Morning all,
Bit of a long ramble this one...
After getting through the MOT last week I installed my new Mountney
steerign wheel, which looks a lot better than the old one. In doing so a
plastic bit snapped off the indicator stalk meaning that the stick would
flap around randomly turning the main beams on. The next day I checked
with the Spitfire Graveyard and they do complete left and right stalks
for #30 so I arranged to pick one up later that day. Got in the car to
go, turned the key and nothing! yep, you guessed it the lights had been
on main beam all day and the battery was flat as a pancake. A call to
the AA later and a bit of a wait after the patrol man went to the wrong
place(!) I had a charged battery. I also took the opportunity to put
some gaffa tape round the mean beam contacts to disable it while I get
round to fitting the new column stalk, which I got yesterday and is in
almost new condition.
I also have an 'underheating' 'problem' in that the engine will run at
about 1/4 on the temperature scale, ocassionally briefly rise to 1/2 (for
about a minute), and then drop back down to 1/4 or lower. My intitial
thought was thermostat, could this be the cause? As it is under, rather
than over-heating I'm not overly concerned with it at the moment, except
for my fuel bills. The other possibility is an electrical problem with
the guage/sender, what do you think?
Except for those couple of problems I am having great fun thrashing the
spitfire about a driving her properly for the first time in a very long
time! With the new steering rack in she is handling superbly and feels
very straight and true at high speed rather than the previous feeling of
not being sure quite how long she was going to keep going in a straight
line. There is still a little bit of slop occasionally when first
turning in and I think that this is due to having to use the old knuckle
coupling joint as the new part was mis-manufactured. I can live with it
for now.
I was also having some problems with a very unstable idle until I went to
fill up with petrol and put unleaded in for the first time because the
garage had run out of LRP and I didn't have enough petrol to make it to
the next station, since then the idle has been good so I reckon I had a
dodgy batch of LRP. I think I will continue using unleaded for now as I
also haven't noticed much of a decrease in performance except for when I
get to about 4500rpm in 3rd or 4th the engine seems to run out of oomph,
is this pinking?
cheers
John
http://www.spit1500.co.uk
Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup
http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com
/// spitfires@autox.team.net mailing list
/// or try http://www.team.net/cgi-bin/majorcool
/// Archives at http://www.team.net/archive
|