[theastronaut]

Went to Illinois a few weeks ago for a Festiva meet and autocross. I think I came in 32nd overall out of around 70 cars and first out of all of the Festivas. It was a fairly open layout so only having 75hp hurt me, and there were numerous trailered/purpose built autocross cars that were running Hoosier A7 slicks competing. I was 5.3 seconds off the fastest time of the day.








I've been wanting a hit and miss engine for years now but they're hard to find in SC. One of the guys at the meet had a 1924 Fairbanks Morse 1.5hp throttle governed engine that I ended up buying... it's not a spoked flywheel hit and miss like I wanted but I can maybe use it to trade up to one.




The engine is starting to get a little weak and smokey so I started collecting parts to build a replacement. I want to stick with the original 1.3 sohc in the white car just to keep it simple.

I picked up a '94 Aspire for a friend in NY and he let me have the engine and trans for storing it for him. Its the same engine and trans as a Festiva, just geared shorter (4.05 vs 3.77). I'll use the trans since to help it pull out of slow corners better, and it'll still hit 60 in second since the new engine will rev to 8k instead of 7k. I had planned on using the engine since it only had 150k miles but it ended up having a blown head gasket and really warped head- the cam had to be hammered out.







Another friend had chopped up a stock engine to see how thick the castings were in various areas.




Measuring the combustion chambers, then refilling them with the amount of cc's needed to get the compression where I want it- .090" off. I had the warped head cut .100" to make sure it could be cut that far safely.








Measuring valve spring pressure.




I've been buying up NOS parts for the build as they've popped up on eBay. There's a set of NOS .030" over pistons in the mail now.












One major upgrade I'm doing is swapping in a 02-05ish Kia Rio crank and rods. They're identical except it has full counterweighting on every rod throw instead of only on half of the throws on the original crank. These also have a harmonic balancer instead of the stamped steel Festiva pulley. This should help the bearings last longer when spinning 8k rpm.




I went to an auction awhile back and bought a tub of AN hoses for $15 with no idea of what I was going to do with them but they were too cheap to pass up. I'll be able to use them to vent the block and head to an air/oil separator. The stock venting leaves a lot to be desired when revving higher than stock, especially on my worn engine that has some blow by.








And no update would be complete without the purchase of another Capri