General Maintenance

Well we finally got a chance to spend some time with the big wagon last weekend. We knew that we had lost reverse gears after the last race but didn't know until last Saturday that all the gears were now nonexistent. So we muscled Demonaco into the shop and began unfastening the power train. We made our front clip easy to remove when we stripped the car out years ago, so it wasn't much trouble to have the whole motor and trans combo out inside of an hour. The main bearings were showing copper so we decided to order up a full set of main and rod bearings for some cheap insurance. The crank looked to be in excellent shape so we'll leave that alone for now. It hasn't been that long since the top end has been apart which means that the heads don't have to be removed. A new mini starter will be added since the old one was complaining of stress and heat and we'll add a starter saver to prolong it's life. Besides that, we'll probably go through the carb and just bolt everything back together.

The transmission is another story altogether. Things went horribly wrong in the mystical world of our automatic gear box. Parts welded themselves to each other and mushroomed shafts making it nearly impossible to even disassemble. Alas, Chris created some make-shift tools to accompany his massive slide hammer to seriously persuade otherwise precision parts to come unglued. Hard parts will be replaced from parts trannys in our inventory and new clutches and steels will come from our new kit.
There is still lots of snow on the ground here but race season is nearly upon us and we don't need to be caught with our pants down (again) on the Friday before race day with an ill performing machine. It pays to be organized and plan ahead for the next catastrophe because this is drag racing and things will break, it's just a matter of when.

Polara Pat