AND IN OTHER NEWS...
FORD MUSTANG
I am delighted to say that, after a little fettling to get the engine idling better, the Mustang has actually been enjoying some spring sunshine – including a round trip of about 100 flawless miles for Drive-it Day. The car was even refuelled twice in one month, when before it had been once in one (albeit unusual) year. Long may that last! LP
JAGUAR E-TYPE 3.8
Car restoration is a bit like walking to a pub in time for last orders – you can see it on the horizon yet it doesn’t seem to get any closer and, meanwhile, the clock is ticking. I gather the electrician has wired up Boo’s new looms and Barry Bishop is waiting to get the car back to his workshop to start painting. GC
VOLKSWAGEN TYPE 3
After the thrill of getting my freshly painted car back, attention has turned to getting all the essential pieces ready for reassembly. Suprisingly for a VW, finding parts for a ’68 Fastback is quite tricky. Because very few were sold in this country, most parts are only available from overseas, meaning delivery delays are the norm. DC
VOLVO 240 GL
Instead of a slow crawl to nowhere through the 20mph zones of east London, a twice-rearranged Airbnb break away up north fell kindly for a 90-minute Drive-it Day Snake Pass run. And the car was running perfectly, in its own lumbering way – singing better than the toddler belting out Frozen songs from the back seat, anyway. JP
The MG had been suffering from gear-selection problems for what seemed like a depressingly long time. It was fine when it was stonecold, but after a couple of miles it would begin to momentarily ‘stick’ in gear and then crunch into the next one. There were never any odd noises and the clutch wasn’t slipping, it was purely a feeling that it wouldn’t disengage.
A new master cylinder and rebuilt slave had failed to have any effect, as had repeated bleeding, so in the end I took it to a semi-retired specialist – a friend of a friend – in order to have a new clutch fitted. On the way home from having that done, coming down into the centre of Calne, I was suddenly unable to select any gears at all. Fortunately it was downhill and I eventually managed to get it into second, just as some traffic lights turned red in front of me. Pressing the pedal was failing to disengage the clutch, so as I stopped the car clumsily stalled.
I turned off the engine and got it back into neutral, but with the engine running it was impossible to select first or any other gear, so when the lights turned green I pushed it into a side road.
It turned out that the lock-nut on the throw-out stop hadn’t been tightened and it had all worked loose. Once it was done up again and roughly adjusted I could select gears and made it home, albeit with a clutch that really felt no better than it had before – and still with the same gear-selection problems.
While trying to adjust everything a bit more accurately, I noticed that the clutch operating lever had been heated and bent – apparently a common bodge in order to provide a bit more travel. I fitted a new one, plus clevis pins, and a new slave cylinder. I then replaced the original combination of solid pipe and flexi hose with an Aeroquip hose – made to measure by Merlin Motorsport at Castle Combe – running directly from master cylinder to slave. All to no avail.
I was beginning to suspect that maybe the clutch hadn’t been replaced at all, and the previous ‘fix’ had simply been to bend the operating lever. I had another specialist recommended to me by a friend and they were based much more locally, so I took it up there and explained the situation.
A few days later he was able to report that, upon inspection, the clutch had been replaced after all – which restored a little of my faith in humanity, if not the car – and that he’d spent a couple of hours adjusting everything, bleeding the system and so on. A day or two after that he took it out on a long test drive and reported that all seemed well.
Mysteriously, that’s remained the case ever since. Quite what caused the transformation from borderline undriveable to good-as-gold is beyond me. We’d almost run out of things to replace in the operating system, so although it’s a relief that all seems well, I can’t say that I have a massive amount of confidence (yet) that it will remain that way.
With lockdown easing, I gave the MG a post-winter service and have put quite a few trouble-free miles on it. There are still some niggling little jobs that need doing, such as touching-in the slight paint damage done while trying to free the chrome headlamp surrounds – whatever the handbook says, they didn’t just ‘lift away’ once the retaining screw had been removed. While the clutch is behaving itself, though, all of that can wait.