A game of two halves or - we were winning at half time!

Retrunmed to the attack on mission PMW with two mates of mine, Paul Darbyshire and Andy Flexney.

Here they are taking a moment to consider the next move!

Well the main problem was getting the engine to turn over anything like quick enough even with another battery to jump start it and then with a fully charged booster pack. Taking much longer to get to than it does to type we sorted this out by using a jump lead to go from one of the starter motor bolts to the battery earth lead and then with battery booster in place it was much better.

OK - no sign of it firing though. So we took the rocker cover off so that we could make sure the timing was right at top dead centre and that we had the plug leads the right way round (well one of the two dizzy lay outs we had put together before was right so we put that one on).

We also took out the carb dampers so the pistons would lift easier ready for Easy Start. Then with cranking the engine over, full throttle and the aforementioned Easy Start in use PMW actually fired up to much cheering from me!

Sounded pretty good to me too but it wouldn't keep running on anything other than Easy Start so next was to take 5 gallons of 3 year old fuel out  of the car and put fresh SuperUnleaded back in.

Now PMW ran happily on petrol rather than Easy Start.

So, as Andy said, if this was a football match we were going in to half time winning!

Coming back out for the second half though we had been concerned that the top end was dry with little oil there but with the rocker cover off of course when the car was now running we saw what looked like water instead of oil being sprayed on the rockers. Checking the dipstick showed an oil/water mix from the sump.

Not what was wanted at all! I was/am fairly sure that there's more than one cylinder head gasket so it was possible I had the wrong one and this was allowing the fluids to mix. Only thing for it was to remove the cylinder head which we got stuck into.

My goodness there was alot of water about including in the cam followers etc.

Water can be seen in the picture above of the block after we removed the cylinder head.

It also shows though that the cylinderhead gasket is the right one in that the holes line up with the holes in the block - at least that's what logic says to me.

First conclusion is that the head wasn't torqued down correctly so I'll be getting all the oil/water mix out of the sump then taking it off to clean it all out. After that another cylinder head gasket can be fitted and we try again.