My friend Andy has asked for help in sorting his car for him.
Last week I went over with Phil & Mark so we could see why it was not running right. Fired it up and everything was running really well.
Later in the day I found the coil positive connector was really loose and barely connected, so we suspect this may have been the cause of the rough running and cutting out.
We left it running for a while and the electric fan kicked in and all was still good. The electric fan did not kick out again though, so I checked the temp on the controller and it was set to 80 degrees. I changed this to 90 degrees and it seems to work a lot better now.
Next job was to sort the seized door wedges, after chiselling off the paint & filler and adding some spray grease they now work properly so the doors now shut without having to smash them into the body.
Next was to sort the inner door handle as Andy was struggling to open the door from inside, again this just needed a good greasing and it now works properly.
Then I had a couple of hours trying to sort some of the wiring issues.
Oil guage goes to max with ign on, but drops to zero slowly when engine running - its a smiths guage so I'm a bit stumped at present on that one.
Water guage, dead. Tried grounding the sender wire, but still dead. I suspect the person who wired it shorted it out and killed the guage.
The ign panel, it's wired wrong and the warning lamps don't work (they were not wired up!) Live from battery terminals (17mm) with no covers fitted going into a steel panel....![]()
Tried rewiring them so it worked how Andy wanted - but this caused other issues, so for now its noted which wires do what and I will have to investigate further another day. A lot of the wires fell out of the crimped (insulated) terminals - reinforcing my hatred of these - I much prefer uninsulated and heat shrink.
Now the bad bits,
First one - this is the kickdown cable - not connectd to anything at all" class="smile">
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Next is this sodding great hole between the engine bay and the passenger compartment;
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Front suspension - assembled with no locking nuts anywhere
Before we left for the day I took it for a test drive to see what Andy meant about the heavy steering.
My anyalsis of this is its truly shocking.
It's not heavy - its binding! It's difficult to turn, and when you do turn it if you don't turn it back it stays turned! I don't know if it's the column or the rack or something else but it's bloody awful.
Anything more than half lock and the tyre treads catch the front wings, and there is about 3" ground clearance.
It will be coming over to me next weekend to start on some of the issues, there are many,many more that I have not listed here but I'll go through them as I find them.
Overall, it's a good car, but it's let down by the fact it's been very rushed, and some of the work seems to have been done without any care.