It’s a nice feeling when you are building a race car and things start going back together fresh and new, especially when racing season is less than two weeks away. But, we still have lots of work to do and there is definitely some long days and nights ahead of us.
Words By AJ Hunsinger // Images By AJ Hunsinger
We bought some pipe Saturday, but we still haven’t added any to the chassis. Dad is the best welder we have and he has unfortunately been under the weather over the last several days. Once he is healthy, we will be doing some welding. We also have yet to pick up the new IMCA yet either with Dad being sick.
I am dying to pick up the new car. Not just because I want it home, but because it is a waiting game to see what all parts come with it. We have a lot of stuff that we need for my IMCA, but we don’t want to buy too much without knowing if we will get what we need with the new IMCA. Though I have been doing as much as I can without the parts, the longer we wait, the less time we have to install the new parts.
 
Since I really couldn’t do much, I decided to put most of the body back on the car. I say most of it because a lot of the body on the right side of the car will need to come back off in order to do the welding we need to do. And also because we are making new body panels for the right side of the car as the old body panels are a little beat up. We are however, able to reuse the left side body panels, roof, hood, and nose piece.
But, the old panels were are reusing of course have the old decals and numbers from the previous owner. So…they have to come off. That is truly easier said than done and is a very tedious job. Since I have nothing else to do on the car, this is literally the perfect time to remove them.
Removing old vinyl from aluminum body panels is easily my least favorite thing to do. To remove the old vinyl, you have to heat the vinyl up with a heat gun, then use a razor blade or your fingers to pull them off once they have some heat in them. Though it is very time consuming, I got most of them off.
After they come off, they usually leave an ugly and sticky residue behind. Fortunately with some elbow grease and some paint thinner, that too will come off. I had very little paint thinner left so I wasn’t able to get much of that stuff off yet. I will save that for another rainy day in the near future.
I also got to see my new 383 racing engine, built by our friend Joe Lane. It is looking very nice and is just about ready to be fired up for the first time.
I decided to see if I could find any videos of my car being ran on the track. After a little bit of searching, I found a few in-car camera videos from another car. In the video was my car. Ironically, the car with the camera ran right behind my car the entire race, as the two cars battled for the lead. My car though, won the race. It was really neat to see and was as if the video was meant for me to see one day. The car looked like it worked very well on the track.
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