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

Every one of them, they all destroy our wallets

Now you've ruined my day. I have a serious case of WANT to dissipate now. I could run that in convoy with the Goddess for the inevitable breakdown, but then what if the Militant broke down? I'd then need another just in case

I'm saved only by the fact that...

1 I can't afford it.
2 I've nowhere to put it.
3 I haven't time.
4 I really want a MK1.

To be fair reason 3 has never stopped me yet and...
Compared to the Routemasters further down the page the Militant is very good value so reason 1 is on dodgy ground too.

Hmmmm.

And so, a nice week of pottering about mostly after work has seen the tow... beam... thing removed. It's bent/twisted, and the mounting brackets aren't really up to much as far as I'm concerned. (Though, admittedly they've held so far! Really not a fan of how it's put together, though. Looks like they sat their mounting blocks on, put bolts through, then welded the I-beam to it in place along the one edge. )





I'm undecided on how I want to go about dealing with it. Not sure if I want to try and straighten the original beam, leave it as it is (bent!), or get a new piece of similarly-sized I beam and make a new bar. Whichever route I go with it, I'm going to make new mounting brackets. It was fastened on to the chassis with 3 bolts -- there's a hole for a fourth, but no bolt -- sharing the top holes for mounting the chassis irons. (The side-holes, through the web of the chassis, still have their rivets in. I think my new brackets might also use those holes too.)

Continuing on...



That looks a bit grim. Put it all back together and give it as much of a cooling system clean as I could. That seemed to dislodge more of the grot, but I'm pretty sure I'll need to clean the radiator out again. Most of the coolant came out clear, though, and it was just the dregs that looked like oily mud.

That left me here, last night:


Following the WSM, that leaves me with:

• Throttle linkage & crossbar
• Capillary tube bulb for the water temperature gauge (very carefully)
• The little bit of wiring & plumbing that connects to the engine
• Clutch linkage, prop-shaft, gearbox.
• Build the special cradle for lifting the engine out, support the engine
• Front cross-member & rear engine mounts
• Pull the engine out
• Cup of tea

And then I can clean the engine off a bit better, and start tearing it apart to find out how much pain I've brought upon myself.

Remind us again what the engine plans are; rebuild or replace?

Plan is to rebuild, with perhaps some tweaks. Nothing irreversible, and I plan to keep any bits I take out, so that some future custodian can restore her back to factory if desired.

The outline at the moment, which is fuzzy for the time being until I can start taking measurements and getting parts in hand, is that I definitely want to go fuel-injection (I have the ECU for it, already wired up and in a case, and I'll make the loom for the engine later down the line when it's all built back up.), and I'd really like to increase the static compression a bit, which will be potentially tricky.

She's an old truck, I'm not planning on hot-rodding her too much...

I think I'd be more open to re-powering with something else if she hadn't turned out to be a bit special, being an artillery tractor conversion. If it'd just been the average, garden-variety dropside, though, who knows! (By the numbers I have, a Cummins ISB4.5 4-cylinder is very similar in weight, with a little more torque and horsepower, with a similar red-line...)



Yup, and yup! It's got all the hallmarks of garage-built (...in a rush, after a liquid lunch, on a Friday) It's anyone's guess as to which garage did the work, though...



Oh, I certainly can do as I please with it. I'm just not totally certain how I want to deal with it, just yet. It's nice to have a robust hitch on the front -- and I definitely want it there -- but if I'm going to have it, it's got to be more confidence-inspiring than what it was. (I'm also tempted by the thought of also adding an electric winch to the front, but only if I can figure out a way of doing it that doesn't look gash.)

Can't say I'm too keen on the idea of sticking a leaf-spring across the front, either! The RLs are a bit late for The War, though they saw their fair share of action, production starting in '53 and 11CE32 is -- I believe -- a '58.



The detents are pretty good! Takes a proper knock to get from one gear to the next, without being too stiff.

Having only seen pictures of the externals of the stovebolt Chevy, it definitely looks like there's a family resemblance.



I've heard the usual dire warnings about trying to skim the head enough to increase compression, but they've mostly centred around it not being possible to skim it enough to make a noticeable improvement in compression without cutting through into coolant passageways.

More than anything, it's a case of only having seen some very grainy & dark pictures that show the head having some incredibly deep combustion chambers. So, I want to see and measure for myself before committing to a course of action. Knowing & having measurements for the various clearances and so forth makes for a more solid ground to base a plan on.



Cynically, I'm not expecting much of anything in the way of bolt-on parts. (Even bearing in mind the usual adage about "bolt-on" parts.) And half the fun is in the discovery & struggle anyway. Why buy a manifold when I can spend longer, and put more work in, building something!

Well, it's certainly an option I've considered. Time will tell what I actually end up doing, though...

How about a big supercharger? With low compression anyway it would be a good way to get around having to raise compressions otherwise.
Geared correctly you should be able to start making boost at just above idle up to maybe 3000 rpm, if it's going above that regularly then adding a turbo as well should get things moving.

Have you thought of going LPG as well to keep running costs "reasonable"