Another Box Ticked.

And the bonus is that both brake and clutch systems worked more or less straight away!

There was a bit of an emergency when I found that the clutch cable was going through too tight a radius – it’s not obvious in the picture but the cable doubles back under all this to hook up with the clutch lever on the bell-housing. Anyway, Learned Counsel popped his head round the corner and said “What you want is an RS2000 cable; it’s a bit longer because of the 5 speed box” (‘e know some stuff  ‘e do). So I ordered one and it’s perfect. What’s also not shown in this picture is the clutch adjustment fandango. I got an 18mm bolt, bored it out and put it between the end of the outer cable and the bracket shown above and it’s given me oodles of adjustment and aligned both pedals.

The brake mechanism; I re-spliced the cable I had to take apart and got the works back up and running and, the problems I thought I was going to have with linking the cable and hydraulic systems together have, so far, seemed to have melted away. There’s so much adjustment available in the cable system that it almost doesn’t matter what the pedal travel is on the hydraulic cylinder; I can set it up exactly how I want it with the front brakes leading the rears; so that’s a relief. Of course, there’s still the question of whether or not I’ve picked the right master cylinder to handle the 2 slaves on the hubs. That’s one of the next jobs – brake pipes and reservoir.

It’s all looking quite business like and the design and build of the firewall and scuttle is fairly imminent. I put the big brass water pipe on the nearside of the engine in preparation for the radiator going in the shell.

I’ve attached the bottom of the shell with 4 bolts that go through bobbins in the cross member so the bottom of the radiator is reasonably firm. The top of the shell will be supported by the bonnet hinge and the top radiator hose.

And, before I put the radiator core in, the badge has to be finished. The building up of the layers of paint was getting a bit tedious so I just mixed up a big blob, slapped it in and scraped the surplus off with a fancy laminated business card someone had given me. It’ll take a few weeks to harden and then I have to do the same with the light blue damaged area – it all takes time but this short-cut seems to have worked. I strode confidently into the make-up department in Morrisons and picked up a bottle of clear nail-varnish to finish the badge.

I’m thinking about electronic ignition. Typically I’ve ended up with a distributor that Aston Martin and Jaguar fitted so the price of everything is hiked accordingly and some of the more expensive conversions require some remedial and non-reversible work to the internals. I don’t want to do that; I want to be able to chuck the lot in the ditch when it fails to perform and go back to points and condenser – which I shall keep handy in the tool box. After some searching on the web, I found a system that seemed to have quite good press and was sensibly priced. I’m also thinking about one of those alternators that look like the original dynamo…. they’re not cheap but dynamos can be a real pain, especially if you’re doing a lot of night driving.

You’ll recall that last weekend I was taken up with wedding duties – a fact that was not lost on Learned Counsel who delighted in telling me what he was going to achieve whilst I was engaged elsewhere. Well, what a lot of flannel…

… he managed to get the dip-switch in. He must have been busy.