Why a sand rail is required for life and how to go about making one.
After making an electric motorcycle, the same friend and I have a desire to build a Sand-rail. For those who do not know, a Sand-rail is basically a stripped down car. They consist of a chassis, engine, transmission, and steering column.
The cool thing about a Sand-rail is how fast they can be because of their reduced weight. They are also great for off-roading because they can be cleaned easily and have very few parts to break.
Sand-rails are generally expensive and hard to build, but that won’t stop us. We plan to buy metal for the chassis in bulk and then weld it ourselves.
Once we have the chassis assembled we will go to a salvage yard and attempt to find an engine with a square block and no damaged cylinders. The reason we are doing it this way is because our junkyard of choice has a flat rate cost on engines, meaning that theoretically, we could acquire a really nice engine for only $120. However this is usually not recommended for a few reasons:
1.Engine blocks need to be completely square and flat in-order to function properly.
2.Engine blocks must have properly bored cylinders to get the best compression(junk yards usually do not allow you to perform compression tests).
3.If gaskets on the top end of the motor have been blown then the cylinders may one damaged by water/oil that has leaked into the engine.
4.Many engines have poorly installed systems to gain horsepower via forced induction (IE to big of turbos/superchargers without a reflash of the ECU).
Once we have the chassis assembled we will go to a salvage yard and attempt to find an engine with a square block and no damaged cylinders. The reason we are doing it this way is because our junkyard of choice has a flat rate cost on engines, meaning that theoretically, we could acquire a really nice engine for only $120. However this is usually not recommended for a few reasons:
1.Engine blocks need to be completely square and flat in-order to function properly.
2.Engine blocks must have properly bored cylinders to get the best compression(junk yards usually do not allow you to perform compression tests).
3.If gaskets on the top end of the motor have been blown then the cylinders may one damaged by water/oil that has leaked into the engine.
4.Many engines have poorly installed systems to gain horsepower via forced induction (IE to big of turbos/superchargers without a reflash of the ECU).
The other problem we have is trasnsportation. Once a sand rail is built, we will not be able to drive it on streets to move it place to place, unless we street legalize it. To make a sand rail street legal you must add many functions such as turn signals, and new exaust to control emmisions. Both of which are expensive.
All in all it will be another huge project to complete with lots of risk taken to keep the cost down. However if everything works out we will have a really fun toy to mess around with.
Labels:Offroad, Sand, Jump, Speed, Fun