[Land-speed] Speedweek tips and thoughts...

Tom Bryant saltracer at awwwsome.com
Mon Aug 20 13:45:26 MDT 2007


Keith and all,

Our problems at Speedweek were brain fade! As you know, we had been fighting
a fuel delivery problem for two years. I fixed the problem by installing a
Kinsler Vapor Separator System. It seemed to work well at the Lakes in May,
so I went to the salt expecting all to be well with the fuel system.

We had multiple problems...first a plugged nozzle attributed to a new hose I
made for the system at the barrel valve. After cleaning "all" the nozzles to
be safe, I thought now we had it whipped. It was better on eight cylinders,
but still running in the low 230s. After a couple of runs, we decided to run
a leakage test on the cylinders. We found the head gasket leaking between #3
& #5 cylinders. We pulled the head and replaced the gasket. Now we were
certain that it would run in the high 140s. Wrong again! A run at 135, still
not pulling well in high gear and we didn't have the computer turned on to
gather info.

We had hooked up a pressure sensor on the Vapor Cannister to see just what
was happening there and moved our fuel pressure monitoring to the barrel
valve side of the compensator valve (a part of the vapor system that is
supposed to compensate for the pressure added to the suction of the Injector
Pump). Our ninth run, we did have the computer on and set. We got some very
useful info, but unfortunately, with all the concentration on performance
problems I neglected to change the oil soon enough which ended up spinning a
bearing. The chain reaction cost me a crankshaft two rods and pistons a
camshaft and two lifters, timing gear set and a badly bruised block. BTW
what does the listers have to say about oil? I have been running Pennzoil
20W/50W for several years. I heard from a couple of sources before this
mishap that Pennzoil doesn't like alky. Any comments?

More later.

Tom, Redding CA - #216 D/FCC

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