Jack Deren reunited with 2275986 et all

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kladd

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As some of you know I am planning to bring the #59 car to Saratoga Springs next weekend. And I plan to include Jack's old trailer as part of the display. I find it amazing how "unpretentious" auto racing was in the 1970's and think it will be fun to kind of recreate what the pits looked like back then.

I gave Jack a call to see if he was interested in attending, and to see if he had any interesting props to include in the display. I was a bit apprehensive since I hadn't spoken with him in over a year, and he is 90 years old after all!

Jack, though very hard of hearing, was in great spirits and immediately excited to attend. The conversation soon turned to the state of the #59 car and I admitted I was having trouble getting it to start. It was definitely a fuel problem as the injectors weren't squirting but if I squirted fuel directly into the intake trumpets the car would momentarily bark. Jack wanted me to bring the car to him but Maine to Carbondale PA is a long slog so instead I decided to fly him to me for a 3 day "vacation". This was a month ago.

We picked up Jack and his lady friend Sarah at the airport, and after a nice dinner, went straight to my garage. What a beautiful moment. I turned on the lights and there was the 59 car under the awning attached to his old trailer with his old tool boxes, tools, spare wheels and tires, an m49 engine block, etc. etc. I even had his old plastic chairs with his, his wife Terri, and Jerry Woody's names hand written on the backs.

For a full 10 minutes he just walked around saying "wow wow wow". At one point he opened a small portable toolbox and pulled out a 12mm wrench which he apparently heavily modified by grinding much of it away. He said "hey that's my wrench"!

to be continued, with pictures....
 
Jack and Sarah the next morning.
 

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The next morning Jack was hot to trot. In literally about 4 seconds he had the hood off. Jack is all about accessability and he had the hood attached via two pull pins - no tools needed. Jack claims the entire nose of the car comes off with just 6 bolts and he could remove an engine without removing transmission, headers, etc. I believe him!

After cracking a bunch of fuel lines and finding pressure nowhere, we soon focused on the feed tank. The feed tank is a cylindrical tank standing on end that holds maybe 2 gallons. A pump runs constantly, pumping fuel from the bottom of the main fuel cell into this feed tank. A return line from the feed tank dumps back into the main cell. With this setup fuel goes round and round and the feed tank should always be full unless of course the main cell runs dry. I always thought the purpose of this setup was to prevent cavitation during high g turns.

But a dipstick indicated the feed tank was only 2/3rds full. We had two different problems: why was the feed tank not filling and why were we seemingly running out of fuel when the feed tank had plenty of fuel?
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really cool story Kevin ... thanks for sharing with us. great to reunite the car with Jack and the discovery of the fuel problem. hopefully it has a relatively simple resolution
 
In the picture in the previous post the feed tank is shown on the right with 5 fittings. The center is the dipstick. Upper right (disconnected) is the input from the feed pump. Upper left is the return to main cell. Lower right is the fuel pickup which feeds the pressure pump to motor. Lower right just capped? We removed the 12 cap nuts and pulled the top off the feed tank. Suddenly Jack had a flashback. Here's basically his explanation:

The feed tank was a Peter Gregg thing. He wanted a reserve fuel tank such that, if he started sputtering out of fuel on track, he could hit a switch and have enough fuel to make it back to the pits. He implemented that function in an unconventional way with the feed tank. The feed tank had two pickups. One pickup went to the bottom and the other pickup only went 5" down. Peter somehow had a switchable valve to select which pickup was active. Default mode was the 5" pickup and if he started to sputter out of gas switch to the deep pickup and head to the pits. The advantage of this "virtual" aux tank is that it is always automatically filled and always has fresh gasoline.

When Jack restored the car in 1992 he apparently felt this setup was overly complicated for a now track toy. He capped the deep pickup and used the shallow pickup and tossed the switchable valve. Jack has forgotten more about the 59 car than I will probably ever know!

I would love to talk to some Brumos mechanics to see if their Porsches used the same setup.

Anyways we filled the feed tank, buttoned it up, and the 59 car started!
 
With the car now running I convinced Jack that even a dufus like me could figure out the remaining problem of why the feed tank was not filling. For the rest of their visit we enjoyed amazing Maine weather on the lake. Their last night we had a bunch of friends and neighboring car nuts come to the garage and Jack started the car one more time. Luckily they had an uneventful flight home.

A few days later I got under the car and disconnected the main fuel line. Only a little fuel dribbled out. A call to Jack and we decided the fuel cell was probably foam filled and it had disintegrated. I took the cell apart and sure enough it was filled with yellow foam dust. Took the bladder out of the car and rinsed with a garden hose. Today the car is entirely put back together and running, just without any foam.

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Hopefully we see you at Saratoga Springs next weekend!
 
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