Ugh! Overheating!! Maybe...

I've been chasing an overheating problem on the car for a few days... Our last engine would overheat when we had air in the cooling system, and since this engine was just installed (and shares the same cooling system design) that seemed the likely suspect! After purging and purging and checking the thermostat and gauge, it now looks like the temp sending unit on the engine has gone bad! Perhaps it got bumped during removal/installation...

test driving

We hooked the car up on the tow dolly today behind my Subaru and went down the road to a vacant business park and did some test driving. The car feels great! The cooling system need air bled so we overheated quickly, but hopefully we'll get that licked before Friday's testing at the track!

I put a "new" muffler on today, but it still sounds like a race car...

weighing the car

We put the car on the scale last night to see what it weighed in race trim:
1763 lbs

And you can see in the next picture that we have almost "perfect" Front/Rear balance @ 66/34:

Oh well, what more can you ask for in a LeMons car...

New engine is in!

A little history...

OK, I have a little time to catch the blog up to where we are!

We ran our '84 Honda Civic hatchback beater in the 24 Hours Of LeMons 2008 Arse-Freeze-Apolooza at Thunderhill Raceway in December. It made it to hour 11 out of 15 when the engine threw a rod and blew a hole in the side of the block... It had been so much fun driving in this race that we were hooked! We needed a new engine for future races...

We then did a little research and found that '86-'89 Acura Integras had a 70% more powerful engine but would more-or-less bolt right in! Of course, the more-or-less part meant that we needed a donor car to completely strip out and transfer lots of stuff over to our car.

And here is our donor! We paid $400 for this beauty...which unfortunately it wasn't worth! It was however worth more than that for the parts we needed so c'est la vie! And we sold of what we didn't need to get back under our $275 new block budget.

She lives!!

We got the 'ol heap running under it's own power this weekend! It drives pretty well and just needs an exhaust and some other minor stuff. Woo hoo!!

We're in!

Just announced, we're accepted in the race!! Woo Hoo!!!!!

Good thing too since we've burned some of our allotted cash and plenty of our "allotted" capital at home!

We dropped our "new" engine in this weekend and hauled the '88 Integra carcass off to the junkyard. Time to get the new engine running!

TSP Blog goes live!

Of course, we don't have time to say anything at the moment...