altezzaclub

So I drove the 600km to pick up The Girl from UNE a week early (11th Oct) and stripped the whole car into bits.. what a mess! From the back forwards.. Someone was putting the battery in the boot and drilled clean into the fuel tank under the boot floor. That had a couple of rubber plugs in and was so low the rocks were denting it through its under-guard. Fuel surge had been a constant problem all year with the pump not sucking hard enough

I ran into one of The Girl's boyfriends while up in Armidale earlier this year who said he had an RA40 rally car. I said to bring the crew & stay with me for the Orange Rally on Sept 15th as I'm at home by myself usually. We unloaded the car and the first thing we tackled was the driver's seat position.. Too far back, too leaning back and too low, typical bloody race-car driving style. I chopped up some 1/2" water pipe I had lying round and lifted the back of the seat 50mm, then said I'd come up to his place and sort it out at the end of Uni term. I managed a couple of photos in the Orange rally, and the car did sit low.

Nice gear!! Up with the $400/corner Bilsteins I assume, expensive, but good.

Can we still buy sills for them?? Even if you cut a pair of sills off a wreck and welded them over yours, having stronger rails under the doors will strengthen the whole shell. Cross-strut bar under the bonnet for sure, in the boot if you're keen. I like adjustable ones that you can screw out to put the strut towers under tension, but other people get fixed ones that include a triangular bar back to the firewall. You could also put a bar across under the dash if you can find a spot for it, we've doe that before. Any other bars will be noticeable inside, but really its a large hollow box that will twist under load. A couple of diagonal bars would make a difference to that. I haven't heard of weak points in the body that need reinforcing for racing use. Those pics will be interesting.

What sort of work do you plan for it? Rallying will be different to racing. Are you going to have a cage? They add a lot of strength.

Get a rear muffler from a wrecker, the bigger the better, and make it so you can bolt it on in a couple of minutes. I'd go tri-chamber rather than straight-through. One with nothing in the middle chamber at all, and each end is packed with glass to absorb noise, which is the sort I use on the Altezza and the KE70. I have run a few on the Altezza, cutting them open to see how the insides matched the noise, and basically the heavier the walls are the quieter is gets inside the car, and anything that is not straight-through is a lot quieter. Try this- http://autospeed.com/cms/title_Giant-Muffler-Comparison-Detailed-Test-Results/A_0383/article.html

Go for it then! If you want to sell the whole thing it must be worth a few hundrd bucks. It puts a T box into a KE, which is something I've thought of and I expect others have too.

So you have the K motor, the K-T bellhousing, the T box and the hydraulic setup for the clutch? Should be all you need, you can fabricate the g'box crossmember and sort the driveshaft. Its better than the K box, and there are no other options really if you're using the K motor.

but the end result it worth it. Cops never stop a car on stockies!

So many skills to aquire....

So... Repco had 3cans of spraypaint for $5 and there was one simple job we had never tidied up...

Brainfade.. I meant an 18RG... Insanity has a few of them. Actually, there is one for sale on here currently.

3TG would be the right period & maybe they were an option so don't need engineering. PM Insanity and chat to him, he's a Corona freak. Those Holden motors were just boat anchors. much better, buy a KE70, get McPhearson strut front and a 5-link rear, rather than 2tons of cross members and wishbones in the front and Roman cart axles behind. Bore it out to 1500cc 5K size and bolt on carbs cam etc... still P-plate legal, more or less.

When they get redhot they will boil the brake fluid, and the bubbles just collapse when you pusjh on the pedal rather than compressing the pistons. When they cool the bubbles re-dissolve and they work again. The big question is... why were they red hot?? When will they fail again?? You are lucky to be alive really, as I am after my Mini Cooper dumped the +ve battery lead out through the brake lines many years ago.

Just caught up with this project, like all of them it seems late and over budget! ;) My first build took three years, from when I was 15 to 18, no wonder I did so badly at school and so good at mechanics! Still, it must be great to hear it running. If you want a wiring diagram PM me. The option to your oil pressure cutout for the fuel pump would be a relay from the alty via the ignitiopn light, so it trips the relay when the red light comes on. The pump doesn't wotk unless the alty is putting out power. Either way, you should add an over-ride from the 'start' position of the key, the starter solenoid activcation wire, so when you crank you power the pump.

Lol Dave! I do remember seeing that, but I don't know what has happened since. Nothing in 'settings' I could find. Imports & exports really should have nothing to do with a Govt, but they grabbed that control umpteen hundred years ago when they wanted to raise taxes to go to war. Seeing they couldn't tax income and the nobles were not too keen on putting money into a bad scheme the King started excise duty and controls to raise money. That and land taxes were the main form of State income until the industrial revolution meant company taxes, and finally the 20th century saw income taxes. American Govt spending went from 3% or GDP to 36%, although you can pay 45% tax there now in some States. Your comment about it not being wise to discuss gun ownership in public is a brilliant example of the tyranny I am trying to demonstrate. Ownership of a piece of machinery should not be subject to any constraints in discussion, that is still censorship and shows how people accept that thinking or discussing some things will get you into trouble with the State... so much for "free speech" You may think what we have is better than a free society, but have you really measured the cost of this "civilisation"?. here's a cute one- Gosh, a Communist Govt would like the world's largest democratic population disarmed.... who wudda thought it!

I can't see Dave's signature, in fact no signatures show on my screen, so I'm at a bit of a loss there. Sure, everyone should have the means of self-defence, otherwise you don't own anything. However, we had firearms for hundreds of years without problems before the Govt decided they wanted a monpoly on force and restricted them The strong and the cunning don't rise to the top unless they have some unfair advantage, usually an army behind them in an unarmed country. Now while young men are usually the ones keen to do things they later regret, that is only noticeable in a country with welfare where your negative outcomes are plastered over by the State health system. If you suffered the direct consequences of your drunking antics a lot more people wouldn't get drunk- there would be plenty of examples begging in the streets. Gangs are no fun when your victims are armed and you get killed. Sadly the world is heading in the opposite direction, and this latest puppet-show in the USA will see the UN's agenda for disarming civilians pushed through in America. Your generation will be serfs to your 'leaders' in a way that mine or my parents never were. The freedoms are taken away so slowly no-one complains. oh- No-one invades Switzerland or the USA because everyone is armed, and Indonesia would have an easier time knocking Aussie off right now than if we were an armed populace. Here's a graph released by some researcher from Canberra yesterday. The USA may have a lot of guns, but their gun homocides are not high. Most the Western world is in the mess typed in the corner of course, low numbers of guns and low deaths.

Great! Welcome in! You've picked the best way to learn to drive. Let me know when you want to weld the diff up.

Love the 31s, had one for years. You have 4wheel steering I assume, sharpens up the turn-in on a big car. It was quite nimble, handled well and had enough wooosh from the turbo back in '92. Unusual in Aussie, but they flooded into NZ back in the day.

Yes, that would be the goal. You would not have the patriotic fevour that binds you to some Govt several thousand miles away, your concerns would be for those physically nearby and those further afield who share your ideals and aspirations. It would be a bigger version of the village concept, much easier now with modern communication. Here in Orange it would take 24hours to label the troublemakers and thieves we have, and if everyone was responsible for their own safety then those people would have a difficult time living here. "Be productive or get out..." I think the rioting and looting and ethnic troubles are usually a product of either Govt or religion, both institutions trying to control the behavour of others. How much rioting would there be if shopkeepers were routinely armed? While we can control criminal behaviour, religion will slways be the face of insanity.

Such a lack of faith in your fellow-Australians.. remember, they vote in the Govt that controls you! I'd swap "democracy" for a rotating system any day of the week. Instead of all the lazy Socialists voting parasitic thugs into power to rob me of my money, I would much rather have a hundred randomly-picked people sent to Parliament to consider whatever it is that they do in there. That would be like the jury that decides your life for you when you are wrongly accused of a serious crime. Without making thousands of laws to coerce money from some people and give it to others, there would be very little to do in Parliament. The 'committing force" penalty would be related to the seriousness for the force used, I'd assume burglary would be less than serious injury. You'd keep a judiciary running for that, and the Police to arrest wrong-doers. Remember, the human race has lived for nearly all its life without a Police force, they are a very recent invention, and even standing armies don't go back that far. We didn't get to our current lifestyle under the conditions we live in. Maybe we could even see the wrong-doers paying restitution to the victim again, instead of to the State. Why would you worry about immigration if there was no welfare? Every immigrant has to work to support themself and so adds to the general well-being of society. .and why would you want a Govt co-ordinator in a national disaster?? You would have seen thousands of volunteers getting out and doing what needed to be done in the Queensland floods, you don't need a Govt taking a third of your income for that. People naturally do the right thing and help each other, but Govt and welfare have left too many of the wrong sort of attitudes around. It would take less than a generation for people to realise you have to help others if you want them to help you. You don't want everyone to agree, you just want people free to do what they want to do without screwing others up, so the sideshows we see on the news with the current clowns would never eventuate. That form of society is much more reachable now we have such wide communications via the net and social media. The Govt no longer controls what we see, read or believe, so we can organise ourselves so much better than in the past. After all, how can you have any faith in the people who brought you the global financial collapse... That incident alone would make me think we are better off without Govts setting interest rates, having a monopoly on printing money and levying taxes.

Make one side of the cross-strut bar adjustable with left & right hand threads, then pull/push that tower where you want it. With the RA40 rally car the bonnet would jam down one side until we made an adjustable cross-strut bar and wound it out. Suddenly it has 4mm down each side, so the strut tops/top chassis rails are very flexible. You could oval the LCA holes in the cross member, get the camber you want then weld washers over the holes to locate the bolts. We are running Sigmas LCAs on the RA40 and get over 4deg neg camber, not something I would want on a road car. Nice work with the suspension measurements.

Once you get into the real Australia beyond the Sandstone Curtain it is astounding just how many thousand cars there are on farms.

Looks like an argument for a complete Altezza motor and box conversion package. If anyone ever runs up the back of my Altezza....

So.. what brings it back up after a circuit has died?? Does something re-set by itself after a while and the circuits work again? Here's the KE70 circuit setup, yours should be similar.