Australian Belly Tank

[Reverend Hedgash]

er... which rumour would that be exactly... and who freakin' told you???

[wobblywalrus]

Rev and Dr, this is something really Mickey Mouse that I do to figure out if sensors are working.  I hesitate to post it, but here goes.

The signals that most sensors send is to the main computer are simple, such as a change in resistance.  Looking in the manual, or by measuring a known good part, I figure out the signals when the sensor says "on" and "off."  Then I go to the electronics store and I buy enough parts to make fake sensors that say to the computer "on" and "off."  I disconnect the real sensor and I plug the fakes into the system, one at a time, and I drive or dyno the vehicle.  Some deductive reasoning tells me what I need to know.

Example.  The Triumph has a throttle position sensor on the standard carbs.  Does omitting the throttle sensor when I install new carbs affect the spark advance curve?

The standard carbs have an analog potentiometer (variable resistor) with approx 4.42 Kohms and 3.96 Kohms resistance at closed throttle between the blue and yellow and black and yellow wires, respectively.  I make a fake sensor out of some resistors with close to this resistance.  I plug it in to the ignition system.  Then I check the spark advance with a light.

Then I make another fake sensor with the different resistances that model full throttle.  This is approx 1.38 Kohms and 3.96 Kohms between the blue and yellow and black and yellow wires.  I check the timing again.  It is different.  This answers my question.  The throttle position sensor does affect ignition timing.  I buy racing carbs with the throttle sensor.  They cost more but I figure that they are worth it.

Maybe fabricating a fake sensor modeling "no knock" and making a dyno run, and making another fake sensor modeling "knock" and performing another dyno run, will tell you what you need to know.     

[grumm441]

Yep I heard that rumour too
But I thought it was just a rumour
The good news is , Leigh Farrell has my 750GT engine in bits and it doesn't need a gearbox or bevel gears
G

[hitz]

My old Tec II turns the knock sensor off at 4500 rpms ( that's what it says in the book). You can also program it off. Can't you just disconnect it??

2009 speed week I couldn't get the Saturn over 5100 rpm with the stock engine in it. Oil aeration.

2010 speed week  I brought it to speed week with new cams, springs, head ports cleaned up, "improved" shift linkage and a dry sump system installed. Worked on it 5 days on the trailer but couldn't get the computer to talk to the Tec II. Finally decided to try to run it with the old program (very rich)
so unloaded it to run run it but found out it only had two speeds available in my gear box.

 Reloaded it and went home. I don't think you need any advice from this quarter.

Good luck, Harvey

[wobblywalrus]

One thing I learned with the Triumph throttle position sensor is that the ignition goes into a retarded default setting if I disconnect the thing.  That is something to check if you remove the anti knock sensor.

[Dr Goggles]

see, what I love the most about this place is the humility.......it's rare to hear someone boasting here because it's a race to the bottom with people bragging about the f***-ups they've made..

You don't hear "you'd be an idiot if you did that...."

You hear, "don't do that, because this is what happened to me when I did it..."

Harv, I have a sense of impending doom....we have been very lucky so far....and this is Hedgash and Goggles not Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.....but I suspect you got your bad luck in the same proportion as we will....but you got it early, we'll get it, in time.

Wobbles, you are the guy lying on his back pointing out the knot in the rope that is fouling the guillotine blade.....BTW  I'd hardly call your sensor checking method MM...that's just nice solid diagnostics, a logical approach.

Rev, I keep hearing it.

Colonel he might finish that motor before you're 80.

[grumm441]

Harv, I have a sense of impending doom....we have been very lucky so far....and this is Hedgash and Goggles not Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.....but I suspect you got your bad luck in the same proportion as we will....but you got it early, we'll get it, in time.

Colonel he might finish that motor before you're 80.

good thing you're not Rosencrantz or Guildenstern as their land speed career was very short

As for finishing it before I'm 80. There is still machine work to be done. Cases have to be bored and I have to recess a gearbox bearing due to the fine quality of early Ducati castings ( number 193)
Its only been out of the bike since 1998. One bloke took so long to do nothing the Leigh had to go to NSW to get my bits back
In fact I was thinking of borrowing Floydjer's spray gun at one stage
G

[Dr Goggles]

Got the cam for the new build the other day...I can see why they can't do this grind on a stock cam....it's big and fat......the valves don't get much time sitting around doing nothing........

I've made a start on the bits and pieces I'll need to make the conversion from the series one to series two cams in our series one block.....I've made a little jig that will help me keep the cam retaining plate centred while I mark where the holes will need to be drilled.

more soon......

[adamadam]

Nice article in the new Street Machine Hot Rod magazine, Congratulations!

[Dr Goggles]

Nice article in the new Street Machine Hot Rod magazine, Congratulations!

Thanks Adam, check the writing credit...it's going on the racing budget......

[grumm441]

Nice article in the new Street Machine Hot Rod magazine, Congratulations!

Yep
Showed it to my Mum
Mum Said " so did you go to the salt that year?"
G

[Dr Goggles]

Yep
Showed it to my Mum
Mum Said " so did you go to the salt that year?"
G

So what , are you cracking the sads because you didn't get your moosh in it?................

for our US readers here is the story from the magazine article , as it would be improper to reproduce the article as published I have made some small alterations by removing Simon's photographs and in an effort to put things right I have included a picture of the Colonel.

It was October 2003 , we were outside the Tennis Centre in Melbourne after seeing Monster Trucks and the Reverend was asking me what I’d been up to…he’s a film maker so I was telling him my idea for a film about caravan demolition derby…he was looking at me kind of funny, like “ are you alright mate?....then he said..”um, anything else?”…..”Well, I saw this article in a mag, it seems they do salt lake racing here, at some lake in South Aus…”
 
The next day he rang me , he’d been searching on the net….”
 Have you seen those bellytanks?”….
“Yeah, they’re the coolest things with wheels”
“Do you reckon you could build one ?”
for some reason, straight off the bat I said......
“yeah”…
 
I was a back yarder, a self taught welder and painter with a line in 60’s and 70’s Holdens, a guitarist , singer and songwriter…not a mechanic, engineer or Hot Rod builder……. He was an architect , a filmmaker and animator who lived in a truck . We knew almost nothing but we liked what we saw and we wanted to be part of it.

I don’t have enough space in this article, to be honest there isn’t enough space in this magazine even, to tell the whole story of how we built our bellytank. Two guys who think they can do anything can get themselves into a fair bit of trouble , if those two guys are too stubborn to give up when they realize how overwhelmingly huge a pickle they’ve got themselves into then it’s going to make for a good read at least.

Salt lakes are huge flat expanses that are perfect places to run things with wheels at high speed , it’s been a regular thing at Bonneville USA since 1948. Since 1990 a club called the Dry Lake Racers of Australia has organized and run Speedweek at Lake Gairdner in outback South Australia, we first went in March 2004 and it just blew our minds. The cars, the bikes , the people and the scenery just reinforced the feeling that we’d bought a ticket on a ride we weren’t going to regret.

Obsessively we went about learning the history of dry lake racing, and specifically bellytanks from Bill Burke’s very first tanks in 1946 right to the current day record holders. We studied aerodynamics  and set about modeling a real race car around the 1953 Canberra jet bomber tank* that we bought from Rod Hadfield. We wanted to build a tank that echoed the early efforts but we didn’t want a copy, besides, the rules now demand an extensive roll cage and there were other tweeks and style cues that we felt we could make. We wanted to keep the tank in its original dimensions because we felt it was perfect ….it just needed wheels and a motor.

We measured everything , a million times. Deciding to keep the tank as it was built made for a seriously difficult job of fitting what we needed, and wanted ,into it…we took the major components of a car, and then took all the space out from between them. If there was anything we could call an advantage it was that we weren’t coming from one type of racing. Landspeed racing has it’s own specific demands and one thing we have noticed is how stubbornly people cling to what they know, we studied landspeed racing and built for it, and nothing else.

We decided to go without suspension, it made for simplicity but it also meant we had less stuff “hanging out in the wind”…..and it meant we could fix our ride height. We passed on a V8 because the V6 was short , but it also fitted into E capacity class for motors between 3.01 and 4.3litres, our first year out we ran 160mph( 260km/h) with a motor from a VP Commodore that had run 330,000km without a rebuild. It proved that the design we had built had great aerodynamics.

We went with a V6 because they are the shortest motors, we shortened an Aussie 4 speed by removing reverse and the extension housing, we made a tailshaft with an inch of tube .We built the entire frame and every single component except the front axle in my single car garage with a drill press, and angle grinder, oxy , a mig and a bunch of other mongrelized home made items begged borrowed or filched from mates.

We made our own twin throttle body manifold , our own headers and exhaust , I made the steering wheel, the gearshift, oh that’s right I already told you….we made everything. Why?...because there is no other car like this one, there are things that look sort of like it , but none the same. Time after time we would get a part, modify it , chop it , change it and then make it again, and sometimes again. I’m not too proud to say we wrecked a heap of stuff along the way. Jack Dolan from San Diego is a great character well known in the US landspeed racing game and is responsible for a huge number of record setting cars and bikes, we got to know Jack through the US landspeed website www.landracing.com/forum , Jack was a great help and encouragement to us. Once when I was explaining the process of wrecking things to finally get to making the right part he said “ yeah , sometimes I see someone looking at a part on a car of mine and I say to them “oh, we’ve only got that one on there until the “real” parts get back from the polishers”, that sums up a lot of our car…..it is functional, not built for show.

Early in the trip we collected an old mate of mine the Colonel who now proudly announces to anyone who cares to ask, “they make stuff, I make it work”, and he’s right. Any team needs forwards and backs, talls and smalls…we three, as they say are men cut from different cloth but together we had just the right mixture of knowledge, interests and skills to drag this machine out of  our imagination and onto the salt. The Reverend is an artist, a genius with shape and design, me ? well I’ve always been prone to biting off more than I can chew and yesterday isn’t soon enough , the Colonel knows how everything works and has the necessary cynicism to keep the Reverend and my feet on the ground… Without me it never would have got finished , without the Reverend it would have been ugly as sin and without the Colonel it just wouldn’t have worked.

The first time we ran the car was at Mangalore airfield in central Victoria in October 2007, we did about 100mph and worked out that a few things we’d done would need to be rethought, but that generally we were on the right track. The salt was cancelled due to rain in 2008 but in 2009 we took the car to Lake Gairdner for the first time, it had taken 5 times longer and cost 5 times as much as we’d thought it would but it was worth every cent, every blue, every lonely “have I stuffed-up?” thought and every burn, cut and blackened nail that we’d copped in the process. By the end of the week the Rev and I both had qualified at 125 and 150mph and the cars top speed was 160.145mph. For Speedweek 2010 we bought an ex-turbo motor and got a “burn-out” chip and a hotter cam , the tank , now known as the Spirit of Sunshine or the Jarman-Stewart Bellytank ran 193.051 before we had an oil leak and packed her up for the week.

 As we speak we are collecting the parts for a proper crack in 2011, stage three heads , a solid valve train and a whopping cam we hope will push the car into the 220’s with our current 2.77:1 diff. We have a new diff on the way from the States which will allow us a choice of final drives of 2.56 , 2.41 and 2.28:1 .Beyond that we have a 3litre destroked version in the wings, a blower and in the mists of the crystal ball I think I smell methanol.

Thank Yous

We have to thank the Hadfields, Norm Hardinge, Wayne Mumford, Vaughn, Pete Quick , all the DLRA volunteers, everyone at www.landracing.com especially Jack D and Bill Smith,Chris Conrad , Greg and the club website at www.dlra.org.au/forum but most importantly we have to thank our families and anyone else who encouraged us and thought for some weird reason that what we were doing was important, we love yous all.

Parts List

VN series one V6 ,Wade cam, ACL slugs, 9.6:1 comp, ported heads, twin throttle bodies
M21 4speed gearbox, HD clutch and billet flywheel.
Borg Warner 2.77 LSD drum brake rear end
EH Holden stub axles and steering arms.
VW Kombi steering box.
Custom made straight tube axle with 30degrees of castor.
’36 Ford wishbone, Commodore panhards for rear radius rods
43mm Mild steel tube frame and cage.
1953 Canberra bomber wing tank( body)
Sabre-jet wing-tank( cowl)
AU Falcon wheel centers
Kombi rims.
28x4.5inch Goodyear 300mph Landspeed tires
Cruciform parachute
15kg extinguishant
60 litres of coolant
10 litres of fuel.



and here's a pic of the new cam up against a stock one....difficult to see the difference


In other news here the StKilda Saints drew with the Collingwood Magpies in the Australian Football League Grand Final , it was a belter of a game and will be replayed next week.....

[racergeo]

  Aussie rules football. They beat the buggery out of each other and no helmets.

[Milwaukee Midget]

. . . and here's a pic of the new cam up against a stock one....difficult to see the difference

That's not a cam - that's an "On-Off" switch. 

 

[johnneilson]

. . . and here's a pic of the new cam up against a stock one....difficult to see the difference

That's not a cam - that's an "On-Off" switch. 

 

Now thats a camshaft..............when the lobe is just .005 smaller than the bearing journal.