36 horse progress

Its been a fair while since I've had the time to sit down and put a progress report together, in fact the last post I made was back in January. This is mostly due to being flat out working on the car getting it ready for Speedweek. Well Speedweek has come and gone and despite putting in the hard yards in I did not get to compete. I had set myself the goal of getting everything together with engine in and running by no later than the end of February. I figured that this way I would still be able to do some tuning and get out to the lake with a relatively good chance of making it through the week with no major dramas. Unfortunately,  I did not get it together by the deadline. I was very close and could have pushed to get it done but this was the exact situation I sought to avoid when I set myself the February deadline. There's nothing like a rushed build to promote silly mistakes and expensive failures.

So as the deadline arrived I simply decided to close up the garage and forget about the build for a while. I also decided not to travel out to the lake this year and instead take the week off with my family as I had pretty much neglected them whilst being stuck out in the garage for the past six months. Not traveling to the lake turned out to be a good thing as it sounds like it was not such a good year this year. Conditions were less than optimal for most of the week, there was a major accident which closed the track for a whole day and several of the other teams had less than successful campaigns. From what I heard there was only one day where conditions were good. So 2015 was not the year for the ovals debut and whilst I was a little disappointed I've convinced myself that not attending was probably for the best.

So now that I've taken a bit of a break from the build to tend to things like house painting and building some more Joe Blow supercharger kits up the past few weeks I've been getting back into finishing off the engine.

Progress though February had been very good and was spent getting the engine together. This involved making up custom EFI manifolds for the Okrasa heads...

Machining the case...

Machining pistons

Making trigger wheels

And pop-off valves

Modifying pushrod tubes

Trial fitting everything to ensure that it all fits

Making up the induction system

And that's where I was at the end of February. Very close as you can see but still too much to do to risk giving it one last push.

There was also a bunch of other stuff that I did such as cutting down the fuel tank so that it fitted under the bonnet

Including making up a holding strap for the tank

And making up a few repair patches here and there

There's probably a bunch of stuff that I forgot about but you can view it all over in the build gallery.

Next up is to get the engine finished off then stripped and cleaned ready for final assembly and installation. Then I can move on to getting the EFI system wired up and get the beast fired up. I'm hoping to get some dyno time on a friends engine dyno here in SA which will allow me to work through the tune myself rather than have to rely on the dyno operator. If this comes of it's probably the part of the build I'm looking forwards to the most. Fingers crossed.