Friday, January 20, 2006

Slow progress

Things have been happening ... albeit slowly.

Before Christmas I invested in some weatherseal to replace the driver's door effort. It was some completely ill-fitting stuff that had been glued on to the paintwork!!!
I'd been told that it was a bitch of a job, but rather than use the special tool you can buy a bent knife and some blu-tac ought to do the trick:

weathersealtool.JPG

It seemed to work ok, despite many temporarily lost clips!!!
The problem I have now is getting the paint tidied up where the old 'seal' was removed.

I've been half-heartedly trying to trace an ignition blip that doesn't seem to be a massive problem. I decided to have a bash with a pertronix ignitor as I had a good experience with one on the GT6 back in England ... and they're pretty cheap too! Having purchased one via England I tried to fit it and just couldn't get the sod to work, despite checking of all the "what to do if it doesn't work" boxes. On the website there is a warning about the two types of 45D 4 cylinder distributors and how there are two different points cam types and one doesn't work ... Well, I ignored this as there is not mention of the 45D 6. It turns out that the late Australian 45D 6 distributor has a different height points cam a la the 45D 4 and it doesn't work either. As you can imagine these things are only revealed after lots of cursing and e-mails to the nice people who sell them.

I started a new job at the beginning of January, and there's flextime! Consequently I've been clocking the hours up and have already earnt a day off. So this morning I've been out to Cleveland to visit Greg Tunstall. I mentioned him a while back I think. The plan is to re-plumb the anti-emissions kit to begin to reveal the true potential of the 'S'. Greg very quickly deduced that there were a few things needed. In order to get some more horses he reckoned we should start with electronic ignition (as I had planned anyway), and he pointed out the wear on the dissy shaft. He organises a reasonably priced Piranha kit with remapped ignition curve on a reconditioned distributor that will benefit from some stronger components. This I can fit it myself. He also diagnosed some nasty wear on the carb's which he will rebuild and 'improve' to work with the K&N filter and the distributor. When refitting the carb's the pollution kit will be 'liberated'. I'm keen to get this done - Greg didn't really try the hard sell, he didn't need to, it's clear that the work needs doing and his reputation out here suggests he's worth relying on.

Look what I spotted the other week! Ella and I went for a trip west of Brisbane up some great mountain roads. On the way back we saw this rather sad looking Pi Estate. It was manual o/d and in need of a bit of TLC. It actually had a MPH clock in it too ... dunno if this means it's an import?

Pi Estate

Hopefully I'll be back soon with some 'before' and 'after' shots of the engine bay with and without the emissions kit.

Goodbye.

No comments: