I've been rubbish keeping this thread updated but much has been happening in camp Dolly, following up from last time the garage had the car back in again and 2 weeks later after lots of moaning they managed to fix the juddering, I forget exactly what the problem was but i think it may have been a internal gearbox seal which was still leaking and contaminating the new clutch, they had the box back out again, replaced the seal, cleaned the clutch up and it's perfect again now, and they didn't charged me either.
Over the summer i done a number of shows including the BMC/BL Show in Peterborough and it performed fine other than it's cutting out issue when hot, me and dad went for the 2p waxstat conversion on the carbs, so far this seems to have cured the issue but during all this we found another...
This time we noticed the car was running on 3 cylinders, it's always been splutterly when you revved it but i didn't think much off it and as it's quite course sounding and tappey you couldn't really hear it, if you took the plug of cylinder 3 the idle wouldn't change like the others so we done a compression test, Cyl 1 was 180, 2 was 130.. Oh, 3 was 150 and 4 was 180 again, that wasn't a good sign so we whipped the head off again for a better look.
That doesn't look good, god knows how we missed it when he did the head gasket a few months back, i guess it's because we wasn't looking for it, our first theory was that it had burnt away because of years of unleaded fuel eating away at it but I've had the away head to a specialist during the week who's said it looks like it's cracked inside the port (you can see this in the photo) and thinks water has been corroding it over the years and eaten away the casting. He wants £90 just to pressure test it and said that if it is cracked then the heads scrap anyway as it can't be welded so I'm now on the hunt for a replacement head if any of you lovely people have one for sale?.
Mean while I've fitted a Powerspark electronic ignition kit to see if that helps with things and then to turned my concentration to the matt paintwork again, it had gone like chalk board and was starting to put me off the car if I'm honest, even to the point that i bought another toy and forgotten about the Dolly for the a bit.
So this week whilst it was in the garage I've been flatting the paintwork back with firstly some 1500 wet & dry and working down to some 2000 then 2500 before machine polishing it with some Farecla G3 compound paste and then some Farecla G10 fine polish, I still need to do the front end and then give the whole car a few hand polishes and a wax but hopefully this will be enough to transform it, It certainly looks like a different car already!.
I tell you, by the time i've finished doing the head it's going to be like a new car again with the amount of work and new parts it's had!