Made a lot of progress this month. Wheels and tires are done, they look real good, Ray used some pretty shiny paint for the wheels:
We have the brakes all bled and ready to go. Not real happy with the solidness of the brake pedal, but with drum brakes we need to drive the car and let the shoes situate themselves. Plus we aren't getting any more bubbles as we bleed the lines. Sorry, no pictures to show for bleeding brakes.
Last item we had mentioned in prior post was wiring. Made lots of progress there. The original harness was gone and replaced with a variety of individual wires. This second, very poor attempt at wiring has now been completely removed, and most of the new harness (just like the original) has been installed. Looks great!
Ray was able to buy quite a few good used parts from a guy in Kentucky, including a new dash. The original one had another hole added for an ammeter, which was not original. Once the paint job is complete on the dash then we'll reinstall it, the gauges and switches, plus wire all this stuff up. We've got all three heater and air flow cables repaired.
One other little job was to repair the battery tray. These typically rust away. We got a new one and our friend Nick the welder welded it in for us:
He also welded in a bracket that had broken off for the exhaust system:
So looking good for perhaps driving this thing before year end!
What a good day, we need one of these every once in a while.
We got our fuel and coolant system leaks resolved and installed a Pertronix electronic ignition system. Earlier this week we tried to start the engine, using a spark tester we confirmed we had a good spark. But we could not get the car to start.
After consulting with Donnie, another SIR Brit member, we removed the valve cover and basically found out the firing was occurring 180 degrees out of phase. In other words, instead of firing after the compression stroke of a four stroke engine we were firing after the exhaust stroke, which does no good. We started to reposition the distributor, but fortunately before we got too far along in this process Donnie suggested that we simply move the plug wires around to get the timing back where it needed to be. Did that, still would not start, messed with timing again because it seemed like it was firing before it got to TDC (looked like it would stop), and finally it took off!
The engine ran fine, idle a little high, good oil pressure, very smooth. Here's a little video footage:
After running for about 15 minutes we shut it down and checked compression again. Delighted to see the compression figures improved dramatically - all four cylinders are now between 120 and 135 psi, excellent. You could even see blowby coming out of the valve cover at initial startup that slowly went away after running - probably due to rings on #2 cylinder freeing up and sealing the piston to the cylinder wall. So it looks like we have a good engine with no further work required on it's internals.
Messing around later we wondered why the tach did not work. Found the drive cable for a mechanical tach, but no place to connect it on the engine. After more google and catalog searches, turns out our engine serial # indicates this engine did not come from an MG but came from an Austin or Morris sedan, which did not have a tach. Our best option at this point is to get an electrical tach from an early MGB and install it (looks the same, pretty easy to wire in).
Running engine also showed temp gauge did not work, typical failure of a broken capillary tube, new ones are available fairly cheap.
So major progress today. Three things need to happen now before the car is drivable:
1. Finish installation of brakes and bleed brake/clutch systems.
2. Install new wiring - current wiring is all loose wires with no bundling, what a mess.
3. Finish wire wheels - replaced broken spokes and trued the wheels up, now need paint, then mount new tires and tubes.
