SCORE Desert Challenge – Class 1
Class 1
Class 1 – anything goes, as a matter of fact a couple of the Trophy Truck teams took the body panels off of their trucks and ran them in Class 1 as well. The Class 1 car has evolved into a fairly light weight long A – arm front suspension vehicle powered for the most part by aluminium LS2 Corvette engines driving custom made manual transmissions.
All I can say is I would love to have had one back when we were racing.
Well that is it for this year! Hopefully we will be able to do this again in 2011!
Trophy Trucks
The Trophy Truck class is the only one that has to qualify – one lap fast time for starting position on Saturday. It gives the spectators a chance to see the truck before most of it’s body work is left laying around the course and whatever is left is covered in dust and mud! These vehicles are truely brutes around 5000 lbs, 800 to 1000 HP, close to 30 inches of suspension travel and costing in the $250-$300K range. These trucks are not for the feint of heart or with small check books.
The overall winner for the weekend was Brian McMillin, grandson of Corky and nephew of Mark. ‘Back In The Day’ Mark and Corky were the major driving force in SCORE. Their Porche powered Class 1 cars ruled the desert from Nevada to the tip of Baja. It is really good to see the family back at it again. Brian is proving that the fruit never falls far from the tree. Mark also ran in this class, but was not as competitive as in the past. If I am not mistaken the McMillins had around 6 vehicles entered in the Desert Challenge this year.
Class 10 & Class 1200
These two classes are perhaps my two favorite SCORE classes. Class 10 is limited to 1600 cc engines and unlimited suspensions. Class 1200 is pretty much like the cars we used to race in Class 1 ‘Back In The Day’ – aka the late 80’s to mid 90’s. Back then the engines were unlimited as were the suspensions. Today the Class 1200 cars must run air cooled VW engines – 1700 or so for single seat cars and 1835 for two seaters – the front and rear suspensions must be VW based trailing link designs – no A-arms etc. To me these two classes offer the most bang for your offroad racing buck and if we were still racing it would probably be in a 1200 car.
Oh, and I forgot! There was one Class 5 Baja Bug! This car won Class 5 last year.
SCORE has a bunch of classes for just about every kind of off-road vehicle that you can imagine. The format of the Desert Challenge is to group similar performance vehicles together and have each Group run either 7 or 8 laps on Saturday and then again on Sunday. Winners are determined by whomever has the lowest combined time for their class. Group 1 which are all of the lower powered/limited suspension cars are 1st off at 6:00 AM – way too early for this old man to haul is butt out of bed to sit in a cold grandstand and watch the 1/2 1600 cars go putting around the track. Around 8:00 they start Group 2, the stock and modified trucks but by the time we had breakfast and chit-chatted a bit it was more like 9-9:30 before we got out to the track – so not a lot of photos of them either.
Class 6 and Trucks
In the second photo from the end of this short slide show you will see a photo of two guys being interviewed. The guy on the left with the sun glasses is Bob Gordon, Robby Gordon’s Dad. Robby and BJ Baldwin were both down in Argentina running the Dakar race and would not make it back to Laughlin until late Saturday. Robby had his dad qualify and race his Trophy Truck on Saturday. BJ had Chad Ragland do the same for his truck. As luck would have it the drive shaft broke in the Gordon ride during qualification and the truck was not sorted out for the race on Saturday which put Robby at the back of the pack on Sunday. Robby put on a real show on Sunday but could not overcome being down 2 1/2 laps in a 8 lap race. Chad did a great job in putting BJ’s Trophy Truck in 3rd after the Saturday race, however BJ blew it up on the 1st lap on Sunday.
All in all the Gordons and Baldwins went to a lot of effort for little return.
2010 SCORE Desert Challenge
Once again Michelle and I made the trek across Arizona to Laughlin NV to attend the SCORE Desert Challenge off-road race that is held on a 6.25 mile closed course at the Laughlin Event Center. We drove over on Thursday and met our old racing friends; Doug Boelman and Danny Eichhorst who drove up from Tucson. Our good friends Paul and Judy Nolte were not able to make the event this year due to Judy having to finish up her chemo treatments.
With all the cold weather that we have had this year, I was hoping for some sun and warm temperatures but our current El Nino pattern decided that we could only have nice weather on Friday. Both Saturday and Sunday were overcast and windy and by Monday it was pouring and we had to deal with a blizzard from around Ashfork to a bit past Winslow on our drive home.
Anyway… back to the race! Friday’s main activities were Contingency in the morning and Trophy Truck qualification in the afternoon. On Friday evening they held the Laughlin Leap – the basic idea here is to accelerate your car/truck as fast as you can up a dirt ramp and then launch into space and see how far you can go before touching back down. The Trophy Trucks and Class 1 buggies were hitting around 100 mph at the end of the ramp and were traveling in the neighborhood of 120 ft or so. Last year the ramp was longer and higher and the trucks were getting close to 170-180 ft as I recall.
Unfortunately the dummy with the camera some how forgot his spare compact flash cards and was not able to get any photos of the Leap action since his one 4GB card was back in the hotel room being downloaded to the lap top.
Contingency Row & Tech Inspection
Most of the money that you can win when racing SCORE, is from Contingency Sponsors; i.e. they award you prize money if you are running their tires, wheels, shocks and/or parts. To give the sponsors an opportunity to look at your car and for you to sign up with them or buy last minute parts that you either forgot or trashed during practice, SCORE has you push your car by all the sponsors/vendors on your way to Tech Inspection. In general it a great time to meet old friends and do a bit of visiting and BS’ing and to check out what all the latest and greatest stuff!
A couple of interesting things of note: Check out the photos of what looks to be a BMW sport car – 6 cyl turbo diesel – 6 speed trans – carbon fiber body parts – and good ground clearance all for $52K and you can drive it on the street! Also check out the small red buggy, it’s a new SCORE spec racer based upon a snow mobile engine and belt drive – looks like a really badass golf cart – I especially liked the fact that it had to ignition keys – one for slow and one for fast! And finally take a look at the new Class 1 buggy that was for sale for only $150K – from what I have heard it was a real bargain.
The Monroe Mark II Mailbox
I finally replaced the old Mark I Mailbox with the new and improved larger Mark II version.
The paint job on it did not go all that well. When I tried to prime it with automotive epoxy it was only about 65F in the shop and the epoxy did not cure fully even though the reducer I used was supposed to be good to 60F – so I stripped it off and primed it with an oil based primer (Rustoleum) that was rated to 50F.
Unfortunately the primer did not have any kind of tech sheet with it – and the instructions on the can assumed that you were going to use a brush or roller to apply it. So I figured that I would thin it 10% with paint thinner – not a good idea too thin and several major saqs resulted.
I wet sanded the primer with 180 grit to knock down the sags and then painted it with a oil based top coat, but didn’t thin it. It layed out okay, but the coverage seemed inconsistent, but no orange peel, dry spots or runs! But I could still see where the primer had sagged – I should have spent more time sanding…
Okay, I wet sanded the top coat with 360 grit to even everything out. Shot it again with the top coat, but this time I tried some different settings of the HF 43430 HVLP gun. I kept the air pressure the same but narrowed the pattern and cut back on the material adjustment. When I started to spray the box, I would get a nice pattern, then it would act like it was running out of material, then start spraying okay again. Things were looking pretty ugly by the time I had finished one side. In addition to the weird pattern, I started getting all manner of small particles in the paint. I decided that the best course of action would be to get the paint thinner and a clean rag and wipe off all the new paint. Once that was done, I ran several tests to see if I could determine what was I doing wrong. I tried spraying a piece of cardboard with several different settings and I still kept having the the running out of material problem. I found that I even had the problem when I was spraying only thinner or solvent!
The HF 43430 HVLP comes with a small strainer that fits between the paint cup and the body of the gun. It was the only thing that I could think of that could be restricting the material flow, so I removed it and loaded the gun with thinner and it sprayed great! The more that I looked at the little strainer, the more it seemed that the instructions that came with the gun had you installing it upside down. I took the gun apart and cleaned it once again, then put the strainer in upside down according to the instructions and it worked great, exactly the same as when I tried it without the strainer.
With the paint strainer installed upside down, I filled the gun with double filtered top coat, opened the pattern up, increased the material flow and once again sprayed the box. The material flowed well and it held a good pattern and the material layed out wet and slick with no sags or runs, the bad news was that the surface was covered with small particles. I emptied the paint cup and disassembled the gun and placed the parts, including the body, in a clean container and filled it with lacquer thinner. I let the parts soak for about an hour then removed them and dried them off. When I went to dump the used lacquer thinner I noticed the bottom of the container was filled with what looked like fine metal particles. I then closely inspected the body of the gun and found that the purple ’anodize’ coating on the inside of the gun had been flaking off.
After the paint had dried, I decided that the paint finish was ‘Good Enough’ for a mail box and hauled it out to the curb and replaced the old box with the new and larger one. Michelle was quite happy with the result, and I am thinking that I might need to bite the bullet and buy a better quality gun… more to follow!
Happy New Year!
I must say that I have never been so glad to see a new year starting!
2009 was not a good year and I am really glad to see it disappearing in my rear view mirror. We lost too many friends and had too many friends have too many problems with their health, wealth and families. Michelle and I hope that 2010 brings good health, happiness and well-being to all of our friends and family!
The Monroe Mark II Mailbox
For Christmas, Michelle asked me to build her a new mailbox since the last one that I had built was in her opinion too small i.e. it was too hard to get the mail and newspapers out of it. In my opinion it was fine, we just get too much mail, but since she is a good wife and doesn’t place much demand on me, I decided to build a new and better mailbox.
The Monroe Mark II Mailbox is two inches wider, two inches longer and two inches taller with a redesigned easy in, easy out door. It is still constructed of .25″ thick steel and will be mounted using four 3/8″ grade eight bolts, on the existing and proven mounting post. The plates were cut from a larger sheet using a computer controlled plasma cutter and MIG welded together using .035 steel wire. Before welding the roof on, I sprayed epoxy primer on the inside of the box to prevent rust.
Unfortunately it has been pretty cold this winter I was having problems with the igniter in my shop furnace, so I was not able to get the shop heated up to more than 62 – 65 F which was not really warm enough to allow the primer to cure properly. Even though I reduced the primer with a cool reducer – rated to 60 F, it really needed to be much warmer for it to set up properly. Based upon this experience, and the fact that the trailer is still buried under 8″ of snow – I may put off sand blasting and primering the ‘56 until it gets warm enough to where I can easily hold the paint booth to at least 70 F.
After welding the top on the box, I primered it with an oil based primer that had a low temp rating of 50 F, it is curing better than the epoxy, but it’s going slow. Did I say it’s been cold this winter? We have been having night time lows around 1-2 F for the past couple of weeks! Anyway, I should be able to spray the color coat sometime today or tomorrow and hopefully it will replace the Mark I box this weekend.
I guess I should have taken a few photos of the box during it’s construction – but I was lazy – I will do some photos when I install it!
Happy Thanksgiving!
We had a great time visiting with our friend Elisabeth from Munich. We toured some of the local sights, but mainly kicked back, relaxing and catching up on what has been going on with each other.
Shortly after we got Elisabeth on a plane to Honolulu we headed back down to the valley for the Goodguys Southwest Nationals at West World in Scottsdale. The weather was excellent and we had a great turn out of cars with several that I had not seen before. Best of all we had a chance to visit and go to dinner with many of our friends.
I am happy to report that Judy Nolte is doing quite well with her breast cancer treatment. She just had her 4th of 6 chemo treatments and was feeling quite well with most of the normal side effects well under control. We will be planning a cruise next year when she finishes her treatments next spring!
I have spent most of the week building a home server and getting it up and operational. It will allow me to have access to all my photos and files from anywhere on my LAN and also from the internet so that I can upload and process photos while on the road. I also set up an account for my fellow club members so that they could easily send me photos for our website www.othg-phoenix.net
As soon as I finish rearranging all of my files and folders and getting everything backed up, I will start converting all of the computers over to Windows 7 for maximium compatability. After that I have some photo projects and web updates to finish then we will be back down to the Valley for our club Christmas Party. With luck I should be able to get back to the Dodge by the second week of December.
Rethinking My Build Plan
We had a great time visiting with our dear friend from Munich last week. It was actually quite nice to take a break from the Dodge project for a few days and have some down time. While on break I did give some serious thought on how to best move forward with the project. I have been concerned about removing the rust from some of the tighter interior crevices. Sand blasting is clearly the way to go, but I would have to do it outside the shop on my driveway which will create an unacceptable mess. I had several mini sand dunes piled up against the shop when I tired my sand blaster out earlier this year.
My neighbor took his ‘38 Chevy to a local powder coating company and had them sand blast it to remove the paint and rust. He was quite pleased with the result and it was quite inexpensive. After talking with the powder coating company I think that I will take the following course of action:
- Complete the installation of the A/C drier on the core support.
- Remove all A/C equipment, radiator, transmission cooler, inner fender panels and core support
- Remove seats and seat tracks
- Remove shift cable, break pedal and gas pedal
- Remove sway bar and cats
- Remove drive shaft
- Remove fuel tank
- Remove dashboard
- Remove engine and transmission
Once everything is removed, use the pneumatic descaler to remove all of the under coating on the bottom of the car.
Load the wagon along with all the sheet metal that has been removed onto the trailer and haul it up to the powder coater and have everything media/sand blasted. While the wagon is out of the shop, expand the paint booth to full size and move the ‘39 into the shop.
When the wagon returns, paint all exposed metal with epoxy to prevent further rust. Then repair the floor and smooth the fire wall before begining the body work.
For the rest of this week I will be working on building and installing a network server for my office and updating my computers to Windows 7.
