1988 Fiero track car

[eHoward]

Looks good!

[Jalisurr]

Well, after far....faaar longer than it should have taken, the Fiero moved under its own power yesterday!

There were many reasons for the delay but the main one was the wiring harness - I'm certainly an amateur as far as those go so I outsourced that work to a shop to build. Unfortunately that shop was seemingly struck with every possible thing to go wrong, but it's finally done. Or at least done enough that I should be able to finish the rest of it.

Got an initial tune loaded into it last night, will be doing some testing today and then hopefully will have an after-action report from its first shakedown at an auto-x this weekend!

[Shaun41178(2)]

Nice

[ericjon262]

Well, after far....faaar longer than it should have taken, the Fiero moved under its own power yesterday!

There were many reasons for the delay but the main one was the wiring harness - I'm certainly an amateur as far as those go so I outsourced that work to a shop to build. Unfortunately that shop was seemingly struck with every possible thing to go wrong, but it's finally done. Or at least done enough that I should be able to finish the rest of it.

Got an initial tune loaded into it last night, will be doing some testing today and then hopefully will have an after-action report from its first shakedown at an auto-x this weekend!

how did the auto-x trip go? got a video?

[Jalisurr]

It did not go. Unfortunately. Going to do a more detailed after action post later on but the front right coleman racing spindle failed in shakedown so I didn't make it to the event.

Car is back together now, hopefully will have a competition report after this coming weekend

[ericjon262]

bummer, that sucks. better luck this weekend.

[Jalisurr]

Alright, so, update.

First off, the initial failure in shakedown. The Coleman racing spindle failed at highway speed, the threaded portion snapped off the spindle adapter resulting in the bearings being ejected rapidly. Thankfully the large fixed porsche brake calipers prevented the wheel from escaping so no serious damage was done. Some parts are scraped up, there's a bit of a gouge in the brake rotor, but nothing that needs replacing at this stage.

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It turns out that the failure was probably not a fault of Coleman - as I mentioned earlier I'm not a great metal fabricator so I have a shop I've been working with for those parts of the project. Unfortunately that shop was also not familiar with old double tapered bearings, so on investigating later I found out that when they were putting the front end together they torqued the wheel nut down to what a cartridge bearing would have been - ~130ft-lbs, which is probably about 10x what it should be. From what I can tell there is no other serious damage. The bearings are off the shelf pieces, and the spindle itself looks to be a relatively straightforward part - I may get a copy made of the remaining intact one and swap back to these in the future. Coleman confirmed they have no more of these so there would need to be enough interest to get them to do another run.

Thankfully, I had a set of Rodney's new rebuildable front hubs sitting in my storage locker as a backup for just this sort of situation. Got those installed and on the car.

Then the next issue - there was some substantial play discovered in the crossshaft for my passenger side front upper control arm. Seems like it had worn down a bit over the years. I'm running the westcoastfiero version of the adjustable upper arms, but the shaft was original to the car. Solution for that was to have the shop cut it off and weld on an appropriate bolt, then turn it down to the right diameter.

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With that she was on the road again. Did a few hours of successful shakedown, and then it was time to swap tires hit the highway for the first real competition outing - ice racing! I'll start a thread in motorsports to give full summaries of the competition days, but the car performed pretty well and had no major issues (the largest problems were a coolant cap vibrating loose, and that the startup fueling is not totally dialed in on the engine tune yet, so convincing it to fire up at -15C was a bit of a challenge)

The highway drive up revealed a couple things as well - one, the car is very loud inside at some harmonic rpms. That might be due to the very stiff poly motor mounts, so swapping those down softer is on the list. The speed sensor isn't working for some reason, so I was relying on GPS speed, and also the reverse lockout solenoid is not wired up, so shifting into 6th was occasionally accompanied by unpleasant gear noises, so I tried to minimize the number of times I did that.

Mandatory pic of sliding around on the ice:

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Along the way, also got a few little things dialed in. Fine tuned the fuel gauge at every fill, made some adjustments to the layout of the screen.

Still on the to-do list:
- Adjust the shifter (it's currently angled away as it's a fwd shifter turned backwards so it's a bit of a reach)
- Further dyno tuning
- Rear wing
- Finish installing the AC
- Reverse lockout
- Speed sensor
- Softer motor mounts

[Jalisurr]

A few more pics of the current state of the car:

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[ericjon262]

everything looks really thought-out, and clean! excellent work! I can't wait to see more track results in your other thread!

[ericjon262]

Alright, so, update.

First off, the initial failure in shakedown. The Coleman racing spindle failed at highway speed, the threaded portion snapped off the spindle adapter resulting in the bearings being ejected rapidly. Thankfully the large fixed porsche brake calipers prevented the wheel from escaping so no serious damage was done. Some parts are scraped up, there's a bit of a gouge in the brake rotor, but nothing that needs replacing at this stage.

IMG_8976.jpg

Is there anything other than the three bolts that hold the bearing, holding the spindle on with the Coleman spindle?

[Jalisurr]

Is there anything other than the three bolts that hold the bearing, holding the spindle on with the Coleman spindle?

Nope. It's just the three bolts that would normally hold the cartridge bearing.