Charlie's Echo/Madam Mayhem - glacial Bedford RL project

I use hobby gas which is a bit dearer but no montly rental and the local hire place does it who are open saturday mornings.

They don't make 'em like they used to! (Thankfully)


Yeah, I've got a bottle for the TIG. Can't really do that gasless... (I've tried, accidentally, and it just makes a big sparkler effect and it's done. )

and yeah, kevins, I get my gas from hobbyweld (via Nuts of Chorley); but, again, the problem is that I'm at work 8.30-17.30 M-F and 8.30-12.30 Saturdays, so by the time I'm out of work, everywhere's closed!


For some reason, I recall my welder threw a tizzy when I swapped polarities so I run it same as I would for normal wire, but I have heard that it should be swapped for gasless (theory being that it puts more heat into the wire and that's more effective for the flux core). Aluminium would be AC welded anyway though I have seen DC used in a pinch, it's just messy, smokey, and didn't really do a good job; but it worked well enough to tack things together while the AC MIG was out for service.


Keeping on keeping on!

There has been a tremendous cock-up with the exhaust headers. I'm very disappointed in all of you!

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...how come nobody reminded me that there's a bloody great front diff I need to make those pipes fit past?!



Current clearance is: Negative a lot.

Frustrating, but not the end of the world, there's plenty of space, it's just in different places than where I put the pipes originally.
I am pretty confident I can cut n shut n weave my way through the available space, but I have learnt a very good lesson here and I am not going to make any more changes to the exhaust until I can sit the engine in the truck, and then know what needs to go where and what clearance it has. Looks like I'll get a chance to revisit those merge collectors after-all! But the headers are going to stay in their lovely long-tube form at least for a while yet, I want to have the engine running before I go to reinstall it. Easier to fix leaks that way.

In other items, once I stopped sulking from discovering that, I've gone and dug the spigot bearing out to get a replacement, and I've gotten in touch with the good folks at Powerlite about a gear-reduction starter.

Not the cheapest, but does have the advantage of being an improvement over the original, and also I can order it online rather than try and find a window in my perma-death schedule to drop the original starter in with a rebuilder for them to make that horrible tooth-sucking sound and pronounce "that's foxed, mate". Also, they have them on the shelf.

It's an RAC402A, for anyone interested. Fits Aston Martins from 1948 to 1972, and also through the wonders of everybody using the exact same parts-bin (Thanks, Lucas!), a Bedford RL.

Also, the spigot bearing appears to be the ubiquitous skateboard-wheel 6202 (albeit a quality SKF one), which I find highly amusing.

That's a proper good sulk !
Keep doing something as it's a great project.
James

Casually flipping the axles upside down, and adding a reverser box in the middle of the driveline to make up for it, so I don't have to cut my nice(ish) headers about! Genius!

Ehhhhh, kinda misses the point, IMO. How am I supposed to do 4WD burnouts without it?!

I don't know if it was the same for these but I was told by a long dead uncle who drove tank transporters in the war that they were instructed to take up all the backlash before applying full power (what little there was), on those the gearing was so low they would be in second by the time the wheels had done one revolution.

Thanks for the offer, generallee , but they're a bit on the bulky side for what I have in mind! They are very definitely of a certain time period, tho, aren't they?

(Funnily enough, work have a cardboard box on the upper floor of stores full of lenses for lights like that, and other odds and sods that nothing uses any more. And usually, I can pick something out and my boss can name what truck it's off (often what customer they ordered the bits for, too!))

I'm piecing together a set of Rubbolite Model 50s; they're nice and compact, which makes them easier to fit in the spaces I've got.

In other items thus far:

Snazzy New Starter!

Marked improvement immediately! ...for all of one turn. My battery is totally scrap at this point, I took it to work and used the drop-tester and it went from 12.8 volts to "just take it out behind the shed and shoot it" instantly. Ah well, it's just more money.

Replacement spigot-bearing!

Yup, it's definitely our good old friend the skateboard wheel bearing, but I got a genuine SKF one so that should do nicely.

Rocker cover hold-downs! (almost)

I should've gotten bigger washers... Also, not shown -- because I've not made them yet -- is that I'm going to make up some leather washers that go underneath the (replacements for the) pictured washers, that will act as a seal and a bit of compliance.

I screwed up getting new belts!


Aaaaaaaaalso, I still need to come up with a good replacement for the alternator pulley.

It being for car use, it's for an A profile V-belt (10mm wide) and has a 15mm shaft, but the vast majority of the pulleys I can find online for B profile have a 17mm centre bore; and the ones that aren't, seem to either have way too much offset, or are much larger so as to underdrive the alternator on a high-revving engine.

Seeing as the Bedford's 300 revs out in the region of 3300rpm and the alternator speed might be a bit marginal at idle, I may need to get myself a chunk of metal -- or maybe a blank-bore pulley with the right groove and a touch too much offset -- and spend some time on the lathe at work to come up with something appropriate.

Sealing!
I'm trying out some ... potentially interesting techniques for making a couple of replacement gaskets, utilising EPDM rubber strip. A sheet of appropriately thick bonded-cork large enough to make a rocker cover gasket (and a 2nd thinner one to make an engine side-panel gasket from) is ... eyewateringly expensive. The rubber strip is significantly cheaper, and there's a lot less wasted material.

I shall keep you updated on how well that works out. (5mm thick for the rocker cover, and 2mm thick for the engine side-panel. And I have more than enough of each to repeat the process again if necessary. There will be sealant involved in order to ensure oil-tightness. Hoping to invoke the magic powers of Hondabond in order to imbue my engine with the legendary oil-tightness of Japanese engines. But it's entirely possible that it doesn't work, and I end up with an engine that leaks more than a Gardner! Won't know unless I try, though! )

Mostly, I want to try some stuff while the engine's out and it's easy to try it; it's not like original gaskets for stuff like that are in wide supply, and I know... normal people would buy a sheet of gasket material and make one that way, but I am definitely not normal.