Buona sera my gitane smoking legeonaires !
Had a fun time the other day , allowing my micro ocd to dominate and cause me trouble ,as usual .
it all started with this bit ..
see that little copper spacer ? , it is now sitting as it should ,nice and square to the chassis , however ,when i put the front end on last week , i managed to put the bolt in wonky , so that copper eye catching item was angled backwards a little .
The bolt that goes through the spacer is threaded into a stainless nut welded to the rad support arm ,so i undid it ,and attempted to thread it back in square ,as it should be . This was not going to happen in a month of sundays , the thread was ,to use technical term, mullered.
so i undid the headlight mount ,rotated it upwards and got a m8 tap .. i still could not get a tap wrench on there so used a 7mm spanner to turn the tap,wiggled the tap up and down with the spanner trying to cut a new thread , and at this point the tap snapped off ... in the hole .
got my picks and little spanners and wiggled the bit of tap out of the hole .
completely removed the headlight to make room , tried to drill away the first thread of the nut , to get down to good thread , no luck , nut was heat hardened stainless.
finally drilled a 3mm hole through the 5mm stainless bar the nut was welded to, then a 6.8mm , this let me use a no1 tap with a good taper on it ,and manage to ,very gently ,re cut the nut thread .
then put it all back together again ,headlight back on etc , and carefully not to cross thread it again , bolt up the fitting with the copper spacer looking like it should do .
a 5 min job became a 2 hour job .
This is typical .
In other news , clutch research has become centred on the plate problem .
my spanky aston clutch has a centre shaft size and spline that is technically known as "too big", and i was intending to get some old 1" 23 spline clutch plates ,take the centres out and adapt them to my aston plates .
HOWEVER, i realised that thee are a few cars out there that use a 228mm dia 1" 23 spline plate as standard ,eg ford galaxy , vw sharan , a load of 1.9 tdi audis and vw's etc .
i found this on ebay ..
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-AC-Delco-Clutch-Kit-Ford-Galaxy-VW-Sharan-Mk-I-2-8-95-00/191784172953which seems cheap , however , having done a lot of work on clutch design in the past creating a clutch that would cope in the turbo mini world , i can see that the friction co eff of the aston plates is higher than what is in the ebay piccy ...will this matter i thought ...hmm, well, it might , i would rather use the aston plates with a lot of metal in the friction surface mix . for the high coeff ...jury is out .
I have prepared the clutch cover for welding so hopefully that will happen soon ..
and lastly may have a bit of a experiment on friday ..
regards
robert.
oh ps , part 7 of the diary is out , its a 2 parter because it got all bloated with cam degreeing stuff ..
diary number 7 ..
pt 1
pt 2