Finding things to do during the COVID-19 crisis.
April 24th 2020
As everyone knows, the country has been in a state of lockdown for the past several weeks meaning we can only make trips for supplies or for essential workers to commute to work. Fortunately my wife is one of those essential workers so every now and then I give her a ride to work in the Morris just to save it from sitting in the garage. A used car is a happy car!
Ok, so at the end of my last post I mentioned a drive out to North Wales (pre-lockdown) to give the car a good run. It was a lovely sunny day and the car performed faultlessly. However the day was soured, after a couple of hours wandering around the shops of Mold I returned to the car to find some oily little tick had thrown an egg at the bonnet! Fortunately I'd just bought some disinfectant wipes so was able to clean off the worst of the sticky mess straight away. The bad news is that the eggshell had made a real mess of the paintwork at the point of impact. I guess these kids just don't realise (or even care) that throwing an egg at a car causes real damage and not just a mess!
Well, idiots will be idiots... Moving on to the present day I decided to give the car a check over and also to replace the rear brake flexi-hose. The front had been done a few months earlier and I did have one to fit to the rear, but as yet had not got around to doing the job.
Before doing that I wanted to take a look at some corrosion on the left chassis rail, below one of the engine mounts. It's not too bad yet but will need some welding doing in the near future so I've been in touch with my local classic car repair shop and they will get me booked in as soon as they are able to return to work.
In addition to the welding, I have purchased an SU carburettor refurb kit so while the car is in the shop they are going to strip, clean and rebuild the carb for me. Although the car does generally run ok, the carb is very tired and leaky so could do with a complete overhaul. Furthermore I have noticed that the vacuum advance isn't working properly so I'll get them to address that as well. I've learnt a lot by working on this car but I'm still a novice and sometimes I'm happy to pay a professional do do jobs that are outside my comfort zone.
Looking into the issue with the vacuum advance, there is a metal 'hard line' running from the carb to the vacuum diaphragm on the distributor. For starters this pipe is loose where it connects to the carb which means the VA system isn't getting the necessary vacuum and also there's another potential induction leak at the inlet manifold.
I then unscrewed the pipe from the top of the VA diaphragm and attached a vacuum pump. I unclipped the distributor cover and pumped the pressure down to see what happened. It looks like the ignition does advance very slightly but seemingly not enough. Also, as soon as I stop pumping the vacuum is lost in less than a second so all in all, not good! I've seen comments on the owner's club forum that the vacuum advance makes little noticeable difference on these engines but even if that's true I'd rather have it working properly, as intended.
Well, that's another thing that needs to be fixed but the carb needs to be working 100% first I think before I tackle this. While I'm in the vicinity I decided to add a few drops of oil to the rear dynamo bearing.
And finally on to the brake hose. I jacked up the rear of the car and rested it on a pair of axle stands before removing the back wheels. The driver's side carpet was then rolled back to expose the master cylinder cap ready for bleeding the brakes afterwards.
Placing a plastic tub underneath to catch any fluid that leaks out, I unscrewed first the front pipe union and then the rear one before discarding the old brake hose.
I then fitted the new hose in reverse order and tightened everything up snugly, using a new copper washer.
The last job was to bleed the rear brake circuit. I connected my vacuum brake bleeder first to one side and then the other, bleeding out plenty of old fluid that looked well past its sell-by date!
And that was probably enough lockdown rambling for one day. It's definitely good to have these little projects to keep me sane until we can all get back to some kind of normality.
Keep safe, guys and I'll catch you in a future instalment.