Chronicles of a Lemons Daytona (Page 5 of 9)

And the engine tries to make itself into a cutaway drawing on it's own, too!

so i went to build the engine tonight. and turns out the guy that turned the crank is a god damn moron. he told me he turned it 0.01", so order one size over bearings all around. I install the first piston, and what do you know, it wiggles on the crank. Measure the journals, and yup, 0.02" undersize. the moron turned the mains one size and the rods two. I'm beyond pissed off. Have to hope NAPA can get me bearings tomorrow, otherwise i'm overnighting them from someone.

whole weekend is now screwed. This shop came highly recommended from a few people too (and no, they were not related to old doges, they were friends from a local car forum). I will never go back to them.

this screw up was done by precision balance and machine in hudson.

where's the shop in nashua you go to? I'd be happy to check out a new shop when i build one of the spare engines this summer.

I'm hoping NAPA can grab bearings from a warehouse tomorrow. otherwise i'm overnighting bearings from one of the sites i commonly use.

I would have just insisted the place turning the crank get me the bearings, or at the very least waited until I had it back and miced out. Maybe the rod journals wouldn't clean up at .01 under?

machine shop is ordering me the right bearings. Will be in tomorrow morning. I'm beyond angry with them. I basically had to flat out ask that he pay for the bearings. He offered zero compensation for the screw up. I will not return to him for further work, and will actively steer people somewhere else. I'm angry about 3 things.
1) the screw up.
2) his statement of "I usually always put a mic on cranks when they come back from being ground. I just didn't this time". which tells me he wasn't interested in doing my work correctly
3) offering nothing to make it right other than a "sorry".

Engine will go in Wednesday night. I'll spend Thursday going over the car for other issues. Lets pray this race goes well.

thanks. I've had a few people suggest other shops for the future. I'll add these guys to the list to check out for next time.

I am apparently the most unlucky person in the world when it comes to nails.........

In my personal vehicle i've picked up 4 nails in the past 6 months. the last one required replacing all 4 tires because it was close to the sidewall and i drive a WRX which demands matched tires....

Now the Lemons tie in. At Monticello our front left started leaking mid day, pretty badly. I dropped it off this week finally to get looked at hoping it was just a bead that got knocked loose. NOPE. We somehow managed, on a race track, to pick up a NAIL, too close to the sidewall to fix.............

I'll have to take a picture when i pick the tire up tonight.

edit: I called sullivan tire back, and they changed their story to "there is a hole with nothing in it. we assumed it was a nail." I didn't correct them. They're giving me $120 towards a new tire. I must have bought road hazard with these originally and forgot about it.

I feel better now that it was just random debris and not a nail.

We lost a tire on track at Monticello to a small puncture that was an empty hole by the time we got it off of the car, happened on the back straight just after the Peugeot grenaded it's motor...you may have hit some similar debris.   Fortunately, the tire in question was already just about done, and we had a spare.

Ahhh... That's where my nail went.  I knew it was rolling around the paddock somewhere.

I have a photo somewhere of a Lemons car with a 10mm wrench sticking out of the sidewall. Picked it up somewhere on the track.

I managed to leave a 17mm hanging from the caliper for the second half of Loudon Annoying last spring. Found it when I dragged the car into the garage to start prepping for Hooptiefest. Now the wrench has a nice thin profile!

I have one, somewhere. A spare one came in one of the many buckets of charger parts. I just haven't had the time to go digging for it and swap it out. Plus, the longer i leave the normal AC bracket on, the more i want to throw a Rotrex on it and twin charge my way to engine failure.