We've been thrashing pretty hard to get the car ready for Speed Week. I'm just going to start dumping pictures of the work we've been doing and the parts we've made, I'll describe some and answer questions about others because there are a shit-load. I'll start by letting you guys know we are going to try our luck running XO/GCC this year. This allows us to push the limits of the Century with some streamlining, fuel injection and ignition.
Above you see the main caps we made during the gundrill operation. Bryan cutting the cam blank, the rods back from heat treating and peening, and some of the new body panels. Here you'll see some of the machining we performed on the engine and parts. We balance, lighten and profile our pistons in house. The core plugs were threaded also. We also made our own rocker assembly.
This is so awesome! Mechanical p@rn!! Did you ran it before? Is it normal for a salt flat car to be this low? What is running beside Buick Straight Eight? Trans? Rear? Is this an Old Build being rebuild? Or a natural evolution in the need for speed, on something you build from the ground up? Is there much avalible for a straight eight, or do you have to design everything from scratch? I know this sound stupid, but i dont know much about salt flat racing, because we dont have salt flags, dry lakes or beachs made for this. All I know is from HAMB or the worlds fastes Indian. Insert red faced smiley.
We ran this car last year in XXO/PRO. The XXO is the engine class and PRO is for production. The car has to have everything like a factory fresh car, headlights, tail lights, horn...etc. Our best run was over 154mph on a 136mph record. The trans is a stock Buick 3 speed and we run a Ford 9 inch rear. Not a lot of aftermarket support for the big Straight 8's so we design and manufacture our own. As for the ride height and aero mods, we learned a few lessons last year and studied the rulebook closely. We hope these changes will make the old Buick stable and safe as we hope to run in the 175mph range.
Pretty impressive work...what's the big mill, a cincinnati? You are getting the most out of "obsolete" machine tools, I see. I like looking at pictures of machine shops, more please.
The mill is an old Knight. Here is a picture of the drilling machine I used to gundrill the main caps. Its called a Drillmation. I used our Pratt & Whitney 1-1/2 B to drill the rocker shafts. We use many "vintage" tools in our shop.
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