Sensor Bracket DONE!

Finished off the megajolt sensor bracket. :-)

More Painting and Megajolting

All painted up and timing wheel sorted. Just need to bolt it back together now.

More Megajolt Progress

Finally got round to getting the local machine shop to enlarge the hole in the trigger wheel last week. Now it fits over the front pulley. Once I am happy I have got the position correct I will put a couple of welds to hold it in place. Having said that they machine shop have made it so tight you need a hammer to move it round! :-)

Today I have also made up the bracket to hold the sensor. I was quite pleased with how it turned out. It bolts on with the timing chain cover and positions the sensor inside the fan belt. This means you don't need to remove the sensor every time you want to change the fan belt.
Getting closer........

Front Suspension...

The front suspension is now completely stripped. New bits are ordered and the painting has started.

AVO bushes

Having stripped the front suspension to replace the worn drivers side wishbone I have noticed that the 6 month old AVO shocks have managed to wear their bushes!!!!! I can't say I am best pleased :-(

Lower wishbone issues

Got round to stripping the front suspension today. I was aware the trunnion bolt was gradually eating through the lower wishbone.

Upon investigation the bolt was not so gradually eating through the lower wishbone. :-(

4p performance boost

Today I got round to removing the waxstat pellets, the reason being that on the trip to Italy the car ran really rough in traffic in the heat. Looking through the internet everything seems to point to the waxstat pellets. The idea is that as the car heats up the mixture is leaned out, or something like that. It was introduced by SU to try to reduce emissions. Anyway this must be the most satisfying job in the world ever!

Time: 1 hour
Cost: 4p

Now any job with those stats has to be good.


If you are thinking of doing this modification yourself, this link provides a great step by step guide. http://www.nireland.com/gd.triumph/waxstats.htm

Day 1 part 2 - Setting the speedo

By now we were bombing down France and with little else to do on the motorway we decided to try to correct the speedo. This involves setting a number which tells the speedo how many miles you travel in 1000 revolution of the wheel.

Without wishing to stop and measure anything we decided to come up with another plan.

Plan 1: Load up the satnav Gilly had borrowed and get that to tell us the speed then correct the speedo to suit.

Problem 1: The satnav refused to work in France as it didn't have the correct maps. Why on earth it doesn't tell you your position and speed anyway I have no clue.

Plan 2: We realised Gilly has a GPS on her fancy new phone. Out came the phone, with user manual and 30 mins later we (Gilly) figured it out. Some quick maths was done and it was esimated to be about 120% out. We made the alterations at the next services and were on our way again.

Problem 2: Somewhere the maths went wrong but on the second attempt it was spot on! :-)

Day 1 finished driving through the lovely French countryside on N roads to Vittel. On arrival we checked the oil and bled the brakes (they felt a bit squishy and tomorrow we were in the Alps).

Day 1 on the BIG adventure

Day 1 of our road trip to Italy!

Woke up early at my parents in Kent, there were still a couple of things I wanted to have a look at before we got going. Got the car up on the ramps and found that there was still oil in the differential. Good News! That had been playing on my mind.

The next task was to look into why the speedo was not working. I thought this could be quite useful on the trip. It appeared that 3 out of 4 of the magnets I had glued onto the propshaft had fallen off. Rummeging through an old tool box I found one of those magnets you screw to window frames for the alarm system. Ripping the plastic box of the outside of it revealed a nice looking magnet. Last time I used epoxy which didn't seem to work so this time I used super glue and whist that was setting I went and had breakfast.

Next stage was the euro-tunnel which went well. The car has been playing up when starting recently and I was nervous it was going to refuse in the train. Luckly the old girl came through for me and we disembarked in France ready and raring!

Stupid Sodding Wheel Studs

What a rubbish morning!

I got round to doing the other wheel studs the other day and then went to Halfords to get locking wheel nuts they turned out to be too short and ruined the ends of the studs!!!!!!!!

I then ordered new wheel nuts as per the ones I already had but some of the threads were too far gone. Not lower down only the first couple of threads.


Two wheels were fine the other two had at least one bad stud. I managed to save the front drivers wheel stud by cleaning up the first couple of threads but the back one was knackered. In addition as it was the first wheel I put the locking wheel nut on I had tried it on a couple of studs to check why is felt odd. This meant that two of the studs were knackered. I fixed one but not the other. Finally I thought I had got the both to work and tried to refit the wheel. Having refitted the wheel I tightened the nut and it stopped........

I tried to get it off. ........

nope it was not moving at all.....

I then got the big tyre wrench thingy and leant on it until I snapped the stud. At least now I had the wheel off again. At this stage in the game out trip to Italy in the gt6 in only 10 days time is looking unlikely :-(

A trip to the Landrover garage in Christchurch and the scrapyard followed in order to get new studs and nuts. The next thing I was worried about was taking the hub off again as it was of course the hub with the hub nut that was about to give up and die.


At about 15:00 my luck finally changed and the hub went back together including the nut taking 100 lb ft. It says 100-110 and I didn't want to push it any more than it had to.

So all in all not a great morning/early afternoon.

IT LIVES!!!!!!!!!!

Turns out the distributor was not adjusted correctly. I am sure I followed the instructions in the book. Anyway the drive cog was out by about 90 degrees. This meant that the engine was spraking exactly on cylinder 4 when it should have been 1 :-(

It sounds amazing! Really throaty! Ran the cam in a 2000k for 20 mins as suggested somewhere and nothing sounds too bad so far. Need to get the accelerator connected up now. :-)

Engine installing

This weekend was mostly spent lifting engines :-( My dad arrived to give me a hand with the engine swap at about 5:30 on Friday. Amazingly by the close of play we had managed to get the old engine out! I couldn't believe we did it so quickly. For future reference I would remove the exhaust. It is possible to get the bellhousing past the exhaust pipe but very difficult and the time spent faffing about could be better spent getting pipes out of the way.

On Saturday we began to put the new engine in. I started bolting the HS6s onto the manifold. I guess that should be another post really..... My dad set to with the engine back plate. By the end of the day we had the new engine in and bolted down. Although the end was in sight it was still a long way off. We still had to attach all of the ancillaries.

So Sunday was all about getting the engine to run. Most of the day was spent bolting on all the bits and bobs around the engine bay. Strangely this took us till about 16:30 to complete. I guess the new manifold and carbs took up a lot of that time. After a swift cup of tea we began the boring task of starting it. First as per someones advise we ran the engine without spark pulgs apparantly to build up oil pressure. This seemed a bit unlikly to me but I didn't think it could do any harm. Having replaced the pulgs we fired her up. Or rather we didn't!

The next couple of hours were spent turning the engine over watching the carbs flood. Not a glimmer of life was shown from the engine. Confusion reigned. Having swapped the carbs at the same time as the engine and never having set them up before I was suspisious. We wnt through all the checks but the timing seemed right, the gap seemed close, the carbs had PLENTY of fuel?????

Ready for the off

The engine is now all together and ready to go. Everything went fairly well during the build up, the only thing I found time consuming was getting the cam timing right. In the end I think it might still be slightly out but as good as I could get without a vernier sprocket. The last little bit I have to do is get the old GT6 back plate off the GT6 engine and pop it onto the new engine.

Rebuild

The engine is now back from the shop. Head is faced as is the block. Bores are done and the whole lot is balanced! WOW that cost a bit :-(

Will now have to start the rebuild. The plan is to get it done in the evenings after work and then get it in on the weekend! Watch this space........

Engine update 1

Started cleaning up the head. All the inlet valves were stiff to come out and number 6 is still stuck in for now.....

Striptease

Today I began stripping the new engine down, a 2.5L lump out of a late saloon. Should be quite quick in the GT6! :-)

Everything went fairly well considering the engine doesn't look like it has run in years. I did find that one of the pushrods was bent, bit of a worry :-s

So far the bores look ok and there are no massive scored marks on any of the bearings. Next step, flywheel, crank and front pulley are off to get balanced.

Nuts

Whilst putting the wheels back on after the speedo fitting I managed to shear the wheel stud! I guess these have been in service for the last 30 years but I didn't think I could shear them with a standard length socket set.

Anyway I decided to replace the offending items with new 12mm versions and this is the finished product.

Wired for speed

Got round to mounting the sensor for the speedo today. Nothing fancy, just a bit of galv bolted to the body behind the drivers seat and epoxied the magnets to the prop shaft. Tried to use as little epoxy as possible so as not to put the prop shaft too much out of balance. Haven't tidied it all up yet but it seems to work so far.

What a Proud Man!

Look at my car :-)

Grandparents meet the GT6

Grandparents brave the cold to inspect........

More Red Paint

Sprayed the bonnet red this week. Quick trip down to Kent (proposed to girlfriend en route), unbolted bonnet, sprayed in dads garage and bolted back on again. Not a bad effort for three days work. It feels like the car is really coming together now. The only bad news is that I think a big end is on its way out :-(


Sanded the old bonnet with 400 grit then filled. Sprayed with high build followed by more filling and sanding. I find I cant see all the imperfections unless there is a uniform colour over the whole surface. Final wet sand with 1200 grit, another wash and then on with the red. One mistake was to sand a little too much near the front and go through the high build. Really strange how no matter how much you sand and area if it starts a different colour the red does not hide it even after 4 coats!

Speedo Install

Got the new speedo installed in the car. Haven't got around to installing the sensor and magents yet but the other wiring is all done.

Installing New Bonnet

So it turns out bolting a new GRP bonnet on is harder than it looks. For starters the bonnet was not/is not quite the right shape. Then there was the fact that the arms/frame were off a mkI.

First I stole the old frames of the metal bonnet. The next problem was that even with everything adjusted to allow the bonnet as high as possible it wasn't high enough. After bending the frames slightly the bonnet seems to fit reasonably well. The final problem is that the sides are not the same shape as the doors. I think a lot of this can be solved by the addition of bonnet cones.
Generally it is very flimsy and the GRP work is not great, on the plus side it was 1/8th the price of a steel version and LOADS lighter. Next stop spraying in Dad's garage :-)