How To Build A Rally Car

[altezzaclub]

Well, about the end of last year we finally got all the shit out of the shed!  Then the timber mezzanines were taken off in tractor-sized sections and stacked outside.

That left the steel posts...  We started with cutting them off

and chopping the concrete down 100mm with a jackhammer..  (nah, he wasn't, that was my job!)

Soon we found we could haul most of them out with a tractor-

and stack them outside!

we filled in the holes and did a lot of cut 'n fill to level the ground, and then compacted it-

 

Which is where I left it for Xmas....   The concreteman dropped a load of crusher dust there and I hear Steve has spread it inside and levelled it. Now we are just waiting for the concreteman to find a gap in his work to get the slab poured.  Slowly slowly, its all getting there!  3-phase wiring throughout after the concrete, paint the floor, re-make the mezzanine about 6mx3m and 2.3M high, get a two-post hoist in..

At least the wrist brace has gone and Steve can't use "but I'm a cripple" as an excuse anymore!

 

[love ke70]

When are you going to build a rally car again?

 

[altezzaclub]

Soon!   Soon..  sometime!..  so many distractions!

We took the tractor up & sliced sheets of ply which we screwed to the top beam, which bird-proofed the shed. I assume they left a big gap as it was a fuel storage shed full of fuel tanks years ago, and the swallows flew in to shit over everything.

Then the workshop did its first job!!  We drove the Mothership up for something or other & I felt the propshaft vibration straightaway.  So it was under the truck on our trolleys and then races around the super-smooth concrete!

Then Steve bought an antennae & grabbed an old aerial of his Dad's. Then took quite some repairing..

We put the birdply pallet we used back on the tractor & lifted the pole up vertically, and fixed it to the Woolshed. That was exciting...

A kiddie stool on top of a tyre & Steve could reach the wires he left too short..  Now we have Wi-fi for 100M around at 37Mbps! The farmhouse gets less than 2 on its Telstra phone line!!

We grabbed three steel pillars from the car storage shed we'd rebuilt the mezzanine in a year ago. These were cleaned up and had feet welded on, ready for painting today. We'll have half new pillars, half bolted onto the shed structure.

We'd started drilling half-inch holes into the shed's pillars to mount the new mezzanine 2.2M high, but with Steve's wrist not too good I was doing that. Of course the drill bit jammed in my one hand above my head and twisted my wrist off! The hospital said its not broken but we're two left-handers with heavy work for this trip.

Of course the promised rain this week meant most days are spent on a tractor discing up a hundred hectares in various paddocks & sowing it, then going over it with harrows.

 

Edited March 22, 2018 by altezzaclub

[altezzaclub]

Mezzanine time...  the sections we took off weighed a couple of hundred Kg each, and they were too wide for the door. That meant putting them inside longways, laying them on a couple of crawlers and the handtruck/engine stand, and turning them 90deg. That was the easy part!

Then picking them up again and lifting them onto the posts.

They went back together within a mm or two & we screwed the sections down and added the planks we'd taken off. Job finally done, a storage area with 2.2M headroom underneath !

Then the hoist could be fitted-

First the pillars were stood upright, which was done by just heaving them up with the two left-handed cripples.  Then lots of measuring and checking, then drilling 18mm holes for the concrete bolts. The concrete man who poured the slab was kind enough to loan us a giant drill bit and we got stuck in.

The bolts torque down to 150lb-ft, and the final job was fitting the top crosspiece about 4M up.

I'm back home now, ToyotaNats this weekend over Easter as a distraction, then inlaws visiting from overseas, then back up there to finish the hoist assembly and wiring.

THEN start a rally car again!  ...well...   first some tools and jacks and parts and everything that makes a shed a workshop!

[love ke70]

I love it!!!

I am going to miss the building updates when you start the rally car again, I think this journey has been much more rewarding.

 

 

[kickn5k]

On 27/03/2018 at 10:49 PM, love ke70 said:

I love it!!!

I am going to miss the building updates when you start the rally car again, I think this journey has been much more rewarding.

 

 

Me too..

I will enjoy the car build too though. 

[altezzaclub]

Dammit!  Left my camera up there.. sorry Team, I'll get it next week.

Needless to say, the hoist is in full work and we still haven't finished a workshop!

Meanwhile, Toymods came along and Mao had work to do at the gymkhana!

[altezzaclub]

Well, the best-laid plans of mice and men go aft astray..

The Girls KE70 died on me, my fault entirely, and that head gasket change is in the build thread.  It did mean I spent May and half of June up on the farm.  i suppose it started one night at 2am when I vaguely woke up and heard water dripping..  I leaned over and put the light on, and thought "its coming from the armchair where I throw my clothes"..  but when I sat up and knelt over on the bed a drip hit me on the butt!  It was dripping onto the bed, through the joins in the tongue & groove ceiling..   So I moved the bed and got a pot..when the drip moved over a board I moved the bed again.. and so on!

Next morning trip in the ceiling showed the drain tray on the gas heating unit had rusted out, and it took over a week to get a stainless one copied.  So THAT was the start of this trip!

Meanwhile we had the benches all welded up, then cleaned and painted. The mobile work bench was earning its money!

I will say that working on clean white benches is just so nice!!

The first big customer for the hoist was Cobar the Landcruiser that didn't like to go into 2nd gear.

Yep, you could lift it up and still walk under it upright!  The new gearbox jack made that job simpler too.  The box was mailed to Terrain Tamer for two or three weeks, and is now back to be fitted this weekend.  Dammit! THAT's where that rope went, I was looking for it yesterday!

[altezzaclub]

Meanwhile at the house we were running the bore pump every couple of days, so I started measuring the tank twice a day.  Turns out the bore pump doesn't pump 9000L up the hill in under an hour, like it used to, in fact it was only pumping 3000L then struggling to get any more water up.  There's a drought you know..  So then I chased water usage and found about 1000L/day of the nearly 3000L/day we were losing, probably 2000L/day going down at the shearer's cottage where Steve's bro lives!  We were losing a day's bore pumping every day and a half!

We went to town & grabbed a pump and fittings, removed a leaking tap completely and moved the pipe valves inside out of the frost. Now we can switch from the bore tank to the rainwater tank, and we'll run on rainwater until the 20,000L has gone, with NO leaks.

Rallying..??  Hang on, the Maxima has a blown head gasket!  I have a particular interest in the Maxima, having solved a long-term missfire a few years back, then the injector woes, and I'm not letting it die from just a BHG!  So lots of time draining the water system, taking out the t'stat and filling it with some head gasket sealant or another.  Every trip had water going into a plastic drink bottle and it was measured.  Its only taken a month but damm you can do anything now and it behaves like there was nothing ever wrong. No water goes into the bottle and we ignore the sodium silicate coating everything!

 

[altezzaclub]

Of course more delays were involved with new staff memberss..

I don't know what they are meant to be doing, they're sleeping on the job a lot!

I think they're doing QC, they watch a lot from the ceiling..

Typical staff, lots of in-fighting

Mao has been up on the hoist for a week, a couple of new steering joints, center driveshaft bearing, and fitting the terratrip sensors. ::Sigh::  there a noobs rally on next weekend, only 45Km of stage, but you don't need a cage and someone I know reckons he can teach them all a thing of two..

Speaking of panelbeating, another job was to tidy up the nana auto for sale, to pay for a MIG welder and welding generator.  The back bumper was slightly out of shape and nana had run down the side of a gate or something, but the main things are original, low Km and no rust!  If you want a lovely untouched KE70, pony up $4K and its yours!  Steve will advertise it properly later.

 

Edited December 24, 2018 by altezzaclub

[altezzaclub]

Of course...  there's drought on! So lots of feeding out, a couple of thousand dollars worth of feed every second day, and two guys for a day.  When Pete sold part of the farm he got permission to use the giant steel hay barn..complete with its giant 6M X 6M roller door that someone had driven into and the gears slipped when you pulled it up on the chain!  So three days were spent rebuilding the planetary gears, and having had it unroll unexpectedly and release the springs we had to wind the tension back on.

That's me winding the gears up

Steve's mate Ronnie on the haybale ladder with a pipewrench

and Steve on the pallet with the other pipe wrench.

Its working better now than it has since new!  You have to pull it down its so keen to go up!

Actually, we DID do something more related to the rally car!  We bought 4 straps for tie-downs and are halfway through making mounts for them. It will be "see a KE70 and Gone In 60seconds!"

So, next time.. more workshop stuff to do, more carpet up on the walls, fireplace installed, tools moved over, 240V electrical supply..Ha!  that's a topic all of its own!  Three electricians, no prices yet and solar looking like a good option!  We might just beat Project Binky!

 

Edited June 14, 2018 by altezzaclub

[altezzaclub]

Welp!  That time went fast! 

Actually, I lost my camera last month, so things got delayed until I rescued it from Ronnie's KE70.  That was at the Woolshed after we picked it up in Armidale with a terrible surging, and spent a couple of days sorting problems out..

However, it all started when Dan the Boilerman was keen to join the team and help build rally cars. He drove down from BNE and we hooked the last section of mezzanine onto his ute..

We sledded in with it (almost) empty, and sledded out with it full..

 

It had run down a bank and crushed the sill , and while it might not make it back on public roads, Steve had bought it as rally car #2.

Edited September 7, 2018 by altezzaclub

[altezzaclub]

A boilerman is the ideal guy to sort out the new MIG Steve bought, and he said the new genset provided cleaner power than the 240V at the powerpoint.  So the car was soon stripped, the sill was soon off and the floor generally straightened.

The donor sill came from the most rusty AE71 we'd ever seen, but the sills were fine!

 

Meanwhile  Steve's cuz was up and chasing the oil leak in Steve's landcruiser.. (yeah right.. only one??)    Ronnies car was being sorted and I was busy in the workshop. Then they decided this was all too easy, and raced off to the neighbours, where they scored an old caravan chassis as a trailer.  This lightweight deathtrap was shortened, narrowed, and then had the whole front chopped off to be converted to a tilt-trailer...  all to replace the sled in moving shells that don't have wheels!

Seeing I lost my camera then, I'd better get some photos of it tomorrow!  AND, I've completely forgotten about the month spent restoring the immaculate Corona wagon Steve bought off the original owner.....     and then gave it to his girlfriend!  I'll find some photos..

Here we are, this wagon...  except it has "L" plates on these days...  Runs beautifully, we even fitted new front shocks. I hope it lasts another 30years!

 

 

The Orange Rally came up when I'd gone home, and Leichty asked Steve & I to service for him. He rocked up with the Nissan 240RS and we had an easy morning until he complained of the front being noisy at the lunchtime service. We found the bushes had disintergrated in the steering idler arm giving it half an inch of slack, so Leichty withdrew and dropped the car off at the Woolshed on his way home the next day. Steve & I stayed down for a wrecker raid last Monday and hauled struts, LCAs, brake boosters and diffs out of old Coronas.  Then it was into the workshop, and amongst other odd things we found the front sway bushes had disintergrated too, just leaving a smear of blue plastic behind.  A Sylvia 240RS, haha, Sir we don't list those..  However I think the same sway bushes are in Patrols, and the steering bushes in C80 vanettes.  We will see next week!

Build our rally car??  What! There's so much else to do!

Edited September 7, 2018 by altezzaclub

[altezzaclub]

Well, here's the trailer as it stands.. the drawbar is sitting on top of the frame waiting to be bolted onto the bolts just in front of the wheels so it tilts. Then we need to organise some floor that a wheel-less car can slide up easily.

Meanwhile Ronnie rocked up for the weekend to work on his 4AGE conversion. His blue KE70 had run over a very solid stump last year and was no longer reckoned as a vehicle, so he had bought one of the beige KE70s off Steve as a stop-gap. Recently he bought an AE71 from Dodgy Habibe in Sydney, and when we got it home we found the abysmal panelbeating in the passenger's front engine bay.  So we dragged it out yesterday and he stripped all the panels off, only to find it really should be cut 'n shut in that corner...  Then he figures maybe we should cut half a nose off a donor and fix his blue car, which is seriously shortened underneath, so we dragged that out today.

Figuring we'd take it straight to the panelbeater and ask his advice, we had to get it on the trailer. No steering of course...  but wait, the Kobar winch!  Well, having not been used to years, it only winched out but not in!!  After breaking off the corroded terminal involved it meant someone jamming the cable on with a big screwdriver, while someone else worked the controls.

The rope goes over the roof!  Well, that's the Woolshed way...  through a pulley mounted on the roofrack, over the rear roller, past the trailer to the KE70.  Yep, the last owner had a tinnie!

..and the application of enough grunt made it easy!

The panelbeater saw it this evening and said yes,  just bring down two cars with completely empty engine bays and he'll give us one back!  That's the red Spirit in the background, carefully converted to a flattie years ago. It will lose the whole nose, drivers side to Ronnie's blue car, passenger's side to Ronnie's  white car.

So another day, another reason not to have a rally car built!

Edited September 9, 2018 by altezzaclub

[Banjo]

Quote

The rope goes over the roof!  Well, that's the Woolshed way...  through a pulley mounted on the roofrack, over the rear roller, past the trailer to the KE70.  Yep, the last owner had a tinnie!

I just love Aussie ingenuity !         I wonder why they just didn't tie rags to the rope & polish the towing vehicles bonnet & roof at the same time ?

Cheers Banjo