I toddled off to Maidstone again to meet with young Ian and do a little more work on the GKE.
First job on the list was to adjust the fuel pump and bolt the refurbished pump top down.
The pump design won’t come as any big surprise. There is a cam in the bottom that lifts a follower and adjuster. That’s all in the cam box.
In the pump top is the actual plunger that pushes fuel into the injector line. There is an inspection port in the side.
Look, here is an engineering drawing directly from the manual. Not.
To set up the pump stroke you set the engine to TDC at the end of the exhaust stroke so the heal of the injection pump cam is against the cam follower. You then put a shim between the adjuster in the cam box and the plunger in the pump top. If the stroke is correct a mark on the plunger will line up with a mark on the inspection window.
Sounds easy doesn’t it.
Well here’s your first problem. You can only get to the adjuster or insert and remove the shim by unbolting and removing the pump top. You have to bolt it down again to do the inspection.
Your next problem is that if you are dumb enough to wind the engine over with the shim installed you push the plunger through the top of the pump. This, in case you are wondering, is generally considered to be suboptimal.
Your third problem is that you have to repeat the process for every cylinder so the pump top is on and off many times. My welded up spanner got plenty of use. Fortunately it worked pretty well.
And lastly, this engine is a five cylinder so it has five evenly spaced TDCs to hunt for.
The TDC and injection points are marked on the flywheel.
Look at that lovely new blue rubber (layrub) coupling on the back of the gearbox…
You see the brown mark on the top of the bell housing? Well that’s an access hole and the brown thing is the top of the flywheel.
You put the gearbox in 4th gear and engage the decompressors on the engine. You can then grab the layrub coupling and pull the engine over while peeking down the inspection hole. We have a notable advantage in that the back section of the prop shaft isn’t fitted so turning the coupling doesn’t try and move the bus round the garage.
Here’s one of the TDC marks in the inspection hole.
I have to admit it takes a while to get your eye in looking for the marks. I started marking them in pencil to make life easier.
And here’s the marks in the window on the side of the pump top.
After five times round the loop we found that, as luck would have it, none of them needed adjustment.
We bolted the pump top down for the last time and added some of the fuel lines to the second fuel filter on the front of the block to make it look pretty.
Good. Next Ian had a quick check of the injection timing. You do it by setting the flywheel to one of the INJ marks and inspecting the plunger in the window on the pump. As luck would have it the pump appears to be badly mistimed. Damn it Janet! Looks like our luck ran out
To adjust this means removing the timing cover off the front of the engine. Removing the timing cover means removing the radiator.
I think we’ll be ignoring this for a while and thinking about it instead. It would be a shame to dismantle half the bus only to find we’d missed something silly.
While Ian started on a pile of other little jobs such as adjusting the clutch and clutch brake I stupidly decided to fix something that’s been bugging me for months. Tightening all the bolts that hold the sump on.
I say ‘stupidly’ because the old Gardner has already ‘marked her territory’ and tightening the sump bolts means lying in a puddle of bus dribble, going home smelling of bus dribble, and being made to get undressed in the utility room before being sent directly for a shower because Mrs Sweetpea believes that bus dribble stinks. I mean, I’d have to mostly agree with her.
So why are the sump bolts coming undone in the first place?
Well, partly because Gardner, for some unfathomable reason, decided to recess the bolts in the block and sump pan so you can’t get a spanner on them. You can barely get a socket on many of them.
You can see what I mean in the photo above. Look at the bolt with the missing nut and you can see the recess machined into the sump pan.
The nut, by the way, is missing because it was so loose it fell off. It wasn’t the only one. Many of the nuts that were still there were barely finger tight. And remember this engine hasn’t really been run as far as we know.
The second reason the nuts are all loose is because whoever bolted the sump pan on, and was faced with this little difficulty, did the only reasonable thing and gave up.
So I went round the whole lot and put spring washers under both the bolt head and the nut. The main reason was to stand the heads off enough to get a tool on them but hopefully it’ll help stop them coming undone too.
It took chuffin’ ages. It’s a big sump with lots of bolts which all needed removing, washers adding, and retightening.
Ian had a jack under the rear springs to make a judgement on the shackle pins. While poking around he found this sitting on the rear spring near the axle on the near side.
We think it could be off the end of one of the brake shoe springs. The thought is that when the bus was moved from Faversham to Maidstone it’s come adrift somehow and got chewed up in the drum. When the bus was pushed back into the bay in Maidstone it got spat out through the backplate.
Here’s a photo I took in Faversham when we put them on.
Certainly looks like it could be off the end of one of the return springs. I think we’ll have to take the hub off again to find out one way or another.
Finally for today…
There seems to be a trend amongst my fellow Retro Rides contributors to post photos of the lovely food stuffs that you are all eating. Cream cakes and the like. I don’t wish to be left out so here’s what constitutes a slap up lunch when you’re sitting on the back platform of an 80 year old bus wearing the oiliest pair of jeans imaginable and a florescent vest that’s so dirty you could hide in a coal mine wearing it.
Hmmmm. Spam and pickle in a roll. Yummmm.
Anyway, if you don’t mind, clear off for a bit while I fill my face.
James
