Gearbox Mount made of poo

While the car is up on axle stands, I thought I'd top up the gearbox oil as it has has a little drip and some leaked out when installing. I had to use a jack against a spanner to undo the filler bolt. Jacking up against the spanner to undo the bung I witnessed the whole gearbox drop down and clonk the chassis once the thread of the bung broke loose! Weird I though, there was plenty of clearance when I installed the gearbox mount!?

On closer inspection, the mount had sagged 5mm, and this explains the clonking I sometimes got on deceleration!

 Cheap shite I didn't even think about when installing!

A little pressure added tightening using one finger on the vice handle squished it by 5mm

 

Above is where my gearbox sat on that mount

as you can see not much was needed to make contact.

After a bit of searching for poly mounts. I found one through Topspeed Automotive who managed to get one in in a couple of days! result!

You can just see, it rests nicely with enough clearance and as the mount is solid poly it doesn't compress anywhere near as much.

Driving and living with it.

Over a year on after completion I thought I would note a few small things I found useful and have learnt living with it.

Marking nuts on suspension and other bolts holding important things with a dab of bright nail varnish is a great visual check. It helped me notice one screw that came loose on the gearbox mount! Not something I would think about checking.
Brake cleaner (not aerosol) in a pump spray (Comma do one) is great for quickly cleaning the engine from oil and dirt. Also cleaning nice shiny wheels.
Windoline Glass cleaner I found best for cleaning the car in the garage without rolling it outside and in out the sun or winter rain! It's best at picking off bugs and crud while leaving no streaks! It not solvent based but still dries quick. Wax after.

Made notes on whiteboard of things I spotted or thought of over time. Now getting on with them in the winter months.

I was given a Ryobi Impact Wrench for Christmas by my wife, and its a really useful thing to have in the toolbox or boot. It would have saved loads of time at the track day and will come with me to the next ones!

Its amazing how different dry November roads are to warmer days! I went for a drive just to use up some fuel before winter set in and fish tailed the back end while joining a dual carriageway. It was reminding me who was boss! And I do think that learning how it behaved on the track and realising what not to do possibly helped me at there!

Although I have 2 trolley jacks, lifting onto axle stands is trickery and dangerous if the garage floor isn't smooth as it wants to pull the cars towards rather than roll as you jack up. I went a bought 2 scissor jacks from screwfix and they lifted straight up safely. One crank handle got straightened to work in a drill for ease and speed.
Small selection of spares and essential imperial and metric tools in the boot is a must.

Now to carry one with a few mods and changes. :) This blog will continue as the car still isn't quite finished! :P..... are they ever? ;)

Rear suspension,

On the track day, both the rear adjusters came loose and one lost its grub screw. As I now have no idea where I had them set to nor where number 1 click would be, I gave Proshock a call and explained my problem to them.

His advice was to take a good one off the car, (Front) remove the springs and turn it 7 clicks or 180 from first click. Then get a feel for the force needed to compress the good one, on a bench or vice, and turn the dial shaft on the faulty one till you get the feel pretty close.
When happy the shock is the same, turn the shaft back 180 and this will be set as first click. repeat for the other rear and locktite the grub screws in.
I was lucky not to loose these bitsThe adjuster knob has a tiny spring and bearing, these were held in with a dab of grease and fitted with a little pressure to seat the bearing into the click ring.The chap at Proshock was willing to have them back and get them reset on their machine if I wanted. But I think I managed to get them pretty close as even what looks like 2 clicks was a noticeable change

First Track day 30th July

Well I finally made it to a track day. GD Organised through Javelin track days. 2.5 hours to get there but what a hoot!
Emptied the boot, Quite surprised how much crap we managed to take and fit in there!!
We had a good safe briefing, then a few sighting laps to get the idea of the track. Then we went out and had some fun.
I spun a couple of times, well 3 to be honest, the 3rd corner was a real tight hairpin and caught a few people out. the other 2 were just me pushing my limits past my luck! :P
I managed to catch the 2 spins on camera.We did have a bit of a rig that we built to hold my camcorder at the angle I wanted to capture to include the front lines, dash, track ahead and hopefully look nice, only cos the marshals and organisers wouldn't allow cameras on a (non fixed mount), i.e. suction cups, adhesive pads or clamps. It had to be hard mounted! So my work buddy built a monstrosity that wasn't going anywhere and they had no excuse not to let it go out! I had to capture my first track day on camera! Needless to say we got ripped about it by others and it was quite funny to see Andy's face when he saw it.

Few laps n spins Video

A little shaky as I later found out that image stabilization isn't good for high frequency vibrations! Hay ho, Not brilliant but I'm happy with the sound I caught!

I had one minor issue during the day, and that was the adjuster knobs on the rear shocks have a grub screw holding them on. one grub screw was gone and the other was loose. so I want able to precisely adjust the shocks as it was still soft for the run in period. Luckily I bought a scissor jack the day before! I took the wheels off and managed to find a rough setting using a screw driver in the slot. After a few goes at refitting the wheels, lowering, doing a bounce test and jacking up taking the wheels off, bit more tweaking...... took about an hour and half. so lost a bit of fiddling time with the camera.

On the way home we detoured to fit a Tunnel run in to end the day with.

Had a cracking drive back too. plenty of pleasant drivers, one truck had a play in the road works on the M25, egging me to blip the throttle, him with his fog horns.... a right giggle!

As you can see, these sort of track days have plenty of room to fall off, and not much traffic to work around! I would recommend it to everyone.

Made it to Stoneleigh!

The is just a brief, quick post to chuck a video up and a couple of pics.

My hot start issue has been resolved! The injectors were out of phase with the spark! the dizzy needed rotating 90deg to get it right and then reset the ht leads. I installed a new MSD Dizzy from the states and somehow managed to break off the center coil nipple and melt the hole shut which Wasnt noticed till the day before stoneleigh as we were trying to sort the timing on the new dizzy. No wonder it ran rough, surprised it ran at all.
So I refitted the cap from the old dizzy and seemed to get the timing sorted.

Bit the bullet the next day and tagged along with another cob for the drive up. I dont think I would have done the drive alone. Not that far.




I wil add more info at a later date as time is in short supply.

Enjoy the short vid.

Its first stay away from home, next to Grandad.

Well it wasn't planned..... I have a gremlin, I think with the fuel pump/evaporation as it doesn't like starting from warm. The pump was sat under my bench unsealed for a long while (same time as the engine but that was sealed and cranked over every 2 months.)
Spoken to a few people and amongst some other small issues I have with my EFI, this needs to be checked first. Rob has been greatly helpful with tips and bits to check as it was his old system. But I knew from the Dyno day that there was a little issue. Hence why Ken Coleman was going on at me about sticking a bloody carb on it. LOL
I wont be beaten easy.

Anyway, I went to see a mate about 30 min drive, and after an hour I went to start and it wouldn't have it. So his dad told me to wheel it round the back as he had some space in his garage and pick it up another day.It looked nice parked next to his AC Aceca! think I gave him a little push to get it restored! :)

First load of Mod's

So 2011 is well and truly here.
Decided to get on with some tweaking. First was to fit my new "old" plates to the beast.
I got the plates made off ebay and just tucked the numberplate bar up inside the nose section. I also stuck a cobra badge on till I visit the factory to wind Andy up and let him replace it with a GD one maybe.
I could have gone with the ACC variant but wanted something different, someone at work told me of a site that does prefix plates by search http://www.theprivateplatecompany.co.uk/
So a few afternoons of browsing, I found this for £250 + transfer & admin costs. Took a while as the fella who owned the plate had to MOT his vehicle to release the plate. No probs, it took over Christmas to get done and as I wasn't driving it I didn't mind.

Also lowered the suspension a little as I felt it was a little high.
Andy told me that the exact rough measurement between wheel and arch of 2 fingers at the front and 3 fingers at the rear. :)
Also 2 to 3 clicks of the shock settings all round for its run in period. Any more and the piston won't be allowed to bed in correctly.

Then I went about fitting the last bit of boot carpet that arrived after my IVA. This meant taking out the roll bars and cutting the roll bar hole into the last bit of carpet.
Laying the carpet in the boot and lining it up evenly, I chopped down one of my white chinagraph pencils so it fit into the mounting holes and marked the underside of the carpet.
Measure the roll bars and cut them out with my red circle cutter. (Good bit of kit that!)

Then a case of temp refitting the roll bars to align the holes and then glue it down.
Another thing that I spotted was the exhaust bobbin nut. It was digging into the boot floor carpet. So I made a hole in 2 bits of off cut and placed them over each nut.
Also took the headrests off. Like the look without for the time being.

Final thing was the silencers. They do make a nice burble, but I wanted a bit more roar. So I spoke to Andy and he made me some pipes that I swapped out for the silencers. Holy c&@p, it now sounds how I wanted it to!

I intend to do a little video drive and get some quality sound at some point. Lots of videos out there only to have the wind drown out the sound of a V8 in full song.

First Local meet.

I managed to squeeze a couple of hours last Sunday to pop along to my local meet. I have been a few times before and knew some of the chaps who gave plenty of ribbings as to when will it be ready in the past, so this was my first visit completed.
Plenty of nice comments and nice to see it alongside others.
From Left: AK, GD Mk3, Pilgrim Sumo, My GD Mk4
The red one with stripes is a Dax. I think the other red one may be a Pilgrim Sumo too.

Good turn out of 7 cobs in total on a brisk November afternoon.

Just over 5 weeks to the shortest Day of the year, then Summer will be on the way! :P

First Few Miles

Its been rather busy lately with work and the little man, so not had much time to drive. Had one Sunday afternoon to make some cosmetic updates, like the side vents, wind winds, stone guards and add the plates.

So far I have driven it to work once, and also took the father in-law out one afternoon when he came round, it was more "how's the car getting on?" "oh its done and passed, wanna go for a little drive?" needless to say he was rather speechless when we got back. :P
Then I took it out for another, longer drive round some local lanes last Sunday. Although it was bitter cold, 3 deg's it was a lovely sunny drive. I treated the car with respect and it drove really well.
With the days getting shorter, I can't see many more miles clocking up. So far I have done 190 miles.
Still need to sort out the idle/cruising idle as its still not 100%. But that's bolt on EFI for you. great when set up properly........ Still got to do that bit. But it runs fine away from idle speeds
May even look into the hardtop as I could have used it a bit more this month. :P

As soon as the shortest day has passed, I'll know summer is on its way! :)
Bring on 2011.

IVA Passed. Wooohoooo!

All the fail items were fixed, some easier than others and after just over an hour it passed.

I have handed in the paperwork to my local DVLA office and will be sleeping under the letter box till the paperwork comes through. :D

Wow, what a journey from start to finish.