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Jockeying for position

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With no front wheels and a need to get the car outside to degrease and clean the front frames the need to make it movable became paramount. After canvassing many helpful suggestions I settled on the idea of using a trailer jockey wheel.

After a bit of welding..success!

 

 

 

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I like plating

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Waiting for parts, la la la.

Got a bucket of stuff back from the platers; I love this stuff.

 

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The Unicorn

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Ron has discovered a very rare beast indeed. He tells me that there is a man called Carl, whose local business does metal polishing, chrome and zinc plating and...powder coating all at the same premises! Ron got some motorbike bits polished and said that they were reasonably priced and look good.

So the back of my car is full of buckets of bolts, freshly sandblasted objects for powder coating and my rusty old bumpers.

Let's see just how good Carl the Unicorn is.

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Washing dishes

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This morning I headed up to Stately Jag Manor on a mission. In the back of the car about 60kg of filthy front suspension and running gear to be cleaned and sandblasted prior to plating. It was freezing, with a light drizzle and wind straight from Antarctica.

Cleaning and fettling parts is very therapeutic even in less than ideal weather, especially with good company. Alan helped me to complete my tasks without damaging anything or myself. Ron worked on his motorbike engine and Chris listened to jazz while occasionally attaching bits to the engine he's rebuilding today.

Lunch consisted of beans on toast served with a lot of off humour.

All in all an excellent day.

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More bits off

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Despite my fundamental lack of enthusiasm for tackling the engine bay, another step was achieved today with the removal of the upper and lower wishbones. Another bucketful of bits for the platers. I think that the sockets in my upper wishbones are probably too worn for the new ball joints to compensate, so I'm looking at alternatives for repair or replacement.

 

 

 

I probably should tidy up the paint on the frames and the firewall while the engine's out, so it's time to source some paint. I hate doing fiddly cleaning and sanding jobs. I'm much better at bolting things together.

 

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Post mortem findings 2

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Yesterday I pulled the whole engine apart.

Basically it looks OK although tired and worn. It's obviously been "rebuilt" to some degree before but IMO not to a good standard. The big end bolts had 12 point (modern) nuts on them, but the original bolts with holes for split pins had been reused. The other main bearing journals look a bit better than the centre main which is quite badly scored. The bearing shells are +0.10 too. I have a spare crank that is in good condition and standard size so I might use it instead.

The block looks OK as best I can tell and the head looks OK although I will be putting on an XJ6 series 3 big valve head anyway so it doesn't really matter.

Chris is going to pick up the bits this week and take them off to the machinist. I have ordered most of the parts apart obviously from pistons and bearings. I'm going to go with a new Fidanza aluminum flywheel too.

 

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Post mortem findings

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I got the head off easily, which was a relief. The Max Jax is great for this using my home made engine lifter. Note to self; get a bit of 35mm solid round bar as the 31mm bar tilts a little too much.

Looking at the head it looked OK although you could see that the front three combustion chambers had a lot more soot in them than the back three.  Presumably this is the result of poor tune on the Strombergs. Looking at the bores they are nice and smooth with no ridges, but certainly not a recent rebuild. The distant tinkling of cowboy spurs was evident; wrong head studs with stacks of washers to take up the slack, and the torque on the nuts was all over the place; some were barely finger tight and some were almost impossible to undo.

 

 

 

The next step was to get the sump off and pull the centre main to have a look at the condition of the bearings and crank. As soon as I go the sump off it was clear that cowboys had been here before too. No lock tabs on any of the main bolts. Centre main cap came off easily and revealed...tragedy. +10 bearing shells and a pretty badly scored crank.

 

 

 

Any fantasies I had about poping in a set of rings and bearings and driving off into the sunset have been shot to bits. It's time for a lovely new rebuilt engine! Good thing I've got a spare crank...

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Engine teardown time

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The specimen is on the slab Igor! Turn up the voltage and let the procedure commence!

 

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Engine's out

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It took a few hours but removing the engine was pretty straightforward.

The job I was most worried about was getting the torsion bars out.  Fortunately the last person to remove them must have put plenty of Never Seize on the splines as they came out with just a few taps. The hardest part was getting all the new ball joints to come apart.

Removing the exhausts provided a surprise; the big pin that supports the rear of the gearbox had fallen out and was sitting between the mufflers.  As I only replaced the exhaust a couple of months ago this must have been a recent event. The gearbox support plate looked like an archaelogical survey of the car's life.

 

 

I built a trolley to support the engine and used the hoist to lift the car up off the engine.  Ron came round to help, probably to make sure that I didn't drop the car on myself.

It all went like clockwork.  I didn't even need to take the water pump or clutch slave off.

 

 

 It's a really big heavy thing. Hopefully I'll have it all stripped in the next week or so.

 

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..until somebody loses an eye.

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I went for a lovely drive on Sunday. Over 2 hours and probably 150km.

Until the car started to run horribly roughly and eventually died.

At least the tow truck was a good colour.

Inspection revealed that the Pertronics igniter unit in the distributor had "failed to proceed". This was the only part of the ignition that had come with the car that I had not replaced.

Once replaced the car started well, but there was now a horrible noise from within the bell housing.

Dead clutch.  Boo.

Ah well.  Engine out time.

Will keep you posted.

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