Attention to Detail(ing)!

Having a car that actually works and dosen't require constant rebuilding of parts is quite a wierd feeling! Possibly that is the reason that I have become a bit more obsessive about how my car looks over the past few weeks.

Detailing is the very thorough cleaning of a car and the basic stages can be broken down into steps. Firstly you need to was the car using a proper car shampoo and a sponge to get all the dirt off the paintwork. Then you need to use soapy water to wet the paintwork while you slide a clay bar over the surface to pull contaminants out of the paint surface. Then you polish and then you wax!

So I started off by giving it a clean with some proper car shampoo and a sponge. Without the encrusted mud up the sides it looked a whole lot better! I then used a Sonus (medium) clay bar lubricated with soapy water to clean the paint until it was perfectly smooth. I then used Autoglym Super Resin Polish and overcoated it with Poorboys World Natty's Blue Paste Wax. The heavily oxidised boot and bonnet were polished using Poorboys World SSR2 which is a compound polish.

I was very impressed with the difference the clay bar and the Poorboys World products made. The bonnet and boot really do have paintwork in poor condition but the improvement was immense. The only downside to the whole process is that the thorough cleaning has highlighted a fair few bits of bodywork that need doing!

Update! (Carbs and Bodywork)

I thought I'd better just update my blog. I've had a busy few weeks working on the car. Firstly, I took the carbs off and rebuit them with new throttle shafts. I took time with the Dremel to thin them out to about half the normal thickness (as recommebed by Kas Kastner and others) but I didn't bother thinning the butterflies for the tiny difference they'd make.

With it all refitted to the car I set about setting the carbs up. One of the most important things to get right is the same amount of air must be sucked in by each carb. In order to check that you need a carb balancer. So after trying out a Gunson Carbtuner and finding out it was absolute crap I got on eBay and bought a decent flowmeter from Eurocarb (who I can highly recommend for their excellent customer service).

So with balance set using the flow meter and mixture set using a Gunson Colourtune it was all good and sounding better than ever. Unfortunatly whilst it revs beautifully and cleanly on the drive it's a bit stuttery on the road. I haven't got around to sorting yet but I will!

I've also been sorting out an unsightly rust scab that had been lurking around on the drivers side of the windscreen frame. I was pleasantly suprised to find no deep structural rust and can happily report that the area has been rust killered and primered and the top coat is drying as I write this. It's looking better already!