What up guys? I'm Matt Field--professional Formula Drift driver.
Except that was my 2017 car.
This year we're building a 2013 Chevrolet Corvette.
Now I don't know Corvettes pretty much at all...
so we're kind of figuring this out as we go.
[bleep]
I made a stupid mistake
[bleep] getting this power steering fitting on is not [bleep] fun
And I'm taking you guys along for the ride
Welcome to Field Prep!
This week we're gonna be working on the fuel system.
I got the actual cell from Fuel Safe. Filters, fittings,
We're also going to be working with some of the wiring and electronics
and we got to put it all together and make it work
So it's gonna be a challenge, but that's okay.
That's why building racecars ain't easy!
What we're doing right now is taking off the
supercharger so that we can put the correct key way and spacer and everything in the pulley
We're gonna do it; get that locked down so we can forget about it
and know that it's good to go when we start to final assemble the car.
So what I'm also gonna do is put in our new power steering fitting that I got
from Turn1. The other fitting that was in the pump was too long and it was
going to run into the secondary drive so they sent me a shorter fitting that I
need a screw an adapter fitting in to make work but I want to check it and
make sure it's all gonna clear since it's a couple of different level things.
So what I'm doing here,
these are actually the key ways for the supercharger pulley on the supercharger itself.
With the abuses of drifting we've found that the on/off throttle constant
abuse can actually cause some slack in the belt and gives it a good whip and
can sometimes make the keyway dent or turn sometimes so this is a pretty
simple process where you keep the metal red hot and then you douse it in
dirty oil and it absorbs the carbon and hardens the outside of the steel
You can see we have two pieces here so the reason for that is I want to utilize
the the entire channel here to make sure we get as much surface area as possible
and as much engagement to spread the load out on that keyway
ensuring that it lives a long life
That's pretty good.
We need to lift the engine up to pull the oil pan off because we have to make
some modifications for it like the supercharger oil return we're gonna go
ahead and bolt this to the engine. It's pretty cool it's made for an LS never
had one of these before. Had an LS for how long and still we've never used it
and put this on, lift the engine up, drop the oil pan, make the modifications we need.
So we're taking the baffle out of the
ARE dry sump pan so that we can drill and tap it for the supercharger return.
They thread lock the bolts in for the baffle so that they don't come loose so we're having to heat up
the bolts, pull them out, so that we can get in here and drill and tap for the oil return of the blower.
Jesus Christ!
[bleep]
Maybe we aren't taking the baffle off!
Maybe we'll just give it a go without it.
It might be thick enough that it only needs to go into there you know?
We decided we are gonna pull the baffle off.
We still should probably get the baffle off; there's no way to tell if all the metal's gone..
It's not worth the risk of knowing if there is an aluminum in there
since we can't see it.
-And that stuff's gonna go right into rightful into the
pump if there is any metal in there.
Can't trust it so the baffles coming off
All of them broke loose no problem with these guns but one so we got a weld it
weld another bolt to it that will break all the Loctite off, we'll pull it out
and replace it with some new hardware
Yeah, two benefits of that is one it gives
you a better surface to grip and the heat from the TIG welder itself actually
helps loosen up the threads so you ever have a really stubborn bolt or you strip
the threads, it's generally the easiest way to get it out.
Looks like ARE's got some really cool little screens built in here to protect your
oiling system in case of any type of failure. Really cool. A lot of thought put into these pans.
and you can see I got the depth thread cut to the right depth.
Verify the fitment's good, and pull it out, clean the pan, put some thread sealer on that,
reinstall it and that's a wrap!
So this is something that I'm very very excited about.
I was able to work and talk with the guys over at Fuel Safe.
We came up with an idea that we were gonna actually build a fuel cell inside of the stock
Corvette gas tank. Now if I wanted to fit in the stock
location it needs to be this shape so instead of trying to measure and form
and build it with an aluminum box why not just use the tough plastic outer
liner it's good it's strong it's gonna be abrasion resistant with it sits up in
there because it just pinches itself within the chassis then of course we
have an actual bladdered fuel cell versus just using the stock tank which
is plastic and definitely not as safe something very interesting with this
specific fuel cell is that this has a pressure pod and what that is is you can
see these bolts around here all of those bolts hold a can on the inside probably
half a gallon or so maybe three quarters of a gallon and there's two Aeromotive
340 fuel pumps within this fuel cell that feed into this pod now this pod has
a relief valve of 10 psi so that means the pump which is being drawn the you
know the pickup basically going to the pump always has 10 psi of head pressure
the pump is never gonna starve on an initial startup it's never going to be
dry or anything so you don't have to worry about cavitation issues any of
those things always gonna have 10 psi head pressure until it starts pumping
out of there and then it usually balances out and doesn't have any
positive pressure but it's great especially like when we had the
mechanical pump in the s14 we had the same setup a lot of times cranking over
and the initial startup with a mechanical pump takes a while because it
feel has to get drawn through the pump but because we had to electric fuel
pumps feeding 10 psi head pressure worked perfectly
so this thing is going to go into the stock location we're still gonna have to
figure out our feed because it needs to go to the left side of the car and this
is on the right side to the opposite of me overall it should be a pretty easy
fit and finish I'm so pumped thank you very much over to the guys
that feel safe you you killed it so what I'm doing right now is putting
on the stock gas tank mount because we have our fuel cell that got made by fuel
safe inside of the stock tank and kind of see it up in there with the top plate
and the filler and everything and it should pull right into the factory
location with the factory mount so I'm just checking to make sure that it is
and that we don't need to do any clearancing or anything so it's mounted
just like that right into the factory location no need for tabs or mounts or
anything oh yeah and it's in there good the next thing I got going on is working
on the lexan front window this is amazing because literally all you do is
you buy a front window from optic armor it already comes blocked out on the
corners it already comes perfectly cut to shape you lay the window on I'm gonna
rip nut it in because I do like taking the window out or having the ability to
take the window out at the end of the season when it's time to take it out or
you gotta do cleaning whatever it just makes life a little bit easier it comes
just like this I already blocked out it fits up in here
this parcel panel tray cover has the stops that hold the window to set the
window height so I just set it left to right I said on this roof seal then I'm
gonna go ahead and start marking it drilling it and what I'm gonna do is I'm
gonna put self-tapping screws in it to hold it in place all the way around
where I want it then I'm gonna pull the window out drill it for the correct
sized rivet nut for five mil and then go ahead and put my five rail rib nuts in
the chassis all the way around well I'm doing the window stuff we have Jay here
from black tracks who came today to start measuring out the engine wiring
harness we got a Holley EFI flying leads engine harness because what Jay ended up
doing before last year is we had the whole harness and he ended up cutting
off all the connectors are deepening it and then doing it all with rake em nice
loom and everything so instead of having to do that
fortunately Holley sells a flying lead harness to do exactly what Jay is going
to do so he's here we're figuring out where we're gonna do we're gonna be
using these fancy guy bulkheads we're just gonna keep it simple but he's
got his toolkit as a man I work so my first mark marks out on the window I'm
gonna go ahead and drill it it's a little scary they don't want to mess up
sometimes just got to go for it.
so I got this top set all on self-tapping screws I'm
gonna come down the sides then come across the bottom then that's when I
pull the window drill it all out and start doing all the riv nuts.
Now I gotta figure out where I want to put these for the bottom how high a lot of room to
play with and what that lower piece did is actually held the window in the right
height for me to make sure that it's all sitting nice and square
got all the self tappers in the front window, now I need to pull the window out
drill out the body for all the Riv nuts pull all the riv nuts in and then drill
out the window so that accepts the 5mm hardware and this is the hardware that
we're gonna be using right here to 5mm countersunk with this nice plastic
washer so it will go in place there there look really really good and then
it keeps the window from getting scratched and cracking because it has
this nice little cushion here
today we just did some preliminary work just kind of mapped out what wires are
needed what wires are needed Matt buying the flying lead harness was actually a
good choice because he's got Holly's assortment of color of wires that we
actually depend out of the harness that we can use for other things like other
accessories and stuff on so pretty much we've lightened the harness by pretty
much in half all this is all that extra stuff that we don't need and we'll be
I'm sure we'll be using that on the car for accessories and probably throughout
the season if we run into any you know electrical issues there emergencies
other than that I mean today was pretty primary we wanted to build a pin map you
know our teams use Google sheets and Google Docs for days forever so this way
we can just kind of map out what is what and when we run into issues and we need
to reference we just go online pull it up on our phone pull it up on our laptop
and it's there the information is there so you'll have a bulkhead pin up you'll
have this Holly superseal connector pin map and everything else including a same
data acquisition that whole system will all be pinned out and that way at any
point at any time we can all reference it online Thank You Jay
yeah sure I hope you guys enjoyed this week's episode definitely things are
slowing down people being out of the office waiting for parts but I'm happy
that I'm standing back here the fuel cell from fuel safe showed up got a
whole lot of work to do back here fortunately the body panels and
everything from hgk are gonna be on their way shortly so we should have
those in a couple of weeks and we can really move back here getting a little
tired of looking at and stressing over what's going on in the engine bay so
continue to follow along check back in next week where we're gonna be hopefully
building our fuel filler neck and getting some more parts in and who knows
when the stuff shows up so hope everyone have happy holidays like comment share
subscribe let us know what you think. Ah, pulling my hair out--I want to work back here already!