April 2012

A Lucas moment

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I've been driving the car a bit while gradually fixing little things.

Yesterday after a bit of a drive to attempt to calibrate the speedometer (a whole other story for the future), I noticed that the indicators briefly stopped working.

Thinking nothing more of it, while removing the speedo today I opened the centre console to discover that it was full of genuine Lucas Smoke! Very exciting.

On further investigation the plastic surrounding the fuse clip for fuse #7 had almost completely melted and the fuse and clip were too hot to touch.

Presumably there's a short somewhere; I did notice that the radiator fans were running without the car being warm, so that's where I'll start looking.

The trim, on the other hand, looks brilliant.  With a new headliner, carpets glued down, rips and scuffs fixed and new door trim she looks a million bucks.  Putting some Dynamat over the tunnel has improved the noise too, although the cabin is still hotter than I'd prefer.

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Off to the trim shop

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Now that I have the car more or less running, the biggest weakness is the poor state of the interior trim.

Bits are torn or missing, it's all loose and it really just looks daggy.

So off to another highly recommended artisan for a bit of a spruce up.

I'm not doing a full restoration, so only the necessary is being done, but new door trims, sound insulation, headliner repairs and generally sticking everything down will I hope make the car a lot more enjoyable to be in.

All things being equal I'll get her back Thursday week.

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A pleasant surprise

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While I had the bonnet off so that I had good access to do the carbs I also installed a set of kevlar Greenstuff front brake pads.

Being a cynic I didn't really expect much improvement, but to my surprise the sponginess in the brake pedal has gone completely.

To be honest I'm not sure how changing the pads can account for this, and I wonder if in replacing the inlet manifold I have inadvertantly fixed a previously undetected vacuum leak, which has in turn allowed the servo to work properly.  I'm happy enough with the brakes that I'm going to hold off fitting the front Wilwood calipers.

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Fine Tuning

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John Hurley is a busy man, but that's because Kent Town Auto Tune has long had the reputation of being the place to get your car properly tuned in Adelaide.

I had managed to get the car to run well enough to be just drivable and dropped it in for John to tune.

John is incredibly thorough; every component gets taken off the car, tested, adjusted to spec and reinstalled.

Unfortunately when John tested the advance curve on the new Powerspark distributor it turned out to be completely wrong with advance starting too late and not peaking until 7000 rpm.  No point on its curve matched the factory numbers.  After discussion I took John my old Lucas distributor.  He checked and calibrated it and deemed it satisfactory.

Needless to say, the car runs beautifully. The SUs do seem to provide more go to the car, although it's perhaps unfair to compare a brand new set of freshly tuned carbs with an old set of emission control Strombergs. Regardless though they look fantastic!

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