rozap
True Classic
Hey everyone. Some friends and I decided to do the 24 hours of lemons. For those who aren't familliar, it's a sub-$500 endurance race series. The search began for a car. We weren't looking for anything in particular. While me and another team member have some VW and Alfa experience, we haven't built a race car, so to keep it simple we planned to get a common, easy to work on, sub-$500 car with good junkyard and aftermarket support. But then a $600 X1/9 popped up on Craigslist, and we threw all those requirements out the door, drove down to Oregon (we're based in Seattle) and picked it up. The guy I bought it from was super nice, and agreed to $500 plus a few big boxes of parts because he had always wanted to make it into a track car.
Trigger warning for all the X1/9 purists: keep in mind that the goal here is to keep *total cost* below $500. That means we have to do things wrong. The rules say so.
This is when we got it. It had a blown head gasket and had sat for about 6 years. It has some rust, a ton of bondo, a cracked roof. But otherwise it was "complete".
So first thing was pulling the engine out and seeing what the damage was. Verdict: very bad. But this is lemons - so we have no choice but to replace the rings, bearings and head gasket, hone it as best we can, resurface the head as best we can, check the runout and then put it back together. Not pictured: the disgusting 6 year old oil/coolant mixture from the blown head gasket. It was in every orifice. Tons of soaking of stuff in degreaser and cleaning.
Yes, we resurfaced the head on my kitchen countertop. It's a flat surface, it took a while. But when we checked it at the end of several hours of hard work and beer drinking, the head's couple thousandths of warping we measured initially was gone, and it was dead flat.
Re-assemble, trying to ignore all the things we're doing "wrong", and first startup
Later verified that the oil pressure gauge was toast, and there was in fact plenty of oil pressure when measured with a known-good gauge. We fixed the running issues, mostly vacuum related, and drove it for a bit. Found an exhaust leak causing a rich condition, fixed that. Did a compression test and found 130+ PSI across all cylinders. Now the car runs really nicely across all temperatures, no misfires, no smoke, idles perfectly. Pretty wild, considering all the corners we've cut.
The brakes were shot so we rebuilt all the calipers and replaced the master cylinder. Also replaced the clutch master cylinder which was dead. That was incredibly unpleasant, not looking forward to more master cylinder work.
Next was wheels. We couldn't find any tires that were decent quality for the 13" steelies, which after more reading felt like a lost cause. The spirit of lemons is crappiness, but racing on bad tires is no fun and also dangerous, so the search began for new wheels. 14" will fit better, but 15" have a much better tire selection, so it's a tradeoff. Found this set of Epsilons from a forum member. In hindsight, should have gotten smaller ones, but at the time the combination of 1) local 2) cheap 3) look cool somehow outweight the hours of work that would be required to do a shitty-wide-body build. Wheel poke is a no-no. So out came the saw and the angle grinder.
The holes on the fender are slide hammer leftovers from years ago, I assume. I removed a metric ton of bondo, to add lightness.
One down, three to go.
Printed a mockup spacer to verify wheel fitment.
Progress on the rear.
These are fiat 500 spacers. So in order to sit properly, we need to remove material from the inside, as well as pressing in a hub centric ring that is matches the epsilon wheels.
Try not to acquire more vehicles in the process. Saw this beauty in the wild and nearly pulled the trigger on it. Yes, that's a Fiat Campagnola driving around in the US.
Sort of done-ish. Before primer. Realized I don't have any shots of us making the spacers, which turned out really nice. Really nice to not have to mess with hub centering rings and just have everything fit perfectly as one piece.
Removing wires. Some aren't required. Some were added by the PO and were ???. We had briefly toyed with the idea of redoing it from scratch, I'm glad we didn't. Much easier to simplify existing stuff.
Whole interior came out.
But we want to use the gauge cluster, so I made this funky mount which uses the mounts that used to hold the dash down, and the existing holes on the cluster. It's stronger than it looks.
Our tallest driver is 6'4", and the rest of us are just under 6', so we needed a slider. Had to make mounts to make it all work.
Installed.
Fire system in and plumbed.
with an external pull-cable.
Found that the return tube was so badly pitted it was leaking. Had to replace it. Took the opportunity to install a coolant pressure sensor, so we will know when we blow a coolant line and won't overheat the thing. The sensor will get a heat shield. Also deleting the heater core.
I think instruments actually fall under "driver comfort" and are exempt from the $500 limit, but I had these 7 segment displays lying around and all the stuff to make a oil pressure, coolant pressure, and oil temperature readout for a lot less than buying them individually, so this is the beginning of that.
So that's more or less where it is today. I licensed and insured it so I could drive it around and see what else is broken. I'm glad I did, because I found that there's a bad rear wheel bearing and the temperature gets to 195 just with light driving. So the wheel bearing is in progress and a scirocco radiator is in the mail.
Next big thing is the cage. And livery, of course. Hopefully will tackle those in the coming weeks, but the coronavirus situation has halted our team's regular once-a-week meetup, so progress has been slow. We had hoped to make the July race but those plans fell apart due to the stay at home order.
All told, we're over the $500, but not by a huge amount. And doing this with an oddball car will likely grant us some leniency from the judges.
Trigger warning for all the X1/9 purists: keep in mind that the goal here is to keep *total cost* below $500. That means we have to do things wrong. The rules say so.
This is when we got it. It had a blown head gasket and had sat for about 6 years. It has some rust, a ton of bondo, a cracked roof. But otherwise it was "complete".
So first thing was pulling the engine out and seeing what the damage was. Verdict: very bad. But this is lemons - so we have no choice but to replace the rings, bearings and head gasket, hone it as best we can, resurface the head as best we can, check the runout and then put it back together. Not pictured: the disgusting 6 year old oil/coolant mixture from the blown head gasket. It was in every orifice. Tons of soaking of stuff in degreaser and cleaning.
Yes, we resurfaced the head on my kitchen countertop. It's a flat surface, it took a while. But when we checked it at the end of several hours of hard work and beer drinking, the head's couple thousandths of warping we measured initially was gone, and it was dead flat.
Re-assemble, trying to ignore all the things we're doing "wrong", and first startup
Later verified that the oil pressure gauge was toast, and there was in fact plenty of oil pressure when measured with a known-good gauge. We fixed the running issues, mostly vacuum related, and drove it for a bit. Found an exhaust leak causing a rich condition, fixed that. Did a compression test and found 130+ PSI across all cylinders. Now the car runs really nicely across all temperatures, no misfires, no smoke, idles perfectly. Pretty wild, considering all the corners we've cut.
The brakes were shot so we rebuilt all the calipers and replaced the master cylinder. Also replaced the clutch master cylinder which was dead. That was incredibly unpleasant, not looking forward to more master cylinder work.
Next was wheels. We couldn't find any tires that were decent quality for the 13" steelies, which after more reading felt like a lost cause. The spirit of lemons is crappiness, but racing on bad tires is no fun and also dangerous, so the search began for new wheels. 14" will fit better, but 15" have a much better tire selection, so it's a tradeoff. Found this set of Epsilons from a forum member. In hindsight, should have gotten smaller ones, but at the time the combination of 1) local 2) cheap 3) look cool somehow outweight the hours of work that would be required to do a shitty-wide-body build. Wheel poke is a no-no. So out came the saw and the angle grinder.
The holes on the fender are slide hammer leftovers from years ago, I assume. I removed a metric ton of bondo, to add lightness.
One down, three to go.
Printed a mockup spacer to verify wheel fitment.
Progress on the rear.
These are fiat 500 spacers. So in order to sit properly, we need to remove material from the inside, as well as pressing in a hub centric ring that is matches the epsilon wheels.
Try not to acquire more vehicles in the process. Saw this beauty in the wild and nearly pulled the trigger on it. Yes, that's a Fiat Campagnola driving around in the US.
Sort of done-ish. Before primer. Realized I don't have any shots of us making the spacers, which turned out really nice. Really nice to not have to mess with hub centering rings and just have everything fit perfectly as one piece.
Removing wires. Some aren't required. Some were added by the PO and were ???. We had briefly toyed with the idea of redoing it from scratch, I'm glad we didn't. Much easier to simplify existing stuff.
Whole interior came out.
But we want to use the gauge cluster, so I made this funky mount which uses the mounts that used to hold the dash down, and the existing holes on the cluster. It's stronger than it looks.
Our tallest driver is 6'4", and the rest of us are just under 6', so we needed a slider. Had to make mounts to make it all work.
Installed.
Fire system in and plumbed.
Found that the return tube was so badly pitted it was leaking. Had to replace it. Took the opportunity to install a coolant pressure sensor, so we will know when we blow a coolant line and won't overheat the thing. The sensor will get a heat shield. Also deleting the heater core.
I think instruments actually fall under "driver comfort" and are exempt from the $500 limit, but I had these 7 segment displays lying around and all the stuff to make a oil pressure, coolant pressure, and oil temperature readout for a lot less than buying them individually, so this is the beginning of that.
So that's more or less where it is today. I licensed and insured it so I could drive it around and see what else is broken. I'm glad I did, because I found that there's a bad rear wheel bearing and the temperature gets to 195 just with light driving. So the wheel bearing is in progress and a scirocco radiator is in the mail.
Next big thing is the cage. And livery, of course. Hopefully will tackle those in the coming weeks, but the coronavirus situation has halted our team's regular once-a-week meetup, so progress has been slow. We had hoped to make the July race but those plans fell apart due to the stay at home order.
All told, we're over the $500, but not by a huge amount. And doing this with an oddball car will likely grant us some leniency from the judges.
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