MORLEY’S WORKSHOP
TRANSPLANTS, CROSS BADGING, ENGINE STOCKPILES AND MORE
Acoupe of issues ago, I outlined the ongoing story of my little RA40 Celica. Ugly little brute that it is, I’m still pretty keen on it and a large part of that is that the bonnet now keeps the bird-crap off an 18RG twin-cam engine, rather than the Corona-spec boat-anchor that it was born with. This is indeed good news, because as well as about twice the power at the tyres, the 18RG is a supremely grunty little fella that also has the ability to rev to 7000 (and yes, I’ve tried it, and yes it does).
My buddy Tim 2 (who fitted the engine, and not to be confused with Tim 1 who gifted me the engine that had been sitting in his Bris Vegas garage for about 18 years) helped me locate and weld up an exhaust leak and also cleaned out the fuel tank for me, evicting 18 years’ worth of spiders and crud (or so we thought).
Which really only left finding a side-draft guru who could tune the little bastard into a degree of civility. Until now, my own fiddling had given the carbs the ability to run properly at wide open throttle, but not much else. At one stage, I’d managed to more or less sort out the idle speed and stop the bugger from popping and farting when it was cold, but guess hat happened then? Yep, I got cocky, kept fiddling and ended up back at square one with a pair of carbs that clearly weren’t on speaking terms, let alone holding hands and singing from the same page.
Enter Randy; an old-school carb whisperer based in Bayswater not far from the MBC. Randy’s business is called the Datsun 1600 Workshop. I like a bloke who tells it how it is and leaves the marketing hoo-ha to the millennials. I also knew, from the moment I walked into the shop, that Randy and me were going to get along fine and that the RA40 was in good hands. Instead of display cases full of multi-coloured turbo plumbing and another shelf of digital tachos and shit-and-glitter and what-not, Randy’s shop was full of old cars with an average of 2.4 carbies per car. Yep, I’m in the right spot here.
In the corner of the shop is a set of dyno rollers and it was straight on to these with the Celica. Randy did a quick baseline run and then started to weave his magic, setting the mixtures, the idle and synchronising the 40mm Solex sidies so they were both playing for the same team. By the time I drove out of there a couple of hours later, the RA40 was running about as close to perfect as an 18RG ever did. Result.
Until a few days later when I went powering up a steep, second and thirdgear hill near my place. By the time I got to the top, the engine had dropped at least two cylinders and was threatening to f lame out altogether. But as I reached the peak, I stopped, slipped her into neutral and let the RG idle for a few seconds. By which time, everything was sweetness, light and 7000rpm again. Clearly, I was looking at a fuel supply problem.
Back home, I upped the bonnet and took a look at the see-through, inline fuel filter. And it was a mess. Full of rusty looking sediment, I could barely blow through it. How the engine ran at all is the real mystery. It now seems pretty obvious that Tim 2 didn’t get all the gunge out of the tank. He reckons it’s because the rust and scale in fuel tanks generally forms on the underside of the top of the tank, because that’s where the condensation forms. And reaching that surface with a pressure-washer is about impossible. He’s probably right.
So I can do a couple of things here. I can keep changing fuel filters every 1000km until the crud is gone or I can rip the tank out and take it from there. Finding a NOS fuel tank for an old Celica is a pretty slim chance, so the shot would be to give it another, more thorough clean. I’ve heard of people filling their tanks with a handful of rocks, securing the tank in a cement mixer, and giving it a merrygo-round ride for a couple of hours. Sounds pretty radical, but the science is sound. Anybody out there tried it? Or got a better idea? Letters and cards to the usual address.