In the early days of learning about FEDS, it occurred to me that they were all missing the starter motor. This saves quite a bit of weight – about 4½ kg. The FEDs were either push started, or run up on a set of rollers. There are no rollers at drag strips anymore, and push starting is often frowned on (you would have to push start, then queue up in the staging lanes with the engine running… not great if the queue is 30 minutes long). IHRA (which sanctions my local track) are pretty blunt in their General Regulations:
Starting by towing or pushing the vehicle or using rollers that drive the wheels of the vehicle. Forbidden
More modern funny cars use a portable starter. The car is pushed or towed to the start line, then the crew pull out the electric starter which looks like a very large wood router. It locks into the crank or blower snout, and turns the motor over. Once the engine is running, the starter is removed and the car stages. This got me thinking. Could I run a remote starter on the FED? Something modern would look horrible, but industrial grey motors used to have a hand-crank option. In these setups, there was no battery. A magneto was run for ignition, and from memory the oil pressure and temperature gauges were offered as mechanical gauges. A spigot was fitted to the damper to allow hand cranking. Somewhere I have the GMH Industrial Engine catalogue with the line drawing and part numbers, but cannot lay hands on where I have stashed the catalogue.
Mebbe I could fit the hand-crank spigot to the FED damper, and use a high-torque Milwaukee rattle run to run it up. Number One Son has one of those rattle guns, and every ounce of weight is going to count on this vehicle. The IHRA rules are a bit more lenient here:
Self Starting for all sportsman categories (excluding junior dragster, modified bike and Supercharged Vehicles) will require an on-board starter motor. Mandatory
The FED will run in Modified Eliminator class, which is a sportsman category. It will be supercharged though, so perhaps some leniency here.
I started here on the how-to-build-your-own version:
- Modern Motor August 1957 1.jpg (3.6 MiB) Viewed 811 times
- Modern Motor August 1957 2.jpg (2.88 MiB) Viewed 811 times
- Modern Motor August 1957 3.jpg (2.94 MiB) Viewed 811 times
Not long ago, an old crusty damper came up for sale on eBay. The damper is not so healthy (looks like it had a puller welded onto it to remove it), but it did have a hand-crank spigot:
- spigot 1.jpg (859.36 KiB) Viewed 811 times
- spigot 2.jpg (951.19 KiB) Viewed 811 times
- spigot 3.jpg (728.52 KiB) Viewed 811 times
- spigot 4.jpg (712.4 KiB) Viewed 811 times
I suspect this is one of the original GMH industrial engine fittings. It is 1 15/32” AF.
So where to from here? I’ll keep the starter motor for now, and see how we go. If I can get the FED to run faster than 10.99 seconds, then I meet the Modified Eliminator cutoff and can play. If I need to skim some weight off the car, then I may come back here and revisit the hand-crank option. The spigot end looks workable, but will need a thread/plate to suit the Ross balancer.
Cheers,
Harv
