Heavenbound Racing

Happy Fathers Day to all you fathers out there. I was blessed with a great Dad who I inherited a fondness for racing and building cool stuff from. But all that takes a back seat to the most precious thing I possess, which he modeled to me, faith in Jesus Christ. I am forever grateful to my Father for that.
God bless you all.
Isaac.

The roll Cage is all done, the seat is mounted and now working on getting the steering wheel positioned and building a pedal assembly. Here is a photo from about 6 weeks ago. I've made a lot of progress since then but I have no photographic evidence. The engine block is in at Mean Machine getting bored and decked and the cylinder heads are getting a whiz up as well, I'm hoping to get those on the flow bench and make some gains on those too. My house has shown up so I may be side tracked by that soon. I'm trying to get in as much work on the car as I can before I get dragged away to more important stuff.

Isaac.

I have some things, and some stuff. Too pretty to hide away in an engine block.

So here is the car. Got a bit of work to get done.

Hi all, this fella happens to be my oldest brother, Josh. He lives in Australia. He has under his right arm there a box for me that he has picked up from the post office this arvo. It contains 8 Mahle small block Chevy pistons and a set of bearings also. That concludes all the needed parts to put the bottom end of my engine back together. When Mum and Dad come home in May, they will bring them home with them.

For those who really care,

These are a really nice set of off the shelf pistons, they come with a 1mm top and second ring with a 2 mm oil ring. They have lateral gas ports and they have a 9cc dome. They are coated with a low friction and thermal barrier coatings.

For those who really really care

When I get the block bored I will also get it decked, the deck hight is currently standard at 9.025 inch, and according to my math we should need to machine it down 0.025" to get the pistons flush with the surface of the deck. With a 0.040" head gasket This should yield a compression ratio of 14:1. Hopefully with the right camshaft combo and a bit of porting of the intake manifold and touching up of some cylinder head details the engine might be quite strong.

That's the plan for the engine. The car is also cut to pieces at the moment as I am halfway through building a new roll cage, maybe some updates on that soon.

Thanks for your time
Blessings from the Heavenbound racing team.

It's update time.
Ruth and I have sold our house so my beloved shed goes with it, we need to be moved out by 14th of July. but I am hoping to build a nice new one after we've relocated a house to our new property in the Moutere fairly soon.
Unfortunately I've got a bulged disc in my back so I'm off work recovering for the next week give or take. I'm thinking that this coming season I may have to miss due to the above priorities. I've done nothing to the car except remove the engine and tear it down and shift the car into my father in laws hay shed. The engine had run all the big end bearings. There was no bad damage to the crank so I passed it on to Mean Machine and they measured it up and it came out spot on so I've had it crack tested and polished. Four of the connecting rods have gone out of round on the big ends a little too much and after pricing up new bolts and adding the cost to re size them I've decided to just replace them as they were only cheap connecting rods any way. I have managed to get some parts under way and my new s**t connecting rods arrived today from Edge Parts and Performance.
Thanks for all the support.
Isaac.

As I sit and reflect on the tragedy at teams champs this weekend I'm faced with posting something, as stated many times over from one end of the country to the other, the shock, grief and pain is overwhelming and I definitely share all those emotions with everyone we are all hurting. The question is why, when I don't know Stephen? I put it down to the amazing caring community we know as our speedway family when one suffers we all suffer.
I can't begin to imagine the pain those closer to the family are feeling, but I want to pass on our deepest sympathy, love and prayer for comfort beyond understanding and peace for the immediate family as the next few weeks unfold.

Will be great to go out for a sq**rt on Saturday. Ive overhauled the steering rack with actual new genuine parts, and made couple of other minor adjustments. Setup on the scales done now so just a quick wash and we'll be ready to race.

It's been a while since my last post, so here is a post.
With the major lack of racing at the moment I've been spending time driving posts.
They are all second hand posts and I got them real cheap, I thought about upgrading but figured I'd just run them into the ground.

Please don't unfriend me.

I have probably left it awkwardly long to give you an update on Saturday night's race meeting, but here goes.

Race 1
Saw smoke coming out of bonnet, got a little trigger happy and pulled in. Shortly realised afterwards that it was more than likely just oil coming out of the breather, as pillock here put the rocker cover with the breather on it on the right hand side of the engine. Cornering force assisted the oil in escaping.

Race 2
Steering shaft was binding in the Bush where the steering shaft passes through the firewall so caused the steering to be quite heavy but also at the same time masking a fault in the steering rack.

Race 3
Steering shaft was much better but fault with steering rack became apparent. It would at random times lock completely when trying to steer right to go left.

Race 4
Pulled in as steering rack now decided to lock completely up when steering left to go left.

Other than this the car felt fine. Especially as it was the first time it's been out the shed under its own power since April last year and a lot has been changed since then. I felt it was a good shake down run and I am really looking forward to ironing out the issues and giving it the beans.

Thanks for all your support and kind messages. It was fantastic to be racing again.

http://www.nelsonspeedway.co.nz/newsarticle/110761?newsfeedId=1307489 #

DIRT MASTERS SUPER SALOONS   WRECK-CREATION   By Pete McNae   It was the last super saloon race of the 2020-21 season at ...

How cool is that!

My lovely wife greeted me with this when I got home from work. Her and the boys went out and brought me some lights and rigged them up for me in the workshop. Loving the festivities round here.

Been a good day so far. New belts arrived, new battery box built, new pull bars made up and the car is now a rolling chassis. I'm now just getting the engine ready to go in. Had an oof moment as I was checking the valve train out, 7 of the polylock rocker arm nuts have fractured I'm quit relieved that I found that. One in pitcular has multiple cracks and has expanded quite a bit and probably wasn't far off failing. Yikes. But other than that, progress is good. Listening to the magnificent roar of those sprint cars while working in the shed has put a smile on my face and raised the motivation a bit.
Peace.
Isaac.

Finally taking shape.

I had big ambitions of posting on here fairly regularly, but I haven't really kept it up during the off season sorry. So here goes a random post for you all. It's my 12 step process to making upper control arms. I designed new front suspension geometry for the car last off season and I wanted a jig to make the upper control arms so I could make a few as spares. We designed this cool as jig which is reversable to make either left or right upper control arms. It has a cnc machined 'spud' which holds the ball joint mounting plate at the correct angles both in side view (caster angle) and front view (King pin inclination angle) to ensure the ball joint is dead straight at ride height. The arms work really well, I can fully stroke the suspension (10 inches of travel with a 7 inch shock) without the ball joint getting to its max angle and bottoming out.

Anyway, I start with an 800mm length of 1/2 inch nominal bore schedule 80 pipe

Little more progress...

Got a bit of work done on the car tonight. It's been hard to get out in the shed the last few weeks but I am very pleased with tonight's progress. Got a few decisions to make on how I'm going to package the rear end setup so still quite a bit to achieve in that department. I'm excited about the changes I'm planning. Hopefully the car and I will be a bit better next season and be able to keep up.
Sleep well everyone, got church in the morning so I'm clocking off now. Good night.

Happy mothers day to all you magnificent women out there known as mum. You are all hero's.
A special thanks our awesome mum Judy. thank you for always being there to fix us up when we were broken and for keeping up epically well fed. Your faith, encouragement and prayers have helped mold us into who we are today.
Also like to honour our Wives Andrea, Jordan and Ruth. Raising Children can be the most demanding occupation there is and you are all awesome.
Peace.

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Had a few hours this afternoon while the little ones were having a sleep so I went full ham with the grinder. I feel a bit bad cutting up an old piece of history like this, but I am pretty keen to modernise the rear end as much as I can. I am going to go with a more conventional J bar and run coil overs on a z link type setup with a pull bar. Nothing out of this world but will be simple, light weight and more adjustable.

Huge congratulations to Mum and Dad, who made it to 40 years of marriage last weekend. Thank you for everything you do, and have done for us boys.

Here's a photo of where it all began, Dad (Murray) racing his valiant streetstock 40 years ago, in the 81/82 season at Nelson Speedway.
It was another 15 odd years and three kids later when he got back on the track after this season, I'm pretty sure a few guys can relate to that!

At the beginning of the season the car had a missfire. Instead of going through and diagnosing the problem, Eric from JetSpeed Motorsport, Tasman Design Manufacture LTD lent me his Crane ignition from a group A Jet boat engine he had.
Unfortunately down in Dunedin I had a little fire under the bonnet and had a bit of a fry up of the ignition leads and distributor. This is what it looked like afterwards.
I have run the ignition for the rest of the season and it hasn't caused me an ounce of trouble. The engine still runs like a champ.
So all this to say, I recon that ignition system is a little trooper. Peace.

Sad moment

Three wide on turn 1 and 2 , some awesome driving by the super saloons.

Hi everyone, thanks again for your encouragement and support. Overwhelmed by your kind messages of concern for me. Thanks to the super saloon class in general, it has been awesome to have the opportunity to race with you fine gentlemen this season. Thanks to those who have very kindly offered me parts to get the car back together.

The car isn't too bad in all the important areas and the accident has given me an excuse to chop some bits off and make some improvements, mostly in the rear end. Thanks to Mike Inwood from Lift n Shift for spending some of his valuable time on his Sunday morning to come and shift the car for me. I'm blown away by the support I've received from the speedway community.

Enough about me, congratulations to the Dunedin team on the well deserved win, I hope we can run the championship again next season. It's been a heck of a lot of fun.

Oh, and I am OK. I thank God for protecting me, and he even kept the more expensive parts of the car from being damaged so that helps with the rebuild too, which is kinda cool.