captain_70s

Could be worse, I had a bottle of brake fluid leak in the Acclaim’s spare wheel well…

I think I've finally woke up since the trip... Caught some grim Welsh illness and feel like death. Anyhoos. The journey started with me waking up at 4:15am, having gone to bed at 1:00am, which was shit. Convoy assembled at Cairn Lodge Services just after 6. 4 Volvos and a German interloper. We headed South Had a pitstop at Tebay (tradition, old charter, something) for breakfast and then ventured to the Commercial Vehicle Museum at Leyland. Arrivalised at the campsite in the late afternoon. On Sat we ventured to a local aircraft museum. I reckon the Welsh hillsides had a higher kill count than the Luftwaffe... I came distinctly middlingly in the night's TV Themes Quiz. Headed home on Sunday and was home for around 7ish. Steed of choice was the 740, because SVM REPRESENT. It got 35mpg-ish and didn't explode. BIG WIN. Big thanks to all who organised things, especially @Sunny Jim being able to convince the site owner we were worth having again. Was good to see some familiar faces again despite the near constant rain. Thank fuck for @binhoker668's gazeebo or we'd have been fucked (or at least wetter).

Looks like we've got ourselves a convoy

Accommodation prepared. Out the door at 5:15am. God help me...

RIP

This is booked in (again)... Volvo is backup (again).

Same sort of setup as last year? The rowdy ones down the bottom, normies in the middle and purveyors of geometric food in Scotch Corner at the top?

There was somebody selling the ID of a Spridget on a FB group t'other day. One guy pointed it out as a ringing kit and got banned for "being a dick". The seller threatened to sue him for defamation. 😂

There are a few Allegros built on Beetles now. So as well as being shit it isn't even original... Although shit, expensive and unoriginal seems to be a decent summary of most of the modern V Dub scene so I guess it's fitting.

Big thanks to @juular and Mrs Juular popping over in the Toledo yesterday to offer assistance with Dolofuckery. Waxstat deleted. I spent way too long attempting this with the carb on the car. Fucking stupid idea. Eventually resigned myself to pulling it off (fnarr) which made it less impossible. While doing this I took the dome/piston off and realised the needle was wobbling all over the place. So I pulled my other (mirror image) carb off the shelf and swapped the relevant parts to the one on the car. Fucked with the mixture a bit while driving up and down the road and got it passable but not great. Then found the timing was wandering, the clamp that secures the dizzy wasn't quite fitting to the dizzy was moving up/down a bit. Pried that back into a functional shape, reattached the dizzy and timed to 10° BTDC with the strobe light saw it now actually drivable. A run up the road to @320touring's unit was on the cards and with the car just about not shitting itself the obviously solution was to throw it at the motorway with the Toledo following. I started regretting this decision when it really didn't want to go above 50mph. Occasionally being hit by a bout of stuttering that'd take it down to 40mph odd and then cleaning up again. Eventually it let out a big cough and then drove perfectly. As in I was feathering the throttle and struggling to keep it at 60mph, it just wanted to go like fuck. Arrived at destination and took it a few drive around the local area and it was going well. On the drive home it played up again and foot hard to the floor = a steady 60mph on the flat and no more. Chief suspect is that the carb has shit in it which is blocking it up. Occasionally if you boot it the crap will get sucked through and it runs fine for a bit. Mixture is also only very roughly set on the "that sounds about right" metric, timing could also be tweaked and the fuel is year old E10 which will be shit. Will investigate further today. Important thing is it managed a trip and didn't dismantle itself! 40 miles completed since rebuild!

No idea. I binned the one on the original carb because why bother retaining a 1970s emission control feature? Some folk say they're shit, some reckon it makes no odds, either way it's a component that's 30 years beyond it's design life so may as well rule it out unless you're going concourse.

As far as I'm aware it should run with the stock setup. It is the carb with the waxstat, I wouldn't have thought it'd adjusted the mix so much it was undrivable but who knows. It's a 2p fix... Coil and condenser are a possibility. Have spares to swap in. I wasn't going to keep driving a car with an empty silencer around in circles at 11pm. Further testing tonight... Wicked fairy curse almost certain. Persistence through misery, the thinking man's strength through joy...

Not a great start. This was immediately preceded by the Volvo not starting due to having run out of fuel, again. The Acclaim then sprang a fuel leak, luckily I spotted the smoke from all the fuel pissing onto the exhaust. Anyway. The Dolly's throttle linkage had died. I'd constructed it out of cable ties to be fair. Bits have been ordered but not yet landed. I reconstructed it with more cable ties. Yes, it has broken down. A quick blat up and down my street saw it going fine but mega down on power. So I chucked the timing light on it and dialed that in better. Then went for a loop around the town. As it warmed up it started running like shit and kangarooing. I opened the choke and it seemed to sort it for another 1/4 mile until it started playing up again. Eventually it would barely drive and I pulled over as it wouldn't climb a 2% grade. Eventually I made a break for it and got it halfway along main street where it died another 2 times. Removed the fuel filter in case that was blocked and checked the pump connections in case it was pulling air. Sat here for 15 mins letting it cool down and managed to get it the final 1/2 mile home by feathering the throttle and slipping the clutch. So it fires right up with a bit of choke from cold, comes off choke in a min or two. Then it runs fine until it starts getting hot at which point it starts acting like it has no fuel. It'll idle and rev a bit but won't pull it's own weight. I thought it was leaning out, but it stank when I pulled up at home so maybe it's actually mega rich...

Bit of both. Must be coming up on a full year since the sump full of bronze discovery as it was just before FotU... It's only the last month or two I've been been putting major time into it. It's booked in to FotU (again) so that was the deadline but to avoid it being an inevitable last-minute shitshow I was aiming to have it ready to take to Berwick on hols, so the last few weeks I've generally been in the garage from 6 till 10 every evening. If I'd not buggered up the cam timing I'd have had it broken in Weds 21st and had the rest of the week to test drive and do other misc shit before leaving on Mon. As it was it first fired at 22:15 on the Sunday! Either way the shifting the goal posts worked, as I now have a few weeks to put miles on and iron out problems before the big trip. (As well as make sure the Volvo will make it to Shitefest)...

One less Fulvia Zagato...

FLEET UPDATE TIME. THE ACCLAIM: I washed it, put a cover on it and forgot about it. Then one day I went to move it and it wouldn't start. A bit of faffing found that no fuel was reaching the carbs. Diagnosed fairly rapidly as a dead fuel pump. The original mech pump is NLA (I found one for sale in Aus, but it was gonna be £120 for a 30+ year old part...) so I replaced it with a decent quality electric lift pump. Currently it's wired direct to the battery so I can move the car around the driveway and works great. Just need to find a switched live to run it from and somewhere to mount it. Less good was this: The cover was fine for the 5 odd weeks of no rain we had but some rain leaked through and the mineral content seemingly baked into the paint within the space of 2 days. Polish/T Cut wouldn't touch it so I resorted to wet sanding which at least got it to a point where it's not as noticeable. This paint just has no resilience to fuck all. The only reason I put a cover on it was that any bird shit causes the paint to crack in under 24hrs. Even less good was that while I was hunting for a fuel pump mounting spot I spied that the passenger side windscreen wiper had collapsed into the scuttle panel. Essentially it's just rotted off. Access is abysmal, ideally the windscreen would come out for a proper repair, but they're NLA and mine is cracked already and the seals are also NLA so that's not happening. I have formulated a vague plan of making an entirely new mounting plinth and welding it in font of the original. This is somewhat down the priority list currently as I've been working on... THE VOLVO: Nothing major to report with this one. I replaced the ARB drop links. Naturally there are two styles and the one I needed was seemingly out of production and only available easily on mainland Europe. Luckily I found Brookhouse Volvo had some in stock, albeit at double the price of the Euro stockists. @rml2345 also raided a 740 saloon that had landed in U-Pull-It in Inverkeithing and got me a few bits. Namely a correct side rubbing strip to replace the 940 one I had, a tow cover and the trim for the windscreen corners. Just back from a Haven caravan park holiday in it (Me and the Mrs really know how to live). The main eater of my free time has been... THE DOLOSHITE: I continued building up the newest iteration of it's powerplant. @juular and Mrs Juular came over, dropped off and assembled @320touring's engine crane which had been used to fit a Volvo Amazon engine. Then Mr Touring himself and @jaypee came over to assist with the engine swappage. Manifolds were tarted up and swapped over. It took a while to get the engine wiggled onto the gearbox but with some blocks of wood and a jack we got the two angled correctly and bolted up. The only real issue was when the front engine lift point/alternator bracket died midway through lifting the new engine. Luckily it snapped and then slowly bent rather than letting go and instantly dropping the engine onto the nose of the car and @320touring spotted it dying. Presumably it was just fatigue from having been used to lift the engine on multiple occasions. Luckily I had a spare... We actually used a different mount for the lift though, one off the Herald engine which was a different design with less harsh angles. The following day @davidfowler2000 came over and helped for a bit before utilising my driveway to swap his 205's sump... Then @juular, Mrs Juular and @Supernaut turned up to really start devaluing the local property values. Several days were then spent trying to get the fucking thing to run. Essentially it'd cough but not actually run. We swapped the carb, the dizzy, the coil, wiring, cleaned points, adjusted mixture. You name it we fucked about with it endlessly. Eventually I had to admit that, despite quadruple checking everything I must have fucked up the cam timing. I think it was 3/4 a tooth out. Or something fucking silly like that. Anyway it got put back together and an attempt to start had it briefly run for a few seconds. So the cooling system was rigged back up ready for breaking in. Then I broke it in. Nothing particularly interesting to report except it'd only run on full choke. After the break in I found massive air leaks around the carb so manufactured some new gaskets. Breaking in oil already swapped for 20w50 and the filter changed. On the "to-do" list is re-torqueing the cylinder head and doing the valve clearances again, refilling the coolant system, as at the moment it's just water for leak testing and flushing, and carb tuning/double checking ignition timing. Then I can start road testing. Fixed the (loose) headlights in with new hardware today and Girlfriend_70s assisted in fitting the bonnet this eve. Maybe by the tail end of this summer I'll have three fully functional cars...

I think the door card colour looks good. Similar to the seats/carpets it doesn't look out of place but different enough it's not a sea of a single shade.

Been there, done that... We had no.1 in the right place initially but thought the arm was rotating clockwise so it would cough on two. Then reversed everything so it was 180 out... It is now, finally, correct though. The SU is "tuned" to the jet flush with surface and then two spins of the nut. This should be in the ballpark but you can't do much else with the car not running. Good spark at all plugs. I did wonder about the ignition switch as it seems to die as soon as the starter disengages. Weird thing is the car ran on Sat with the old engine. Same carb, dizzy, alternator, starter, manifolds, etc.

Much wailing and knashing of teeth has occurred with this thing the last couple of days as @juular, Mrs_Juular and I have been trying to get it to run. Good compression, good oil pressure, ign timing seems spot on, good spark, carb came off a running engine, all potential vac leaks are sealed, spins over by hand fine but it'll just cough and splutter enough to kick the starter out and then die. Fucking Triumph.

Appreciating classic car.

More forum downtime today...

All my cars have a myriad of faults. Non-functional blower motors, deflating tyres, partially dismantled interiors, loose/missing trim. It's fucking endless. I'm usually found fixing brakes/suspension/engines/exhausts, so the non-essential stuff ends up down the priority list. A good example is the 740's heater blower motor. The resistor packed in, and was NLA, then the fan seized, also NLA. So a 850 resistor was bought to modify and a second hand 940 fan for similar reasons. Since then I've rebuilt the front brakes and fuel injection system, rewired the radio twice. Now it urgently needs drop links, a prop carrier and an exhaust... One day maybe I'll get to the blower motor, and the rear door that won't open properly, and the sunroof headlining being in tatters, and the rear wash wipe not working, and the non-functional heated seats... etc.

See what happens when the site is down... Honestly...

CARNT BELIV SUMONE WUD PAINT OVR AL THT NICE BRASS. BLOODY VANDILISM

Snap!