Saturday 4 April 2009

On the Road at Last!!!

Today these arrived in the post: This enabled me to go and get these:These plates will only be temporary until I get my V5 at which point I'm going to change the registration. So I needed a temporary means of putting them on (as the final front plate will be a stick on affair on the nose). Cut up and bent some aluminium strip, a few rivets and some chassis foam and made these:These are a snug fit thus:With some stick on pads the front plate was fixed:The rear plate was simply stuck on with sticky pads direct onto the boot. Next job was to get the vacuum gauge out and set the mixture screws on the carb to lean best idle... which is more or less the maximum vacuum for a given idle speed. The maximum vacuum was around 15"Hg and the screws didn't seem to have a massive effect on vacuum unless they were way in / way out. I ended up with 1.5 turns out and had to reset the idle down around 200 rpm.
The next job was to fit the mota-lita wheel having got a replacement boss from GD. Problem.... I needed to know where "straight ahead" was on the Vauxhall Wheel as I had sort of thrown it on just before SVA. Solution... quick drive armed with a piece of masking tape to stick on the steering wheel rim.
.........
34 miles later I came back!..... got a bit carried away!
The main issue with fitting the boss is to make the indicators self cancel (out of the 34 miles I had probably left them on for 20 niles! - too excited to notice)
On the Vauxhall column there is a small white peg that protrudes when the indicators are armed:Here's a close up:You need to drill 2 holes in the back of the boss and insert 2 pins to flick the peg and cancel the indicators. After lots of careful measuring I ended up this:The pins are 6mm stainless steel and are an interference fit into holes drilled into the boss. I also Araldited them in just in case. I'll put the wheel on tomorrow when the Araldite has gone off.

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