Peddle Box Blues

Two posts in one day again. This post is by way of an antidote to the previous one and has a much happier ending.

Whilst the engine has been away, on and off, there has been precious little progress on the rest of the car, so I decided to get to work on some of the ancillaries. The peddle box looked like a good place to start. This is what it looked like when I got the car:

 

 

 

Pretty grim as you can see. One of the peddles was damaged when someone tried to remove the pivot, (which fortunately was in one of the boxes of odds and sods) and the remains of the spindle is seized into the shaft. The spindle had been cut in half to get the peddles out of the box.

 

 

Anyhow, it all cleaned up fine in Deox-C and the peddle was rewelded and straightened easily.

 



 

 

 

Off to the powder coaters who gave it a light blast, zinced it and then coated it

 

Then re assembly with new spindles

Needs a little fettling to get the accelerator spindle right and, on reflection, I will probably get a new lubrication plate, as the old one is not readable and kind of spoils the effect, but on the whole I am rather pleased with it.





A quick update to the peddle box:

I did, in the end, get a new lube plate, from David Gerald's.

 

Senility, new glasses and a bit of luck

This is a bit embarrassing so I am going to put it down to senility and poor eyesight.

So, I got the block back from the engineers. They managed to get the broken bolt out, but had to Helicoil the threads. So far, so good.

I have never really been happy with the state of the deck; there was some rust pitting around the waterways, probably either where the engine had been stored with water remaining in the block or where it had been run for a prolonged period with no rust inhibitor in the water. Also, with back and forth to the engineers in the boot, I had managed to  put a healthy scratch in the top. So I decided ot get the deck skimmed before the final assembly.

6 thou off and it looked reasonable, not perfect but OK. So I ordered a load of new bits from Burton Power, new bolts gaskets, locking washers etc. and I was ready to go. I had to wait a whole week before I could get on with the rebuild, the last thing to do was to give the whole thing one final clean up.

I started on the bores, which had gathered a bit of dirt over the last few months. They all cleaned up beautifully, except No. 1 which had something dried onto it. I wiped at it with an oily rag, but it stayed on. I wiped it with carb cleaner and still it stayed on. Engine cleaner, nope. I scraped it with a finger nail and no luck. I tentatively poked it with a screwdriver ...hmmm.

I went and got my new reading glasses and peered at it. I shone my new, super-dooper, retina burning LED torch at it......and it turns out it was not a mark at all, but a bloody great gouge out the wall of the bore, about 5mm across, that I had completely mistaken for a bit of dirt. Worse still, there was another imperfection, a long scrape, parallel to the piston rings, about an inch down the bore, and deep enough to possibly catch the edge of the top ring.

I went in and had a cup of tea; when I came out and looked at it again it was still there.

So there we are. The block has been bored out to +90thou, which is as far as one can go. It has a dirty great gouge in the No. 1 bore, which I, being clearly senile and partially blind, had missed for the last 9 months and was now, probably useless.  In despair I headed for the drinks cupboard, grabbed a G and T and logged on to E bay to see how much a second hand Crossflow was going to be. And there, freshly listed, was a barely used, +90 thou over bored, 711M block, 35 minutes drive away.

That was definitely going to be MINE!

Saw it, bought it, cleaned it and am now in the middle of a dry build using all the new bits from my engine. I am not going to prejudice the outcome by even mentioning anything else about it till its finished and ready to install.

Except,

It might be black now.

My eye has developed a twitch.