Breakdown!

I had a particularly unlucky day today! Seeing as the weather was decent I pulled on a jumper and scarf and got the top down and hit the road. Filled up with another tenner of Shell V Power and took a tour around the local fast A roads. Lovely!

I got home and agreed to have a coffee with a mate in Birmingham so I hopped back in the Spit and headed over there! Stopped to let a particularly nice Mk1 Escort pull out in front (and gasped in awe as I heard his dump valve and realised he was running the Cosworth lump) before getting caught up at the lights. Then I noticed I was idling quite high so I blipped the throttle to try and close the butterflies more firmly but to no avail and subsequent stops showed the problem was getting worse! Eventually I gave up and called the AA.

When the guy showed up he had a good look over it but was just as stumped as me. So I got him to tow me home and, after my first ever towing experience, I whipped the carbs off.

So far I'm still pretty stumped but I'm going to replace the really quite badly worn throttle shafts (see photo) and then put everything back together and hope I come across the problem when refitting!

Core Plugs

I thought I'd replace the core plugs while I had the head off and I'm beginning to regret that now! I first tried drilling a hole and putting a self tapper in there before using the claw hammer to try and lever it out. All it did was pull out the self tapper and make the hole bigger! So after trying a bit more with larger screws and the same results I realised I was in for a long slog. After copious amounts of levering, grinding, bashing and swearing it came out looking like this and the hole it came out of is completely undamaged which is great because if you damage the seat they never seal up properly again!

More Cylinder Head Porting Stuff!

Just a quick update on the cylinder head! Basically on the Triumph 1500 head the valves are recessed into pockets in the port to give a flat surface for the original makers to drill the valve guide holes into (according to David Vizard's book) and this has the effect of really messing up the airflow through the port. His book mentions using 'chemical metal' style filler to fill up the pocket but I wasn't keen on a chunk of that falling into my newly rebuilt engine to say the least! So, I ground out the pocket as much as I can and smoothed the ports as much as possible without enlarging them. At the moment the inlets are all nearly done, the chambers are half way to being polished and I've made a start on the exhaust ports, which were simply dreadfull. Huge chunks of metal were lurking about where the casting was just appauling and there were more small pockets for the valve guides to grind out. The water jackets run closer to the exhaust ports so I have been more convervative that the inlets but it still looks a lot better!

Check out the nasty casting marks in the exhaust port! This is one of the better ones and some were far worse than this!

The nearly finished inlet ports looks a whole lot better than they did to start with!

And I'm also about halfway through polishing the chambers!

Oil Change

Completed an oil change today. It's been 1300 happy miles of motoring since the new engine went in. Not much but then it has been laid up for a few years! Anyway, All went smoothly apart from the sump plug which managed to pop out of my hand and into the rapidly increasing puddle of oil in the metal tray. For once though it wasnt a big deal as all I had to do was have a rummage through my spares box to find a magnetic sump plug I got on Ebay a while back and had been waiting for an oppertunity to fit! I also replaced the filter while I was there with a FRAM filter I bought from Canley Classics a few months ago. After the nerveracking bit where the oil pressure light comes on because the filters filling with oil there were no oil leaks (no new ones anyway!) and it was time to take a test drive! All was well, although there is a bit of a leak from the rear oil seal which smokes off on the exhaust, so that'll be something to do on another day!