1964-1974 [Subscribe to Daily Digest] |
I got some standard 4" steel 96 rims and sent them to Willamette's Custom Wheel in Portland, OR, to have 6" rims welded onto them. Willamette's does a good job of this and knows what dimensions to use for Sonetts, thanks to having done a lot of wheels for Jack Ashcraft.
Originally I had planned to use the wider wheels at all four corners, with 195/60x15 tires retired from my daily-driver Escort GT. However, when I tried it, I found that I can't use the wider wheels at the back because my springs have sagged and the wheel lips rub on the tires. I've got a new set of springs on order from MSS; meanwhile, I just use the wider wheels at the front. Actually this isn't a bad compromise, since the front is where you need more rubber on a Sonett to counteract understeer.
Some of the pictures on my website show standard soccerball wheels on the car because (a) the pictures were taken before I got the wider wheels, OR (b) because I was too lazy to switch wheels the night before the event!
The 'carb story' -- I wanted to bolt on a little more performance but couldn't afford a two-barrel Weber carb and manifold. So a helpful soul in Europe found me a less-expensive substitute: the Solex progressive two-barrel setup that was standard equipment on Euro-spec V4 Saabs from 1977 on. Apparently these are still fairly easy to get from European salvage yards off rusted-out or crashed 95s and 96es. The whole setup -- carb, 2-bbl manifold, linkage pieces, etc. -- cost me less than $150, which is less than some US vendors charge for the manifold alone. I had to clean up the carb in my kitchen, but it wasn't difficult, and I had to adapt throttle linkage pieces between the original FoMoCo and Solex bits, but that was just a matter of mix'n'match, no "re-engineering" required! The Solex doesn't have the performance reputation of a Weber, but it does make the car noticeably more responsive than with a single-barrel carb, particularly at highway speeds.
Of course, having a carb that was never standard equipment on a Sonett and wheels more than 1" beyond the original rim width technically take my car out of the SCCA "stock" classification, but I've been approaching that issue on a "don't ask/don't tell" basis, and since I'm HIGHLY unlikely to qualify for Nationals, nobody seems to care... yet...
posted by 32.97.3...
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