Saturday 1 December 2018

Winter Changes

Not a great deal has happened since the last post, none of it photo-worthy, but progress has been made.

I took down the near side pod, took the over-wheel section of the exhaust off & re-shaped it further forward & upward, so it now clears the wheel by a much larger margin & the car should be tyre-smoke-free on right hand bends with a passenger (fingers crossed). This of course involved WELDING - a thing I'm not very good at, but after blowing a lot of holes in the pipe, I bought an auto-darkening welding helmet & was then able to heal-over all the holes. Not pretty, but job done. As the pipe is now further forward & further out, I had to re-cut the trailing edge of the pod to fit round it & noticed the upper face was all cracked where it bolts on, so made up an aluminium plate & fitter the anchor nut to that & pop-riveted it on so the area's all nice & reinforced.

I've also replaced the 15 year old cam-belt. It's not as bad as it seems as it was fitted to the engine by Fords in 2004, then sat waiting for me to buy it until 2012 so it's not seen a lot of use, just a lot of years.

It all went OK until I tried to start the engine & it just turned over & over & I realised I must've got the cam timing out by one tooth (DOH!). This morning I took out & cleaned all the plugs, left 3 of them loose in the car so I could turn it over, locked the cams & CAREFULLY rocked the crank back & forth until I was happy No.1 piston was at Top Dead Centre (TDC), then CAREFULLY threaded the belt round the pulleys again. This time it fired straight away, so I'm happy all's well.

Like I said, nothing very interesting or exciting, but it needed doing.

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