Messages

1

General Discussion / Re: NOT VMX - 1970 Ford Escort resto / rally prep - For Parkinsons awareness

« on: February 18, 2014, 02:50:16 pm »

Hi all,
Just a quick update on progress with the Escort project.
As far as the car goes itself, we've been a little constrained this past three weeks due to:
 -workshop renovations - building a new composites room, and painting the workshop floor
 - bushfires -Mark Browne, project instigator / leader, in Wallan, and the fires came within 200 yards of his place last week
 - fundraising - I've been travelling a bit throughout Qld and NSW visiting the unis, running a few racecar design seminars for their Formula SAE teams and teeing up a few more.  (Proceeds going to the Escort project)

(For what it is worth, FSAE is a student engineering design competition where they design and race small open wheeled racing cars.  610cc capacity, generally around 160-240kgs, depending on motor, and some now getting into electric powered cars too.  Check them out if you get a chance, the quality of engineering is brilliant - sometimes   )

The Formula SAE car we built in 2003, just so you  know what I was on about  (that's me front left):



On that final point, I'll be in Perth this coming weekend (22 and 23 Feb) giving a two day FSAE Design seminar at Curtin Uni, for students of Curtin, Edith Cowan and UWA.  If you are interested at all please message me here or privately. I've got one of our forum members hopefully coming along on the Sunday, and I'm going to Edith Cowan Uni socially on the Monday to check out their motorsport engineering facility - can see if I can arrange a tour if any of you are interested. 

Back to the Escort, we've just received delivery of some floor pans, rear turrets and a panhard rod, and we are meant to be getting our four-link kit soon.  Spoke to the dude at Trackart (see roll cage photos above), and it is looking like he will do our cage for us.  As a one man business he can't afford to do it for us gratis, but he is still helping us out significantly.  Lovely guy, does brilliant general fabrication work.  Given the beauty of his welding, we are going to try to keep the cage raw steel with a clearcoat if we can - or at least a significant part of it. 

As for the wider Parkinsons cause, we have got some guys who have agreed to design a website for us.  I can't give a company name yet, as I don't know if it is official or through the back door.  We sent off logo / branding concepts to them just yesterday, along with a bit of a brief about what we want to put on the website. 

Plan is for the website to be a bit of a fun, light, pisstakey sort of thing.  When I was diagnosed, all the services were helpful, but they also tended to be really serious and left you feeling pretty morose.  Shakies have a predisposition for depression (great work on the other thread re the classic A4DE too - well done to all!), and to be honest I just wanted someone to share a laugh with occasionally.  So that is where we are going with the website.  Intended overall name - "Shaky Foundation" - which leads to assorted puns like you can't build stable future without a Shaky Foundation, etc.  Subheadings like Movers and Shakers (stories of inspiring people with PD), Shaky Advice (tips for people living with PD and their families), etc.  Progress on the Escort will come under the heading "Slim Shaky's Escort Service" - as those of you who have contacted me on Facebook will know.

I'm crapping on a bit here.  Feel free to doze off...

Website logo we are playing around with:




Gratuitous pic of me on my first bike, to make some link to the intent of this forum:




And at last, genuine VMX - My RM100/125, which was surplus to requirements and went on the market recently - only to be taken off again when we found a rubber grommet in the engine case was not so much factory installed, but rather an "aftermarket" part carefully chosen to fit a crankcase breather hole apparently machined by a rock...
Serves me right for thinking I could sell a bike without giving the engine a full rebuild.  My public apology to the gents who came to look at it.





Cheers all, thanks for the interest


 

2

General Discussion / Re: Thanks for the ride

« on: February 15, 2014, 01:42:19 am »

I've said similar elsewhere, but will say it here too - cheers Bill, thanks for keeping us entertained, and for some very well written and provocative posts.  TM Bill will be missed, but I look forward to the arrival of RM Bill, or CR Bill, or Virago Bill, or whatever your next incarnation will be. 

Cheers,

Geoff

3

Competition / Re: Rule re-write.

« on: February 13, 2014, 11:53:15 am »

I have just stumbled across this thread after a period of a few weeks where I've spent little time here.  My fullest congratulations to Nathan for biting the bullet and giving the rules re-write a red hot go.  And more so for taking the time to annotate it and explain the intent.  I'll be sure to work through it all before I make any detail comment, but Nathan you have my full respect for having such vision, and acting on it to deliver such a comprehensive review. 

Cheers,

Geoff

4

General Discussion / Re: Vale Eddie LANCASTER: Vic A-grade MXer from mid-1970s ...

« on: February 03, 2014, 10:11:57 am »

Kate, I hope you get this and I am sorry that I missed this thread.  I used to work with your dad at Yamaha Australia back in the 90's, and in fact we sat at adjacent desks.  He was a true character, and had a booming laugh I can still hear as clearly as if he were sitting next to me now.  I am deeply, deeply sorry to hear this news.

Your father gave me some advice once which I have carried with me to this day.  He told me that no matter what you did with your life, and no matter what mistakes you might have made in the past - if you were willing to put in ten good years of effort, you could get anywhere you wanted to in this life.  Those words were crucial in my decision to go back to uni in my mid 30's to get my degree, which built a whole new career and a new life for me. 

I have often thought of finding him, just to say thanks.  His was just some fatherly advice for a kid who was a bit lost - but it changed my life.  I'm a bit upset now, that I never got around to following through.  A lesson in not putting off until tomorrow what you can do today.

Rest in peace Eddie.  And thanks mate.

Geoff

5

General Discussion / Re: NOT VMX - 1970 Ford Escort resto / rally prep

« on: January 26, 2014, 11:07:16 am »

I have seriously considered the clear coat option if we get this guy to do it.  Glare??  Nothing a bit of strategically placed duct tape wouldn't fix...

You might have already found it, but Andy's facebook page has a heap more photos.  Trackart Custom Fabrications.  We lost a good two hours of an otherwise productive Saturday looking through his photos.  What, with the distractions of his site, the Motorsport Retro link, and these forums, it doesnt look like we'll be posting too many progress updates in the near future.

Cheers all,

6

General Discussion / Re: NOT VMX - 1970 Ford Escort resto / rally prep

« on: January 26, 2014, 02:13:52 am »

Thanks for sending those through Troy, and we'll keep you updated through FB.
Things been a little quiet over Christmas / Jan, but we are beginning to ramp up a bit now.  Planning a bit of a barby get-together next Saturday (1st Feb) to get things rolling again for the year. 
Cutting the floor out of the car at the moment, got some replacement floor panels coming.  The old ones looked like old gold-mining sieves...  I can't really offer many good photos of the car at the moment as we have coated it in etch primer and the thing is flat black.  Try photographing it and it looks like a black smudge.
Below is one shot where we are getting an idea of seat position, before we start putting in seat mounts, and more importantly, the roll cage. 


We are speaking to a guy by the name of Andy from Trackart here in Melbourne about the rollcage, as he has offered to help us out given the car be used for a bit of charity work.  I hope we can manage something, his work is just - well - art.  The following are lifted from his facebook page, and the car is a Porsche GT3 Cup car - but I thought the fabricators and engineers on these boards would appreciate it.  Check out the welding:





Also, we have the rear suspension components on the way - four link, panhard bar, coilovers, pre-formed turrets and assorted brackets.  They will be getting to Melbourne next weekend.  These have been "facilitated" by a bunch of uni students at Uni of Queensland, who arranged for me to go to Qld a couple of weekends back to present a seminar on fundamentals of vehicle design and vehicle handling.  This was for the students at the unis up there who are involved in the Formula SAE student engineering design competition.  They all pitched in a few bucks for it, and proceeds were forwarded to the Escort project.  I'm off to Uni of Wollongong this week (Thursday 30th) to present the same seminar to their students, WA in a few weeks for the students at Curtin, UWA and ECU, and back to NSW in a couple of weeks to do one at ADFA in Canberra, and another in Sydney central.

If anyone on here is interested in coming along to any of these seminars please let me know, you would be most welcome to do so.  I'm covering some basics on tyres (on asphalt), steering geometry, vehicle suspension design, vehicle chassis design, a bit of project management, etc.  It is primarily about open-wheeled race car design for the FSAE competition, but engineers are engineers and most of us have multiple engineering interests.

Also, while I think of it - I'm catching up with some engineer friends up in Qld who are now involved in V8 Supercars, about putting on a bit of a fundraising dinner with proceeds once again going towards the Escort.  The idea at this stage is to have a bit of a dinner where these guys will talk a bit about their careers, what they do in their teams over a race weekend, how the new V8 Supercar "Cars of the Future" are working for them,  and what they would do if they were designing a Formula SAE student racecar if they could do so with the knowledge they have now.  (Most of them are graduates of the FSAE program, and have been working for 888, Tekno and now DJR).  Nothing is confirmed as yet, but if any of you are interested in coming along to such a thing please message me.  Qld would be the first attempt at such a thing, but we should also be able to do one here in Melbourne quite easily enough with the contacts we have in teams down here. 

Sorry ladies and gents, I got a bit carried away with this post.  I'll try to get back on track with the next one...

Cheers,

Geoff

7

eBay Finds / Re: 81 rm250

« on: January 10, 2014, 10:08:12 pm »

Was watching this one and would have liked to bid myself (got a 250x parts bike already in the shed).  Did anyone on here win this?  Went for a pretty reasonable price

8

Foto Forum / Re: Chrysler Drifter - circa 1977

« on: January 08, 2014, 01:33:18 am »

Thanks for the responses thus far.  Since we have started talking about movie cars and Valiant Chargers...

Curiously enough, in the same box as I found the Drifter brochure, I found an envelope of old photos.  This is me in Alvin Purple's Charger, at the 1974(??) Aus Grand Prix at Sandown.  Dad's mate was Clerk of Course or something, and the Charger was being used as a course car.  After the race, I was taken for a lap of the track in it.  I thought I was royalty.



Graeme Macrae won the race...



My favourite car of the meeting was Mike Stillwell's Escort



And just to get back to panel vans, in the same envelope I found this very dodgy photo I took of the Coca Cola 3XY Freedom Machine, taken at Wattle Park Speedway - 1979 maybe??



Cheers all, 

Geoff

9

Foto Forum / Re: Chrysler Drifter - circa 1977

« on: January 05, 2014, 10:28:55 pm »

10

Foto Forum / Re: Chrysler Drifter - circa 1977

« on: January 05, 2014, 10:27:36 pm »

11

Foto Forum / Chrysler Drifter - circa 1977

« on: January 05, 2014, 10:25:42 pm »

When I was a little tacker all I wanted was a panel van and a motocross bike.  Specifically, I wanted a red Escort Sundowner and either an RM or a Montesa - but I wasn't going to be too fussy. 

I picked up a brochure for a Chrysler Drifter panel van somewhere, and I used to spend hours looking at it.  To me the photos in it portrayed the ideal life.  Cool van, great bikes, riding with mates. 

Anyway, I thought I'd lost the brochure years ago,  but with the parents selling up the farm and moving into town last month, we uncovered a heap of cool stuff from my childhood.  Including the Drifter brochure.  So I've scanned the cover page and the bikes pages, and present them below for your amusement.

I remember reading in Van Wheels magazine that only 1959 Chrysler panel vans were ever made, and the Drifter would have comprised only a small fraction of these.  Anyone here own one? 

Cheers

12

General Discussion / Re: NOT VMX - 1970 Ford Escort resto / rally prep

« on: January 04, 2014, 12:06:03 pm »

Thanks for the support and kind comments, it is much appreciated.  It is a great little project, and I am indeed fortunate to have the friends that I do.

If any of you are on facebook, feel free to "friend" me and I can put you into our closed workgroup for more regular updates.  Yep, facebook I'm afraid.  There are a heap of Gen Y's involved in the project and this is the way they organize themselves.  My name to look up - Geoff Pearson - there is a profile shot of me wearing a blue top hat and dreadlocks, and my main photo is a shot of me racing at Phillip Island back in the 90's.  (BTW, Lozza, are you on the TZ250racing.com forums too??)

Cheers all,

Geoff

13

General Discussion / Re: NOT VMX - 1970 Ford Escort resto / rally prep

« on: January 04, 2014, 04:21:18 am »

Ugh.



Prepping for bubble arch flares



The whole front end had been pretty well butchered - the radiator support panel had been chopped up with a grinder and bent out of the way, there was bog everywhere - very ugly.  The Targa rules allow fibreglass panels at the front end and the boot lid, so we decided to make a complete fibreglass front end - one piece front quarters and front / grille panel.  Once we have this sussed, we are also planning to do a complete one piece front end including bonnet.  Should be pretty cool. 

 

This is the front end without bonnet.  The original front panel on the car was useless, so the lads made up a foam buck for the front panel, and attached it to the front quarters.  This foam panel was coated in fibreglass to give a hard shell, and then bog added for shaping .  A few more hours spent sanding and we'll be right to start making moulds...

Aside from that, the engine is off being checked over by a mate's dad in Geelong ( Ford employee), we've sourced a five speed gearbox, Minilite wheels are coming, we've sourced some adjustable front struts, LSD coming, we've got one race seat ready to go in, but have got a bit of rust cutting to do pretty urgently.  All good fun.

Let me know if you want updates as we go.  We are aiming to have the car done by midyear.  We are welcoming any interest or assistance, so if you would like to get involved or just drop by to take a look, please PM me on here.  Car is located in Thomastown Vic.

Cheers all,

Geoff

14

General Discussion / Re: NOT VMX - 1970 Ford Escort resto / rally prep

« on: January 04, 2014, 04:06:46 am »

A full days work by a team of enthusiastic friends, and it was stripped down to this

 
Coming out of the sandblasters.  Some home truths becoming evident...


Back at the workshop, a bit of damage evident on rear quarters

15

General Discussion / NOT VMX - 1970 Ford Escort resto / rally prep

« on: January 04, 2014, 04:00:16 am »

Hi all,

Elsewhere on these boards I've mentioned a Ford Escort restoration project I'm involved in, and a few of you said you would be interested in following its progress.  Still early days yet, we started in October and have obviously been distracted by Christmas and all the holiday season nonsense.  But I think we have enough done to start showing pics.  Apologies, I haven't yet shown any VMX credentials before drifting off onto four wheel projects...

Basic details.  Ford Escort Mk1 2 door, 2.0 Pinto engine, being prepped as a tarmac rally car for Targa Tassie and the like.  Getting a full roll cage, stripped interior, rear discs, 4 link rear end, LSD, watts link, bubble arches and 8 inch minilites.   The car is also being used as a bit of a charity/promo vehicle to raise awareness of young onset Parkinsons Disease. 

First time I've posted images here - hope they work.

 
The starting point.  In all, it didn't look too bad with the paint still on it.  Aside from the white interceptors though, they were a worry



The very tasteful interior.  Workmanship = extremely shoddy.  Dashboard fastened down to the support panel with woodscrews.  Ouch.