Sunbeam

More goodies to pick up!

Custom made coils and reset leaves. 
 

New vs old:

And fronts installed! 

The leaf mounts need cleaning and painting, so aiming to have it on its wheels next week.

While it’s up in the air, I thought “why not give the underside a clean?” Because it would be a horrible job of course! So I did it anyway. The whole underside has a layer of gravel road dust on it for some reason.

Now it does not. Btw, waterblasting inside the shed doesn’t make as big a mess as you think as long as you’re careful with your aim and you squeegie excess water out the door before it can flow under your workbench/tools/other treasure.

Pagoda 280SL. In Sefton of all places. Excuse on the move potato pic.

I’m not very good at taking photos of my process of cleaning things up and mostly I think folks might find them boring anyway. Here are some after pics.

Uprights and stub axles

front suspension arms

New handbrake cable inner (thanks Digger)

Leaf spring mounts

And clean cross member. This hole is ready for an engine but the engine’s not quite ready for the hole!

Summary: New ball joints, all new bushes (polyurethane) re-booted tie rod ends and thorough de-scuzzification of components. 

Next head scratcher is how to remove this stud so I can replace it. It’s for the top shock mount. I ended up having to split the nut to get it off back in the day. Any ideas?

I also promised to give my mate a hand putting new suspension in his work ute, so I was keen to free up the hoist. I put some blocks between the rear axle and bump stops and just let the front sit on the bumps…

The steering is unbelievably light with all new ball joints!

Submitted for @Adoom’s approval.

I got the engine buttoned up today. I was a bit wary of the head gasket. This is how it came out of the packet:

Best mate #1 who is a good mechanic said send it, so I did. When I was torquing the head bolts, one of them didn’t feel great but still made the wrench go click. I did send a thread chaser through first. Then I put the cam boxes on and lined everything up. At this point I became confused (not difficult) because it looked like no1 was at the end of the exhaust stroke. Back to the books…oh that’s how they’re meant to go. The Fiat twin cam isn’t timed with no1 at TDC on compression, but on overlap, so no4 is on compression. Ok, good. Then I threw some oil down the distributor hole and spun the auxiliary shaft pulley with my drill and got the oil pump primed and pushed some oil to the top of the engine. This revealed a fail.

That little gallery plug has failed to seal, so I need to extract it and and find another. These plugs are lens shaped and you put some loctite 515 on the mating surface and then you pop the plug in convex side out and smack it flat with a hammer and drift. You only get one go, and it looks like I stuffed it up somehow. It looks like the edge of the plug snagged on one of those staked bits.  I’ll come back to it. In the mean time I popped the timing belt on with a new tensioner bearing.

Turned it all over a few times, and nothing hit anything, yay!

With the bushes removed, it’s cleanup time. Degreaser, scotchbrite, water blaster. Then I found this under the workbench, I have had it leftover for about 14 years from a bungalow renovation…

Which went into a plastic tub where all the suspension arms and bits and pieces had a bath. The stripper still works! Out of the bath and another water blast…

Soooo much rust under the old paint. I’m glad I’m making the effort. I also bought this

with which I made a 20 litre bath for all the bits to fizz for a day or so

While all this was happening, remember the engine paint saga? Well, over a month later I still can’t get any Ford Grey, so I went blue instead!

Good from far but due to catastrophically lazy masking I shall need to rub a bit off here and there once it’s cured, but 100% better than silver.

Bone stock looking Volvo complete with old man hat on the parcel shelf.. Sounding suspiciously like it has a large V8 under the bonnet…

This afternoon I dropped the handbrake cable off at Digger’s Cable and brake in Christchurch. He surely must know what he’s doing because you certainly don’t go there for dynamic customer interaction…

After this I went to Chamberlains to drop off the rear leaf springs, one stock coil and the recipe for the 125T springs. This will be less easy than I thought. The spring specs for the T are quite comprehensive, but the nice man at Chamberlain’s shot me down immediately by saying the spring steel of today is much different, rendering my data sheet next to useless. He said that if I could get an installed length for the stock spring, they can gather test data on the stock spring and their computer will spit out a recipe for a shorter slightly stiffer spring which is what I’m after. Ok….small problem, the car is on a hoist, no engine or springs fitted. Then I had a brainwave. Hoist plus transmission jack plus spirit level plus tape measure! I can replicate the static suspension data from the manual. The manual has a diagram of setup data using special tool A.74.144/1/7 (flash axle stands) which then gives static ride height data. Now, I could jack the front wheel with the transmission jack and using a spirit level and tape measure I could measure the height to “ground” from the sill pinch weld and the bottom of the engine crossmember. Then, locking the lower A arm in place, I took the wheel off and measured the distance between the spring seats and voila! 215mm. Remember the free length is 416mm!!

Setup:

Maximum slam, on the bump stops:

which gave me the opportunity to check for clearance at full lock both ways bearing in mind that’s a 185 tyre and I’ll be running 205s.  Nothing touches, but then I can’t check clearance to the spring either.