The life and times of my 71 maverick

the spoiler does a job on the cones it hits!

 

Looks sooo FUN!!!!!! Not sure if there's any autocross in my area. I believe they are building one soon.

 

Looks like SCCA Solo runs lot's of dates next year, I remember when they only ran a few times a year! http://sdrscca.com/solo-schedule/

 

Looking good, I'm always a fan of cars that get driven hard and I KNOW this one was/is.

 

today i fixed the broken coil over mount. it had a 1/2" set screw used to screw the ears together. that is what keeps snapping. so i looked over the design and what was there to work with and decided to enlarge the threaded holes in the ears to 9/16s and put a 9/16s stud in place of the 1/2.

i also took off the front addco 7/8s sway bar and installed one of the 3 custom addco 1 1/8 sway bars i have. i used the one with the 3 adjustment points. i put it on the middle hole. it really made the car feel very stiff and even more planted to the ground than before.

i removed the links for the rear traction bars. over on protouring.com it was suggested to remove them. they cause an instant change in roll center when the power is applied in a turn. this could be contributing the tail happy attitude the car had last saturday.

some of the mounting tabs on the billet grill were broken off, so i took it off and got them welded back together. it took some enlarging of the holes to get it back on and not have tension on the tabs.

yesterday i worked on the steering column. Mo always had problems with the steering wheel going on too far and scraping the column. this also was eating up the horn buttons in the turn signal switch. also the turn signals didnt work. so started taking it all apart. i figured i could take the turn signal switch out of my old cars column since it worked great. i pulled the wheel off that column (both are grant wheels) and noticed a spacer on the column shaft that was not on this one. bingo! i just put that spacer in and the wheel felt great now. now more scraping. as for the turn signals, they were not getting power. i went to the custom fuse panel that Mo had put in and started checking the fuses. they were all good but i found a wire pulled out of one of the connections to the panel. i fix the wire and the turn signals started working.... kind of. the right turn worked great the left turn would not lock in the on position. with close inspection, the lever was hitting the column housing before the lock mechanism could catch. it seems that with all the turn signal switches Mo changed out the plate it mounts to is slightly rotated in the column. i just ground the the housing to give the lever the clearance it needed. now the turn signals work great.

then i changed out the drivers corbeau seat for my kirky pro drag seat that i had from my other car. this lowered me down about 3 inches in the car. this is way better now.

this sunday is a scca autocross event. im going to go and run in the cam class. its a class based on american muscle cars. its rules are pretty lax. they mostly depend on having a minimum 200 treadwear tire rating to be the great equalizer.

i didnt get any pics of any of this. sorry, i know thats what really makes these project threads interesting. ill try to get some pics and video at the autocross.

 

I had lots of problems with turn signals and sparks from all the rubbing from the wheel... The spacer that was missing cured mine too...

 

Way more updates on this car than the forgotten comrick. Probably because this one runs lol.

Either way keep the updates and upgrades coming

 

the comrick is not forgotten. dont worry. i was working on it before i got the maverick. it just boring stuff like welding up the million holes in the engine compartment and trim holes. nothing exciting and pic worthy till its done. the game plan is to get the little things finished on the maverick so i can play with it and then get back on the comrick. the priority on the comrick is to get it painted. at that point is when i will need to finalize on what direction to go with it.

 

Keep up the good work! The R&D you are doing will almost certainly save the rest of us hours of frustration and lots of $$$.

 

That was fun to watch.

I can only imagine the peels of laughter that would have erupted had I took my stock '74 Grabber through that course. I never could imagine a car could handle that bad (mine, not yours).

 

today i did my first autocross competition in the cam class. what a great group of guys. really cool cars. a few mustangs, camaros, fairlane, falcon, chevelle, and a valiant.

so first off i need to work on reading the course. the first 2 runs, i didnt see the lane change element correctly and didnt realize it. the nice people who put on the autocross had a instructor come and help me. that was great. on the next run with an instructor i did the course correctly. then i let him drive a lap and he was able to see how much of the bad driving was the cars abilities vs mine. on the last lap i took i did pretty good. i was just getting used to the course. thats going to be the hardest part about this autocross thing. the track is never the same as the time before so you have to learn the track quickly with the track walk and then be able to drive it well. i fully expect that the more experience i get the easier it will become.

with the bigger front sway bar the car went from having oversteer to having understeer. that is worse to deal with. so i made 3 major changes from last time to this time.
1. changed front sway bar from 7/8s to the 1 1/8 with the adjustable ends. i set the adjustable end to the middle setting so i could move it to the end which should soften it. problem is that the adjustment holes are not parallel to the control arm and the end link doesn't easily reach the hole.
2. fixed the broken coil over mount. i should not have ran on it before but i did. i think the sway bar was partially supporting that side. so with it repaired the front of the car came up over an inch. i can lower it down some but this ride height is much better for going over bumps and driveways. so im not going to lower it more than 1/2".
3. took the traction bar links out. i think this tamed the rear ends desire to kick out when power was applied. before it really felt like if i applied any real power coming out of a turn the car would instantly snap the rear end out. when the traction bars make contact with springs when power is applied they bind the spring and that instantly moves the roll center. i think that was contributing to the twitchy oversteer.

so that really leaves the front sway bar as my option for adjusting. im thinking of going back to the 7/8s bar. i am thinking of replacing the urethane end links with rod endlinks to make it a little stiffer.

groberts did say to detach the rear bar. i think i will try leaving it on for the first run or 2 then try it detached to see the effect.
there are no more scca autocrosses till next year so ill have to wait or try another club out.

i will have to say that autocrossing takes way more driver skill than dragracing. i would say its cheaper. you dont need to spend a ton of money on a motor for power. a really good set of tires and some suspension upgrades can really make it fun and competitive.

 

this is very interesting to read, especially as you have quite a lot of tuning and adjusting options.
does the car have a locking differential?

 

it has a factory trac loc diff. last time at the drag strip it was doing one tire burn outs. so the lsd is getting a bit weak. im really interested in trying one of the torsen style lsds. like the wave loc or s track or platinum trac diffs.
they are torque biasing and work backwards compared to how a clutch type lsd works.
a clutch lsd has the most resistance against the axles turning at different speeds when they are at the same speed. as soon as that initial friction is over come the amount of resistance against the axles spinning at different speeds drops.
a torsen uses a worm gear configuration instead of traditional spider side gears. these worm gears work like an oil pump with the gear oil. the faster they turn when the axles are turning at different speeds the more resistance is generated against the different speed of the axles. this will provide driving power to the inside tire in a turn and keep it from just going up in smoke unlike a clutch type lsd.

 

awesome to see this car live on

 

today i changed the manual 20 to 1 ratio steering box to the power steering 15 to 1 box.
nothing worth taking pics of so nothing to see. i did check and adjust the power steering box preloads before i installed it. i followed this site http://www.stangerssite.com/adjustment.html
my steering input shaft was at the 4 to 5 inch lbs already but at the center it would jump way up to around 20 in lbs. i backed off the set screw and reset it to give me a increase to 8"s.
changing the steering box was a bit of a pain. first off i had to unbolt the long tube header on the drivers side. i had to unbolt the steering column from the dash and fire wall and remove the package tray. then i was able to unbolt the steering box and pull off the pitman arm. i was barely able to pull the box out the bottom with the header flopping loose.
i then put the 15 to 1 box in and bolted it back in place and put the pitman arm. now came the hardest part of the whole job. putting the steering rag joint back on the steering box. this was a real pain. i had to take a long pry bar going up from the bottom and walk the rag joint on to the input shaft of the box. i had to rotate the shaft 180 degrees back and forth to slowly walk the joint on.
once i got it on, the rest went back together with no problem.

then i changed the front 1 1/8" sway bar back to the 7/8 sway bar and removed the 3/4" sway bar.

next weekend is a auto x practice on saturday and a race on sunday. ill see how these changes work at the practice and then i can make any needed changes saturday night for the race on sunday.

this up coming week i plan on making some home made alignment tools. right now my tires are getting eaten up on the outer edges. their are 2 things doing this. the alignment shop put a lot of toe in because they had a good amount of negative camber that they couldnt reduce with out the tires hitting the fenders. also the caster is not enough. in the hard turns of auto x, the outer tread of the tires show a lot of scrub with none on the inner portion of the tread. sense then ive raised the front to get the clearance needed. i dont want to keep paying the alignment shop for some thing i can do better with home made tools.
so i plan on increasing the caster as much as i can, setting the camber at about 1 degree negative and the toe at 1/16" in.

if i get enough time left, ill work on a pan hard bar set up for the rear. after much research ive ditched the idea for the watts link and am going with a double adjustable pan hard bar.

i got a gopro camera from santa and will get a lot of video next weekend. hopefully some of it will be good and worth posting. stay tuned for more up dates.