I stumped up for a 5th tyre and hubcap, and I now have a matching spare. Well it matches the front tyres, I figure I'm much more likely to have issues with the front rather than the back.
Had to use the wide angle-lens to get a picture in my garage - makes the roof even more ridiculously tall than it is
Still haven't driven it, but it has to be better than Noah's crossplies - I hope.
Well I've driven it now - OMG such a difference tyres make - obviously. The steering is so much more predictable, now it isn't battling tyres worn into an odd shape by out of whack tracking. I've kept the wires and crossplies, but after today's drive - I'm not sure they will ever go back on.
Whilst out and about, I took a few pictures to check the stance of the new tyres sizes.
Scrabbling around for a bit of content, as a lot of the usual suspects are at Goodwood revival........
I had a noise I wanted to track down, efforts to deduce if it is road speed or engine speed related have proved inconclusive. But I do know it gets more frequent the faster you go. It sounds like a spinning thing coming into contact with a tin-plate. So I was thinking sump. I wanted to drop the sump anyway, as there is no oil-filter, and crud accumulates in the bottom.
It came off alright, but is a big heavy thing, as on this model it is half of the bell-housing, and is tough enough to take the starter motor. Wasn't disappointed when I came looking for groo.
There is a metal gauze on the oil pump, that was pretty grotty too, and I poked a hole in it, trying to clean it. Thankfully parts supply is good, and a new one was procured.
But I couldn't find any witness marks for the noise. The only marks I found were on the back of the starter ring-gear, and I think that is just from starter engagement.
Sometimes I have a mental block, about sending things out for blasting, this was one of those times. Tried a head gun, got bored. Fired up the spinning tools.
After a good while and a lot of mess I was ready for paint with a very improvised setup.
I used 2/3rds of a can of Simoniz gloss black engine enamel. Straight to bare metal with a little bit of rust converter in places. As it is enamel, I baked it a little.
I run out of pictures here. But the gaskets are a pain. 3 pieces of cork and a rope seal. In my mind there are two ways of fitting all that, and now I'm convinced I used the wrong way, but we'll see if it leaks another day.
I used some sump snap-up to hold the sump in place, to avoid the gaskets becoming dislodged. A very clever idea from Felpro.
I couldn't source any in time, but yet again the 3D printer came to the rescue. I printed them out of PETG to give a little bit of flexibility, and printed the 5/16UNC thread. After running a die down the thread, they worked perfectly.