Blackbushe May 25

 I & my girlfriend to the Stylus to Blackbushe on Sunday, we had breakfast in the café, saw my nephew & a couple of friends & wandered among the cars. Here is the Stylus among some esteemed company. It was chilly with a bit of a wind, but very sunny, which made photography difficult as my shadow seemed to be permanently in my photos.

Ford Model A - built in Canada, imported from South Africa, it's had quite a journey

Just lovely

I had a two door MkI in that colour....

...AND I had a MkIII in that colour.

We chatted to the owner of this Westfield XI for some time.

AC was very nice.

'33 Ford three window, MMMmmm!

This view doesn't show the orange flake paint, but it was stunning.

Soft top Interceptor

OH NO!

The Stylus went for its MoT today at the brilliant Silvesters in Guildford.

It does look pretty tired to be fair

BUT - it failed! one of the rear callipers was weeping hydraulic oil. Obviously I checked the fluid level before bringing it home, & it has two separate brake systems & it's traffic all the way, so there was no risk as the front brakes were perfectly OK. I knew the disc conversion kit was a Rally Design one, so I looked online - the calliper looked the same, but on the car they're handed & there was only one part number. I sent a message with a tick in the "URGENT" box & got a reply within 5 minutes saying if I ordered two (which I was) I'd get one left & one right.

I put the order in & got a confirmation, then DISASTER - an e-mail saying they were out of stock & it would be 4-5 weeks! That meant I was out of Wheels Day & the Devon road trip.

I e-mailed back explaining that I needed the car for a road trip & was there any alternative - could they supply a seal kit, or as I knew the calliper was a VAG part, could they tell me the vehicle so I could try somewhere else. About 15 mins later I got another e-mail saying there is another kit with the same calliper but different brackets, if I didn't mind swapping the brackets they could send that through. so as I write, the offending calliper is on the garage floor & the new ones are in the post, due tomorrow.

I think that's pretty good service, my only fear is that at some point since the car was built (24 years ago) Rally Design have changed the calliper type & the new ones won't fit. 

The Management

 When I put the blacktop Zetec in the Stylus I had a thing in mind, the engine shouldn't look newer than the car.

OK, strictly speaking the engine is the same age as the car, but the car looks late '60s - early '70s, so I wanted the engine to look "appropriate". I took off all the plastic & replaced it with alloy & put the coil pack under the throttle bodies, so the HT leads come up between the intake runners as if it had a distributor. I'd struggled with cable management as however I arranged it, one of the  HT leads or a fuel hose was always rubbing, but in the end I had it how I wanted it.

A couple of years & a few thousand miles & I noticed a rub on one of the HT leads, so I've done some cable management & it's now all clear (again). I've made a new bracket to hold the pair of leads that pass between the first two runners (I made a bracket for the gap twixt second & third last time) so it looks much neater & I have just ordered some bolts to tidy it up further, but inevitably I've now realised I should've made a new bracket that controls all the wires, rather than have one bracket for each pair.

But this will do. Also - can you tell I now have a buffing wheel? 😁

Also in the pipeline is a better throttle cable arrangement, where the cable will pass out through the front face of the pedal box, rather than the top. This will mean the cable doesn't pass the pedal any more, there's will be over a foot less cable, so less drag & the cable outer will only turn through 90deg, rather than 360deg, again reducing cable drag. This is a good thing.

At Last - Some Proper Engineering

When I bought the Stylus the throttle was VERY sensitive, this made it difficult to drive in the lower gears (it also lacked up & down-stops for the throttle), so I drilled a new hole in the throttle pedal & re-routed the cable to change the ratio of movement between the pedal & the throttle butterflies - I'd done something similar to the Fury, I think it's to do with the throttle bodies being intended for a bike, so operated by a hand throttle - hands are more sensitive that feet, so a higher gearing works.

That's how it's been for the last couple of years, but every time I start driving the car after the winter layup I think I should gear it down more, then I get used to not driving in first gear & forget about it.

But not so this year!

To be honest I've looked at it a couple of times & not seen an easy way to improve it, the throttle pedal bends round the brake bias adjuster limiting the options.

Up-stop cap......

However, yesterday it occurred to me that if I put a "flag" on the pedal higher up, the first part of the movement would be forwards & down as the pedal moved around the pivot point, then increasingly down the further it got pushed, mimicking the "snail cam" on the butterfly shaft. This gives a more precise movement at small throttle openings & more coarse as the pedal is mashed into the bulkhead.

To begin with I tried to make a bolt-on thing from aluminium, but it wasn't going anywhere, so I found a very thick steel square washer left over from the Quantum refurb (NEVER throw anything away!), cleaned off the galvanising & welded it on, then cut lumps off it until it was the right sort of shape. A hole for the cable fork went in & astonishingly when I re-fitted the pedal & adjusted the cable it seemed to work. For a few added improvements I drew up & printed a soft "cap" for the up-stop so the pedal isn't vibrating against it at idle.

.......printed & fitted

I adjusted the the up-stop & found that the down-stop was no longer required, the pedal hit the bulkhead as the butterfly shaft hit it's fully open stop, so the pedal was moving about an inch & a half further for the same butterfly travel - hurrah!

Lower ratio pedal, up-stop & return spring

But of course every silver lining has a cloud & the pedal was now very light indeed. I found a convenient hole next to where the up-stop fits. A brief search recovered a fairly weak tension spring with only one "end" - again, left over from the Quantum. I put a short bolt through the convenient hole & wound the spring onto the flange around the bolt, then hooked the loop on the other end over a new bolt through the original throttle cable hole, so I can adjust the spring by screwing it up & down over the flange but it can't come off or un-adjust itself.

Initially the return spring rubbed against the up-stop bolt cap, but a longer bolt & a couple of control washers sorted that out.

A short test drive confirmed the car is much nicer to drive in the lower gears, not trying to leap away & having to be controlled with the clutch when moving slowly - success!

What's next?

A long soak in a hot bath I think, as spending 1/2 a day with my upper torso buried in a kit car pedal box has taken it's toll. Still, could be worse, at least I have doors I can open to gain access.

Return Of The Stylus

 Yes the Stylus has returned.

After laying out an obscene amount of money for a year's road tax (£345! - which I wouldn't mind if it had a supercharged small block V8 - but it'll happily do 40+mpg at 70 on a motorway AND it's made from re-used parts!) I took it round to my brothers house through the stationary traffic at M25 Jcn10, then the very next day I took it 115 miles to see my lovely girlfriend. But before that, I tested the various systems, knobs & switches & found the rear fog light didn't work. This was disappointing as it's a switch from a Sea Harrier, but I ordered another couple of switches (standard sort of thing for a car this time) & they had arrived by the time I got home, so after a bit of a fiddle, I replaced both switches & the car is ready for the MoT next month - unless something else breaks.

Here they are - all systems go. Fog light on the left, screen heater on the right, swarf from enlarging the holes underneath.

But, there were no problems in 177 miles, so I'm happy with that.

Not Much To Say

 Yes, sorry, I've not had much to say recently, because very little has happened to the Stylus. This is partly to do with it being very reliable, but mostly because it's been so COLD. It has been very VERY COLD for a very long time. We also went to see my son's family in Scotland, planning a couple of things to see on the journey - we were planning on calling in at Scotland's "National Museum of Flight" (sounds very grand doesn't it? Has a very professional looking website too). Turns out it was SHUT - only opens at the weekends in Feb. So we looked for other things to do & it seems that the vast majority of Scotland was SHUT. We did find a small car museum that was open Weds to Sun, but the road to it was SHUT.

However, summer is coming in spite of the outside temperature & I've started tidying up some of the car's minor irritations. The Stylus has been pretty good, so there's no real "work" to do, I've topped up the fluids & changed the oil, but apart from that I've been printing bits for it.

First, the walkie-talkie. I'd tried various ways of mounting the two way radio, most recently with a large P-clip, but there's a few requirements to be met. It needs to be quite high in the car so the signal can get out, it needs to be close enough for me to reach if there's a problem (for normal use there's a remote Press To Transmit button so I don't need to touch it) & the wires don't want to be dangling across the interior.

There's a space on the lower tube of the roll bar which works well, but the P-clip mounting I came up with is "permanent" - I can't just take the radio out if there's a problem with it.

So I drew up a better mounting that holds the radio by the belt clip & is inevitably 3D printed, it clamps round the tube quite nicely & is printed in TPU - which is polyurethane, so it's softish & won't rattle, but because the belt loop on the radio has a double return it won't jump out if I fail to notice a speed hump & take it at 40.

It worked so well, that I started looking at other parts that needed a tidy up & I've now re-drawn a steady for the new GoPro mount - the one that allows the cameras to look over the roll bar, but folds in seconds if I need to put the roof up.

Also on the activity list is a new mounting for the GoPro remote, at the moment it's just held on to the dash with sticky-back velcro, it wobbles & it's started to "migrate" leaving a smear of sticky goo on the dash. So I'm adapting a GoPro mount to hold the remote in place (also with a 3D printed thingy), which will allow a degree of flexibility as well as not being so floppy.

When the weather warms up a bit I'll do some more preparation, but until then, I'm staying indoors.

Retirement!

 I never wanted to retire, I enjoyed my work & saw no real reason to stop, but then designing aeroplanes isn't really a job, it's a hobby people pay you to do.

Then I asked a woman I'd known for ten years or so if she'd like to go out to a few places - car events & aircraft museums - that sort of thing, she liked the idea & the past 18months or so have been wonderful, just really good fun. So in a rare burst of optimism back in January '24 I told the bosses I'd like to retire at the end of the year & so as I write, just after Christmas, this is me joining the ranks of the "economically inactive" (although I still seem to be paying tax & buying stuff, so that phrase seems a little off the mark to me).

Of course when I say retired - I mean from full time working, there's a rather interesting project coming up that I will go back for part time & short term, but basically my time is my own. The big fear was always boredom & loneliness, but as my girlfriend is an accomplished maker of things & something of an IT specialist, while I'm a maker of things with a mechanical bent, we should have no difficulty finding projects & indeed one of her Christmas presents from me is an alloy "Silvertop" Zetec cam cover to replace the plastic "blacktop" one on her kit car, so when she has decided how she would like it to be, there will be some painting & possibly 3D printing & machining to do.

There are of course projects I'd like to do on the Stylus, mostly centred around the interior, when I was refurbishing the car, I had a go at gluing on vinyl & it looked OK & has done a few years without peeling off (too much), but my girlfriend is also very good with fabrics, so with her help I can do better now. There's also some things I need to do around the house, but I shan't bore you with those, unless they involve car or plane parts - which now I come to think of it - they often do.

So yes, a whole new chapter is opening up - wish me luck!