Saturday, 17 March 2012

On with the SUs!

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Today's work was to install the new SUs, and reinstall my newly painted, non emission controlled exhaust manifolds. I also took the oportunity to clean and paint the sides of the block, and to install a gear reduction starter.

Because of the tight access to the lower row of inlet manifold nuts I replaced all of the lower studs with new ones. This paid a huge dividend as I was easily able to do them all up finger tight before having to get a spanner anywhere near them. This easily halved the time it took to get them back on.

Access to the exhausts is a lot easier and they went on easily, as did the Bell stainless downpipes.

All in all a fairly easy afternoon's work, and amazingly the car started straight away on the first turn of the key! My attempts at tuning however were laughably poor so the car is off to Adelaide's finest SU tuner.

Looks pretty too!

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"All the leaves are brown.."

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With autumn upon us a man's thoughts once again turn to converting a road going car into an unwieldy pile of rolling junk.
With this in mind, I have decided that the time to install the triple SU's has come.
Actually, the real motivator was the awful noises that the starter motor was making.
So flush with enthusiasm I ordered a new high torque starter from Barratts and set to the task of removing the Stronbergs.
As the crossover manifold means that the rear exhaust manifold also needs to be changed over I have chosen to install the rest of the stainless exhaust too.
Removal of the Strombergs was a slow but straightforward process. Locating and removing the dozens of completely invisible nuts concealed under the manifold took a while. So did understanding the baffling arrangement of studs that hold the Stromberg manifold together. Presumably this is to prevent the amateur mechanic from risking the release of valuable Lucas smoke from within it's tortuous interior.
Anyway eventually it succumbed to reason, bad language and a 1/2" spanner.
The exhaust manifolds, which were the ones I was actually worried about, literally fell off in about 5 minutes.

I had to call a friend to work out how to get the starter motor out though. At a stretch I could almost see the head of the bottom retaining bolt, but given that it was the best part of a foot down a 1" wide gap between gearbox and transmission tunnel I had no idea how to access it. I asked Chris, who wisely told me about the access cover in the footwell. Armed with this information I had it out 5 minutes later. The picture below shows that there may be some slight wear contributing to its noisy operation...
Now if the new one would only arrive from Blighty. The Barratts carrier vultures must be out to lunch..

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