10/21/08

Ok, yesterday I left off with taking Shichi home for the night Saturday. Sunday morning I got ready to go north for the gimmick rally and barbecue up past Denton. Shichi performed admirably all the way to the mall where the rally was to begin. I was the first to arrive so I drove around a bit and finally decided to park on the hill overlooking the parking lot. Pretty soon, a Jaguar rolled in and the folks got out. Another, virtually identical, Jaguar pulled in not long after. The lady in the passenger seat had a look at Shichi and began asking questions about it being a Datsun. She told me her late husband retired from Nissan/Datsun so she knew a little about them. She said, “I see you have the SU carburetors on there. I'll bet you didn’t expect me to know about SUs.” I was slightly taken aback by it but it was a British car event so it wasn’t really that far out of left field to me. The organizer of the rally arrived and began setting up his tent in the lower parking lot so we moved down there. Before long the cars began to arrive. There was a Triumph Stag, several TR6s, at least one Spitfire, a Caterham, Bernie’s Birkin, Carlos’ Birkin, the two Jaguars, some Austin Healeys, some MGs, and of course my Birkin. Carlos and I were the only two without navigators so we decided to just follow Bernie on the rally and not worry about the score. We took off up the access road and stopped at the truck stop just north of the mall so Carlos could fill up and empty, the car and his bladder respectively. When we took off again we got stuck behind the Stag. He was going the speed of smell. We got past him and took off on the rally route. After we missed the first turn off, we got stuck behind the Stag again and had to pass him. Bernie and Carlos got around but the passing lane ran out before I could. After following him for what seemed like a million miles, but was probably more like one half, he pulled over and let me by. I romped on it to catch the other two Sevens. We took off again and honed through the rally. Every time we stopped for a stop sign or something, they would take off at a brisk clip and I would rip-snort up behind them. At the time I was thinking we were all doing a hoon accelerating up to speed but then I remembered, they each have at least 100 horsepower on me. They were probably just loafing along. Well, they didn’t leave me behind so there's that. Anyhoo, we finally finished the rally and wound up at Jeff's ranch where we hung out with the owners of the other cars, had some barbecue, and looked at stuff, and things, and stuff. Around 1500 h the three Birkin owners decided to leave so we each headed out. I took off down towards I-35 and as I approached I thought, “I have got to be low on gas. I've done almost 200 miles on this tank.” I pulled into a gas station and began filling up. Carlos pulled in soon after and we saw Bernie drive by. I only got a little over 5 gallons into the tank before it filled the filler neck! I did the math and since those 5 gallons got me 178 miles, I was averaging over 35 miles per gallon! And that was flogging the piss out of it most of the time with the carburetors running fat! I was impressed. I took off down the highway towards home. About twenty miles of highway cruising later, as I passed through Denton and exited for I-35W, I smelled a little burning oil. It went away when I got past the truck I was passing so I assumed it was him. I cruised on south. Unfortunately, as I rolled into the throttle to climb the big assed hill coming up from Alliance airport, I noticed the smell again. This time the sun was just right to also see the wispy smoke coming out from under the hood around the carburetors. It went away again as soon as I eased off the throttle so I'm sure it is blow by coming out of the vent when the manifold vacuum goes away. The oil pressure remained good so I was sure I hadn’t pumped it all up into the valve cover and thence out onto the engine. The only other thing I could worry about was that somehow the oil cap had come off and I was venting through that. There wasn’t anything I could do about that so I didn’t stop to check. I did exit Western Center and let the thing idle down and run surface-street speeds for a bit just in case the top end was full of oil needing drain back. Nothing felt funny so I headed back onto the freeway. At the shop I pulled the hood expecting to see mass quantities of oil on everything. Nope, everything was perfectly normal under there. So, I guess the moral of the story is that Shichi doesn’t really like long hauls of constant 70 mile per hour driving. Darn, I guess I won’t be driving it to Alaska then. And on that note, I think I'll call it a rant. I'll be off tomorrow so I'll talk to y'all again Thursday.