Just came in from the shed at 10pm on a work night, plodding along assembling, cleaning, taking things apart again because I put them together in the wrong order...it's kind of like going back to where you grew up, you think you remember how things went but for some reason time has distorted them, it's starting to come together though. It's so much more apparent now that the car was really never "finished", and it probably won't ever really be so either. It's kind of hard to finish something when you don't know what it is. When the Reverend and I started this thing we thought it would be pretty cool to go 150mph and our idea of how long it would take and how much it would cost were probably as far off the mark as what we thought the car would be. In the end it is really just a great big go-kart, the possibilities were endless but in a twist of fate we decided that we make it fit inside the first tank we found, a week after we thought it would be a great idea to build one. That was nine years ago now, but it seems like a lifetime.
I've watched other builds lately and seen the ebb and flow of enthusiasm, money and know-how as the owner/builders go through the same agony of indecision and opportunity that we did. Like the half cut sports fan it's easy to be an expert from the sideline, but it's the guy there under the pump, in the spot-light who is the one who has to make the decision, make the call on how he'll play the shot and strangely it's every extra piece of advice that seems to make the decision harder. I got told that when our car was just a drawing by another tank builder who looked at me in bewilderment, when he told me that it was an important moment. Because when I heard that I knew this was something I was going to love.
As I was finishing up tonight I remembered that the car had been sitting on the truck ready to leave when we heard the meet was cancelled in 2010. We'd built a new motor after I totalled the 2009 motor at around 193mph, a speed it did twice but flatly refused to exceed. As the car sat on the truck we knew it had nearly 50% more power but we also knew it had a valve train issue that stopped the motor abruptly at 6450rpm and the gearing was the same, the car would accellerate more quickly than it had the year before but it wouldn't go any faster than it had in 2009, that's just plain physics.
We'd first run the car in October 2007 at Mangalore airfield, it had been a mad rush to get the car ready when the meet was convened with three weeks notice. The car had been driven ten feet along the driveway at this point. We ran around a hundered miles per hour. A few things were apparent...the gearshift was almost un-useable, the seat was probably dangerous, the brakes were purely decorative, the firewall would need to be sealed pproperly, the cab needed positive pressure and if we were ever going to drive the car again it had to be on track with a very very fine surface tolerance, I particularly was fairly badly beaten by the car getting airborne and landing heavily, no suspension and less than 2 inches of ground clearance make for a sensitive ride.Other than that we were thrilled to bits, then we had to change things.
Ever since then there has never really been a static point where we thought , "yep, that's it". Constant changes to the metalwork, more holes drilled here and there, rushed solutions to some apparent problem, change or perceived shortcoming...the initial frame paint job in 2007 had been brushed over two or three times , it was burned, dirty, greasy, it was a mess.
When the meet was cancelled in 2010 we already had the makings of a good motor and we knew how it could be a whole lot better, we also had the 10 bolt Torsen centred diff with a swathe of ratios that Sparky had marshalled for us, it was time to bite the bullet.I blew the car to bits and cut the peices we needed to make some big changes, there wasn't any going back, then I had it all blasted.
As I walked out of the shed tonight I thought to myself ..." man, I'm glad we didn't go that year". The car was compromised, it looked shitty and there were reasons that we should have stayed at home but we're too mad,and too proud. Now we have the ten bolt, the motor is being sorted and the car underneath the skin looks a whole lot more business like than it ever has before.Neater,better functioning, safer. That's not to say it is easy, financially it hurts as much or more than ever before, just like my life. I've made a lot of friends doing this yet sometimes I've looked at that car and thought, " am I done?"...tonight I left the shed and I was thinking "no dude, this is stronger than ever before". If anyone has been wondering....don't worry ya little heads.
Topic: Australian Belly Tank (Read 3185996 times)