A very early start saw me making the trip to Grace to drop off a clutch and allow me to see how work was progressing. What can I say, it's shi.... ;) nah, it's the dogs pods. The sump modifications had enlarged the capacity by a considerable amount, with baffles internally to stop the oil sloshing away from the pickup. The overall quality was greatand I'd say the work is a must to avoid oil starvation which X-flows are so prone to.
The short engine looks great in Mercury Grey paint. The cylinders are all now +090 (for regs) and everything has been balanced and blueprinted. Needless to say I can't go into detail about all the mods, but I'm hoping Grace's experience will get those few vital extra ponies!! That said, my brief was in the case of power vs. reliability, I'd rather sacrifice the power for a stronger engine. You can make a 1300GT screamer (within reason - or rather regs!) but you'll be rebuilding every race. Not an option.
So with my racing monster engine nearing completion, it was time to turn my attention to the old one for rebuild.
Being a Bank Holiday, I took the Friday off to make for a nice long weekend which gave me the opportunity to get to work at home. All the rebuild parts had finally arrived. From left to right in the pic: High pressure/high capacity oil pump, thermostat and cam followers, oil filter, mains bearings, ends bearings, Graphogen building goo, head bolts, flywheel bolts and conrod bolts (all standard). The other picture is of the old No.4 bore cam follower. Needless to say, it ain't supposed to be the shape of the one on the left!!
From past experience and advice from the builders I set to work being as meticulous as possible. The block bores were all almost perfect with only one tiny score mark in No.3. The old mains and ends were fine too. A good start, however, this had never been the problem. I set to work covering every moving part and surface in building grease (excellent stuff) and carefully built up the crank. With the mains torqued down (almost had a sticky moment with this when I realised the torque ratchet had seized!!!), the crank ran nice and free with no stiff spots. A check of the end float came out at well under 8 thou. (smallest feeler guage I had) so that was fine. Onto the camshaft and followers. This was where the problems arose. Followers 6 and 8 (which had worn the most) where too stiff to go into the bores and took some persuasion. Not good. I'll have to find a way of reaming them out accurately to remove the highspots caused by the follower wear. I've got a Dremel tool for this - I'll let you know how I get on!! I continued with a dry build anyway just to make sure everything would be OK once the followers were sorted. Next up were the pistons. It's a pain in the arse doing these on your own especially when my nice Sykes Pickvant ring compressor decided to keep slipping it's ratchet! One and two went in OK, then 3 taking car to rotate the rings.... except the gap in the top compression ring was about 2 inches!!! Bugger. An inspection of the box where the pistons had been stored revealed the broken piece of ring. They're as brittle as a brittle thing and must have got clouted in transport from the workshop :( So, that effectively stopped me from going any further. I put in No.4 piston and checked the rotation. Everything felt MUCH freer than before so I was a lot happier. So now I've got to get hold of a ring. A set costs about 40 quid :( So hopefully the boys at Grace will be able to help me out. That's as much as can be done this weekend, so I'm off to Stoneleigh to see the Kit Car show, then onto Oulton Park to watch the Powertour GT racing
Just a brief entry in the diary today. Had a call from Grace Developments on Tuesday to say that the engine was finally ready - hoorah!! So off I trotted to pick it up. As you can see from the pic. they've done a great job - well, on the outside at least! I've seen the inside however and the attention to detail goes throughout. I also picked up a Pacet fuel pump kit and regulator to replace the mechanical pump on the x-flow. This will all be fitted tomorrow where hopefully I can fire it up for the first time! Then it's a quick run-in, dyno on Thursday, testing Friday then race on Saturday. Another busy week!
Time for the new engine to go in! An early start saw me drinking coffee... I mean, beavering away in the workshop to get the new engine in the car. A reasonably straightforward affair. However, before I got too carried away I needed to give some consideration to the positioning of the new fuel pump and regulator. A suitable location was near the original fuel line take-off.
The Facet pump can be purchased as a kit to include the anti-vibration mounts (which must be earthed), a spare filter and 3/16ths BSP nipples for the flexible fuel line. With the usual skinning of knuckles and general cursing, the new engine was dropped into place. As everything else on it was now so new, I bought UNC nut, bolt and spring washer selections from the agricultural supplier next door so new bolts are used throughout. The three sets collectively cost about 40 quid, but gives me enough for two engines (the other is in bits remember) and loads of spares. I HATE using 20 year old bolts which are covered in rust and crap. So, once the engine was in place I finalised the pump position and bolted it on. The regulator sat neatly on the scuttle bulkhead and, with a bit of mounting plate modification, made pipe mounting a doddle. The bolts are a bit close to the chassis members in the footwell, but with a bit of fiddling, everything was securely fastened in place.
Next up was the remote oil filter take-off. What initially seemed so simple took by far the most time and involved a great deal of effing and blinding! The remote take-off allows me to use a larger oil filter without the risk of fouling the lower chassis rail. The engine can move about quite a bit and the last thing you want is a cracked filter and oil all over the track. Routing the aeroquip hoses was a right bast! The trouble with these things is that if you curve them too much they close up - no good for oil flow. Additionally, with this set up there's no place to put the oil-stat which has a send and return. So, I ditched it. The engine's far more likely to run hot than cold. It's a pain and I now wish I'd bought an integrated stat/sandwich plate. Anyone want to buy a Mocal oil stat? With the engine in, the positioning of the filter was straightforward and I decided to mount it on the suspension upright chassis member. Errrr.... Doh, Doh and Doh! This was fine UNTIL I came to fitting the alternator which is placed neatly in EXACTLY the same place. What a prat. So more aeroquip cutting took place and the filter take-off sits nicely under the oil cooler mounted to the bottom chassis rail above the front ally base plate.
So, with all the cooling hoses re-attached, fluids were put in. For running in I'm using some non-synthetic 20W-50 oil. Fairly cheap stuff. I'll switch to Valvoline Racing 20W-50 later on (again, non-synthetic). It took LOADS of oil to get the correct level. About 6.5 litres!!! That sump is BIG! Of course, the oil cooler, filter and piping takes quite a bit too. Once everything was in, the plugs were removed and the engine cranked over to test for oil pressure. The moment of truth!! This took AGES and I was getting quite concerned. The oil pressure switch sender was removed and a quick crank over finally saw the first dribble of oil appearing. With the sender reconnected, the light went straight out and the engine could be started for the first time. With some trepidation, I thumbed the started and without hesitation the new block fired up - woohoo!! Oil pressure was a steady 2.2bar and there were no leaks. I let the engine run up to temperature only to discover that the fan wasn't working AGAIN (dodgy connection which was soon fixed) then it was left to cool completely so the valve clearances could be checked and the head bolts re-torqued. Job done!
Last thing to do before running in was to replace the rear drums. I'd been having problems with the brakes pulling hard left and binding drums. You could tell just by pushing the car along by hand. Removal of the drums showed them to be slightly ovalled so new ones were the order of the day. Fitting them is dead straightforward but make sure you reset the self adjusting handbrake cam or you'll waste half an hour scratching your head deciding why they won't fit over the shoes. Not that I'd do that of course ;)
Final job of the day required the most elbow grease. Bloody aluminium polishing! After a quick steam-clean (which disintegrated my Locost Limited sponsor stickers!), it's a case of patience and graft with a cloth and the autosol to bring everything up to a showroom shine. A whizz round the GRP with Autoglym (best stuff to polish anything imho) got rid of all the diesel crap that the Isuzu pumps under the car cover when towing and the car looks like new again. Until it rains of course! Next up is a bit of running in before a Dyno session ready for Friday's testing at Cadwell.
Testing at Cadwell Park today in time for tomorrow's race. Have a look at my race diary to see what the latest disaster was :(
Not a great deal to report today as I've been out collecting more donor stuff! To add to my increasing of MK2 Escort junk, I mean spares, I managed to get hold of a 1300 estate with a spare 1300HC (high compression) engine and 'box in the boot! My race engine, which got comprehensively knackered at Cadwell, is awaiting its new cam and followers. Ironic that the cam supplier are dragging their feet with the one component that caused the failure in the first place!!!
So yet another of Dagenham's finest gets dismembered as the engine, box and diff got removed. The diff strangely was a 3.54:1. I say strangely as I was expecting a 4.11:1? Still, live and learn. The critical thing with these engines (from bitter experience) is to get them as original as possible as you don't want to end up with a block with lined bores. I owed a short engine to another racer so I stripped the one from the gold MK1 that I got for him. Sure enough, the block, although rebored, wasn't lined. Moving my attention to the high compression engine, I found that I now had a spare twin-choke downdraft Weber (23/24mm venturi's). Cool! I need to find out more about this engine as I'm unsure whether it is GT spec or not. The invaluable egroups will come to the rescue no doubt!
Resisting the temptation to stay in bed, I finally got round to finishing the rebuild of my original engine. As you may recall, the cam followers had decided to eat themselves which in the process had scored two of the follower bores. After considering various ways of honing them out without the necessary engineering tools, I settled on a slightly undersize masonry bit of about 12QUOT long, which I wrapped in wet and dry. Using some graphogen as lube, I carefully honed out the follower bores until the burrs were removed and the follower could drop in nicely. Job done. After thoroughly cleaning the area of any swarf with white spirit, WD40 and lots of rags, the engine was ready for total assembly. One thing worthy of note was the head gasket. Be VERY careful when you use a gasket replacement kit as they don't necessarily have enough holes in them. Mine was missing 5 from the cylinder water jackets!! No wonder the cooling was crap (after further discussion with other builders, no-one seems to know wether they're supposed to be there or not so sod it - we'll have to wait and see!). Anyway, I drilled and finished the holes with a 5mm drill in the required places and assembled the head with new bolts. After a quick lick of hammerite, the engine was good as new once again. Now all I need is my race engine to be ready before Mallory!!
Well, I finally picked up the race engine from Grace last night. Other than a bit less paint it looks great ;) So Saturday morning saw me down the workshop to put it in the car ready to do a bit of roadtesting. Slotting it in was the usual straightforward affair after all, we're used to it! The only new stuff to report was a shortening of the accelerator pedal by about half an inch (cheers bro) to stop it fouling the mounting bracket which had a plate added to stop the linkage actuation rod falling out and the replacement of the coil with a Lumenition version which was matched to the Lumenution ignitor in the dizzy. This was to try and cure the misfire which we had at Cadwell. A heavy return spring from a rear brake drum refurb kit was fitted to the throttle linkage. It's a bit too heavy really and gives you a false impression of where full throttle is but I'll get used to it. Twice on the roadtest, I thought I had it floored only to find another half inch or so of travel! Talk about a rev-limiter ;)
James from Grace turned up in the afternoon to check the CO and re-jet the carb. We went up a size on the mains and bigger on the air aswell as increasing the float bowl fuel level. Another brief roadtest showed no probems with fuelling that I could reproduce, still, I couldn't reproduce them in the paddock at Cadwell so only the race tomorrow will truly check things out. A bolt check showed the front suspension to be a bit sloppy so everything was tightened up and we were ready to race. See my race diary for details of how we got on.
Very little to report really as the car was fine after Mallory was cancelled. A new Lumenition coil went on to replace the damaged one (broken terminal), but that's about it. It was just a question of loading up the vans and making our way to Snetterton for the race. Find out how we got on in my race diary.