Happy New Year

Tire Choices

I posted a build thread for our car over on the A-body.net forum

After informing us we picked the wrong engine for our car, the conversation drifted off to talking about tires. It seems the general thought there is that we stick with the 14" rims since they are lighter and go to a wider lower profile tire. By lowering the profile we can lower the car which improves handling and also give the car a bit more pick up and improve breaking. The down side is it would slightly lower top speed (I really doubt we would ever hit the theoretical top speed of the car), and the speedometer would end up being off which really isn't a big deal.

The default is 185 75 14, the ones we were looking at were 205 70 14, the ones that the a-body were suggesting were 205 60 14 or 215 60 14. Anything with lower profiles ended up being racing tires.

So here are the sidewall heights of the various tires

Tire size ----- Sidewall(mm) ------- Sidewall(in)
185 75 14 ----- 138.75 ---------------- 5.46
205 70 14 ----- 143.5 ----------------- 5.63
205 60 14 ----- 123 ------------------ 4.84
215 60 14 ----- 129 ------------------- 5.08

We also have to figure out how wide we want the tires. While we can go out to 215 on our rims, the width will add rolling resistance and eventually hurt the cars pickup, also in snow or rain wider tires have less force to go down to the ground making it harder to make contact. So more to think about.

More pics

Here are a couple more pics from sunday



Why is Duffy taking a nap on the engine? He said because it was warm from when we had run it a few hours earlier.


Or maybe he was trying to remove the Temperature Sensor



Can't see the sensor? Look for the green wire and follow it down the the sensor, there you can see him trying to remove it, maybe. I was there and saw it happen, and I can barely see it.

Although this last picture I believe shows signs of the work being finished for this year.



Stupid Winter

Working in the Cold Picture Gallery

They say that a picture is worth 1,000 words, so here is about 10,000 words worth of pictures;

The Flags

Last night I had a thought about the flags on the side of our car. Knowing the ones I did off hand I started to wonder if they were the NATO countries. Although I soon found out while most are in NATO not all (I wasn't sure what to do with a NATO theme anyway) but I still wanted to find out what they were so from left to right as best as I can figure since I think some of the colors have changed over the years

United states
Canada
Belgium
Finland
Italy(although it might be Ireland)
United Kingdom
Holland
Switzerland
France
Portugal
Sweden
Maybe Spain? (might be but it is a really old flag if it is one that hadn't been used since the late 70s)
Denmark
Ireland(although it can be Italy, they are really really similar looking after years of fading)
Germany

Thrill of Victory

Here is a picture of a triumphant Pete and Duff having freed a oil cooler from an old 4x4 pickup.



Of course shortly after this we were quickly defeated by bolts that were larger than anything we had with us. Since then the guys at A-Body.net have been good enough to tell me that we need a 24mm socket.

On a side note we really should fix their link on the side bar so it actually works. Update the link has been fixed.