February 2013

Sunday, 24 February 2013

Starting to come together

IRS finished. Carbs finished. Lots of hours but both were a lot easeir than I had imagined.

 The IRS is a beautiful piece of engineering. Very satisfying to reassemble.

 

3.8 IRS partial

 

3.8 IRS complete

 The carbies look fantastic with the pipes polished.

3.8 carbs complete

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Sunday, 17 February 2013

Ross has been busy

Ross has been very busy with the bodywork.

The floor sections under the seats have been replaced with new panels from Robey's.

3.8 Ross floors

The rust holes in the boot floor have been cut out and repaired.

3.8 Ross boot floor repairs

The accident damage to the right rear quarter has been fixed.. 

3.8 Ross rear patch

..and the trial fit of the chrome work is complete.

3.8 Ross rear metal finished

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Saturday, 02 February 2013

There's always one little tiny problem...

I thought that I'd be sensible and rebush the throttle shafts. I couldn't do this myself because you need a good reamer so I sent then off to Midel in Sydney, who returned them having done an excellent job. I specified that they only do the bushes as I was confident that I could refit the throtle stops etc. How hard could it be after all?
However the PO had had this done too, and had used oversized shafts. So the throttle stops, having been overbored, were loose. George at Midel rang me and said I'd need new stops, which I bought.
However when they arrived, they had no holes in them.
Now I was happy enough to drill the shafts to fit the old throttle stops with existing holes. It's easy; you just use the existing holes as guides. But I'd never been confronted by a virgin stop before...
After a lot of thought and a good look at another SU today I did the deed. I bolted the SU body down firmly onto the table on my mill and using a #31 drill as specified, drilled the stop and the shaft in one. Tense?? You could have cut the air with a knife.
But happily all went well. In the end all 3 took about 15 mins including pressing the locking pins in.

 

3.8 throttle stops

 


Flushed with success I moved on to the IRS. Today's job was to install the lower wishbone, along with its multitude of Torrington bearings, bearing tubes, spacers seals etc etc.
Essentially the difficulty relates to the deciduous nature of these various accoutrements, while trying to gently fit a heavy lump of steel. Alan B said "it's a 2 man job". The only spare man I had available was my 13 year old son, and try manfully though he might he just isn't strong enough to hold the bugger still for long enough.
Adversity, however, breeds innovation. I turned up a couple of dummy accoutrement retainers out of Delrin. Without them the job would have been impossible. With them, each side took maybe 10 mins.

 

3.8 wishbone dummy shafts

 

 

 

3.8 Wishbones on

 

 

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