Ok, one day when I am old and grey, I will have one out of three of my MG's
to actually drive. ;) At the moment it's three zip, and my Mazda is close to
it's expiry date too! I somehow managed to flat spot my front RHS tyre, so
now it's 'Good vibrations' Arrgh! Now I sort of have my frustrations out,
this has not been a good day. First of all my beloved All Blacks get
hammered by the French (who deserved to win) in the WC semi, then my Bank
card expires leaving me cashless without any fuel in the tank. Total
disaster, well, the Rugby anyway.
I got the early MGB head back from the machine shop on Friday. I'm fitting
this to the MGA 1600. All looked well, looked like a great job until I
noticed one of the guides was fractured on the inside of #1 exhaust port.
How they missed this, I have no idea, stood out like dogs.. well y'know. So
back to the shop it goes. After that let down, I decided to assemble the
head anyway and do a test fit on the motor, to see how these new rocker
arms, short pushrods, lightweight lifters etc would work out. Wayne a guy I
know in the US, warned me there might be some problems with these new rocker
arms. Well it turns out he was right... More on that.. Firstly, I tried to
assemble the new shaft using the Moss (made in the UK) solid spacer kit. Not
only was the inner diameter of the spacers far to rough to fit on the shaft,
but even after hours of sanding the inside to fit them on the shaft, the
endfloat was way off - with or without my roller rocker arms/std arms.
Basically this sucks, I don't own a lathe so I can't fix this myself.
Basically there is no endfloat, and there is supposed to be between 3-5 thou
across all three spacers. I also tried this with 2 other pedestal sets.
Basically IMO these spacers are junk and a waste of $. I reverted to the
springs and some washers to prevent the springs biting into the soft alloy
arms. Moral of the story, if you want R/R's the do it yourself way, be
prepared for DIY spacers.
After that, the next problem. Because these arms are higher ratio, ie the
distance from centre of the shaft to the adjuster is less than on a stock
arm, it makes the pushrods lean quite a bit more over towards the rocker
assembly. Yep, the arms touch on the side of the head. This is with the 1.6
ratio arms and apparently it's the same with the 1.55. It seems I will have
to take to the head to enlarge the pushrod holes slightly. I am aware that
these holes run perilously close to the ports. Can someone tell me how much
leeway I might have? This is a 1326 casting from a 65B. Will recheck the
Burgess bible. I would need to take at least a 2-3mm off by the looks of
this.
So there you go. My MG just demands more and more attention every day. Sigh.
;) Says a lot for KISS. (keep it simple stupid) lol!
Cheers,
Neil.
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