An interesting week at the workshop to round off the year…
Tim brought over his race spec Caterham, from Ilkley, first thing on Wednesday morning. Tim had bought the car from a friend of his who used to race it, but hadn’t turned a key for 12 years. When the opportunity arose Tim fancied the idea of taking it on and restoring it to its former glory. With quite a bit to do he set about the list with his son in law, Martin, and sorted out all the electrics, the gear linkages and various suspension components etc etc. The next next step was to have all the mechanical issues sorted. He knew that when he bought the car it had a misfire and no compression on cylinder 4, so he got in touch and asked us to look at this for him.
Once we removed the head we found scoring to cylinder 2 and on removal of the cam rack found the valve spring cap in two pieces, amazingly though although there was nothing holding the valve in place it hadn’t dropped into the engine and we even found both of the collets that retain the valve. With all parts accounted for, and as a matter of course, we replaced the stem seal, the valve, the spring and the collets.
Sump removed, and piston dropped out to replace the liner on number two, this sounds simple (and it should have been), but one of the bolts in the sump had been previously snapped and corrosion had set in, obviously this needed removing to take the sump off, 5 hours later this was achieved! Poor Jon!
Everything put back together, on firing up we noticed that the tick-over was slightly high, an air leak was traced to a blanked off air supply, which was leaking. Once this was sorted the car was sounding very smooth.
Tim and Martin came over today to collect her. Once they’ve worked through the rest of the list they will be enjoying taking her to some track days next year to kick up her heels again as she rightly should! We’re looking forward to hearing of the further developments and seeing the final result.
Lovely to see Adrian on Thursday who popped over from Beverley to have a remote battery isolater fitted to his TF.
Warren dropped off his TF 160 with us on Tuesday as the EML had come on. This was found to be the Lambda sensor, as suspected. Unfortunately, the old sensor wouldn’t come out, and despite trying retap the old flexi section as can happen too many of the threads had stripped out. New flexi and Lambda sensor fitted.
A really good end to the year, and apart from going over to see Paul, in Hull, to sort the head gasket on his TF next week, we will be having a few days off to recharge our batteries, before heading back out on the road again.
Happy New Year to one and all! 🎉 – https://ift.tt/wOqBJoX
