PhilA

Didn't get a chance to sit down and relax! --Phil

Had ten minutes so cleaned and touched up some of the paint chips. Little less noticeable now, though the paint has dried a shade or two darker than I had hoped. Might have to mix in a little white and try again. Phil Phil

Seeing that makes the hard work worth it. Phil

Whooee, it's getting too hot for this. Phil

Nice day today and I'm stuck at home so I decided that the car needed a bit of TLC in the looks department. Started with 2000 grit and soap and water, started to wet-flat the paint. Cutting compound making a noticeable difference. Polish and wax. Comes up well enough still. Phil

I will admit to having taken the bumper off mine and spent an afternoon with a drill, coping saw and a file removing all the blanks. I then fixed mesh behind it (B&Q natch, painted alloy wheel silver) Even with the garden brand home improvement it looked better. Without the mesh all you saw was the pipework and emissions crap. Phil

This afternoon I set about looking at the ignition system. I checked none of the spark wires were high resistance or open circuit. They all came back good. For giggles, with everything plugged in right I decided to see if adjusting the timing would help. That'll be a yes then New distributor cap time Phil

"Please don't try to run this on turpentine"

I should go work for Toyota. I got this design thing down pat.

6.6:1 compression It'll run on stale dishwater --Phil

Still got a really bad misfire at light to medium throttle. Feels fuelly but not too sure- stamping my foot down generates all the right actions though, and at light throttle it runs really quite well. Things are out of adjustment, troubleshooting old fuel and crappy gaskets right now which really doesn't help. --Phil

The mechanism had a lot of slack in. Problem was, the threaded rod wasn't holding straight. So, I cut up a spring from a door latch. Fitted it in place and now it holds the thing in line. Adjusted the rest of the linkage up, added a couple more springs and now it's a lot better. Idle is better also after I pushed all the wires back into the distributor cap fully... Phil

I took a look at it in the dark tonight and there's nothing going astray that I can see, not even St Elmo's Fire. Something else is crappy but it's all old and all questionable so that I can sort- linkages first though. Phil

I decided to focus on the gearbox this afternoon. Took a look at the linkage that combines the throttle and gearbox modulator. I had adjusted it badly first time round- there a specific procedure in the manual but the individual pieces of the linkage are particularly worn and sloppy. This time I set the relationship between the gearbox and the throttle better- now it changes gear smoothly, getting into 4th by 20 (as it should) without thumping into gears like it was. It was changing gear as if I had the throttle held down a little. The additional compensation pressure must've been holding the rear band on slightly, before it bled off gently. The rear drum is slightly out of true causing it to snatch, that was the "misfire" in 4th. It's still only running on 7 but that's a problem for another day. Now it shifts gently (even the 2-3 shift is fairly docile) with gearshifts held until higher road speed if the throttle is pressed down. 4-3 downshift works. I need to work on removing the looseness from the linkage and that should help significantly; then I should be able to set the adjustment correctly. Phil

I'm just trying to figure why it would do it at low rpm and not higher rpm. I guess I can't get the dynamics of what it's doing in my head. --Phil