PART 1: Last week has been insane, last 48 hours have been more insane. This whole month has been one of the hardest pushes I've done on anything and ended in a way to make it certainly memorable.
I don't have many photos from the past week, but I'll post what I do have. Starting with a steering wheel extension. The steering wheel placement has always been slightly awful. It's fine for crawling but not setup for good twitchy control or extended comfort--- let alone harnessed in which is a completely different animal to normal wheeling. I machined a 4" extension out of delrin (since it was the only material with a large enough diameter I had laying around) to push the disconnect and steering wheel apart. Kind of funky on the one hand and some getting used to to pop the wheel on and off, but is also nice since it keeps the steering column from protruding out extremely far. The 4" extension is a huge difference, I used to be conscious of the steering wheel position driving and now don't even think about it and can react a lot faster and easier with more range of motion.
Other things on the list but low priority that I want to change for comfort is adjust the brake pedal, and put a jog in the transfer case shifters to bring them a bit closer so I don't have to stretch for them.
I think I had mentioned in the last post that the handling has degraded. I had adjusted the front axle position so it was centered relative to the nose so that the bump stops hit the axle at the same spot from center. This then jacked up the alignment, and was very noticable driving that the axles weren't parallel. I have a friend that runs an alignment shop in town so was able to get on his alignment rack, and the night before did my best to align everything. The rear end still seemed fine and was pretty square with the chassis, though the front was not the same---which is good, the rear is extremely hard to adjust the alignment where as the front requires a crescent wrench and that's it.
On the rack it turned out my tape measure alignment was pretty close, and he was able to show me the lateral misalignment of the axles, the thrust angle, all the toe specs, the whole 9 yards. We adjusted the front end a bit to get the two axles parallel to each other and then adjusted the front end toe. Everything except caster on one side is in the green as far as a conventional F350 alignment is concerned. The rear housing is bent front to back a bit, I think it was like 0.75deg of total toe between the rear wheels. But now I know the alignment of everything is at a good an as close to perfect baseline as possible. I will probably adjust the toe and caster and see how I like it, but I know where the reset point is which is great.
That afternoon I then had a remote tuning session with a guy named Andrew from the Holley forums, I think his website and contact info is Dr. EFI. After we got the engine running correctly, the tune was off more than I would've liked with the engine now running lean at times. I figured with the race coming up, the engine configuration now changed, and my inherent lack of knowledge about using the Holley, that it'd be easier to have a professional do it.
We had a few phone calls, a couple drives, and he tweaked just about everything and now the engine is running very good. I also had the supercharger bypass valve plumbed wrong and didn't have the fuel pressure regulator hooked up to the supercharger so he had me do that and it runs great now! I haven't put a lot of miles on it, but it's pretty nasty for what it is and I can't wait to drive it more!
I did do one little test drive though, and half way through pulled the front hub lock outs to test the vibration issues I had been having. Lol and behold that fixed it! And putting the front drive line into drive made the vibration happen again.
There was a nut on one of the carrier bearing u joints that had backed out a little, so I'm thinking that may have been the issue. But since fixing that I didn't drive it again to see if that really was the issue.
The next few days was a flurry of activity with not many photos. The fire suppression mounting was a bit of a bitch, I decided to only mount one of the two tanks (one is actually meant for suppression, the other is an extinguisher that CAN be setup for suppression but the extinguishers huge handle makes packaging it a lot harder). I mounted the tank in the rear, above the wishbone. The tanks come with these kind of derpy straps that are like 0.75" wide and .030" thick, and I've had plenty of extinguishers fall due to the hose clamps breaking so just relying on those for a tank that weighs 20lbs put me on edge. My maybe janky solution to this was to make some bulkheads essentially that the tank loosely slides into, and then the two straps hold it tight. In the event a strap failed, the tank can't go anywhere and you'd need both straps to fail and even then at worst the tank will just slide back and forth a bit. With the tools, time, and space constraints I had this seemed like the best solution.
I'm hoping the huge extinguisher I could swap out the head on it for the suppression head, but worst case I'll buy a second suppression tank and mount it the same way on the driver's side. The coolant line on this side will have to get tweaked, it's fine and works but not the most elegant routing needless to say.
Because I was only mounting one suppression system, I decided it'd all be dedicated to the cockpit. I mounted the automatic heat bulb on the dash. One line runs from the tank to the bulb, kind of along the passenger seat. From the bulb it Y's off along both of the intrusion bars up to a four nozzle spray setup right at the center tube junction of the windshield bars.
I've never done anything with fire suppression before, so I figured all of this on the fly and is why it's not very invisibly integrated. I don't know how many rigs I've seen with suppression, but either they don't have it or it's well hidden! How I set it up I tried to keep it as snag free as possible. There is a nozzle pointed towards the lap and then one to the foot well on both sides. The automatic heat bulb and the fittings that came in the kit aren't very conducive to nice routing though. Like I'd prefer one line off the heat bulb going to a four way split, instead I have to use both lines off the bulb going to essentially the same location and then two T fittings. Again, not the sexiest but it'll do for now. The other suppression system I'll have dedicated to the engine bay and transmission which is what the guys at the race event recommended. The manual activation handle is mounted next to the kill switch so very easy for both occupants to access, and is setup for the second systems handle too.
Additionally, I have two 4lb traditional extinguishers mounted off the C pillars on the outside of the vehicle just above the fuel cell. In between the occupants on the roof there is a 5lb extinguisher with the same foaming product that the suppression system uses. Currently there is 23lbs of fire extinguishing product on the vehicle, with an additional 10lb suppression system coming soon. All of the small extinguishers are on pin pull quick release mounts that I made.
At this point there's no photos. I made a lowrance mount that can swing in and out for the codriver and wired that in. I'm running a gen 2 HDS 12" I got off
eBay for less than a new 7" unit. The guy that was gonna codrive for me did all the body work and made a hood. We pinned the seat belt buckles, bolted the seats in properly, routed some vent lines, I braced the rear bump stops and added fuel cell bracing, and built a spare tire carrier, lots of shit got pumped out the night before we drove to the race. No pictures of any of it, but we wrapped up at 3am and I went back out at 630am to wrench a bit more and this is the sexy thing that drove out of the shop that morning!
Three weeks of going ham and it turned out great! Course most of the work you can't see, that body really elevates it from a trail buggy to looking pretty racecar like! I think the raw aluminum is sweet too!
