How Not To Build A Rally Car

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The Build-

 

I drew plans for the little 33L in-boot tank and had it made up by the local water tank place here, then welded by my engineer. With a tiny 350ml surge tank being fed down through a piece of 40mm filler tube, the pump can always draw fuel

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We pressure tested it before delivery and made sure the newish Toyota Echo filler pipes sealed.

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The engineer also made 4 stands that go from 400mm high to 800mm high, giving some serious working space under the car. That all totaled $800odd.

 

The Echo filling gear was scored from the wreckers when The Girl and I went shopping, along with a Landcruiser front steering bar, to get left and right-hand threads in a pipe, and a set of Sigma LCAs.

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I took the tank up to make sure it all fitted before it was welded, and we launched into welding plates on the chassis for a few days. Luckily he has a perfect-condition spares car, the ugly liftback, but everything except the rear body fits the the rally car.

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We cut the chassis top rail out of the donor car and replaced the bent one......

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and plated over the lower chassis rails from the giant scrap pile outside the woolshed. I don't know why farmers have scrap piles outside their woolsheds, but this one had plenty of angle and 1.6mm flat sheet.

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Steve started a tech course to learn welding, but seeing I've always used oxy-acetylene we used that. When the acetylene ran out we moved to LPG/oxy with a leaking old barbeque bottle, (which was hopeless!) then when the oxy ran out we move to MIG. Weeks later when the cover gas ran out we used old-fashioned arc, so he got a good education! We braced the turret before we welded the rails back in.

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The tank support was welded up out of some odd angle, and we doubled it at one end to make the tank slope so it drained. I grabbed an inner tube from a dirt bike and sliced it up, then glued it to the tank base so it sat tight in the frame. A trip to the saddler in Walcha with a trailer tie-down gave us a double-thickness belt to strap the tank into the frame. An old 4L drench container gave a splash tray.

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Meanwhile the boy was busy at the front, welding in chassis rail and plating over the bottom ones-

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Things looked pretty good as we patched them in.

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I headed back to Orange and left him another list, starting with "finish rust welding and a quick paint of engine bay". There was hours of cutting and welding in a jigsaw around the firewall, and then the painting was no quick job! After three weeks I went back up on Nov 8th to find that the car looked beautiful but no actual building had taken place!

Edited December 28, 2012 by altezzaclub

[altezzaclub]

So I instantly instigated 6.45am mornings and work until 9pm at night, 7days a week!

 

The parts car gave up its cross-member, hubs & discs, castor mounts and many odd parts. Naturally nothing fitted and it all had to be filed and ground! After some hours of fighting we had out first success, a cross-member in place!

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With a cross-member in we fitted the Sigma LCAs and then we measured the brake disc thickness and replaced the hubs, calipers and discs from the parts car. This lead to further problems in the rally, as we shall come to... The struts came back from Sydney Shocks with $900 Bilstein front shocks with gas pressure greater than my 70kg weight.. and we cleaned up the old camber-tops and fitted all the front suspension on.

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For rear suspension we just raided the parts car and replaced all the arms. The shocks were replaced with re-valved Bilsteins that had about 50Kg gas pressure and instantly pushed the car back up.. for about $700. We spent a few hours re-positioning the exhaust to clear the diff, but hoped the extra height would solve the smashing problem.

 

With the shell back on its wheels we could move it outside and get the motors out.

 

We dropped the grooved sump off the rally motor and grabbed one off the spare 18RG.

 

This turned out to be one that had been cut horizontally all around and re-welded on backwards, then covered with epoxy to seal it... so we made a note to strip this so-called "race engine" Steve had bought before it was ever used!!

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So we pulled off a stock sump off another and of course found it wouldn't fit nicely over our larger oil pump... Then I realised why the oil pickup was so abused in that modified motor..