[misc_work] Still Nothing To Do With 205's...

[Rippthrough 98]

Some of you will have seen this from other forums, so if you have, tough

 

This might interest some here, it's a little different from the norm, so I'll give a quick rundown on the car and flesh it out later with more detail.

 

 

It's co-owned between me and my mate Ed, he originally built up the frame as a cheap car to compete in the local regional championships in, total build cost was around £3k originally, which is fairly cheap as there are some of our own Peugeot 206-based machines in the championships costing between £30-80k.

 

The build started before I even knew Ed a fair few years back, cost and time constraints had meant the car had been built around heavily modified VW torsion bar suspension bought in from the states (they use in on their Baja buggies so it's cheap and works reasonably well).

The engine was a bored and stroked 2.3 Beetle unit, on twin 45's, mild camshaft and various modifications to the rockers and heads.

 

The first time I met him, I gave it the once over and told him the dizzy would give him problems, it wasn't too healthy, and had been mucked about with to stop the engine pinging (given it was original designed as a 1.6 litre unit...)

 

Anyhow, a phonecall shortly after he attended his first event revealed the dizzy had exploded and scuppered any chance of a finish.

Which resulted in a fair amount of p*ss taking for the next week, and eventually ended up with me getting roped in for years of work on the bloody thing afterword, should have kept quiet

 

So the last few years we've been working the buggy over between us with upgrades here there and everywhere, ready to enter it in the british championship rather than the few clubman events we've run in on shakedown tests, it's been stripped bare a few times, and work has been seriously slow on it for the past 6 months because of work commitments (dozen orders for the 4wd rally cars).

 

Anyway, being a 2wd budget vehicle, the racing should be interesting, as theoretically we should get blown away - however, there are no weight limits on 2wd vehicles, whereas 4wd is 1200 kilo (wet, but no fuel), so we're half a tonne up already with more to loose yet...

 

 

Back to history, the original engine specifications were along these lines:

 

2.3L VW aircooled engine, build from 1.6 unit.

- 4-1 manifold,

- PTFE gaskets,

- Dellorto 45's + custom inlet manifold

- Engle 120 camshaft

- Needle roller rockers, high lift 1.4:1 ratio

- Full flow casing with external oil coolers

- Modified cowling with electric fan assist.

- Counterbalanced forged steel crank.

- 3D ignition system (MegaJolt, supplied by MartinM, fitted after the dizzy problems), I did the ignition mapping DIY.

 

Along the way the buggy has had 3 complete new rear ends, 4 suspension setups, a new front end, 4 different gearboxes/linkages/pedal setups, and 3 different braking systems, I'll go into detail on these at some point.

Now, that may sound excessive and a bit chop and change - but usually they've coincided with a change in the chassis (or an exploding gearbox...) in order to keep the entire chassis working as well as can be expected.

 

The first change came shortly after it's second event, in which there were a few problems, the first was the greenstuff rear pads, sponsors of the series so they had to be use, fell to pieces, and the backing plates then ground into the disc, welded themselves there and then ground away at the hub.

The result of which was some mintex 1144's painted green, the Hi-spec 4 pots fitted and some new laser cut discs.

 

The second was the gearbox exploding, this was the original box sourced with the engine so it was to be expected, another box was duly sought, and the engine and rear frame pulled out for fitment, the new box was a five speed version though, which gave us a little more pace as the VW tended to drop off cam, this was later resolved through some careful carb jetting and linkage tweaks, but the shorter gears were welcome at the time.

 

Of course, the problem with a five speed box is that it's slightly longer, which meant a simple gearbox change meant we had to rejig all the linkages, the cabling, and the entire back end and engine mounts needed moving an inch back.

This in itself mean the driveshafts had to be altered, and new panels formed up out of ally sheet.

 

So next time you are swearing during a gearbox swap, just remember, it could be worse....

 

 

The fun is in getting the engine on the box (yes, that is the right way around), which takes 4-5 goes to get the splines located right, which, when you are holding an engine made from sharp aircooling fins, gets you some funny looks from the missus when she sees 'scratch marks' in a pattern down your arm, whoops.

 

 

The second box came around 2 events later on, after a final drive turned itself into smeared lump in objection to landing a 10ft drop off a small quarry under full power. Ah well, the joys of cars built out of scrapyard bits :mellow

 

This time we sourced several boxes while we decided what to do with it, the engine was down on power and there was a brand new 3.6 Nissan V6 sat on a crate in the workshop, a Porsche carrera 4wd box was duly acquired, along with a standard 2wd box.

It was decided to stay 2wd as they're more fun to drive, and it's more fun when you leave the 4wd boys, unfortunately the next events were fairly soon, and there was no way the 3.6 V6 was going to shoehorn in with the necessary plumbing without a complete new rear end and suspension setup, so in went a 5-speed Renault Master gearbox, complete with 9" differential, again, this meant new linkages and tweaks to the chassis, along with a spring change due to the different CoG, we finished at 4:30 the morning of the next event....

 

Now, the problem with concentrating mainly on sorting out the rear, is that, at 5:30am, the morning of the event, after a short nap, you really don't want a whining noise to appear on the shakedown drive before loading it up on the lorry.

You most definately don't want that sound to be whining front wheel bearing, and you definately don't want to be 2 miles from home when it starts getting worse.

Once a bearing goes on something like this, they don't last long at all under the stresses, unlike in a car where it'll whine for 2000 miles, you're lucky to get 2000 yards...

Unfortunately, the smallest of the workshops must be 2010 yards away, because the wheel fell off trundling around the last corner back to it.

In itself that's not a problem, the way the buggy is setup you can post a running stage time with just 3 wheels.........

What IS a problem, is that beautiful machined steel wheel, meeting a beautiful but rather softer alloy wilwood '5-star' rally hub.

After turning the 5-star hub into a 1-disc smear, it decided to take a chunk out of the from calipers just for kick before it did it's party trick of wandering off down the lane.

Shiiiittttt.

 

We've got plenty of spare bearings, but no spare hubs, so that's the end of that event already, what fun.

 

The next event was the final one we attended before taking it back in the workshop for a rethink, a clubman-type event where you can just turn up and drive, all went well that morning, bar getting the lorry stuck in the staging area and having to tow it out with the car.

The engine was running a little rough, but then, it's been due some new piston rings and probably some new shells for a while, but we couldn't see the point of spending money on the VW engine, it does the job but when it goes bang, well, there was that V6 waiting in the workshop....

This probably annoyed the poor overworked veedub, after being originally designed as a 1.6 with about 40 horsepower, for some greasemonkey to pull it apart, subject it to a bore out of existing holes, put in holes that shouldn't be there, push the output to 120bhp and then run it at 5000rpm, solid mounted to a buggy driven by a pair of nutters with suicidal tendancies, well, perhaps it had every right to to be a bit ****ed off and spit a shell that day....

 

The competition in the 2wd class wasn't all that impressive bar an RS200 look-a-like, and a similar machine to ours but with a long-travel double wishbone front end, 1.6 turbo engine with ~140bhp, and a spaceframe designed with no regard to actual stress patterns.

We promptly ****ed of aforementioned turbo powered car by setting a time 12 seconds faster than him (7 mile stage), which got us the cold shoulder and some mutterings about his power steering failing and his engine overheating.

 

What we didn't tell him was we'd had to stop for 30 seconds at the bottom of the hill as the carbs flooded the engine because of bouncing floats, and my pace notes listed adjustments that should pick up another 15 seconds...well, no point rubbing it in is there, that's what the next lap is for....

Especially when you'd lost time yourself as the VW had thrown a belt and you'd lost PAS and overheated the engine yourself.

 

After rigging a new belting system up and making a hasty set of float dampers out of a couple of o-rings, some tube and a pen (see, Blue Peter is useful!), we were ready to go out for the second stage, with the updated notes allowing Ed to pick up the pace on the corners and avoid the ripples on the exit to get the power down, we worked out at 43 seconds up two thirds of the around the course, on par with the fastest of the 4wd guys running there, but we were loosing power, the engine was starting to blow a little smoke, but we had to finish the stage to get back to service area anyway, so full throttle it is.

Out of the marshland they called a corner halfway around the course, the car simply would not slog it's way out of the mud, struggling to pull second gear where normally we would have been in the top of third, onto the next straight, top of 5th at 80-90mph over ripples - imagine speedbumps 2 feet apart at 80mph - and the engine spun a shell, the shock and friction as it attempted to weld to the crank dropped the engine revs massively and with a locked rear axle and the back end already snaking as it was putting the power down over the ripples, the car immediately spun several times, we ended up travelling backwards at around 60-70mph, downhill on wet grass toward a stone wall.

 

Now, we weren't too concerned about the buggy as we know how strong it is - the entire frame is T45 tubing - but we knew for a fact that there were spectators behind the wall and the buggy would do a damn fine job of attempting to flatten it.

With Ed hard on the footbrake and attempting to bring the front end back around with the steering, I hung onto the left hand fiddle brake and between us we managed to slew the buggy around to a stop away from the wall.

Some good natured cursing ensued in the fight to restart the engine, which luckily hadn't welded itself solid, and once it fired into a nice, uneven beat with lashings of rattles, we limped the remainder of the stage in first gear, and announced our retirement to the marshalls.

 

We posted an 8m40s stage time.

Faster than a third of the competitors, hilarious.

Ooops:

 

 

The diagnosis as terminal, we went home and hatched plans, coming to the conclusion that the 3.6 V6 was just too big for the current chassis and we may as well start from scratch with it as we could use it as a stressed member for a double wishbone front and rear.

Given the buggy was meant to be a low-budget challenge, this was wiped off the list and an RX-8 renesis engine accidentally made it's way into the workshop.

 

Well, 2 actually, because I've just got one for the 306 after a couple of no-goes with dead RX7 engines (another project thread for next year!)

 

 

Quick rundown on the chassis before I go into the Renesis conversion:

 

Chassis-

 

- Mixture of 2-3" T45 steel tubing, mandrel bent and TIG welded, weight is a touch over 600 kilos. You can quite happily lift the front with one person and walk around with the car.

- Rear setup are 4 gas pressure monotubes, consisting of 2 Bilstein dampers, 2 Fox adjustable coilovers, all remote res. nitrogen charged, giving around 16 inches of rear suspension travel, these act on a rear torsion bar setup with heavily braced arms, again, made from T45 tube, the bars are rising rate and there's a secondary assist bar which comes into play after 10" of travel.

- Front setup is now 2 Fox coilovers aiding a rising rate twin torsion bar front end adapted from the VW setup, approximately 13" of travel up front.

- Brakes are a mixture of small 4 pot wilwoods up front and beefy Hispec 4 pots on the back, linked with braided hoses to 2 AP master cylinders on a balance bar with a homemade pedal box, it also sports a hydraulic handbrake and a fiddle brake setup to brake individual wheels for donuts turning the front end in quicker. Solid discs (less weight) all around matched with 1144 pads.

- Wheels are our own steels - 15x7J, weighing in at 5.8kilos, fitted with 215/75 Bridgestone MS's.

 

 

It's absolutely hilarious to drive, but not exactly the most sophisticated or good-looking car in the world I'll admit

 

 

 

More updates when I find time to work the copy and paste button!

Edited October 7, 2008 by Rippthrough

[Rippthrough 98]

Right, job number one was to mock up and adapter plate to get the RX-8 engine onto the VW gearbox, as well as machine a new flywheel with a counterbalance weight to fit a smaller clutch, as the the Mazda unit is too large for the bellhousing.

 

So, a decent 2800lb pressure plate, plus an AP cerametallic 3-puck clutch plate, with the centre cut out and a VW one pressed in, made it's way onto the engine:

 

 

Which lets us bolt the engine on for mock-up of the ancillaries and hoses, before taking it back off and machining the various brackets and fixtures out of ally to keep the weight down - it's easier to mock-up in steel as you can just whack the MIG on it to tack something in place - but it's a hell of a weight penalty when you add up the amount of brackets and adaptors on a car, so all the final versions are ally where they can be.

 

 

New seat mounts to replace the steel ones, although we still haven't fitted em yet :lol

 

 

And a couple of hours work to get the exhaust manifold sorted out - unequal length manifold as the centre port is siamesed on these, like an a-series, so the centre branch meets at a different length to the others to keep it from causing problems with pulse tuning.

 

 

 

As you can see, still not touched the plumbing! :whistle:

 

We've kept the standard intake manifold on this engine, as although it's quite large, it's an extremely good design, with several variable intake ports on it, replacing it with throttle bodies would result in a marginal top end gain for the cost of a huge amount of midrange.

 

We had massive problems with a fooked microtech ECU we were supplied, which isn't fun when the only bloke who maps them is several hours trip away and really couldn't be arsed to do our car anyway - we took 4 trips over there and the car ran like a bag of s*it even after switching to DTA instead, bearing in mind this guy is a rotary specialist we got led up a lot of blind alleys with regard to the fuel system - one trip to our normal DTA mapper and the car now flies. Hmm.

 

A month or so later on and the car had the rest of the exhaust made up, a new crank trigger wheel on for the DTA to read (they're a right pain to make up!), most of the plumbing in, and the loom stripped out for wiring to begin, hence the big pile of old wiring on the floor:

 

 

A new rear bonnet to keep it all dry:

 

We had massive problems with a fooked microtech ECU we were supplied, which isn't fun when the only bloke who maps them is several hours trip away and really couldn't be arsed to do our car anyway - we took 4 trips over there and the car ran like a bag of s*it even after switching to DTA instead, bearing in mind this guy is a rotary specialist we got led up a lot of blind alleys with regard to the fuel system - one trip to our normal DTA mapper and the car now flies. Hmm.

That set us back month and a very large sum of money we didn't really have to spend.

 

And we finally got the thing running about 2 months ago, there were still a few jobs left to do on it, and a lot to tidy up, including another trip to the dyno having a flat spot sorted out and the top end mapped to account for getting the final variable inlet stage working - the rev. limiter is at 9600rpm...

 

Hopefully, we should soon be back to this:

 

 

I'll get some video eventually, the engine noise is amazing, ask Nath how much better it sounds than a knocking 405 engine

 

 

We'll run this car for a year or two to prove the drivetrain, then sell it and make a new car with the RX8 engine (well, the new 1.6L version, when it arrives) in the middle where it should be, multi-link wishbones and a body with at least some kind of nod to aero

 

 

 

 

Some more to come yet...

Edited October 7, 2008 by Rippthrough

[allanallen 528 2 Cars]

absoloutley awesome mate. Seeing stuff like this reminds me why i got into engineering, just a shame i make un-interesting s*it.

 

keep the updates coming

[Sandy 191]

Brilliant!

[welshpug 1,656]

you haven't said about the flames Phill

[Rippthrough 98]

you haven't said about the flames Phill

 

Some sad bugger might have spent most of yesterday morning getting the biggest flame possible on the over-run, who'd do that eh, bit childish

 

Gone from a flicker of blue to a lovely 2 foot long, rich orange flame on the way down the gearbox.

There's some night races, and I'm a tart

 

 

 

As to the manifold - it took two hours and involved 4 pieces of string, a pencil and paper, and two blobs of bluetack, highly technical process that

Edited October 7, 2008 by Rippthrough

[tom_m 0]

looks awesome!

[Rippthrough 98]

Let's give that Paste button some more work to do eh?

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

A little more work squeezed in over the past few weeks - made the doors (as these are now compulsary), with tubular ally frames and thermoformed polycarb over the top, new front bulkhead made to clear the new brake cylinders.

 

There's a pair of new front calipers on the way as the old ones are too far gone now to be worth refurbishing (they are 30 years old....), plus new pads.

I'll be machining some new discs up for it this week as the old ones have warped very badly from the sticking front calipers (they're about 3mm out )

After that a quick strip down of the front suspension to replace some worn beam bearings and then it's finally ready to roll.

 

Just in time for me to get tied up building our new 4wd car, bah!

And on that note, the old one is for sale to free up the floor space: Click

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

New discs for it I've milled up from some CGI iron plate:

 

 

 

Ideally the rear needs to go vented now we have 260-odd bhp, but they'll do for now until we've got some pennies spare, as always it's gone over budget!

 

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

After fitting new calipers/pads/discs and building the scoop for the rear bonnet, along with finishing off the mesh, and rebuilding the front suspension, we went of to Newstead last weekend to finally compete.

 

Unfortunately the going was so sandy/boggy that we were running for miles at full throttle, which resulted in the fuel boiling in the rail from the buildup of heat in the engine bay.

 

Which means this week we're lifting the rear scoop upwards and forwards into cleaner air, meshing the rear panel by the exhaust manifold, and wrapping the fuel rail to keep it insulated.

We'll probably double skin the exhaust too as that's where most of the heat-soak is coming from - rotaries run silly exhaust temperatures, the outer two headers get cherry red, butthe shared center runner glows orange right up to the collector!

 

 

Back end as it stands after a wash - going to remove the louvres, bring the scoop up and above the roof:

 

Edited October 7, 2008 by Rippthrough

[Baz 421]

Looks an interesting toy Phil!!

 

keep us updated with the progress, both development and events etc!

[Rippthrough 98]

Looks an interesting toy Phil!!

 

Better than meccano any day

[Rippthrough 98]

Here you go, drivearound/parade lap at Newstead, coupled with an abysmal attempt at cornering by Ed (I think he was still asleep!), short shifting at 7000rpm though, supposed to be a sighting lap.

 

Exhaust sounds buzzy in the video but it's a far deeper note than that in reality.

 

Edited October 7, 2008 by Rippthrough

[GLPoomobile 958]

Quality write up. I really enjoyed that

[Rippthrough 98]

Well, there's some more to come before it's finished yet I'm sure, and it's going to be alter for a multi-link front end at some point too, glad its made an interesting read though, I've missed a lot out in the latter stages so I may flesh those out a bit when I get time.

 

 

Plus, there's the writeup for an M5 5.0L V10 powered version of this:

Edited October 7, 2008 by Rippthrough

[miamichris 9]

that video is awesome, the car looks great fun!!

[Rippthrough 98]

Here's a couple of the cars we should be competing against next year - it's going to hard work keeping up:

 

 

 

 

[Rippthrough 98]

I will, one day, eventually remember to take my decent camera with me instead of just crap phone pictures, but you can get a sense of how small the car actually is from this one:

 

[Rippthrough 98]

This is one for all you polishing fanatics, how to clean the underside of your car the lazy way:

 

 

That's a mere 100+ kilos of mud, gravel and sheep s*it you can see washing away under the car....

Edited October 9, 2008 by Rippthrough

[Rippthrough 98]

Right, the louvers are gone, air intake has been shifted around to the side and ducted forward to a scoop, the bottom rear panel by the headers has been meshed to allow some airflow over them, and the entire exhaust has gone off to be ceramic coated.

 

Just got to work out how to sort the roof scoop out and we'll be motoring again

 

 

 

And some playing with the variable inlet has found us another 15bhp

Edited November 7, 2008 by Rippthrough

[Peetypug 5]

that 206 looks seriously rapid!!!!

[DanteICE 72]

That stuff is almost as fast as group B machinery! you are mental my friend!

 

Geoff

[Rippthrough 98]

That stuff is almost as fast as group B machinery! you are mental my friend!

 

Geoff

 

We're up against a real 205 T16 in France in a couple of weeks, and I wouldn't put a bet down on the T16 even coming in the top ten........

 

 

The 206 is one of ours, there's a fair few floating around.

Edited November 8, 2008 by Rippthrough

[Rippthrough 98]

And Foucart should have his 205 W12 fixed again and working properly in his 205, I'm afraid a T16 won't see which way it went, here's it with the old engine:

 

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v89/Ripp...ent=foucart.flv

Edited November 8, 2008 by Rippthrough

[Rippthrough 98]

Second in class at the rally by the way, the T16 never made it out of parce ferme, was blowing oil out the exhaust.

 

Anyway, Ed's been a busy bee whilst I was away playing in France, and the buggy now has nice ally roof scoop and rejigged hinges and rear scoop to take air from the high pressure area at the top of the windscreen, the exhaust collector and manifold has gained a couple more heatshields and there's been a few alterations to the panels for the engine air intake and cooling around the exhaust manifold.

 

We've cut down the rear bulkhead to the 'V' in the rear cross and then panelled that up to the roof to give a large airbox for the radiator to draw from and to remove the restriction the rear rollover hoop would cause with the new roof scoop.

 

 

Nearly there, should be at Cadwell on the 25th with it.

[Rippthrough 98]

Managed an Oulton drift day instead

 

[Rippthrough 98]