build diary

April 22, 2006: Ahh, the Se7ens festival.
Turns out the festival is really a NASA race weekend with a Se7ens parking area. Fair enough, it made for some very interesting scenery running around - two Porsche Carrera GTs, for example - and a real track bias amongst participants. I was given a hearty welcome by the organisers and unloaded the car. Shortly after, Mark Rivera showed up with his heroic build that went from daily driver Miata to running Locost in about 4 months. He quickly set to work installing seats, side panels, fenders and a number of other pieces that some consider important to a functional car. Since I knew his car should be significantly faster than mine, I decided to emphasise my finished state by polishing. And polishing. And polishing. Mark suggested that perhaps I should spend some time ensuring the car was running well and I scoffed. After all, it's a Miata engine and it was running beautifully at home.

Chris Fiaccone showed up shortly after with his car. While he hasn't been quite as crazed as Mark over the last few months, he did step up the pace to have his motorcycle engined car ready. And it is a stunner. Painted flat black with some really nice touches on the rear lights and around the exhaust, it looked like a mutant hot rod and showed some beautiful workmanship. Another car faster than mine, so I polished some more.

A fourth Locost showed up as well. Jon's car was built partially as a father/son project, partially to let Jon learn metalworking skills and partly for the Grassroots Motorsports $2005 challenge. It's amazing. Jon built the nose cone and all other body parts by hand. It looks more like a Lotus 6 than a Lotus 7, but the amount of work involved rocks everyone back on their feet. I knew that I couldn't out-polish this one so I stopped and decided to go for a spin.

As has become tradition, the Seven decided to foul up a couple of plugs to celebrate the arrival at a new track. It also was running very rich as I discovered on a short run. Why? Well, thanks to my super-cool throttle bodies it runs in a fairly narrow range of vacuum. And that range had just shifted drastically enough that my highway cruise at sea level was similar to my wide open throttle at altitude. I took off to do some tuning and try to settle the car. I also discovered that the synchronisation between the two pairs of throttle bodies had developed a problem and my idle was now about 1300 rpm if I was lucky. At home it's closer to 850. It's as if there is a big vacuum leak but I can't find it anywhere. I had to dump a lot of extra fuel in the idle zones in the computer and pull a huge amount out of the cruise. Hmm, maybe I did spend too long polishing.

Or maybe not. I started talking to Howard Cole from Kit Car magazine and he did a photo shoot of the car. Hopefully he'll give a review of the book and accompany it with some photos of the real thing.

So, other than the poor running and stinky black smoke in the pits, how was it? Well, the car was very well received. The most common comment was that it looks far better in person than in my website, and the color in particular blew people away. I guess my photos don't show that it's metallic. This is probably because the car is usually dirty and photographed in a dim garage. I've also been working to improve the presentation recently. As always, the Birkin/Caterham/Ultralite owners were extremely welcoming.

entry 1216 of 1439
<< | random | >>
back to entry listing