Just starting to break the tires free in the next shot.

It is in fact a very tight driver’s compartment, I guess I am just short. Visibility is great though.

And of course we must thank NAPA Sumas for their support. They set me up with some new tires for my car the other day, fantastic service, very personal, and they took great care with the installation.

Bill is walking drag racing history. He drove his first dragster in 1958, seven years before I was even born, and has been racing ever since, over fifty years.

His experience and wisdom is immense.

His budget is very small, using mostly second hand parts, and a chassis built in 1978 he is still able to run 5.50 et’s and qualify at the Seattle National event in 2009. He takes his time in preparing the car, and is a stickler for details. He watches all the small things that add up to get the car down the track. It is a huge pleasure for me to be able to work closely with him and learn.

This season is still a little unknown for me at this point. In mid April I finally got Dennis Hicks’ car into my shop to update the driver’s compartment, install a new clutch and trans, and sort out the trouble I was having with the steering all last season. Unfortunately once I got it here I discovered that my steering problem was a result of the chassis being out of alignment by about 3 and a half inches. Most of the trouble appeared to be in the rear axle housing. Add to that the engine being way out of alignment with the pinion. (no wonder the rear trans seal was always leaking).  The good news is that the shop that built the car in the first place said they would make it right, so Dennis took the car back up to them to have it made right. Because the work I had to do was all based on and around the rear axle and bellhousing there was nothing I could effectively do with the car until the alignment issues were resolved. At this point I am not sure of the status of the car. I am a big believer in checking the car immediately after the race event, or race season, not immediately before the race event or race season, that way there is plenty of time and resources to make any required repairs properly.

I was sad to not be able to make it to the opening event in Ashcroft this last weekend, but very happy to hear that it all went well for everyone. I was in Woodburn Oregon with Bill Edwards racing. I will be helping Bill and his son BJ, (Bill Junior) with their Top Alcohol Dragster operation this year, and be doing a bit of driving for them as their schedule allows. We are hoping to have the car in Ashcroft with me driving for the AHRA Reunion tour event in August.

I made one attempt at a half track pass in the car on Saturday. It wasn’t very pretty. In hindsight I should have made more adjustments in the driver’s compartment, I didn’t have the clutch control I should have had, which resulted in no burnout. Add to that a little more horsepower in the motor than Bill was expecting and the car went straight into wheelspin on the launch, then into some pretty violent tire shake. I poked second gear hoping it might settle down, but it didn’t.

On Sunday BJ took over the controls as planned. Unfortunately he didn’t fare much better, with bad tire shake breaking the tires free on the first run and breaking a fuel line on the second run. We are certainly hoping for much better results in Mission in two weeks.

I have a few photos from the weekend which I will post up in a couple days. One great shot of what bad tire shake looks like.

While I was in Woodburn I was able to catch up with Darin Bay, whom I met at the BC Classic and Custom car show earlier this year. He was there with his two jet dragsters and was doing double duty driving Twig Ziggler’s Nostalgia funny car as well. There is a Jet funny car owner in this area who is still talking about getting me to pilot his car, so I catch up with the jet cars whenever I can. They really do put on a fantastic show. I was able to watch one of Darin’s runs from the top end on Sunday, it is absolutely amazing how fast those things are accelerating from about 800 feet onwards. They are just starting to really get going when they have to be shut down. . . I wonder how fast they could go on a half mile run? . . .

I have tried to sit down and answer these questions in a blog post as they come in, but I have found that the articles become almost huge as there are so many variables that need to be addressed.

I have an idea.

I encourage you to ask  your question directly to me. You can email me through the contacts page at the back, and I will reply, most likely with more questions so I can answer your question as it pertains to your needs.

I have many customers who email me with all sorts of questions, they send me photos and specs and I guide them through the process they are trying to accomplish. The cool thing about this sport is it is hands on, most of you guys and girls build the car, and set it up yourself. That is fantastic, and if I can help I am more than happy to.

So, don’t be shy or embarrassed, ask away, and I will respond in a timely manner, (you won’t be waiting a week for a reply). You can ask anything to do with Drag racing, from chassis design and setup, engine building and tuning, gas, alcohol, and nitro, gear ratios, tires, driving techniques, sponsorship, or rules, or any thing else.

It has been a very big move from the Sunshine Coast, but I am mostly settled now, and Telus finally got my phone connected today, 18 days after it was supposed to be connected, how is that for service?

I invite everyone to drop by and say hi. For the next little while I will be busy getting caught up on work and getting more organized, so I will be here pretty much seven days a week, so stop in on the weekend, or over the holidays.

Pinion angle in and of itself does not affect the way a car launches. A change in pinion angle does change the angle of the four link or ladder bar brackets on the rear axle housing. So a change in pinion angle will change the angle of push and pull on your rear suspension components, but, and this is the important part, we do not want to use pinion angle as a rear suspension tuning aid.

What we do want to do with pinion angle is have the drive-line in the right relationship so the universal joints work correctly.

Universal joints; this is really cool. Picture a simple shaft, now add a single universal joint in the middle of it and bend it slightly. You can now rotate one end of the shaft, and the other end of the shaft can also rotate, even though it is, in effect, going around a corner. (that’s not the cool part) If you could rotate the input end of the shaft at a very accurate constant velocity, and if you could accurately measure the velocity of the output shaft as it rotates, you would find that the output shaft does not rotate at a constant velocity. In fact through one revolution it actually speeds up and slows down several times as each cross of the universal joint changes angle, even though it still completes one revolution in the same amount of time as the input shaft.

The amount of this acceleration and deceleration changes with the angle of the universal joint. (you can see where I am going with this already can’t you?) From there it is pretty simple to visualize what we might want from a driveshaft with two universal joints in it, we would want both joints to accelerate and decelerate the same amount, at the same time, if we do not, we end up with vibration. We will not always feel the vibration in a drag car that is accelerating, but it is tearing up universal joints as they fight each other. So, pretty simple, we want both universal joint angles to be the same. Mark Williams has a great drawing here to show what I mean.

Now comes the bit that seems to be magic, we want the universal joints to operate at the same angle. . . when the shaft is turning.

Generally if the car has universal joints, it has suspension, suspension allows movement, which will change the angle of the u-joints, so we need some sort of compromise. Logic says we would want our universal joints to be operating at the same angles when they are under the greatest load. Which in our case is when we launch the car. If you remember back to a previous installment, when we launch the car, the rotation of the pinion gear on the ring gear causes the rear axle housing to rotate around the axles in the opposite direction of the tires. Put simply the front of the axle housing wants to go up, the front where the pinion goes in. . . the pinion that is on the end of the driveshaft. . .  after the universal joint. So we will want to take this movement into account when we are setting our pinion angle.

So now, when you are setting up your pinion angle on the floor of your shop, you want to add a little to the angle to compensate for the rotation of the rear housing when you accelerate, here it comes that number you have heard, two degrees down. Ok, two degrees is not always the “exactly” correct angle, but it is a good starting point. but this does not mean that your pinion is set to two degrees, what you want is two degrees more to compensate for rear axle housing rotation. Let’s refer the the Mark Williams drawing here. If Angle “B” is ten degrees, you would want angle “A”, at the pinion, to be pointed down a little to compensate for torque reaction during launch, (the rotation of the front of the axle housing upward), so angle “A” should be about eight degrees. Of course the number itself is dependent on where you measure the angle, but let’s put it simple, you want the pinion pointed down about two degrees more than the back of the transmission. Of course this is all at ride height with fuel load and driver weight in place.

I think one place where many go wrong with the whole pinion angle deal is they do not correct pinion angle after they adjust the rear suspension. Particularly with ladder bars, if you change the front mount location, you must correct your pinion angle.