Wiring and plumbing for vintage/club racing

Post Reply
Mopar 151w2
Posts: 342
Joined: Fri May 11, 2012 9:08 pm
AntiSpam: No

Wiring and plumbing for vintage/club racing

Post by Mopar 151w2 »

When ‘Lectricity Come to Arkansas
Using technology to make your club racer or vintage car safer, easier, faster (!), and more reliable, while maintaining the look and feel of “The Day”. An opinion in several parts.

Sources: There are 2 major sources I use to make this easy.
• Cole – Hersee Master Catalog (http://www.colehersee.com) Your local parts store, especially if they deal in truck parts, should be able to get you the catalog.
• McMaster-Carr (mcmaster.com) Catalogs are hard to come by. They are a huge industrial supply company. If you can cajole one off your buddy in Maintenance or Engineering, even if it is 5# behind the new one, it’s great. Don’t bother to call unless you are a bona fide open account customer. They’ll hang up the phone! But… the website is great! Good search, pictures, and anybody can order online with a credit/debit card. “You can built the space shuttle outa that book!”
Charging/electrical system
• Battery – They are better now than they were, in many ways, and it goes double for boxes, terminals, and everything else over there. The deal is, that a “wet” lead acid battery is fragile, heavy, and a couple kinds of dangerous. The acid is part of it, but the advice to cover the positive terminal really extends down the cable all the way to the starter. “You can spray a fire extinguisher right on the arc of the short, and it won’t even slow the fire down!” is how the Pro Rally tech guy explained it to me. The neat little covers from Taylor Cable work fine, but the “authentic” one is a polyethylene (flexible & opaque) flat style “aspirin” bottle, modified with the sharpest knife available. AGM – Absorbent Glass Mat is the answer to the acid problem. An Optima is a popular example, but it looks wrong and it’s too big & heavy. Down to Sam’s Club, and likely lots more places, they have AGM batteries now that are sized for VW and similar imports, and maybe 30% more than the same “wet” battery. Formula car guys and similar have used ‘em for decades, but they cost the earth and wouldn’t crank a V8 reliably without a plug-in booster. If it ain’t a jet engine, you don’t want a starter cart. Stealing the old racer’s trick of wrapping a hard rubber battery in black viniyl electrical tape to toughen it up works just fine to cover over the modern look.
Post Reply