Day 9 of 10 – South West – Haytor…
A departure from our digs in Plymouth bright and early this morning to head over to Haytor for work on Roger’s two MGFs.
One of which, we had done some work on four years ago. Today this one, a W reg 1.8 mpi in Nightfire was in need of hydragas pump up and the underfloor coolant pipes replacing with stainless.
The other one, a R reg 1.8 mpi, in Tahiti, which he had fairly recently bought, was in need of a head gasket replacement and cambelt service, hydragas pump up and underfloor pipes. Well that’s what we thought.
Unfortunately, on removing the engine cover we could tell that there was something definitely amiss. On further investigation and on removing the cylinder head we found that the engine had been well and truly cooked.
The cylinder head had deep indentations made by the fire-rings, once removing all the oil from the cylinders we found that the liners were all scored and rusty. The cams were rusted up too. Thick mayo had made its way into the inlet manifold, the air pipe, the air-filter box, the exhaust manifold, the original plastic allocation dowels were just melted blobs. The cambelt casing was completely melted. Part of alternator belt was missing, luckily this hadn’t caused any further problems. Surprisingly, too even in this case the liners still hadn’t sunk!
So the car is going to require, new piston rings, new liners, new covers etcetera, along with obviously all the gaskets, cambelt, water pump and everything else required to put it back to rights.
After liaising with Roger he’s decided to go ahead with all the works. So we’ll find a date to come back and get this sorted for him. He wasn’t sure of the history of the car when he took it on, it had been stood for doing nothing for quite some time, but he certainly wasn’t expecting things to be this bad. But, it’s nothing that a bit of TLC and time can’t put right.
We look forward to our return and getting it back up and running, as it should, for Roger to enjoy.
We had a quick nip round the corner to Haytor rocks, and had an ice cream, I still couldn’t persuade Jon to walk to the top this time either! Maybe next time. So we’re now on our way back up the country to just near Ross-on-Wye for the evening. – https://ift.tt/45Um8Wr
