Blood, Sweat and Rain..

Its a good thing that i was allowed to mess around and make dens at home when i was a child as those skills came very handy today. Im sure everyone made a ‘house’ out of a bed cover or blanket to hide under and today i did just that but on a larger scale, involding cars!

Anyway, you might be wondering where im going with this, but over the past couple weeks the daily driver has been loosing its ability to stop which is no good when you live in a hilly area full of tourists and bad drivers, so i carried out some tests. The first one is a pretty good test really if you dont have 4wheel dyno like most MOT test centre, but it works just the same, so heres what you do to test the brakes:

1. Drive along at about 5 mph on gravel or dirt (preferably dry)

2. Hit the brakes as hard and  fast as you can to skid for a second

3. Stop

4. Look at the skid marks

after doing this i found 2 decent skidmarks in the grave 1 where it was just disturbed abit and one where there was no evidence of any braking, Oh dear :/ .Out cane the trolly jack and i gave the offending sides a quick look over as i was going out biking soon and heres what i found; the NSF hose had a split in in (easy fix, just some new hose) and the NSR drum had no visible problems apart from looking abit damp, which was strange seeing as it was a sunny day, so i went out on my bike

Fast forward to today and you will see what i was going on about at the beginning. It was pouring down! but i knew it wouldnt stop soon so i parked the polo next to my dads chicken run, got a tarp out the garage and streched it over the car, trapping it in the boot and drivers door and used bungie cords to attach it to the fence so i had a little tent no light underneeth, but atleast i was dry.

after a breif tea break i pulled off the drum to find this:

with a little puddle of brake fluid in the drum still there. so i checked the seals on the seals on the cylinder and look what i found!

Mmm them crumblies… which was actually crystallized  brake fluid (which ive only seen once before on a bike that was left standing for 3 years)

anyway, after finding why they don’t work i drove to TMS in penrith to buy replacement parts and fitted them. Now heres a nother top tip for those of you who dont like waiting for parts to be delivered:

if your brake pads are covered in brake fluid, take them off and heat them up with a blow torch. This will burn away any fluid on them and the heat seems to draw it out of your pads and burn that away too. This wont make them how they should be normally and will make loads of nasty smoke, but has kept me going long enough to get new ones sorted

Just a little update

Trust me, i cant write much about this! I have only really undone the 4 bolts that hold the cab on the jiffy in the last 4 days, but i have been keeping myself busy with biking, more electrickery and sorting out the Polo

Since the weathers been pretty crappy recently ive been working on the dials, cleaning them up and sorting out the old PCB on the back of them.

On the back of the dials there is a PCB unlike any other which needed a clean and a check with a multimeter in case there was any breaks in it.

This picture is from after i cleaned and checked it. Its made from piece of paper thin copper, that was then hand cut (you can see the imperfections in it) and then sandwiched between two pieces of sticky back plastic, which were peeling off allowing the copper to corrode. After a wipe down with some contact cleaner and new sticky back plastic its was as good as new

The next day  the weather improved and it was actually sunny! so i went outside and got the cab ready for taking off. I took the doors off and stashed them behind the flat bed and put the bonet inside the garage and then took out the rest of the interior.

After a bit of fun with a pressure washer it looked something like this…

Thats all for now because i need helpers to lift the cab off, then the engine work can start

Slacking off

It’s been a a fair while since i last updated my blog and i do have some excuses !

Ive been back at work at the Bond Museum durin my college half term and the weekends leeding up to it, The past few days i have been writing a CV to send off to some plumber (if theres any out there reading this who wants an apprentice i’ll gladly send one off), and its also been bloody cold here when its not been raining:P

I have done some work to it though.  Shortly after driving it up the drive i set about taking the bed off, all the bolts came off without hassle (which was nice) but i need another person to help me lift it off, but now my brothers back for the weekend i shall get that done tomorrow

The next little task i got done was removing the dash board and the instruments, this however turned out to be rather easy seeing as it was held in by 5 screws! compared to the hillman this was a blessing as that one never came out  ( i gave up after finding it was welded in :[  )

after that i started the at-first daunting task of making the wiring do what its meant to. After a couple mins of head scratching and a cup of tea i decide to remove as much of the badly applied electrical tape, only to find a load of broken soldered joints and more bits of wire twisted together than you could shake a stick at. Atleast i know why most of the electrics didnt work.

Anyway, enough words for now. Have some pictures:

^^It Doesn’t look Too bad….

^^….but its mostly electrical tape…..

^^….Same out here too….

^^…And a birds nest inside!? The things you find in second hand cars eh?

Along with those ill also give you a nice picture from the Malcolm Wilson rally today and one of my old hillman. Can you tell which is which though?>

It’s alive!

Yesterday, although the jiffy looks no different, I managed to get it running! And quite well at that apart from that I checked the underside for rust, of which there wasn’t anything to worry about and put the spare off my polo on the front so I can drive it into the garage.
Today was the usual story of pouring rain and a cold wind so after college I got in, checked on my order from mini spares and went on the xbox and done some drifting.
Let’s hope the weather improves so I can get the lights outside and start on some long nights

Rainy day

I woke up this morning to find the weather had taken a turn for the worse (again) and decided that it would rain and be super windy, not good for working on my car. All i could do was sit down in front of the TV with an omelet and watch American hotrod and cafe racer on turbo until the weather improved. Luckily though, the rain stopped and the wind died down at around 2, so i got out and down to the jiffy.

After trying to inflate the front tyre with no luck, i set about putting the carb back together with the old gaskets(temporary fix) so i can try to get it started tomorrow. This took ages how ever because i managed to drop the smallest screw ever into a muddy puddle on my garage floor. Doh!

Once i’d found it and got it all sorted i came inside and placed my first order off  Mini Spares for ignition leads, ignition barrel and a full set of gaskets as ill be stripping and sorting the whole engine once i get it inside.

Ill let you all know if i do get it started, or god forbid, running at all tomorrow, but i doubt it will somehow…….

It committed carbocide.

It was an early start this morning to go and pick up the jiffy. With help from Jam and his dad we managed to get it back without any problems which was nice  As soon as we unloaded the jiffy i set about stripping some of the interior, as there isnt a firewall like most cars, just some fibreglass panels you can unscrew to get access to the carburettor and various other bits and bobs to service the 998cc mini engine.

The first job on my list was to remove the carburettor as fuel was going in, but not coming out where it should have. so armed with a 1/2″ spanner i set about removing the SU carb, only to find it held on with a 9/16″ nut and a 14mm nut. Good start.

so, ive got it off ,into the comparative warmth of my leaky garage and opened the float bowl:

Oh Dear….

All this crud wasnt helping anything down there! I think ive found the source of the bad fuel delivery. So its on with the stripping and cleaning now. It all came apart fairly easily, revealing more grimy bits. Luckily there was no corrosion so all the bad bits are just cosmetic:

Just set about cleaning it after stripping. Everything that isnt on the paper was taken inside to the kitchen sink and given a bath in fairy liquid and boiling water, then after 1 hour of soaking i gave it a good old fashioned scrub with a brush, then brillow pad, then it met the barkeepers mate to give it some shine again. Came out pretty well in the end

Hopefully the weather is meant to improve tomorrow so ill see what’s hiding under the rocker cover, and maybe the flat bed if we’re lucky

It’ll be there in a Jiffy….

So here we go again.

Ive just bought another car which i haven’t heard running and just have the previous owners word for it that it ever did. After the success of my previous project (ill show you that Pandora’s box of rust later on) i somehow still love the quirky, retro cars you just dont see enough of on the roads now a days, so after seeing the jiffy looking sorry for itself in a field i had to make the owner an offer, which he gladly accepted, so my mum has the pleasure of another car on the drive way as of tomorrow.

Anyway, Heres a taste of what’s to come…….