Jason's Blog

An oil change is an easy thing to do, provided you have the right tools. Draining your oil into a square flat pan is a good idea But not if it has a crack in it and lest the oil out almost as fast as it goes in Pouring the oil out of the pan into an old oil can is a good idea But not if your funnel gets blocked and the oil spills out over the top Hammering a screw driver into the spin on oil filter is one way of getting purchase on it to get it off Hammering two holes causes oil to squirt out of one hole into your eye Staggering about the garage with oil in your eye looking for a rag to wipe your face on is OK Unless you to kick over an old oil container full of waste oil that you forgot to put the top on As you can tell, today I have been learning that I should not play with oil first thing in the morning. It's all cleared up now, ready for some trunnion oiling - another messy job! Trouble is today I have some family stuff to do that entails me getting dressed in tidy clothes - sa...

Bought myself a vacuum gauge off eBay for a tenner - we'll see just how much this engine sucks and how well it stacks up to the factory figures. You see a PI relies on good vacuum to adjust the fule delivery - something I am now accutely aware of following Guru Pearson's wise teachings. (James, where's that photo??) Playing with the metering unit today I found the right feeler gauge to insert between the datum and the roller by trial and error - it's a metric feeler with "20" on it so I'm guessing .2 of a millimeter? That converts to 0.007874 of an inch which bears little resmblence to the "couple of thou" comments from the Guru - I hope I've done it right! I ran the car for a while with the feeler gauge inserted, a bit of gaffer tape could have held it in ofr a drive around but I decided that it seemed so much better that it's was there or there abouts. Any bigger and the engine died, any smaller and the effect was negligable. So I set t...

The full story is that the gauge worked fine for years. I took the tank out and welded in a new bigger bore outlet for the PI, washing the tank and generally having it at all sorts of angles in the process. I think the gauge worked fine after that but immediately I'd done the welding I replaced the tacho cable and disturbed the instruments in the process. The gauge then read zero so I pulled it out and found a dodgy earth, I put a new terminal on the earth (I think this is the earth for the light and nothing to do with gauge operation). So then the gauge read full (wrongly but I thought it was OK). Last night my brother in law came round (I'm recovering some lost data from his laptop for him) and so I pressed him into fault finding service - he used to race a Vitesse in the early 90's and is a lifelong Porsche technician so he can be very useful :-) Testing voltages and resistances, pulling wires off the sender and joining them together all indicated that there was an inter...

I went up to Canley’s yesterday to help Dave get the venue ready for the driver’s briefing and to get him to lay hands upon the Vitesse. I reciprocated by laying hands on his Stag, dredging up my knowledge of SU fuel pumps from 25 years ago (my first car was a Morris Minor) and being entrusted with rebuilding the distributor internals - first time I'd ever seen dual points, interesting! The Vitesse had been pretty good on the way up, the fuel pump behaved and felt cool when I tested it. I ran in daylight with the lights on dip to ensure nothing got too hot in my new wiring – an hour+ running like that was fine. The fuse holder was warm but not excessively hot – I didn’t burn my fingers again! I bought a new one anyway to be sure. There is an annoying vibration over 70 mph, it’s one I can feel through my backside, the steering wheel is fine. It feels like driveline – the prop is new so could it be rear wheel balance? These tyres haven’t been on a year and were fully balanced when fi...

Here are the relays, nestling up in the dry and out of the way yet accessible if needs be. And another shot supposed to show them in context but I was distracted by my nice engine!

Well what have I learned today? When something is smoking, it is not a good idea to touch it because you WILL burn your finger! I didn't get the time I needed at the car tonight, I fiddled with the timing and it seemed to be running better so I jumped in and sped off down the road. Suddenly, no lights! Damn! That's when I realised what the problem was, well after I blistered my finger! That spare fuse box I installed had been in mt spares stock for a few years, it was well tarnished. I "cleaned" it up a bit when I fitted it but not much, in fact not enough! the fuse was barely making contact and the contact it was making was crap. I removed it, after it had cooled down a bit! I then gave it the once over in the sand blaster cured the corrosion. I refitted it all, put the lights on and then, this is the good bit, I used the temperature probe on my multimeter to see if it was still too hot! It was hot but it never got too hot! The main issue was that I lost a bit of con...

Headlamps completed - relays fitted, second fuse box added, wiring tidied up and loom taped up, 100watt mains in (OK so they are the wrong bulbs but we'll gloss over that - eBay has turned up a pair of the correct P45t fittings - 100 watt mains for £6.50 delivered - they popped up and I sanpped them on a buy-it now). It's all nice and neat under the bonnet now. Fired her up and noticed that the fuel gauge was registering zero, not right. Temp gauge worked fine but fuel gauge didn't! Fiddled about under the dash and found a rather dodgy earth connector (just the wires twisted round the mounting) made up a new eye connector and reinstalled it all. Works fine. I'd always wanted to fix the wipers on this car since I've had it - they work but don't sweep the whole screen. I'd been told that the gear in the woper motor was probably wrong, it should be stamped 160 and was probably stamped 130 - sure enough it was. I swapped the whole motor out for a spare that I ch...