Sweat and blood but no tears (yet!)

I left off saying I needed to remove the sump - this is why. It may not be obvious in the picture below if you don't know the insides of engines but at the bottom is the front part of the sump sans gasket, which is not a good thing.


So, how to go about removing the sump? The picture below is the front of the engine just being lifted as can be seen on the right as it starts to clear an engine mounting (trust me on this one!).

I had to get under the car, undo all the sump bolts, loosen the engine mounting nut on the offside to allow the engine to move up and remove the engine mounting under the engine completely in the end.

With a trolley jack under the front of the gearbox it was then possible to lift the engine and ......

wrestle the sump off - as can be seen here. Also just visible in the first photo is the spring from the chain tensioner - it's much more visible on the one below along with a bit of sump gasket. Neither of these would be good to have circulating in the engine so I am glad to have gone to the trouble of removing the sump. It has now had a good clean, along with the mating surfaces for the new gasket.


There was certainly plenty of sweat and toil in all this but the blood? See picture below

Mayhem and destruction

Next step in the Sprint engine saga was to get the front cover off which didn't take too long. This is because I am getting used to it by now and also I used my new air impact wrench.

For those of you familiar with the Sprint engine you will probably recognise the duplex timing chain running down to the cranckshaft sprocket and back up to the jackshaft sprocket - what is not normal is the "half-moon" tab lock washer jammed in down there!

Having removed that carefully I went looking for the missing camshaft sprocket bolt - which should also be at the top of the engine. By lying headfirst into the engine bay upside down (!) whilst using the excellent combined torch and magnetic probe (also used as a radio mike!!) given to me by Paul Darbyshire I spotted the missing bolt and removed it.

If you look very carefully you can see it in the pic below sitting on the front level of the sump - definitely not where it's supposed to be!!

Another go

Slowly progressing on the cam timing front.

Kevin came along again this morning and first we secured the camshaft sprocket to the camshaft with 2 new longer cap head bolts as only one of the originals was long enough to bite! So that was one bit of security dealt with.

Then I reset the pointer with a longer bit of wire and we rotated the engine a few times manually and did a few checks. Yes, the protractor was moving - goodness knows how but it was.

So, off it came and we cut a larger hole in the centre and glued it to the crankshaft pulley so there was no chance it could move with the pulley bolt.

At last we were able to get some consistent results so that we then adjusted to cam timing to 108 degrees after top dead centre which is where it should be (about!).

Having done this it seems the cam is a 275 degree duration which is very unusual, certainly i can't find a Triumphtune or a Piper cam of this duration and the calculated max lift should be at 112 degrees, not the 108 we have set it at.

Hmmm - I think this could be where we put it all back together and see how the car runs!

A protracted affair

Sorry about the pun in the title but it is getting like that! Thanks to help from Carl Shalespeare I am moving on very slowly, it's all about timing you know

Sorry about that one too!

Anyway, Carl has been helping me out with long distance advice and he even went so far as to post me a laminated timing wheel/protractor that I could use with the standard pulley bolt.

Once it arrived I thought - "I could do that" so went on to scan my Piper Cams protractor, laminate it and then carefully scribe out a hole in the centre to the exact size of the cranckshaft pulley bolt. Then with a few packing washers behind it, it can be bolted into place as seen in the photo.

Kevin will be along in the morning with a dial gauge that will reach the inlet buckets and we'll swing into action. It's a good thing I know so many kind people or I would be lost.

After I got this into place I moved on to looking at fitting the Brantz Rally Tripmeter I had at Christmas. If anyone at work is reading this by the way, I have taken a day off!

Siiting in the co-driver's seat (something I will need to be getting used to) and looking straight ahead I felt the right location was on the glovebox door as in Theo Boonen's car and as can be seen here as a trial.

What it also meant though was that the leather strap I fitted to stop the glove box lid coming open when the going gets a bit rough needed relocating to the left. Sounds easy enough and it is but did take a fair bit of time as the trim above the lid where the electric fire extinguisher control box is needed removing to get at the back of the fixing.

The Welsh flag by the way is Sarah's as she is very proud of her ancestry and quite right too.

Then it was a case of fixing the Brantz which I did by virtue of long countersunk black screws which really match well the car and the Brantz. To ensure the Brantz is vertical I needed some spacers and having thought about this I came up with what I hope is a very neat solution.

I cut some spacers (longer at the bottom than at the top) from black flexible fuel pipe which nicely helps locate the Brantz. The fuel pipe makes the spacers the right colour (a good thing) but also give some cushioning which I think must be a benefit.

More time needed to plumb it in but here's a picture of the installation and it's looking good, very businesslike and functional - just how I like it.

4 more hours

Almost like the crowd cheering "4 more years" for a new President but in this case, it's me in my head, saying 4 more hours, 4 more hours.

In my case though, it takes so much longer than I know a skilled mechanic could do things. A case in point can be illustrated by the picture above whcih does show the front timing cover back on the engine but this took way too long to do.

The good thing, however, is that I can now take things steady and when things aren't right I take the time to find out what the problem is rather than just "banging it on". When I tried to fit the front cover, no matter what I tried I couldn't get it to close up and it seemed to "pivot" on a high spot.

So, I took it off several times and then spotted I had fitted one of the chain guides wrong. But to remove it and fit it correctly the tensioner had to come off again as well, then it was necessary to check the alignment of the jackshaft sprocket which I did and had to ease the chain away whilst I rotated it to the correct place.

Doing all of that and then putting it back correctly took at least an hour but that has saved a great deal of grief. The front cover still wouldn't go on though and I spent more time lieing over the engine bay with my head where the radiator should be trying to work out what the problem was. Found it though - I had fitted a bolt which shouldn't have been there!

After that it just was just a case of bolting everything back up - and remembering that the reason 2 of the bolts seemed too long was because the alternator bracketry had to be there and I had forgotten grrrr!!!!

There's also time for philosphy - like "why do many of the bolts which prove to be the most difficult have to be at full stretch for me?" Then there's a time for courage - I had removed the clutch slave cylinder to hold the ring gear and jam the engine whilst removing the crankshaft pulley bolt. It didn't help of course (!) but now the slave cylinder needed to go back on and it wouldn't co-operate when I ws lieing safely to the side of the car (at full stretch again of course). No, the only solution was to crawl under the car which is suspended on axle stands and just get on with it whilst ignoring the fact that if anything went wrong the whole car would crush me. It was good to be back "out from under" when that was done.

Finally, with all that done you can see in the pic below my attempt to establish TDC using a dial gauge on the top of an extension down number 1 plug hole.

Looks pretty good, almost like I now what I am doing but I have to say that I was not at all confident I was doing things right here so decided to remember " the right time to say enough for the day".

I will return to this next weekend.

The virtues of patience

Did a bit more - in fact nearly another 2 hours and didn't seem to get that far.

Basically I got the pistons at TDC and got the cylinder head fully torqued down with the camshaft and rocker arms. How the heck did that take 2 hours?

It's always satisfying to see things going back together though and this gave me an opportunity to retorque the cylinder head whcih is always a good thing on these engines. The cylinder head nuts in the centre of the rocker shaft had to be done of course, but I still retorqued the cylinder head bolts which hadn't been touched and it was surprising that a couple of them "nipped" up.

Next step is to get the new timing chain and tenisioner on as well as fit the camshaft vernier sprocket after which I'll pause whilst I get my head round "timing in the cam" and will probably need Bryce's help on this anyway.

Know when to stop

Know when to stop - that's what I have been trying to learn for years now. I have done some more work on BRP which generally went very well but it's important to stop and put tools away etc before things start to go wrong, usually when my concentration starts to waver a bit!

First off I have done the dreaded shimming which actually doesn't seem to be too bad. I had quite a few shims but not quite enough of the right sizes of course, in fact I had plenty for if the gaps had been too much but not enough for how they were (too tight).

It's all done now though so we'll see what it's like when I fire her up.

Having done that though I moved on to removing the timing chain, tensioner and crankshaft sprocket which you can see here in the pics with the puller attached and nearly off.


Having replaced that it was then back to the top of the engine to refit the camshaft and rocker assembly. Getting this in was a bit if a fiddle and it was now that I realised I should stop - my concentration was falling and impatience growing! This was especially the case when I knocked shims off the top of the exhaust valves so once it was back on and lightly tightened down I called it a day.

Voyage of discovery

First the 2000.

Some more time spent today means I at least know where I am with the headlights.

When I started they wouldn't work on dip or main but 2 out of 4 would work on headlamp flash.

Cleaning connections at the lamps and the earths brought back full beam on 3 out of 4 (near side inner clearly gone).

After advice on the Club Triumph forum I cleaned the contacts at the light switch and the main./dip - checked for current and found power going into the switch and back out again to the dip/main switch which also works fine. Back to the lamps and there's power at the connections for dip beam so really it's down to 3 sealed beams gone (2 outer on dip and one inner on main).

As I have bought the car for a continental trip which will involve overnight drving I'll look at halogen conversions.

Then back on to BRP - here the plan is to re-shim the valve clearances, replace the crankshaft sprocket, the timing chain and tensioner followed by timing the cam in. Then it all goes back together with no problems whatsover with less rattles, more reliability and more power - yeah right!

Anyway, thanks to assistance from Bryce the other day and a new whirly gun we got the crankshaft bolt off which had been very very reluctant to let go. Actually, what also probably helped was a product got for me by Burnerboy - "shock and unlock" which we sprayed on ( it is a combination of WD40 and a freezing agent).

Today though, after working on the 2000 I removed the front timing chain cover of BRP, the rocker shaft and the camshaft so that I can get on to actually shimming the valve clearances and be ready to procede with the timing chain shennanigans. Well it wasn't as easy as that sentence makes it sound but perseverance and patience won through in the end.

Here though I think I may have found 2 sources of all the rattles. Part of the timing chain tensioner (the bit that's on a piston with something looking like a wedgeshaped hammer head) actually fell out when I removed the front cover. Now this might just be because tension had been released but, looking at this component, there are a number of areas where gouges/wear have been made in the metal of it which doesn't seem right to me - could this have just been rattling around inside the front cover instead of doing it's job?

Then at the camshaft end the sprocket is held away from the camshaf during removal by the use of a "slave" nut. When it all goes back together this slave nut isn't needed and should be removed - only I still found it in pace but with the internal thread completely stripped so it has probably been rattling around for months at the front end of the camshaft sprocket!

All of this is no doubt down to my incompetence and there's plenty more where that came from!

I decided a couple of hours was enough so called it a day as I think that being patient might just help me do a better job and I am not in a huge rush anyway.

Off with a head to get to the prize

In order to source another component for the timing chain job I have had to remove the cylinder head from one of my spare engines. With that is a pair of carbs seen here which I am putting to one side for possible future refurbishment and use.

The important thing here is that the inlet manifold is not the same as the 8 valve engine as the carbs are further apart so keeping a Sprint inlet manifold is always worthwhile. Added to this the afficionados amongst you will have spotted that the carbs are 2" SUs which are very sought after - with a well sorted angine these can give nearly as much power as a pair of 45DCOes but cost much less (certainly in my case!).

It is possible in the future that the convertible will get a Sprint engine with the carbs from BRP whilst BRP gets thse 2 inchers.

Meanwhile, though, here's what I have liberated as a result of this effort - a vernier timing sprocket (fanfare!!)

The slots with bolts to secure them mean that some fine tuning can be had when it's all put together with the new timing chain gear so I can get the most out of that group 2 cam and the car will then fly

Moving on to timing

After some discussion with a CT Sprint guru (you know who you are CS) I have bought a new timing chain kit and a crankshaft sprocket.

This will all go together with a vernier cam sprocket I have and then the cam will be timed in to the spec for a Triumph Tune "Sprint" cam along with all the valve clearances being shimmed up correctly.

The aim of all this is to improve reliability whilst upping performance. All very brave for a man of my limited talents.

Today has seen me remove the radiator, alternator and lots and lots of bolts on the front timing cover which is all well and good until I came up on the cranks shaft pulley nut and washer.

Of course, the engine rotates when you try to undo it so I waited for Bryce to pop over and we had a go at removing it with me locking the engine via a big screwdriver in the ring gear and him wielding a large bar and socket.

No dice so we stopped before we broke something!

Next up is Bryce bringing over an air wrench so that we can "shock" the nut loose.