Catching up on our progress.

During the seasons first event, at Mt. Ascutney, the car and myself spent the weekend at home in the garage. It would have taken a massive effort with 14+ hour days and no issues during the past week to have finished the car for Ascutney. Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate, so I made the decision a week before Ascutney to make the Burke Mt. hillclimb the cars premier event. This gives us a few more weeks to finish, and has helped to relieve some of the pressure to get things done quickly, albeit only slightly.

The good news is that the engine is now running. At first I encountered a no start issue, although that turned out to be caused by a misaligned crank position sensor trigger wheel.(Pictured above) Once I got things oriented correctly it fired right up. It also took some time to figure out the fuel pump relay wiring, as at first it did not function. In order to meet the rule book requirements for the CTTC the fuel pump needs to shut down automatically when the engine shuts off, which makes perfect sense. This meant I could not just run the relay from a simple switch. The issue was eventually sorted out. The ecu controls the relay to ground, and I will have a switch in the cabin to give power to the relay, so there will be two ways to shut down the fuel pump. Right now the engine harness is being stripped down and re-wrapped. We also constructed a harness to supply the necessary powers and signals to the T5 system. The beauty of using Saabs T5 system is that every lead that needs an external power or signal goes through one plug, which has made the job creating an adapter harness much easier. The gauge cluster harness has also been finished, although it is still untested. Hopefully everything in the cluster will work. This was originally one of the wiring tasks that worried me most, but after spending some time with the wiring diagram it ended up being a fairly simple job.

In addition, we also began painting the cars interior today. The finish will be a gloss white throughout, with flat black being added around the windshield to cut down on glare.

The rear suspension is currently out of the car. All of the parts will be cleaned and re-finished, although it appears as though nothing will need to be replaced! Once these parts go back on the suspension will be finished. The front went back together last week with cleaned and greased axles plus new axle boots. All of the other front suspension parts had been re-furbished months ago and were already ready to bolt on.

Hopefully the rest of the assembly will go smoothly and we can put some miles on the car before the Burke hillclimb on June 10th. The Burke event should be a great shakedown for the car, as I think the Burke road is somewhat similar to the lower section of Mt. Washington.