiring.

Jack has the new exhaust setup ready for dyno testing. We have different lengths for the tubes before the final collector. 

Brakes bled and clutch and throttle cables adjusted.

Sunset cruise. 

Can you run without any muffler, dont you run into problems with noise restrictions? I hope something can be shared from the dyno session, would be interesting to see how that exhaust works.

Its fascinating to see how big the difference is between the chassis, this pic is the same type of car that i bought (just alot more shiny :) ), which is from 1970. So much narrower and more tubing. The development was very rapid and the competition was fierce in the late 60s with a plethora of car builders fighting for glory.

In reply to Cedricn :

We don't have noise restrictions at the tracks we run at. Since we're running in vintage, our car is not as sophisticated as the one in your picture. 

Well, the dyno doesn't lie. 


We lost about 1-2 hp with the new exhaust through the whole curve  We thought we might lose a little peak but gain some midrange. We did learn a few things, so that's good. We're probably going to go back to a 4->1 setup after we have a good think about it.

In reply to Carl Heideman :

Seeing this picture really brings home how you wear this car to drive it!

In reply to 11GTCS :

That's roomy by formula car standards! 

Jack made the exhaust back into a 4-->1. He tilted it down a little bit to clear the Daytona tail and also shortened it a few inches to make it legal. 

We went back to the dyno with it today, which marked 366 days since our first trip to the dyno with this car. We gained back the power, which felt good. We made a few minor tuning changes and found a little more power and extended our torque band a little. Also felt good, especially after the least session.

We had a couple of interesting things happen. 

First, we usually make a pull, then immediately repeat and make sure they match. Often, the second pull is a hair lower than the first with the heat build up. This session and the last session were during 40 degree days. We took the car off the trailer, warmed up the engine, and found that every pull gained a little power and didn't repeat well enough. Last time, it took about 6 pulls to repeat. Today, it took us 10 pulls to get it to repeat, each one about 1/2 HP more. We think it was the cold gearbox and oil.

Second, we've been curious how much the generator and fan cost us, so we made the last pull with the belt off. The answer for our setup is 2.5HP. We've heard higher numbers (like 8HP, maybe at the flywheel) from other racers. Not too useful since we need to run them, but a little extra data never hurts.

As an aside, we also put a customer's TR7 on the dyno. His grandfather ran the car in the '80s and '90s and he pulled it out of mothballs last year and updated it. 

We made a 2 degree change in his timing and picked up 4HP. Most small bore cars see about 1 HP per degree outside of the sweet spot, so this was a great result.

This was a rare, easy pair of dyno sessions where both cars responded well with fairly simple work. It's nice to win a couple rather than go home scratching our heads!

The frame i put up there is also a vintage Vee, just an illustration of how fast the development was after the first years in the mid sixties when the first cars where shipped over from the state to demonstrate the Vee series in Europe. After that the german, swedish, finnish over here etc quickly took on the challenge and developed the cars further, and i also think the rules diverged a bit from the US original concept, since the cars here got the 1300 engine and ball joint front end(from 1969)

Interesting with the dyno, do you have a rough length of the primary pipes? would be interesting to make a rough calculations of what RPM they are tuned for.

Time for a few quick updates:

We've been working on the spares we take to the track, so we had Quixote Racing build us a backup carb. Dietmar does a nice job, but we took it one step further after our fuel sloshing issues last year. The carb top in held on with a four screws and a relatively thick gasket. As a result, there can be warpage that lets the fuel splash out of the float bowl on hard corners. So we take a file to the carb body top and true it up, then sand the carb top on a flat surface to make sure the warp is gone. Then, we're very careful to not over tighten the screws.

We also have decided to have a spare nose. We had a pretty rough one that we made less rough.

The goal for this one was fast, not high quality, just to get us through a weekend if something messes up the regular nose.

High build primer hides a lot of sins!

I still need to build up a 2nd set of front link pins.

Good idea with surfacing the carb faces. I'll do that and I have started making my own gaskets out of thinner material as well.  I'd also check the surface of the accelerator pump cover and carb face prior to putting it back on.  They'll get a little warp and cause an irritating leak only when you hit the throttle.  I use a really thin layer of fuel resistant gasket dressing (literally only enough to make the surface sticky) when putting it together, then tighten the 4 screws in a cross pattern just to get them snug.

In reply to gcurl :

We grease the gasket as we find that gives a good seal but we can pull the carb top easily if needed. 

Between sessions, we have a checklist we go through before we send the car out again. It has a lot of bolt checks, timing check, etc.. One thing we added was a "shake test." We let the car idle, grab the top of the roll hoop, and shake the car side to side while looking down the carb throat. If the gasket is leaking, we'll see fuel spill and know there is an issue.

Speaking of spares, Owen built spare rear trailing arms for us. 

Which brings me to the touch-up paint discovery we made. The floors at Eclectic Motorworks are painted with floor paint from a local paint store called RepcoLite. This paint has been great for us. It's not as durable as epoxy, but it doesn't chip and peel off in chunks like epoxy does. We just touch up bad spots and it blends in really well. We thought about using it for frame touch up, but it's a little darker. I brought them a spray-out when we did the frame and they tinted it to match, so now we have a quart of touch up paint. Better yet, they put some in rattle cans so we can choose to brush or spray. We sprayed the new trailing arms with one of the rattle cans and it looks just as nice as the epoxy/clear. We didn't even use primer, and it covered well in two light coats. We're going to run these trailing arms and see how the paint holds up. 

Jack ground out the crack on the Z-bar mount, TIGed it back together, then used a brush to lightly touch up the paint. It blended in and really can't be detected.

RepcoLite for the win!

I've mentioned my friend Nick in this thread a few times and a lot more times in my Jeep CJ2A build thread. He's lettered probably hundreds of race cars, mainly circle track, and always gets them just right. So Jack said, let's just have Nick do what he wants and it will be great. And Jack was right.

We gave Nick a photo of the car, he traced it, then came up with this. He said, not only will the silver look great, but it will make the car easier to see on the track since the black can blend into the asphalt. We of course loved it.

Nick played with the tape a little bit to get it this far.

He made some paper patterns to get the scallops in the front symmetrical.

And then we took the body off to start painting.

Next, we masked and painted.

We taped off the black, scuffed everything with red brillo pads, cleaned it many many times to ensure no oil or mold release was anywhere, and I primed it with one fairly heavy coat of DP50LP epoxy primer. We let that dry for about 90 minutes, then I put down one coat of acrylic urethane single stage silver. It's the same color as we paint silver wheels on MGs and Formula Vees--1975 Ford Granada silver.

We pulled the masking back about 20 minutes after we put the topcoat on and left it to fully dry.

Nick does real pinstriping when it's appropriate, but in this case it's not necessary and did the red with tape. He did a beautiful job as always.

We're really happy with it and so thankful to have a friend like Nick.

We really like the Daytona tail and hope it gives us a little more MPH. 

Looks great!

I think it needs a big 3 and Goodwrench down both sides with those colours though :)

In reply to adam525i :

Yea, that thought came to mind. Part of Nick's reasoning was that Jack's enduro kart is black, and my other son Chris' STS CRX Si is black/silver, so why not just make black/silver the team colors? Plus it was a lot easier to put some silver on than do my red/white/blue bomb pop idea...

A number of little things happened leading up so VSCDA at Gingerman this weekend.

I built up an extra set of spindles/king pins/link pins.

We poured a seat insert for the new seat.

Nick put the Eclectic Motorworks stickers on the car.

Jack recently found this 1.6 Spec Miata for a good price, which can run in vintage too. Entering a 2nd car this weekend is only $150, so we I guess we're running it to shake it down. We updated the safety equipment and did a prep and setup on it. After this weekend, we'll see what else it needs.

And we loaded up. We can't quite fit both cars in this trailer, so the Miata is going on the open trailer behind Jack's Ridgeline.

Car looks really good! How do you finish that seat insert after the foam is shaped? Might be something i need to do in a not so distant future..

Unloaded and ready for a nice day.