September 15, 2007

This picture is getting to look way too familiar. However, believe it or not, there is light at the end of the tunnel. As you can see we are in the middle of a torque converter change which we are hoping will really pick the car up both by ET and mph.

I'm not a rookie at changing torque converters. I have probably done it 200 times in my lifetime and always with small blocks. It's really a pretty simple procedure. You drop the converter in twice onto the input shaft, put the transmission in the car, line up the bolt holes and bolt it up. The center hub of the converter fits in the crankshaft socket and that's it. However, we just discovered that my stupid crankshaft has a 1.63" hole to accept a standard 1.70" converter hub. That's like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. When you look at it from the bottom you can't see that the hub doesn't fit inside the socket. Did this crankshaft come from Mars? No wonder the car won't run right, geeeezzz. I'm going to catch so much flack over this, it's gonna be ugly.

On Monday I'm going to have both converter hubs turned down .20" a quarter of an inch deep and that problem should be history. The car should then pick up a ton and really run it's potential. I just can't wait as I have a hard time dealing with miserable performances like last night at Sunshine.

Last night at Sunshine, Nicole Markwart won the Right Trailers Dead-On money with a perfect 4.950 ET run on a 4.95 Dial in. She accomplished this in the eighth pair of the first round. It's a good thing for her that she was up front as Mark Young was a few pair behind her and ran dead on also. As a result, Nicole is $50 richer.