Setting fire to PMW?

That is a rag stuck into the petrol filler neck but not with the inention of setting fire to the car even if it has been proving a pain.

No, this is part of a plan following various dicussions and thoughts on how to get the car to run like it wants to actually drive somewhere.

It will now start OK and run happily on the drive but out on the road it doesn't want to accelerate at all and hesitates.

Like fuel starvation but using my saying of 95% of all fuel issues are actually on the ignition side I have been working my way through different possible causes.

One being a non standard cam which meant that putting a strobe light on the car showed the timing to be miles out from the standard marks.

I followed through advice from Andy Pearce and basically after doing all this, establishing true top dead centre, marking this up and then going back 8 degrees btdc from this the car was running in pretty much exactly the same place timing wise as before with the same level of non performance.

Talking this through at the Cheshire and Staffs meeting I was advised it sounded very much like a fuel problem. Well I was reluctant to go down what I expected to be a blind alley but then my mate Andy Flexney suggested that yes it might be.

So today I got the car up on axle stands and checked the fuel pipe all the way through from the tank to the engine bay just to check that during the wild boar incident it hadn't been flattened anywhere. That proved OK so I then got my airline out, disconnected the fuel pipe at the engine bay end and blew air back through it to the tank. This is where the rag comes in as Andy had told me of a time he did this and fuel was ejected out of the filler neck all over a wall! Not this time having been forewarned but I could certainly hear air being blown through the fuel line and into the tank.

Next I checked out the inline filter which I lways like to have fitted just before the fuel pump. There was certainly signs of gunge in there as can be seen in the photo so I removed it all together.

Now this was not fitted by me but by my local garage. I just have a suspicion that it might have been fitted the wrong way round too as the clean part is on the "inlet" side which is not where it should be if it had been fitted the way the arrow shows the flow should be.  If it was fitted the wrong way round then could that also cause a restriction? Mind you, it was OK all round the 10CR until the wild boar incident.

Not being content with this though I took the glass bowl off the top of the fuel pump to get at it's own filter and found quite alot of muck in there too as can be seen in the next photo. In fact it looks like a tea leaf strainer and not a fuel pump :-(

Using the airline I cleaned all this out too and cleaned the inside of the glass bowl as well before reassembling.

So that was the fuel side worked through but whilst the car was up on axle stands I did a few other jobs too like topping up the reconditioned diff  with gear oil, tidied up a few connections and rotated the tyres.

Now would all of this improve the way the car drove? Would it drive?

Well initially I was just glad it started and then didn't pump fuel all over the engine bay. Then I ventured out on to the roads and it seemed a bit unhappy initially but then it was cold and hadn't run properly for a while so I took it all with a pinch of salt and checked everything over after a couple of miles. This in itself was much better than recently so Idecided to give it another couple of miles which turned into 10.

There's still some hesitation but in general the car is so much better. It pulled up a fair hill at 2500rpm in overdrive top for example and in the last couple of miles I deliberately left in 4th at 30mph and it was pretty much OK.

In fact  it was not bad at all, no sign of overheating either and I don't know if you noticed but I quoted overdrive too - yes my new knob (!) and wiring seems to have done the trick and overdrive is working too.

I know when to take a few wins out of a day's work so I put the car away, the tools away and spent the afternoon watching Derby County win again. That's the best blog update in many a long time.