Project Sandrail

Part 1.8

Radiator, Header and stuff

6 October 2000

 

   Brake line clamps and throttle cable clamp for the front of the car. The brake line clamps have a rubber base to help eliminate noise from vibrations.
   Here's a view of the throttle cable clamp on the engine.
   The complete carburetor linkage and throttle cable.
   When the suspension is at full rebound, the c.v. joints were binding so I had to add suspension limiting straps to prevent the rear trailing arms from moving so far down that they would damage the c.v. joints.
   The radiator needs a fan or two and the fans need to be mounted on a shroud that will direct the air through the radiator. This is the beginning of the fan shroud.
   Here's the radiator and fans installed in the car. The fans will be blowing hot air onto the gas tank, so I'll have to add a small piece of aluminum to divert the air away from the fuel tank.
   Gotta get the coolant from the engine to the radiator. Here's a close up of the aluminum tube, mounting bracket and hoses needed to plumb the radiator.
   Here's the alternator belt tensioner, a radius rod. A radius rod has heim joints on both ends and left-hand threads on one end, so when the rod is rotated, the length increases or decreases depending on the direction of rotation. In this case, it snugs the belt nicely.
   A distrubutor is too tall to work with the weber carburetors, a more precise and tunable ignition is a crank-fire ignition. The unit on the left of the picture is the crank-fire ignition unit. It receives pulses from a proximity sensor and toothed wheel on the crankshaft and fires a spark to the appropriate cylinder
   The highlighted area is the ignition trigger. Most new cars use a similar type of ignition with many coils and no distributor.
   The distributor drive runs the oil pump, so I could not totally eliminate the distributor. The highlighted area on the left is an old ford distributor that I turned down in the lathe and capped off so it will run the oil pump. The highlighted area on the right is an engine mount that I machined out of a chunk of aluminum. Larger radius rods will suspend the engine. The rods are on back -order right now so the rest of the mount will have to wait.
 

 One of the most challenging things I have done on this car is fabricating a header. The only headers available for a rear mounted pinto engine are high-mount, they stick up above the engine and almost 2 feet to the rear. Unacceptable.

After much research, I decided on a step-header design. The tubes directly off the cylinder head are 1 3/8 inch diameter and extend for 8 inches. The second step is tubes 30 inches long and 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Here's the beginnings.

   The tubes all have to be within 1/4 inch in length and extend from the head to the collector. It was quite a day of trial and error - it wasn't measure twice, cut once; more like measure 15 times, cut 3 times.
   Here's all four tubes of the header welded and mounted on the car.
   Another view - the radius rod that will mount the engine will go through the center of the header.
  One more view. A supertrapp muffler will be added to the end of the header next week and sometime in the future the entire assembly will be coated by Jet-Hot.

 

 
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