Fostek's R&D department

[RWD fords rule]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

Power is nothing without Traction

And Commitment

[FOSSIE]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

I have heard rumors that there are Alloy Axle casings that are about on some historic Escorts.

Not that I'm aware of. There are alloy axles in existence (see my Facebook page) but not in Historic rallying.

The axle for this car is pretty special; Magnesium diff housing, titanium LSD, chromoly tubes, it is unique and not something available to customers at the moment. I'll start a thread just for the axle when I get round to assembling it...

[Forest_rallying]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

Thanks for that interesting news, look forward to reading more as and when.

[alladdin]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

looks superb and i love a build that dares to defy the trend and offer alternative thinking

[FOSSIE]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

Interesting build, looks mint already, very nice and I like the bolt on panels

Your weight penalties may change this a lot making the two classes very close together with both cars close to the minimum weight

If it was a straight up drag race 2.5 would win for sure but rallying does not compare to this, 70kg is a lot of weight on each corner and with 6 speed the 2.0 will be ready to go out of every corner

Thanks for the comment.

I think the important thing to remember is that "most" mk2s out there are built to similar specs regardless of the engine; I'd be surprised if there was much difference in weight between the average 2L and the average 2.5, and for that reason, yes, the 2.5 will just overall seem quicker. But I can't get around the idea that how quickly a car accelerates is down to power-to-weight and gear ratios...

1 car has 330hp and weighs 950kgs, 8k rpm, 120mph max, 4.6 final drive
1 car has 290hp and weighs 820kgs, 9.5k rpm, 120mph max, 5.1 final drive
(otherwise cars are the same)

which will win the drag race ?

I think it's important to look at the overall package, not just how much grunt you've got.

And I agree with several of the posts above about 330hp being a pain in crappy conditions; I wish I had £1 for everytime a big banger escort driver has said to me "I could do with 100hp less" after a slippery stage, which lets face it, is more often than not in the UK!

[mk2harrierST]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

lovely car

[Xr3i eoin]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

What a build, savage work so far and cant wait to see the finished result!

[muckerbarry]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

One thing worth mentioning, (and this was an idea I got from Andy Pipe's TS thread) is that I actually fully plumbed/bled/setup the braking system on the bench prior to fitting in the car. I reckon one of the biggest causes of unsatisfactory brakes in a competition car is the pedalbox either being badly built, or just not set up properly. There is a lot can go wrong! By doing it on the bench, I was able to bleed the whole system and piss-fart around with master cylinder pushrod lengths, bias bar float, pedal height etc etc - the idea being that you want the bar itself 90 degrees to the pushrods when it's under pressure. This invariably means the bar will sit slightly skewed when at rest, but that's fine. This sort of fine tuning is just a pain in the arse when the box is in the car! Another thing I noticed (might be obvious to some people, but I'd never noticed before) was that it was just not possible to PROPERLY bleed the system unless I opened a front and rear bleed nipple at the same time. If you just opened 1, it would seem to bleed ok, except what was actually happening was that 1 MC was running out of travel before the other (only just, but it would be enough to trap air). That's just the sort of thing you wouldn't spot with the system in-situ. So once happy the pedalbox was setup properly, it was all fitted up... Apart from adjusting the front>back bias, it shouldn't need touching now.

Thats a great idea Tom, I went with a slightly different tactic though, i made all flexible the pipes into and out of the pedal box way too long, about 1M too long, loads of room behind the dash for for the extra piping, so once the system is bled on the car i can disconnect the throttle cable in about 10 seconds, undo the four bolts holding the pedal box in place and rest the whole lot on the seat and tweak the push rods etc, it saves a lot of f'n around upside down with your head in the foot well. I assume you needed to disconnect the callipers after you bled it all on the bench? Or do you have some nifty trick to feed the pipes to the wheel wells without disconnecting them?

STUNNING build, you have an incredible eye for detail.

[muckerbarry]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

Any pictures of the floor above the diff/axle? ... it looks very clever.

[Nelly]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

Looks great, I particularly like the bolt on panels.

Any more pics of the shell fabrication?

[FOSSIE]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

Any pictures of the floor above the diff/axle? ... it looks very clever.

I'm a bit short on photos from the fabrication stage, but these pictures should show most of it...

Seriously, there's nothing very interesting about the shell, for 2 main reasons; 1) You're not allowed to do anything drastic these days, and 2) I'm running 13" wheels which means you don't need to start dicking about with extra high tunnels, raised chassis, turrets etc. We spent a lot of time making sure everything was right from a geometry point of view, for example, we mounted the shell on a jig and discovered the front strut tops were 2mm out, left-to-right, so we squared everything up so there's a good square base to start from.

There's now enough available axle travel that the chassis rails will hit the floor before the axle touches anything... Obviously you'd not want this to happen, but it does mean we can use every mm of available damper travel.

The tank platform wasn't quite as effective as I had planned, but it was still worth doing. We've saved some weight, moved the fuel tank further forward and lowered it's COG, plus the old floor was cut out so the axle now has more travel. Again, this isn't quite so drastic/important as it would be with 15" wheels, but it does mean that I now have enough space to get the axle, exhaust etc well out of harms way.

The fuel tank is a Pro-alloy job (very impressed) which although looks quite high-up in the car, it's wide/fat rather than tall/thin, so it's centre of mass is now actually a few inches lower and 10" further forward than a typical escort gp4 shaped tank (in fact it's bang over the axle).

[Nelly]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

I always thought an exhaust tunnel would increase the height of the seat mounts so i was interested to see how you had done yours. By separating it from the transmision tunnel you can put a nice low mount between the two, seems obvious now ive seen it!

Are you sticking with 13" wheels to simplify the build as you mentioned or is there more to it than that?

[FOSSIE]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

You're on the right lines with the exhaust tunnel, but in this case, my plan backfired! I have mounted the driver's seat as low as it can possibly go, i.e. the underside of the seat shell almost resting on the exhaust tunnel, but when I sit in it, my head is wedged against the roof. So I can't drive the car, but that's probably a good thing.

It isn't helped with the exhaust being so large (3" at that point) - and I was keen to keep it well up out the way.

But if you are a bit shorter than me, or at least more normally proportioned, you should be OK.

13" wheels - well that's a whole other subject in itself - the long and short is that there are pros and cons for both 13s and 15s - and I decided at an early stage that 13's would be best, for this particular car, on the sort of events it's going to do. If it was built to do airfields (where brake temps are way higher) or perhaps if it had a bigger engine where every last square mm of tyre footprint was vital, then perhaps it would have had 15s. The plan might backfire (as it may with so many other items on this car) but for now we have to stick the 13's - the whole chassis setup is designed and manufactured around a 13" wheel and subsequent ride height.

Speaking of which, I do have a problem which I need to sort out fairly soon - wheels!

Naturally we wanted to fit the biggest possible braking setup on the front, and in order to do this, I got my hands on as many different 8x13 rims as I could, scanned the inner profile of the rims, and overlayed the CAD drawings on top of each other so I could see which one had the best caliper clearance. The Compomotive ML was the winner by a mile, like 8mm better, so we plumped for the Comp ML in a particular offset.

Didn't Compomotive then stop making wheels!!?? I have 2 options; reduce the size of the brakes (new disc, bell, caliper bracket at the very least) or try to find some more suitable wheels. Split rims would solve the problem, but they are very expensive and, I think, banned in rallying (need to confirm). The other option is to make some! Watch this space...

[steerfromdarear]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

love this build keep up the good work i need more pics tho

[Nelly]

Re: Fostek's R&D department

At 6 foot 3 i have the same problem, you very soon run out of headroom with a helmet on and a cage in the way!

Unfortunate on your choice of wheels. There was a rumour compomotive might be starting limited production again at some point? I guess there is always second hand ones around if you needed a temporary solution.