30 Jul All The Trimmings
Today, progress is being made on several fronts over in fabrication, so let’s check them out!
We’ll start with the LS-swapped WRX. After removing the engine at the end of last week, we set about cleaning up the motor. We removed the harness and went to town on the throttle body and a few other places, cleaning up as much carbon as we could. With the correct oil pan baffles received, we went about putting the motor back together before shoehorning ‘er back into place. While the motor was out, we bolted the headers to the appropriate spaces to give you a better idea of the routing we had to fabricate to make this setup work with the WRX body.
A few more trimmings have been added to the vehicle, as well. While putting the rear end in, we swapped the hubs and brakes from an STi onto the rear of the WRX. To complement the rear brakes, the owner provided us with some serious stopping power up front, courtesy of a Wilwood big brake kit. The wheels are currently on the car, as it’s resting on the ground, and with the jet-black rotors, we weren’t able to capture much of a picture. Once the wheels are back off, though, we’ll snap this setup in all its BBK glory.
We also received the fuel cell, which will be installed in place of the spare tire in the trunk.
Over the weekend, we also did a little more two-wheeled work, this time on a customer’s minibike. He wanted to clean it up a bit, fix the lack of a rear brake (which made for a seriously harrowing test drive), and service the motor a bit. Nothing too crazy, but we thought this picture of a very lonely Tom would be a fitting inclusion in today’s blog post.
Finally, we move to the mighty 190E Cosworth, which is the true reasoning behind the use of trimmings in today’s title. The crank scraper that was sent to us was more of a “generic fit” crank scraper, despite it being described in a much different manner. No matter, though, as we’re always up for a bit of modification. Both the metal and vinyl components of the scraper needed to be trimmed to fit the 190’s current crankshaft, so that’s what we did. We started with the metal part of the scraper, which went off without a hitch.
From there, we set about marking the necessary trimming position on the vinyl portion of the scraper, and slowly went to town with nothing but a razor blade and good ol’ fashioned elbow grease. Each time we wanted to check the progress, we would bolt it back into the block and manually rotate the crank to make sure it contacts in exactly the correct position. After quite a few rounds of this, we had it exactly where it needed to be. Now it’s a matter of bolting most of the engine back together, as we had to take off a couple other components to access this area, and we wanted to change some gaskets, as well.
All in all, a strong start to the week. See you tomorrow!
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