Monday, January 28, 2008

Messing with motors

Had a busy day Saturday playing with some of the fleet. First off was the daughters 13/60. She had complained of a horrible noise when cornering, and a friends boyfriend had suggested to her that a wheel bearing was shot, and a wheel was about to drop off! Needless to say that put the fear of God into her so I brought it into work to check it over. It only made the noise once for me and that was when I reversed off the drive at home. All was revealed once I had opened the bonnet in the workshop. One of the valance brackets had managed to come loose and was fowling the tyre on full lock. While it was in the workshop I filled the trunnions with EP90, and gave the car a quick once over, no other problems to report.
Next on the agenda was the daughters other car, her 'pimped my ride' 948 saloon that you may remember me working on from this time last year. It had gone on the back burner after getting 90% completed when we found her 'Harry' the 13/60 above. Well now the space the 948 occupies is needed by several other exciting projects that have recently come into the workshop. I spent a couple of hours re-fitting some of the internal trim, before deciding to put the wife's PI on the Sun tuner to try and find that rogue miss-fire mentioned in my previous blog.
Half an hour later and I was none the wiser. Indeed the PI performed faultlessly on the 'scope' with everything to book, and near identical patterns on the screen, nice vacuum, and no clues as to it's tantrums. I'm wondering now if this is a recurrence of a previous problem we suffered for many years of some foreign body floating around in the petrol tank. Of course it wasn't so critical when it was a carb car, as it only manifested itself at speeds above 70mph, of on inclines on the motorway, and it never left us stranded. PI's however need a constant flow of high pressure/volume fuel and will not tolerate temporary interruption of fuel. About a year ago I noticed something odd looking in the filter before the pump. I dissected the filter with a stanley blade only to find what looked like the remnants of a plastic bag, or a latex glove. I thought that was the end of it, maybe not!
Anyway I couldn't hang about as we had been invited out for the evening to the Gaydon Heritage Museum for the British Racing Mechanic Club's annual dinner, and presentation do. After a pleasant evening in some superb company we managed to top the night off by coming out of the Heritage Centre and turning the wrong way on the M40! Fortunately as it was gone midnight the road was empty so a quick blast down to Oxford and back at an impressive rate of knots in the Chicane ensured we weren't to late home for bed.

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