Speedweek 2016 is at the end of February which is not really too far away. Whilst there's not too much to do on the Oval there's still heaps when I take into account how little time I actually get to concentrate on one project. In addition to Speedweek it looks like the SATA are putting together a speed trial at Waikerie. This will be open to SATA members and SATA / SCTA compatible cars and bikes. This is great news and is exactly what I was hoping for except that the meet is to be held on November 18th which leaves just a shade over a month to get everything together. Now of course I'm not going to kid myself that I can make it happen, but if I put another engine in that I happen to have already built and laying around the garage I recon I might be in with a chance of at least doing some shakedown testing on the car itself.
So having gained a little newfound inspiration I've actually done a few things on the engine. The first thing I did was to finally bolt the throttle body on to the supercharger. Previously I had made an adaptor plate but had not drilled and tapped the mountings for it. This was a small job that didn't take too long to do and takes me one step closer to getting the induction side of the engine set up.
I also ordered and picked up some drive pulleys for the crank and blower. These are heavy duty jobbies that run a 25mm belt. There's no chance of these slipping. The pulleys are supplied pilot drilled which means that they are un-machined and so you can modify then to fit your application so tonight a spent some time turning the small pulley to fit the supercharger.
I also picked up a second set which I will install on the lowlight as a bit of an R&D experiment. This is the pre-cursor to setting up the EFI version of the supercharger kit that I sell. Once I am happy with everything I will look to get the new design drafted up and manufactured.
At the moment I'm not 100% how I am going to do the crank pulley, a lot depends on the cooling setup that I end up with. My initial thoughts are to use a standard vee belt to drive the cooling and the toothed belt to drive the supercharger only. I've got a standard alloy style vee belt pulley on order so when it arrives I will look to machine the two pulley so that I can bolt them together to form one single pulley. I may even make a hub for these to fit on. Early days yet.
The toothed crank pulley is slightly larger than the stock pulley, this was so that I could get the ratios that I needed without having to run the blower pulley too small. The good thing with using off of the shelf stuff is that I can buy the blower pulley in a variety of different sizes which means that I can easily dial the boost in once the engine is up and running.