It's been a while since we all discussed the death rattle and rattling on
part throttle in my spit and a few other people's cars. Well, I still
haven't done anything about it, but I happen to be at a local brit car shop
and asked if the mechanic would diagnose it. Steve Jackson had already been
out a while ago this summer and told me it was probably rod knock, but not
wanting to deal with that, I figured I'd keep taking it to other doctors to
get the diagnosys I wanted to hear :-).
Well, it backfired. (The plan, not the car) The mechanic not only said
without hesitation that it was SERIOUS rod knock, but he even told me which
cylinder it was. He very simply pulled each spark plug in turn, blipped the
trottle and listened for the knock. Sure enough, when he pulled the #1
plug, no knock. A good thing to test for you others who were wondering if
your noise was the same as mine.
The mechanic went on to say that it was so bad now that I really had no
choice but to pull the motor and rebuild the bottom end, as the crank would
undoubtedly be scored. Great, now I've got two engines to rebuild. The MGB
I planned to learn on, but now I've got the spit as well.
Sigh... Well, I'm gonna put the spit away for the winter and by the time
next spring rolls around I hopefully will have been through the MGB's engine
and will be more confident about pulling the spits engine and fixing it.
That's why I bought the spit, to learn... All she's doing is helpfully
continuing my education :-)
Jeremy DuBois
Programmer/System Administrator
Thermalogic Corporation
'74 MGB, '76 Spit
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