Sunday 4 September 2011

10CR Preparations Day 2 ...

A fairly early start this morning, as the car’s preparations continued. First thing to tackle were the front brakes. As an inspection some four weeks ago had shown, the pads needed replacing, So that’s what I did. As I haven’t had time to pay a visit to nearby brake specialist C&C Parts, I took the pads from the attic that came with this brake set when I purchased it many years ago from S&S Preparations. Hopefully they are up to the job, will know next week. But more interesting were the pads that came of the car. They definitely were past their prime, showing clear signs of some excessive heat ...




With the pads changed, it was time to check and clean the front suspension ...


And the rear brakes and suspension. Brakes at the rear were fine, but I am a little undecided on the condition of the left hand half shaft bearing. It has a bit of lateral movement, which isn’t to worrying. What worries me more though is the fact that there was a fair amount of grease, which had escaped from the bearing. A discussion point for tomorrow afternoon, when a friend comes over to assist with flushing/bleeding the brakes and clutch.


After lunch I busied myself with a job that wasn’t really necessary from a reliability point of view. But as I had to take of the original starter motor to sort a rattling heat shield, I took the opportunity to change the rather heavy original starter for a modern light weight one ...


On the left 3.5 kg and on the right 7.5 kg! Fitting took slightly longer than planned as I had to adapt the wiring a little to get a proper fit. But the end result looks rather nice, with much more clearance from the exhaust on all sides ...


While in the Alps earlier this summer, I found that the temperature was wandering up and down more than what I am used to with my TR7's. Having checked various possible problem areas, in the end I decided it was time to fit a new viscous coupling. Turned out that the old unit had a fair amount of play on the centre part. Also there was hardly any resistance left in the old unit, irrelevant of temperature or revs. So probably all fluid has escaped from the unit!

Removing the viscous coupling from the pulley assembly wasn’t too difficult using the proper tools. I did support the assembly under the viscous coupling. And with a small outer diameter socket on the pulley shaft it could be tapped out. As the coupling was shot already I didn’t worry too much about damaging it!


When refitting the coupling I supported it under the rotating part of the pulley assembly. And gently tapping it in position using a correct (outer) diameter socket on the couplings inner ring and using a new tolerance ring of course (please note the clearly visible old and flattened tolerance ring in the picture above!).


Turning the viscous coupling showed that the new item has much more resistance compared to the old one, so hopefully problem solved. With the new coupling fitted to the pulley, I thought it a good idea to clean the fan a bit, as it had collected quite a lot of dirt over the past year. But it had also acquired something else, a few cracks ...


As I don’t like the idea of fan blades attacking my bonnet I picked another one without cracks ...


So remain the following items on the to do list before this Thursday;
• Second opinion on LH rear bearing;
• Change brake and clutch fluid;
• Sort dashboard lights;
• Finish general check over.

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