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Scrubworks

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Everything posted by Scrubworks

  1. I'll go and write it now, I've been busy procrastinating. I'll take some pictures of the SuperPro polybushes I've bought for my Moggy so you'll be able to have a sort of comparison.
  2. Yeah I was gonna say, Moggy ones look like they'd be the same. I think all those BMC A-Series rear wheel drive axles are all the same suspension design :P. Looks like good work though, should drive so much nicer. Interested to hear how you get on with the Spax dampers.
  3. Definitely sounds like electrical infidelity. If there is an "anti-start relay" I'd be bypassing that for sure.
  4. As long as you aren't using Charles Wright font they won't be ANPR readable, and as long as your actual plates are clearly displayed, that'd be fine. Besides, I don't think that really relates to my original question. If there's a legal definition for "race numbers" under the Road Traffic Act or Highway Code or similar, I'd like to see it.
  5. What qualifies as a race number, exactly? If I decide to be hilarious and put a giant 69 on the side of my Moggy, which has never been a racing car, how can anyone possibly prosecute me for anything?
  6. The make is the Chinese People's Instrumentation Factory No. 237 🤣 It's just a cheap ebay job, wouldn't recommend to be honest. I will actually be binning it for a genuine Mini Cooper gauge that I picked up some years ago. It was just easy and convenient to wire in at the time. If you want a suggestion for a rev counter of similar size and style that's actually good quality I can recommend something.
  7. Wiring is done. It's not ever anyone's favourite job on any car, but it wasn't too painful in this case, especially once I'd worked out how to assemble the new terminals into the modular fuse box. Here is what I started with: Old, crap, redundant voltage regulator taking up space, and wires mostly uncovered due to the original braided covered mostly rotting away. You can also see the factory inline fuse holder for the sidelights on the red wire. Here is what I ended up with: Wires tidied up and rewrapped in fabric tape. Wires all nicely rerouted into the new fusebox, which is mounted on the bulkhead (I could only use three of the four mounting holes due to space constraints, but it's nice and solid). The fuse holder for the sidelights is also deleted. I've actually been able to remove about 10 feet of wiring from the car by condensing it down like this, which was a nice bonus. While I was there, I also wired in the brake fluid level switch that is built into the MX-5 master cylinder. It's just a simple float switch that completes a circuit when the float sits low enough. I've run that through a nice bright red warning light on the dashboard which will be easily seen. Having the loom uncovered also gave me the opportunity to add in the wires for a new electric washer kit I bought. It's basically a copy of the electric washer system they used to fit to Minis in the 80s, before they switched to a servo master cylinder in 1989. Nice, compact little reservoir with integrated pump. It was only £17 off eBay, and it came with a little wiring pigtail, a mount for the reservoir, several feet of plastic tube, a momentary push switch, and even a pair of washer jets. I honestly can't fault it. I drilled a couple of holes in the inner wing to bolt the mount on , extended the wiring pigtail up to a spare fuse in the new fusebox, then plugged the pump into the existing washer system using the new length of pipe. The original manual washer pump was removed from its hole in the dashboard, and the hose connections bypassed with a little plastic union that came with the washer kit. The push switch was then mounted in the hole, and wired into the ignition circuit. That was all it took to install the system. It works extremely well. I know have two-speed wipers, AND electric washers. Such decadence. You may also have spotted the new horn in the picture. It's a cheap klaxon, "awoooga" horn, and, to be honest, is far too loud. Should be good for scaring pedestrians 😁. I also installed the new ignition barrel with the accessory position. As you can see it looks pretty much the same as factory, and it only took a little bit of work with a file to slightly enlarge the hole to fit it. After that it just plugged in on the back with spade terminals. You can also see the little black push switch for the washers on the left in the picture. While I had the speedo out to fit the key barrel, I changed all the lights on the back for warm white LEDs. Wasn't particularly cheap at £25 for 10, but it's made a world of difference: At least twice as bright as the incandescent bulbs they replaced, although my phone has over-exposed the picture a bit. The indicator lights for the ignition and high beams also stand out much more vividly too. The two orange lights, for the oil filter and oil pressure no longer function; the new oil filter housing has no provision for a sender (and they never work properly anyway), and the main oil pressure sender on the engine block has been replaced with a feed to a mechanical oil pressure gauge. I also replaced the original, faulty mechanical voltage stabiliser for the fuel gauge on the back of the speedo with a new, electronic one. This should make the fuel gauge at least reasonably accurate now, as well as permit me to supply regulated voltage to a new coolant temperature gauge I am installing. Now for a bit of tedium. In order to actually work out and document the rather drastic changes to the car's wiring, I actually sat down and made my own new wiring diagram (actually I just altered an existing one made by another Moggy fan, but I had to blow it up into proper resolution). Here is the standard Morris Minor wiring, altered slightly with an alternator in place of the original dynamo: Here is my new wiring setup: P stands for Permanent Live, A for Accessory, and I for Ignition. I know it initially looks more complicated, but when you consider the bus bar and the fusebox are now all contained inside one physical component, it's actually far more compact. I also now have ten fuses, rather than three; two for permanent stuff, three for accessories, and five for ignition stuff. I can also grab unfused power, should it be needed, for all three circuits from the bus bar. I've also deleted the under-dash switch for the speedo illumination, which is pointless and just breaks anyway. The fuse holder for the sidelights is also gone, and now the power for the side AND headlights is run through a fuse. A friend of mine did express a bit of concern at that decision, as if that fuse blows, I will lose my headlights. He's right, but with a suitably rated fuse it shouldn't be an issue. It will be easy to change if it does prove troublesome. Everything is tested and working, and this marks the end of the pre-engine work that needs to be done to the car. The engine bay is ready to accept the new engine, the engine is ready to be accepted. I am nervous.
  8. Tenner says it's the exact same problem as Volvos of that era have. Plastic drive gear etc.
  9. Isn't this about 10 years too late to be malaise era? It has the brick styling though.
  10. Much like my Minor then. Pulled the front suspension apart last year, and found some bushes that were basically non-existent, and some that still said MOWOG on them and had clearly never been changed. Polybushing will make it much better. I prefer SuperPro brand bushes myself but on a design this old it hardly matters. The armstrong dampers can be refilled with a thicker oil if you want to uprate them. I filled the ones on my Moggy with SAE 40 oil (standard is SAE 20), which would be perfect for a track, but on the road is way too harsh. I'm now draining and refilling them again to SAE 30 which should be ok. For the rear, check the U bolts that hold the axle onto the springs. They can loosen over time and cause issues, and often get overlooked.
  11. Check out this guy sending it: New wheels look sweet by the way 👌.
  12. Ugh. The weather. That's one bad thing about working on one's own project; you can't force yourself to go outside and work on it in 30+ degrees. This means I'm limited to couple of hours every evening when the sun is low, but there's still enough light to work by. Still, here's what I've managed to get done: The Marina clutch and brake pedals were removed, and the pedal pads were cut off and welded back on at the correct angle again. I also took the opportunity to actually cut the pedals back a bit behind the pads, so they will sit further towards the front of the car by about an inch. Doesn't sound like much, but the more room I make for my Bayonetta legs the better. I then painted the pedals in stonechip, and put on a pair of new rubbers. Shite picture, but it's the only one I remembered to take. The pedal box was then put back in the car, although I've only fitted the clutch pedal for now. The reason for omitting the brake pedal, is because I will be running-in the new engine using the standard carb, inlet and exhaust. The MX-5 brake servo naturally needs a vacuum source on the intake for it to function, and the standard intake manifold does not have a vacuum port. This means I'd have to run the MX-5 master cylinder with no power assist; not advisable. So, I need access to the standard brakes for the time being. Once the engine is run in, I will install the twin HS2 carbs, the manifold for which does have a vacuum port, so that should work fine. I will install the front disc brakes at that time as well. The new clutch, however, is now plumbed in and working. I ordered an 18 inch hard line off eBay, and it all connects together like factory, and seems to be working properly, though I won't be able to fully tell until there's an actual clutch for the system to push on. Despite not needing it quite yet, I've decided to fit the MX-5 master and servo, in order to check what clearances would be required. As I suspected, both the shock absorber and inner wing don't provide quite enough room. The inner wing was simply bashed out a little bit with a hammer, no issues there. The shock absorber is literally 4mm too tall; the height of the little filler plug on top. Since I needed to drain and refill the shocks anyway, I just removed it from the car. The MX-5 servo now fits like a glove. The shock absorber should be able to refit now with juuuust enough clearance. If not I may have to shave it a bit. This also means that I can't remove the servo without also removing the shock absorber, but that's ok. In time, I'll be binning them for Spax adjustable gas shocks, which will make this issue moot. Oh yes, I also had to cut a notch in the brace bar on the bonnet to provide room for the master cylinder reservoir, but that took but a moment. Back to the pedals, I then had to do something about the throttle pedal. You see, in its standard configuration, the top bit where the throttle cable attaches is now completely blocked by the hinge bar on the Marina pedal box. I first considered lengthening or shortening that part so the throttle cable could pass under or over the hinge bar, but I didn't really like that idea, because it would change the amount of pull you get on the cable. Instead, I decided to lengthen the horizontal part of the pedal, to push the cable arm further to the left, so now it runs just past the clutch end of the hinge bar. This also makes routing the new throttle cable much easier. I had to shave the hole in the bulkhead a bit to clear the pedal, but other than that it's worked a treat. Stonechipped the pedal as well so it now matches the other two. Now, I can move on to the electrics. Since Morris Minors have dynamos from factory, they use an external voltage regulator. This lives up on the bulkhead, and pretty much all the electrics are plugged into it. Even when converting over to an alternator, which is regulated internally, most people keep the redundant voltage regulator in place, because it houses the bus bar that most of the electrics plug into; they just disconnect the dynamo and field connections to the regulator, so it no longer functions. The Morris Minor's fusebox, which has all of two fuses, lives elsewhere on the bulkhead. BMC also decided, in 1964/5 to add in a third fuse for the sidelights, for some reason. Rather than redesign the fusebox to accommodate the extra fuse, they added in an off-the-shelf inline fuse holder. They did that from factory. Incredible. Now, this is all fine if you're just converting a car to alternator and leaving the rest of it standard, but I have a few problems with it: Having the bus bar and fusebox as separate components is an inefficient use of space and wiring. There are only two proper fuses, which limits expansion. The sidelights fuse really should be included in the fusebox. Glass fuses. There is no provision for relays, so if needed they have to be wired in and mounted externally, which is messy. The stock key-barrel does not have an accessory position. Not a massive issue in itself, but it'd be nice to have. To remedy this, I have bought these: This is a modular fusebox system made by MTA. The way it works is, you buy your basic fusebox, based on how many modules you want to fit (this one holds 4), and then fit it with the modules you want. The first module I've picked holds 10 mini blade fuses, and one full-size relay. The second module holds another full-size relay, and a mini relay. These modules will click into the fusebox in the middle. One space will be left blank for future expansion, and the other space will house a small bus bar. The bus bar will serve as a connection point for all electrics that require unfused, permanent current. It will also have two other terminals that will be energised by the accessory and ignition positions on the key barrel. These can then also be used to supply unfused circuits if necessary. The bus bar terminals will also feed power directly to the fuses and relays they are assigned to. Having the bus bar inside the fusebox will cut down on the amount of wiring needed significantly. To get an accessory position on the ignition key, I've bought this: It's made by Durite, and it's an ignition barrel for plant equipment like excavators and such like. It happens to be only slightly bigger in diameter than the original Lucas key barrel, so fitting it will be pretty easy, and it won't look out of place at all. It comes with two keys which can be ordered by serial number if needed. The original circuits will just plug straight in, and the extra accessory circuit won't take long to create at all. Making the fusebox fit properly, and rearranging the wiring to plug into it properly, I suspect, while conceptually simple, in practice is going to be a pain in the girldick. I have actually sat down and created a whole new wiring diagram to document the changes, as I am liable to forget halfway through and will need reference. I'll update with how I get on soon.
  13. In the HD games, I always grabbed one of these, the Karin Futo, clearly meant to be an AE86 Levin saloon: In GTA 4 especially, they're proper fast. I especially like the decal on the door that says it's fitted with the 20 valve version of the 4-AGE engine, which means someone on the dev team actually knows their cars. In San Andreas, continuing my love of Jap stuff, the ZR-350, meant to be an RX-7 FD: I also liked the FBI Rancher, (Chevy Suburban) partly because of the black paint, partly because it was hard to get, and also because it was the only version of the Rancher that was LWB and could carry 4 people. The siren was cool too: In Vice City, without question, the Cuban Hermes (late 40s Mercury?): In GTA 3, the Patriot, because I was a kid and could smash through things with it:
  14. They added this car in like 2019, mainly for the online crowd. If you play the original single player incarnation of the game from 2013, it doesn't really have any Euro cars. They actually later put in a bunch of cars that were never available stateside. The dev team on GTA 5 is actually mostly British, and it shows.
  15. My engine ran just as well, if not better with the Accuspark system. Electronic ignition kits are also maintenance free, which really is the main attraction. He probably hasn't reset the timing properly, or the hall effect sensor is too far away from the magnet ring; sometimes they need to be pushed in a bit.
  16. Looks like I'm getting into the habit of monthly updates. Hopefully as things progress more rapidly from hereon the posts will be more frequent. The last pictures you saw of the engine were of me smearing the bare block with burgundy paint. The engine, after a couple of months on a stand in my living room, is now complete. I didn't document the build step by step because that's tedious, and I'm sure most of you know what a connecting rod looks like, so here are some choice pictures: This is an adjustable camshaft pulley, which allows you to vary the cam timing to a minute level. This is pretty much essential if you're running an aftermarket cam, like I am, because you have to degree the camshaft and verify its timing is correct. Degreeing a cam is possibly one of the most tedious things I've ever done, but good thing I did; the timing turned out to be 22 degrees advanced, so I dialled it back and it's now perfect. Mmm. Copper. The full engine. It still needs the backplate and flywheel, but they'll have to wait until the stand bracket is removed. I really like this rocker cover. It's not a special branded one, just one that you can pick up for £40 or so from ESM Morris Minors, but I love the raw, cast and polished look it has, very old school. On the car itself, moving on from the wiper motor conversion, I decided to tackle the most major task of welding in the pedal box bracket. The bracket had been tacked into place, so I removed it again after checking the fitment of the new Marina pedals, which have now been bent to accommodate the Minor's steering column, and line up with the original pedals pretty much bang on. The pedal pads will need to be removed and welded on again at the proper angle. I didn't take that many pictures of the process of welding the pedal box bracket into place, but it wasn't too difficult, and actually came out very solid. I was concerned that the bulkhead would flex whenever the brakes were pushed and so extra reinforcing would be needed, but I can grab the bracket and move the whole car with it, no flex, so I'm happy. Welding the inboard side of the bracket to the battery tray definitely helped. I also constructed a small frame across the top rear part of the bracket, both to help rigidity, and also to accommodate six threaded holes. I will later make a metal plate that can bolt on and off, if I need to access the top of the pedal box. The whole thing was then coated in Bilt Hamber grey weld-through primer, which is excellent by the way, before being welded in. You can also see here that the two holes for the heater hoses, and the hole for the wiring loom, are a few inches higher than their original location. I remade these holes and moved the wiring, then welded up the original holes. I also took the opportunity to finally close up the ugly hole in the bulkhead left by the Bosch immobiliser coil. The new holes will allow the hoses and wiring to sit clear of the pedal box, rather than comingling with it, which would have been a bit messy. This does mean I am now a bit pinched on space for my upcoming fusebox conversion, but I'll manage. The pedal box was then coated in fresh almond green, followed by a liberal dusting of lacquer. There will also be cavity waxing later, I don't want this going rusty. This is the bracket with the pedal box reinstalled: Since the pedal box is nearing its final installation, I've also set about converting the clutch system from the original mechanical rod, to the hydraulic system as used in Spridgets. This involves the simple bolting on of a mk2 Spridget slave cylinder to the gearbox; the holes are already drilled and tapped in the bellhousing, because both cars use the same gearbox casing, and it must have been easier just to drill and tap them all. A Mini clutch hose is then needed to provide the flexible join, along with removing the Minor's clutch fork, and replacing it with a Spridget item. Same fork, but with a different attachment point that will work with the slave cylinder. I then made a small bracket for the clutch hose to secure to, and welded it to the car. It's in red primer, pending some black stone chip later. Now all that is required is an 18 inch brake pipe to go between the clutch master cylinder and the flexible hose, and the system will be complete. Really a rather simple conversion. Next on the agenda is to get the new pedals prepped for final installation, along with test fitting the MX-5 master cylinder and servo.
  17. We've actually met before, at an MKFurs meet years ago when you had your Lada. You showed SKCat and I the fuel injection spaghetti wiring you did on it .
  18. This car belongs to my housemate . I originally bought it to take on the Mongol rally back in 2018, which thankfully never happened. I then sold it to my housemate who's been using it as a daily ever since. It was registered in February 93, and I reckon it's the oldest "working" Sunderland K11 still in existence (excluding prototypes and first-off-the-line models maybe kept in museums). And you may see it about yet, as we're in MK.
  19. A friend of mine wanted a mk3 Fiesta. He had a lead on one, 1989 first year of production, and full Ghia spec, now quite rare. Friend had been told it'd been off the road for a while, and just required a bit of usual mechanical servicing and such like to get it to a roadworthy state. I was doubtful, but my friend wanted to go and see it so off we went. The Fiesta was shoved in the back of a muddy garden next to a pile of miscellaneous Ford wheels and other bits. The sellers were a father and son pair who were the exact kind of dodgy Ford fanatics you want to stay away from. The car was actually being sold by the son, who barely looked old enough to drive, but had already clearly learned from his old man how to talk out of both sides of his mouth. They immediately tried it on with my friend, doing the standard "yer m8 ford fiesta innit m8 ghia m8 good little car m8 look at these ford bits m8 yeh m8 cosworth alloys m8 escort gti m8". Safe to say I decided I despised them both. The car itself was completely fucked. It was complete, and looked fairly straight, but that's where its good points ended. The sills were rotten. The bottoms of the doors (all four of them) were rotten. The bootlid was rotten. The engine bay was rotten. The interior was full of condensation because the sunroof leaked, because it was rotten. The windscreen was cracked. The paint on the roof had been scratched to fuck. I pointed all this out, and the son seemed put out, almost indignant. "Yeh but I've got a pair of good rear doors for it." He protested. "Are they included in the sale?" "No mate but I'll do you a deal for £200 for them." "And what about the front doors?" "Oh you get them easy mate." "Oh well that's fine then." I said. I don't think he picked up on the irony. I lifted the bonnet to reveal acres of cobwebs. "When did it last run?" "Recently" This was clearly a lie. The little shit had an answer for everything. Every single problem I pointed out was met with a "That's ok though m8" or "You fix that easily m8" or "It's a 30 year old car tho m8". The punchline? The kid wanted £1000 for this colander. I told them I wanted a quiet word with my friend, and took him to the other end of the garden. Except, about 20 seconds into me telling my friend "This thing is a basket-case, don't even think about it." the dad walked over and interrupted us by opening his garden shed to show us his mk1 Escort. It was purple, had flat tyres on corroded slotmag wheels, and clearly hadn't run since Tony Blair left office. "Oh is this for sale too?" "Ah nah mate I'll never sell this." ".........how come you're showing us then?" "Oh I just thought you might be interested." visible_confusion.jpg We eventually got enough of a word in to tell them we weren't interested, and they turned the sell on. They pretty much immediately offered to throw the extra set of doors in for free. Somehow that didn't change our minds, and we left. My friend then got a facebook message from them a couple of days later offering him the car and doors for £800. I told him if he bought it, I'd burn it. He eventually got a solid Fiesta.
  20. Never heard of this Fire head, I know all about the BMW K head swap. I have a 16V K1200 head with the RS cams in it in storage, but I think the power gained from it is no longer very good value compared to just swapping to a more modern engine with more displacement.
  21. Yeah, it's probably the heaviest A-Series sump in existence now . I'm not too clued up on the Fiat engines, but the general consensus these days seems to be they're not worth the time or the money. They're very old now and getting parts for a rebuild can be a pain. There also is the issue of finding a gearbox that isn't shagged. If I do swap to a non-BMC engine in the future, it'll probably be a Toyota 4-AGE. Nice and compact, and far better engineered than the Fiat unit.
  22. It's been a while, and I've been very busy. I decided to crack on getting the driver's seat installed. This involved fabricating a couple of adapters out of angle iron. Simple in theory, but actually quite time-consuming in practice. I've installed aftermarket seats before, but those were using premade adapters. I've never had to make my own from scratch. It involves bolting the unfinished adapters onto the seat rails, and then taking the seat in and out of the car about 50 times, experimenting with mounting locations, mocking things up, and then eventually crafting the feet for the adapters bit by bit and welding them on. You then eventually end up with this: And then the seat simply bolts on: Looks fairly decent. The brilliant thing of course is being able to position the seat at the exact height and distance from the wheel to suit my 6ft 5 frame. And of course, they have proper seat runners, so varying them is easy. That done, I decided I couldn't be bothered to do the passenger seat, so I turned my attention to the windscreen wipers. The original wiper motor broke last year, and I was unable to fix it. You can buy a reconditioned exchange unit, but they're £100. which isn't really good value for a motor that's fairly crap in the first place, and only has one speed. However, I had all the wiper system components left from a K11 Micra that I parted out a few years ago, just begging to be used. Now, there is an episode of the Project Binky Mini build by Bad Obsession, where they remove the entire stock wiper system. which is the same design as the one fitted to a Minor, and replace it with the system from a more modern Peugeot. However, watching the episode again, it looked like quite a bit of surgery and work to do, so I decided I'd instead retain the Minor's original wiper system, but adapt the K11 wiper motor to operate it. This is how the motor looks when you take it off the Micra. It bolts to a steel plate, which in turn bolts through rubber bushes to the body. The spindle has a small metal arm (not shown here) that bolts onto it and is driven by splines, which drives the rods that make the wipers move. However, the Minor uses a cable that is drawn back and forth inside a wheelbox by a connecting rod, that then sits on a metal peg on a gear, that is then driven round and round by the wiper motor. The con rod turns that rotational motion into a reciprocating motion the move the wiper cable forward and back. I decided the best way to adapt the Micra motor would be to build my own wheelbox from scratch, where the rotating peg is instead attached to the metal arm on the Micra spline-drive. This would then rotate the connecting rod, which would drive the cable as before. To actually mount the motor to the car, I decided to cut the original motor bracket from the Minor in two, and then welded four M8 nuts in each corner. This allows the original Micra mounting plate to bolt straight on: Not only does this allow for easy installation and removal, but it also keeps the rubber mounting bushes to reduce vibrations. That done, I started working on the wheelbox. I decided to mount this directly to the Micra mounting place using the three bolts that thread directly into the wiper motor. This may prove not to be the best way in time, but it should be strong enough. This is the base of the new wheelbox: The two upright pieces of thick steel form a guide for the wiper cable end to move back and forth in. The original wheelbox has a track like that too. This was then mounted to the motor plate, and then the original motor bracket welded back onto the car: I had to ruin my recent repaint of this area to weld the bracket on. The inner wing also needed a few taps with the hammer for a bit of extra clearance. You can also see here the motor arm, which is the original Micra one. I cut it in half to keep the splined end, and welded on a raised portion, through which an 8mm hole was drilled, at exactly the right point. The distance between the centre of the motor spindle, and the peg that drives the con rod is crucial, as that sets the stroke of the con rod, and therefore how far it pushes and pulls the cable, and ultimately, how far the wipers sweep. If the distance is too short, the wipers won't sweep the whole screen. Too long, and the wipers will go off the edge of the glass. Fortunately it seems just right. The drive peg itself I had made by an engineer to my exacting specifications, drawn on some paper in crayon. The Minor's wiring plugs straight in to the Micra motor, although to get both the speeds from the motor, I had to add an extra wire, no biggie. A basic test proved it works, so I dismantled it all, and finished building the wheelbox: It's painted with red oxide and then black satin paint. I also welded nuts around it so that the like can be bolted on and off, similar to the original wheelbox. I also repainted the bracket area on the car. Again: After that dried, I remounted everything for a final fit. I also rewrapped the wiring in new fabric tape: It's definitely overbuilt, but it also works pretty well so far. Both speeds are working (had to buy a 3-position switch), and the motor provides far more oomph than the weedy original. It also should be more dependable, and even if it does break, will be cheaply replaceable. I've also bought a generic off-the-shelf electric washer kit to replace the super-soaker fitted originally. The Minor build in general is now proceeding full speed. I have my con rods back from the engineer, so now the engine is going together. I have also had the new clutch and brake pedals altered, so the next big task will be to finalise the fitment of the pedal box, and fit the new hydraulic clutch system.
  23. 90s VTEC engines using oil is pretty much a Honda meme at this point. Halfway through every tofu delivery run you will need to top up with 10W40. I think the reason is that the VTEC system increases valve lift, and that makes the valve stem move beyond its comfort zone, and oil leaks around the valve stem seal, because they're all old now. Add in the fact that the engine is pulling in a lot more air on VTEC, and you have oil getting burned.
  24. I'm beginning to learn that engine building is 10% sourcing parts and dismantling, 5% actually building the new engine, and 85% waiting for engineers to finish your parts. I still don't have my bloody conrods (or my pedals) back, but that does give me more time to sort out more stuff on the car itself. I mentioned before that I'm planning a modification to the wiper motor system; more on that some other time as it develops, but doing so required me to remove the original wiper motor mount from the inner wing by drilling the spot welds out. This gave me the perfect opportunity to fix this mess lurking behind it. The inner wheel arch underneath the littler strengthening plate (which has already been cut away here) had clearly rotted through at some point, and someone had just welded a small plate of metal underneath it. This itself then rotted away in turn. I cut a nice big chunk of the wheel arch out and formed a new section out of 2mm steel, much thicker. This was then welded in, along with the rebuilt lower half of the strengthening plate, followed by plenty of seam sealer. Not concourse, but it will last. On braking matters, my second hand MX-5 mk2 master cylinder and servo arrived. Obviously it wasn't going to fit the Marina pedal box, so I made an adapter plate. The easy thing to do would have been to just drill four new holes in the pedal box to accept the Mazda servo, but to get the nuts on the backside to hold it properly would have been a pain, due to the complicated shape of the pedal box. Instead, I was going to weld the steel plate to the Mazda studs, then cut them off flush and use some new M8 bolts to attach the servo through the original servo stud holes. However, I decided to do both of these plans together for extra security. Four holes were drilled for the Mazda studs to pass through, as well as welding the steel plate to them lower down. This way the servo will be secured to the pedal box both by the steel adapter plate with the new M8 bolts, and also with some nuts on the original studs. Looks actually quite smart when all fitted up. You can see the new clutch master cylinder is also mounted to the pedal box. Both the edge of the servo and the side of the clutch master had to be gently shaved so that they can sit comfortably side by side, but they now mount together quite happily. Fortunately, the clevis pin diameter on the Mazda pushrod is exactly the same as the one used on the Marina, which saves some tedious drilling; I guess it must be an industry standard. The Mazda pushrod is also threaded, so I've been able to adjust it to exactly the right length. Lovely. All I need to do now is make some brake lines that start with metric fittings, and end with an imperial ones. Pipe flaring kit is on order. I've also been thinking about the interior of the car, and for that I recently took a trip down to Southend in Essex to pick these up. A slightly grotty pair of seats from a 90s Alfa Romeo GTV. These seats are a favourite of kit car and classic car modifiers , Because they are modern, well-constructed, supportive, and reasonably safe, yet are small enough to fit even into a Mini, and have a subtle retro style that doesn't look too out of place in an older car. That does mean that they command a bit of a price premium, but this pair I was able to pick up for £130. The ruined bolster and mould on the driver's seat didn't really bother me, as my plan is to have them retrimmed in pale green vinyl to match the rest of the interior. However, that plan will have to wait. The trimmer I went to quoted me £1800 to do the pair(!). I'll think about that some other time. I doused them with leather cleaner and scrubbed hard, and all the mould came off, so they are at least hygienic. When everything reopens tomorrow, I'll head down to the metal merchant 🤘 and pick up some nice angle steel to make some mounts out of. Shouldn't be too difficult.
  25. White Vinegar, that will derust anything over a couple of days.
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