Tommyboy12

Today I turned the Montego into a twin engine 2.6L yet managed to make it even slower in the process? 🤔 A casual 400 miles to collect this lump...

I did at least go to the effort of drilling holes in the wood so it doesn't break loose... 😅

Set about the task of replacing the starter and radiator this morning. Should have been simple. Turned into a slog which I can demonstrate with a single picture The starter motor at least slotted straight in place. I don't particularly advocate bodgery but it seemed a waste of a new radiator that nearly fit so...

Spotted the other day in Peterborough

Bought some parts. My starter repair didn't last and I'm sorting a radiator leak. Starter is a rebuild unit stamped Lucas. Radiator came from Rimmerbros. Their Montego/Maestro pages are a bit disorganised but this was advertised as a Maestro 1.3 radiator but it has the dimensions of the 1.6 radiator.

The only estate I will ever need (ignoring the 406 estate I had about 11 years ago)

Ordered and paid

My legit starter motor repair worked so have some revs from the old girl in celebration. I filmed this for a tiktok video so ten internet points if you can be bothered to hunt it down. Shouldn't be too hard being about the only lunatic posting Montego content on tiktok 😅 134842462_PXL_20220109_1056557214.mp4

dozeydustman - x2 catsinthewelder - x1 andyberg - x1 barefoot - x1 RobT - x1 Fumbler - x1 Wilko220 - x1 Tommyboy12 - x1

Legit repair innit. Even managed to get it straight thanks to the uneven break in the shaft.

Indeed it is! I actually have a grainy archival picture of it from BBC iplayer working an apple farm in Somerset in the 60s.

Fair enough. Ill give it a go regardless and see what it does for temps. It was only an adjustment of existing mounts so hasnt cost me anything. If I get cooler temps I will have done what I set out to do. If it makes no difference then I can reverse it.

In other news an absolute disaster has befallen the Montego! The starter motor has broken. Woe, woe and thrice woe! I went to go and pick my daughter up at lunch and it wouldnt start and sounded like a flat battery but a jump pack wouldnt do anything. Took off the starter motor to find the following: It should look like this: The starter has no bearing supporting the motor on that end so the nose slides into a bronze bush and acts as the bearing. Thus I believe the motor is just shorting on the body of the starter. Any sensible man would replace the starter. I am not a sensible man. I own a welder. You can see where this is going.

Im missing the inner wings and I have no grille so airflow is probably a mess in the engine bay anyway. That being said air passing over the top of the bonnet at high speed/high pressure should draw air out the gap not suck air into it. Same principle as an aeroplane wing creating lift.

Simple answer is HP doesn't plough fields, torque does. Complicated answer is it's designed for high torque at low RPM (2100rpm is the red line on this engine) and constant running at high load on very low octane petrol (in the 80s octane rating). When I say high load I mean that it would be like driving a car capable of 100mph with your foot welded to the floor at 100mph for 7-8 hours a day every day. That's going to wear it out very quickly. When you drive your car at 70mph it's maybe at 15% engine load, sometimes less. When you accelerate it might peak at 100% but that's for 20-30 seconds at most. A tractor works at 100% load whenever it's doing work in the field. If it's not at 100% it isn't being used efficiently. It creates exceptional wear on an engine to work that hard if it isn't designed properly. A tractor engine is also expected to last thousands of hours, equivalent to millions of car miles, whereas a car engine would maybe last a couple of hundred hours being treated like that and even if it is being used properly how many cars reach a million miles with major overhaul? So you design the engine to be strong and not so powerful as to help in its own destruction, yet torquey enough to do the job. Hence tractors even today have 6-cyl 7L engines with only 200hp. It's the same engine that's in some Standard cars. In that application it's 70hp.