Upping the pressure

I got back to PMW and the quest to get it running again.

First though I got the car up on axle stands and got the clutch slave cylinder bolted on. It was much easier to work out where it went when I could see the bell housing etc.

Meanwhile, last week petrol had been pumping out of the front carb which seemed a bit of a worry. I thought a float valve was stuck so I took along a spare set of carbs with the intention of swapping  bits over but found the fuel pipe that links the two carbs in the boot!

No wonder, it's supoosed to do that with fuel being fed from the front carb to the rear one via the fuel pipe I had not attached - idiot!

So, back to spinning the engine over with the plugs out and even with a battery pack attached there was still no oil pressure. At Bryce's suggestion we fed oil into the oil pump by removing the oil pressure sender and pumping oil in.

Then when the engine was turned over eventually we got oil coming out of the hole where the oil pressure sender had been so we were making progress. Replacing the sender though then meant oil coming by the oil filter housing so making progress sort of as at least oil was finding leaks!

Taking the spin on oil filter housing off the engine I found that I had left the outer seal on the old engine; what a pillock. There was another seal too which looked none too  clever so we replaced this with a new o ring, fitted the outer seal and put it all back together.

This time no leaks and enough oil pressure to get the oil light to go out so good news.

On to the next stage. Although we had an oil light which went out now, there was no ignition light. I trraced this problem to one of the alternator wires not fitting correctly so that was put right.

This was followed by making sure the plug leads were on correctly, the wiring to the coil and distributor in place and the points cleaned and gapped.

Couldn't get the car to fire up though even though we had a spark at the plugs. The battery was really suffering by now and we need to sort out the timing. The car is in an old shed with no lighting and by now bad light really did stop play.

Not bad though, I think the happy day is getting closer.