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Decided my rear quarters were looking kind of boring so I spruced them up.
there's sarcasm like this all over the car. Next I went ahead and made that master cylinder brace. First I had to cut my bucket of scrap to find what I needed at the bottom.
The bucket has had it. I demoted some of the bigger stuff to my new to me scrap dumpster, i.e. the stuff I'm getting rid of. Should make for a nice backup source for raw material too. The mount came out pretty good, got it drilled and cut in accordance with the old eyecrometer.
I put these .093" thick washers in to raise the brace up closer to match that .098" thick piece the front of the brace was going to rest on.
The aforementioned eyecrometer didn't catch the offset of the strut bolts so I ended up punching 3 holes. Whoops.
The angle of the bolt is pretty much parallel prior to adding preload. Once preload is added, it pushes the front of the master upward so I didn't go crazy with the preload. Makes it pretty clear how much deflection there is not only in the firewall, but also the booster. Time to load it for the Dyno, I have a 0900 tomorrow.
Good thing you use a nice foot-pad that rests on the end of the MC. The ebay one just supplies a straight bolt - threads can dig into the MC it appears.
I was gonna gusset it, but after preloading it I quickly realized it was an order of magnitude stronger than the firewall and booster as is so I left it. I used a carriage bolt to interface with the master cylinder. I should make a bunch and sell them for $50 a pop and undercut everyone.
Dyno went well, but this motor must be about to blow up. I bumped the breather hose from 5/8" to 3/4" and it's shorter now too. That seems to have added a few whp as I had to plate down from a 36mm to a 35mm to bang out 261/310. I simply cannot understand why this motor makes so much and everyone else with high miles needs mods unrestricted to hit 260.
Man that MC brace is simple, I guess it really doesn't need any extra gussets since just the angle iron is way stronger than without.
keeping up with scrap metal is a pain too, I just picked up a shallow storage tub to keep mine in for easy searching of the smaller pieces that I can never find when I need them
So I bought a Momo cool shirt, fittings, line, cooler, and bilge pump back in 2014. I got busy with life and deghettofying this thing and put it on the back burner. Thanks to my at home time with Coronavirus, this finally climbed to the top of my list. I got everything out and realized the mounts were already half baked.
So I bolted it all up using the 1/4" screws and nuts it was intended for and made a plan to mount it all in the car. That plan changed about 9 times. I prefer to keep things cheap, simple, and effective. To meet all that criteria with my slow *** brain takes a number of iterations to arrive at a good conclusion. At one point, I was convinced I needed to rivet some from the bottom so I opened the garage door, fired up the car, moved it far enough from the wall, and put it on stands. When I was done with that, I closed the garage door and realized I hadn't checked clearance at all. I got lucky.
So making a mount lime this is simple. It's tedious, but very simple. I'm not a huge fan of tedious work, but it seems to be a big part of what I do on this thing. I will say that when it's done it's very satisfying. Well today was extra painful 1 due to my shoulder deciding to be a POS and 2 due to race cars with cages making anything inside difficult.
I had to climb through this mess just to put eyes on anything. Luckily I'm stubborn. AF so if I want this done it will get done regardless of how much I hate doing it. That said, it could never have been done without vise grips.
And bam! Finished FREE mount made with pre-existing crap in my garage because Lowe's and Ace are excruciating to buy from anymore.
And to think how close I was to buying a $92 prefabbed mount makes me sick. I'll use a ratchet strap just in front of that centerish truss. That made a noticeable improvement in strength, though I suspect I would have been fine without but I like my peace of mind. Car is already wired for this so the rest will be a snap. I anticipate I'll have it wrapped up which means it'll likely be the day after or day after that.
When you get to testing that cooling setup, report back. Been looking at them, and possibly making one for years for motorcycles in the summer here in az.
I expect it to be one of those things I'd wished I'd done sooner. Right now I'm a bit conflicted on how I want to build the cooler which should be the easy part. Here's a couple links to some other DIY setups.
My Momo shirt has Fast ends, but I didn't see hoses listed on Fast's site so I emailed them. We'll see where they come in, if they're in line with that cool shirt hose I'll just get the hose with ends from them. That is if they have the pull to release ends. I know I'm going to forget to unplug myself and I don't want to destroy anything in doing so, so I may end up changing it all over to the cool shirt style anyway. So zero progress on the cooler today, but I did get some new calipers ordered up. Mine are spread badly, I've been putting it off because I want to get my Stoptechs on but I'm not yet willing to pony up ~$1000 for the 2 piece floating rotors that I'd need to go with it so $160 worth of C6 calipers should do the trick. Supposedly they're stronger than the C5 calipers too. As an added bonus, I nabbed the C6 J55 calipers with mounts, those mounts are destined for my C5Z as I've been sitting on some larger rotors and new pads for a hot minute. I'll likely do the same thing for the back of the Corvette, just get remans with mounts as the rear J55 calipers have a smaller piston.
Today I replaced something I should have a long time ago, the POS water overflow tank. It's always sucked. I don't think it's ever done its job and this year on the Dyno the car puked water on the floor. Water temp was 190 so I followed the trail and it led to this POS tank.
I think the idea here must have been simple, light, and extremely ghetto. I was waiting to relocate my PS cooler to make room for a stock overflow until I realized what a monstrosity that was so I nabbed a universal from Blow Reilly's instead. Here's the failure mode on the old one.
Well that explains the mess and also why I had to add a little water after every race. The ID of that hole was so small on the other end I'm not sure it was possible for it to ever do its job. New one is a different story. Legit 3/8" nipple instead of this hokey mess.
While not a huge accomplishment, it is a nice bump in refinement. Tomorrow my new front calipers arrive, so I can swap those out and finally flush out last year's brake fluid.
I did get the new calipers in, brakes bled, and finally got to the track with a few other guys from my group. Car showed 180 for water on the factory gauge and about 190 on the Autometer whose sender is at the back of the engine. Oil stayed around 270. The car digs out of a 2nd gear corner better than before and I was no longer off the pace even on old tires so that was super encouraging. What's not encouraging is after a some hard laps chasing, my brakes still faded. Up until that point, they definitely communicated more than before but the pads are still getting cooked. My next step is to change out the spindle ducts. The ones I have are for 12" rotors and my car has 13" rotors so there's a gap between the duct and the ring. I don't expect this to be the end all fix, but I have to eliminate it as a possibility. I'm also STILL having issues hitting 3rd gear. The new syncros are money, but I'm still hitting a wall. Only thing I can figure now is to try another shifter. I currently have a B&M in the car with a tall Blainefab delrin ****. It only happens when I get it good and hot, like something is expanding and getting sloppy. I'm not sure who to consult.
I might have missed it but what trans fluid are you running? There was talk on frrax about synthetic being too slippery and some preferred dino dex III.
I'm curious how your brake cooling will go too when you seal the gap, can't be good for it. I can't wait to try mine, I added some extra flow but waiting for a track day to test. I run the standard c5/c6 rotors and the 3" duct is cutoff so I expanded it to hopefully get the full air flow.
Running dino Dex3, but the syncros are working just fine. I'm hitting between the gears still, seems too easy to do like something just isn't guiding me into the gear. Still shifting slowly because of that. Fingers crossed on the spindle ducts because the other 2 fast guys have the exact same NACA ducts feeding their setups and they don't seem to have any issues. May have to splurge on the C5 hub adapters too.
I'm almost willing to bet that increasing the size of the brake dust shield will not help you. The cooler air should come in to the center of the disc, and carry the heat out of edges of the disc. That's the design of the internal vanes. Cooler air over the outside surfaces of the disc is very ineffective. The rest of the ducting material is actually a dust and dirt shield, to keep road crud off the rotor.
The best thing to do is make sure as much cool air as possible is making it into the center of the brake disc. Look at how a NASCAR brake dust is designed. It only covers the center of the disc; and it covers it very closely. There's nothing over the braking surface.
05-05-2020, 07:14 PM
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