Little Lamb-orghini

Paul is doing a great job of creating order out of the total chaos that is the car right now! Many thanks for his help.

I would also like to thank my friend Brian Elgin who hooked me up with a deal on this HUGE 1/2″ fuel hose. Yeh, prolly a bit overkill, bu has anyone ever really complained that their fuel hose was too big?

I spent a little time fabricating tie rods to hold the rear wheels straight in lieu of the steering rack.

Also hooked up the Zetec throttle and picked a few miscellaneous parts from the u-pull this morning.

Just because it was originally designed to couple sewer pipes doesn’t mean it can’t be a Lamb-orghini part!

Like my jammies?

Here’s the preliminary layout for the dashboard Paul Blaylock has begun to lay out. The box with the knobs at the top is the ‘Mega Throttle Instruction Module’ AKA MegaTIM, the brainchild of Tim ‘The Wizard’ Black. This controls the rear throttle, and in effect, torque bias.

The other switches are main kill, spark and fuel kills for both engine A and engine B, transmission control push buttons for selecting D4 or N on the rear tranny, and driver comfort switches – A/C, fan, or AC/DC via stereo.

I don’t know what two of the buttons do… maybe rockets? Deploy in flight refueling nozzle?

Rear fender flare work in progress. Decided to go all steel rather than make a fiberglass one with the thought that it will be easier to beat back into shape if mangled on track. Still pretty rough, but you can start to get the idea of what it will look like.

See the official release.

Apparently we’ll be in Hula dancer attire for costume day! Good thing I’ve been working on my tan…not!

For those following along at home, made some good progress this weekend, but most of it is not very photogenic. I was also a bit too busy chopping and welding steel to be snapping photos, but I promise a photo update this week showing a new firewall, and redonkulous wide rear fender flares. Also promise pics of the car sitting on it’s 17″ Mustang rim. Yes that’s right folks, an Escort sitting on 5X4.5″ bolt pattern Mustang rims. The solution to make that work is a little trickier than it sounds, but with a little back yard engineering and some serious help from my friends (Dirk VanVorst & Dan Hammond) made it work. Lets just say it took a friggin’ laser to get it done.

Oh, and the throttle control is complete! It is, in a word, awesome. This has got to be the first $500 AWD car with on the fly electronically controlled torque bias.

Here’s the schemat so I don’t lose it. Thanks to Tim Black who did pretty much ALL the work on this system, developing it from scratch from some parts scrounged from a junk yard and stuff he already had lying around his house.

Ian at Sick Innovations is going to give us a hand again with the final cage welding this Saturday, after which I will have few excuses for getting the car mechanically completed. Other updates, Tim Black is all but completely done with the fly-by-wire throttle control system. He’s just making a couple tweaks, adding a display and putting it in a project box for mounting – but the hard stuff is done and working on the bench. Paul has completed the ECU work, and is working on the transmission controller, which is also up an communicating. I have figured out the plumbing for the cooling system, but need to do some fab yet. Parts for widening the front end are all being constructed (some of them as I type) so it will not be long before the front end sits 9.5″ wider than stock from wheel mounting face to wheel mounting face. Extra width beyond that for the additional width of wider tires. Dirk and I spent last weekend machining a plate to hold the Zetec starter and welding it to the Escort tranny and cutting out space for the starter nose. This required disassembly of the transmission, but I’ve got it back together now with a minimum quantity of unimportant looking pieces left over.

This monster is coming together. And it will be a real monster.