The easy stuff….

Tonight, our task list included:

1. Change the oil
2. Bleed brake and clutch fluid
3. Flush coolant
4. Make new headrest
5. Remove, clean, repaint rear trailing arms on the suspension
6. Drink beer
7. Reseal the end cover and bearing carrier on the gearbox (bad seal job the last, and first time, we did it)

Well, I think our task list included more than this, but this is what we actually got done. We were both hoping for an easy night. However, this is never the case.

Two things learned this evening:

There’s no manual for race cars – So very easy questions for most cars, likeHow much oil does it need, end up being mild challenges for us… So, just fill it up, run it, and see how much more you can pour in. For those wanting to write a manual for us, it was 7 quarts of oil to make it to our feel-good mark – take note.

No job is simple on race cars - “simply” bleeding the brakes turned into an hour and a trip to Autozone. The right-front brake bleeder screw is 1/4″, which means its a really tiny wrench, with lots of possibility to round it right off. Well, someone (not us!) had done this prior (which, also means the brake fluid in there was probably 15 years old) so we ended up using the jaws of life to extract the little guy, which renders it useless. Luckily, the Autozone up the road had them in stock. I bought 3, just in case. And, in true karma fashion, if you buy spares in anticipation others will break, they won’t. Good thing they were $3.

The positive side of the evening included the coolant flush, which was painless and 10 minutes, and Don making the new headrest plate. During our SCCA tech inspection, the inspector wouldn’t pass us because the headrest was .5 square inches too small. Yeah, like .5 square inches is going to matter. That’s why I wear a helmet, right?

The trailing arms were relatively painless, too. Although I think Don has carpal-tunnel from scraping the old spray-paint job off. They look nice. They don’t look so bent when they’re cleaned up.

Resealing the Hewland was easier than before. This time, it only took us two attempts at getting everything lined back up and spinning in the right direction. This required RTV’ing, letting the RTV get dry as we screwed around trying to stack gears, then removing all the RTV, re-RTV’ing, finding a broomstick (ok, an entire broom that Don wouldn’t cut up) to stack the gears on, then assembling everything properly. We’re getting good at this.

And, as usual, we succeeded in drinking beer. That part of the job never seems to take too long, cause too many problems, or require us to soak our hands in cancer-causing nasty oil.