It’s Alive!

Which is more than I can say for the dope operating it!

Knowing absolutely nothing about the mill and having not read the manual – so I still don’t know what all the levers do – I had a crack at drilling some holes as a test piece for the ROV sensor attachment points in a gash piece of channel. The digital readout (DRO) was a bit of a revelation once I understood how it worked. There’s an option for ‘absolute’ or ‘accumulative’ measurements. It was set to ‘accumulative’ when I turned it on and it was only after watching a ‘This Old Tony‘ YouTube video that I was alerted to the ‘absolute’ function which saved me having to zero everything all the time. Anyway, the test piece demonstrated that there was a snag with the drawing, so I put my experiment to one side and elected to make holes in some of the parts for real. In my enthusiasm, I forgot to change the drill bit and now 66 of the holes are too big and will need bushing.

Sometimes I wonder why I even get up in the morning because I’m almost certain to add to my catalogue of disasters – though they’re mostly recoverable – and create twice the work. Some 8 x 1mm tube will sort the problem out.

And so, having got the neoprene ‘O’ rings, I started to assemble the MS head. What a blinkin’ game that was! I hadn’t got quite the right setup, but even with the factory tools, I’m not sure it would have been the easiest of tasks. I shall have to compress the springs in stages: the first to align the slots in the valve with the locking collar, and the second, to further compress the springs in order to get the camshaft through the castings. I don’t see how you can confidently do it any other way. Of course, the manual, with cheerful indifference to the amateur mechanic, says that reassembly is the reverse of the disassembly process. That much would be obvious to most.

Some of the tappets didn’t quite screw far enough into the valve stems – over time, the accumulation of carbon deposits would most likely be to blame. Also, the threads on one or two of the tappets looked a bit suspect, but running a die down them would solve the problem. Ha! They’re 28tpi – an unusual size and one not in my collection. Fortunately, the interweb came up trumps but I’ve no way of telling what type of thread it is – BSF, UNF, AF etc – so I’ll either get lucky or have to file them by hand,

A visitor to the workshop was this Fisher Fury, a car completely new to me. I understand that this is one of the early examples; the firm having changed hands several times over the years.

A Lancia twin cam makes the car suitable for properly bad behaviour.

Talking of which, Leon is upgrading his Coventry Climax A7 with a hairy cam. That’ll step out a bit lively.

This Week…

… has gone too quickly and after 7 weeks of largely sedentary work, perhaps it was a mistake to start digging holes in the garden. Muscles I didn’t know even existed have howled with protest for the last 2 days. It’s all been rather hush hush, but the new pad for my rocket experiments is nearing completion.

I thought a line of bricks around its perimeter would make it easier to keep things tidy with the lawnmower and I’m thinking I should rig up some sort of sprinkler affair to keep the fence from setting alight – it’s always good to accommodate the neighbours…

… and the soon-to-be-displaced residents.

In between my labouring duties, I started to strip down the Wolseley 6/80 engine. Happily, all the bolts loosened after a couple of taps with the knockmeter and the only disaster was the breaking of one of the lugs on the thermostat housing – which didn’t contain a thermostat; tut, tut!

I was very pleased with the new oil filter cap and only discovered later that the land at the top of the cap (where the pilot hole is) was too narrow for the male BSP fitting. I popped down to Chumley’s and found another piece of ali in his scrap bin. At least on the next go, I can endeavour to get the holes in the right places.

Sunday was forecast to be fine and four Breakfast Club cars turned up for a bacon bap at the café in Thorpeness. I missed one turn on the way there and added a couple of miles to the outward journey. I don’t know what went wrong on the way back, but a round trip of 89 miles turned into 105. Still, it was a lovely day and I went down roads I’ve never been down before which is always an adventure.

Counsel was occupied respraying the restored body of The Great Collector’s 1925 Peugeot 172. Renaud, a regular contributor to the comments section, has pointed us in the right direction to track down a suitable magneto – the only thing missing from this otherwise complete little pick-up.

Renaud himself has been busy and has all but finished the restoration of his Series III Lotus 7. A quick blast around his meadow proved all the systems worked and there’s just a bit of tidying up to do before it’s presented for its contrôle technique, the French equivalent of our MOT.

Leon took his Climax-engined A7 to Snetterton for a track day and was very pleased with the results despite his initial misgivings about getting in the way of all the mad lads in their hot hatches. I’ve thought about taking the Hillman. As the indicated revs approach the 5k mark, there’s a definite surge in power and a respectable turn of speed, but it’s a heavy beast to fling around corners and you can run out of track very quickly. Maybe one day.

The model has undergone more surgery. The bonnet has been reshaped and only the rear wing and roof now need attention. That can wait until next week.

The Golden Rule….

… is that you should do something every day – however small – to advance your project. Well, I’ve already tripped up on that one.

It was our first breakfast run of the year, so I spent most of the day before, fiddling about with the Hillman. The 12v supply to the phone charger socket had stopped working, preventing me from pumping up the tyres with my 12v pump when I was out a week or two back. I showed everything the grease gun, especially the shaft on which the brake and accelerator pedals sit. I suspected the brake pedal was opening the throttle when coming to a stop – something which tends to concentrate the mind.

Awkward’s Morgan ran very well after his attentions to the engine and gearbox though he’s making noises about moving it on so he can concentrate on squeezing 100mph out of the Avon.

I sketched out a design for Leon’s Climax-engined A7 which met with his approval – I now have the job of painting it on the bonnet.

I managed to snatch a couple of hours to myself and finished off the gearbox mount on the Teardrop Special.

Talking of which, they are now positioned and bolted onto the top rail. With the engine out of the way, I can get in to drill the rails for the horizontal tubes and retaining bolts. After that I’ll be able to start dismantling everything ready for sandblasting. I’ll just do a coat of primer for starters as I don’t want to break through the powder coating when drilling fixings for the body that don’t marry up with existing holes.

Learned Counsel had been itching to get an MX-5 engine into his Locost since the success of the last conversion which The Racing Driver took to 2nd place in the Sports Special Championship last year and I popped along to lend a hand. It didn’t take long to get the Ford and all its ancillaries out and clear the decks ready for the Mazda engine to go in.

It was a tight squeeze but once we’d remembered the method, it went in and out quite smoothly.

We had to make a couple of small adjustments on the job – some bits left over from the Ford gearbox mount managed to get in the way of the Mazda gear lever extension….

…. and by the end of the second day the engine was in position and secure so that mountings could be made up. This engine had done only 40k miles – barely run in.

As I’m going to start the Special body by building the scuttle, I was interested to have a look at the Jowett’s arrangement. Learned Counsel knocked up a new one of these in a couple of hours – including the swaging – for his original car. I don’t think I’ll be quite that fast.

Having missed two days of Special building, I comforted myself with the last of Big Sister’s truffles. The one with the gold bits reminded me of the rule.

Over & Out.

When I had a trip round the houses in the flying club’s Cessna 152 last November, it was fun to be back in the air again but not in the 152. In the first instance, it’s quite a small cockpit and with a non-adjustable seat back, I found it all rather cramped and uncomfortable. Secondly, it’s high-wing and doesn’t afford anything like the visibility of a low-wing aircraft. So I’ve elected to continue the revalidation of my license in the club’s Piper Archer.

I thought it would be prudent to go and sit in the cockpit for 15 mins and see where everything was as we were socked in for 3 days and weren’t going anywhere. It’s just as well I did as the whole layout (and half the instruments) were completely unfamiliar. And that’s only the half of it!

Here’s the other half. One of the things I’ve got to master for the flying test is the use of VOR’s as aids to navigation. They’re beacons on the ground dotted about here and there, sending out a signal on each of their 360 radials. You can tune into a particular beacon (the frequency and morse ident is on your chart) and establish yourself on, or navigate to a radial or VOR of your choice. The matter of whether the radial you want to use is ‘to’ or ‘from’ is the tricky bit and until I got things sorted out in the old hay loft, there were some spectacular gaffs in the nav department. I think I’ve got the hang of it now but for a simple fellow like me, the various explanations I both listened to and read of how VOR’s work and how to use them, were just so much static. In the end I managed to reduce the whole manual to two words: ‘to’, and ‘reciprocal’. If I’m asked to fly to a beacon, I dial up and fly the reciprocal heading and, conversely, from a beacon, the actual heading from the beacon. Intercepting a radial has an added complication but the same rule applies. Can’t go wrong.

Staying with a flying theme, I blew through the Hillman radiator matrix with a compressed air tool. Now I know where they get the filling for Eccles cakes.

Chap ordered a couple more stainless steel manifolds which helped to defray costs at the flying club and, as I was at a bit of a loose end – I’d hoped to have the discs back by now but they’ve not yet materialised – I took myself off to see what Awkward and Leon were up to.

Awkward was cleaning the Avon’s Model A block ready for re-assembly with its new self-balancing flywheel fandango.

Leon had added a few lightening holes to his Climax-engined A7 and, in his enthusiasm had decided to polish the bodywork – a decision he was beginning to regret because if you start polishing, you’ve got to finish and it’s not hard to find something more interesting to do than polishing.

Like giving a Mini head a bit of a clean up and renewing the oil seals on the inlet valves. Once the valve spring compressor is in place, all you’ve got to do is turn the head over and the collets fall out.

Over and out then.

 

This Won’t Do.

The hottest day of the year so far was an excuse for The Ambassador’s Daughter and me to try out another beach cafe, this time at Winterton-on-Sea.

The sun shone, the roads were practically empty and the Hillman (with a new 40 zillion volt coil) ran like a dog for most of the 130 miles there and back. The snag was that after a longish run at a steady speed, the slowing down for a roundabout or somesuch, caused the engine to miss and cough and splutter on the exit and continue to misbehave for the next couple of miles until the (indicated) temperature came down a couple of degrees again. Even then there was no guarantee of consistent running until I strapped the bonnet open with the help of my trousers belt and a bungee cord that I found in the tool bag. This  helped to get some cooler air going past the carb and reduce the temperature under the bonnet. We just made it back to the farm where of course, the engine sat and ticked over as smooth as silk.

So it could have been a bunch of things. Air in the fuel line (there were some bubbles in the gascolator but the carb’s float bowl should eliminate any problem there) or fuel evaporation as the carb heats up with the transfer of the heat from the block when slowing down, rubbish fuel (I always buy the expensive unleaded) or a combination of all those things. It’s definitely not electrical as the system is producing plenty of sparks and it runs really sweetly on tick over and low revs. When it gets hot, the problems start, though, having said that, at one point in my fury I dropped it into 3rd, pushed it up to and past (an indicated) 5000 rpm where the power band comes in and it just wanted to go, pulling like a train without a moment’s hesitation.

It’s enough to drive a chap nuts. More interestingly, I spotted this little sprint job at the local bike meet and wondered why I hadn’t had the same idea with my first motorcycle (also a BSA C15). Krazy Horse always puts on a good show and it’s very well attended. The combination of art and engineering that goes into some of the bikes on show is really inspiring.

As is Leon’s Coventry Climax installation in his A7. It looks and sounds fabulous and it’s only taken him about 5 minutes to complete!

And this is what I like…

… the car as an aide-memoire. That’s art. I was telling Leon about my troubles with the Hillman and describing the symptoms when something he said reminded me that the air intake to the carb is not an open bell-mouth like on the Austin, but via an air cleaner which sits on the top of the engine in the hottest part of the bonnet. I wondered if I made a couple of air scoops to help pull in cool air directly into the air cleaner gauze, it might make a difference to the running?

Years ago I made up a beech tool to press out some aluminium fairings for the Jodel control cable exits.

That’ll do.

 

 

Barszcz.

Pronounced ‘barscht’ in Polish which is why when I asked in the Polish shop for ‘borscht’, it drew some blank looks. Anyway, it’s beetroot soup to us and although not to everyone’s taste, if you add fried lardons, chopped Savoy cabbage, organic carrots and potatoes, it’s a feast – worlds away from the borscht I remember being dished up in Moscow back in the 70’s.

Leon’s A7 gearbox has been mated to the Coventry Climax for a couple of weeks now; a very neat and tidy job and then the other day, this came through..

Job done; breakfast run here we come. Meanwhile, The Ambassador’s Daughter and I took a quick run out in the Hillman on the first official day of Spring – it seems eons ago now – in preparation for the annual run to Ufford.

I think it was probably the best turnout ever – I would guess over 200 cars – and over the years the weather has got steadily warmer and sunnier for this early April event. I remember the first one I went to in The Great Collector’s Rolls; I sat in the back holding picnic mugs to catch the rain pouring through the rails of the sun roof.

Awkward was there having prepared his Avon for a trip abroad – confusion about his country of origin is unlikely…. and my car of the day was this Invicta. It’s not often you see an Invicta of this size and style.

Project ‘X’ is now in full swing so these trips out and car stuff in general have taken a back seat. The front wings for the Austin 7 are still waiting to be done; the Riley racing car I haven’t even thought about for what seems an age, I’ve got a suspension piece to make for a Hurtu, a Mercedes hood to repair and I’ve still got to fit in the dhobi and hoovering.

Good job the evenings are drawing out – Na Zdorovie!