anglia4

I have been daily driving this now for the past couple of weeks, because, why not 🤷🏻‍♂️ I’ve loved every minute of it. It’s beautiful to cruise in, just feels good to drive. Being out in the elements a bit is seeming quite hard on the patina, and it was all getting quite active and tea staining all over the place. So this afternoon I washed it, wire wooled it and then washed it again. That tidied up most of the tea staining and got rid of all the orange rust. Next I went over the car with turtle wax, not so much to try and make it shiny, but more to try and get some kind of moisture barrier over the little exposed edge pieces down the side of the car. Lastly, I put a layer of penetrol across the hood and front guards. Tomorrow I’ll add another coat of penetrol and wax on the bits I think needs it. It looks much nicer than it did yesterday 👌🏼

I'm loving this build. The level of detail, technology and effort that you are putting in is just epic.

Thank you! I get a bit disappointed now and again comparing how rough it is against my mustang, I’m starting to feel the need to paint it…

I did a little more adjusting today and have got it running really nicely now. It’s got a nice smooth idle and pulls away really clean. stoked. Here are some photos of it in various carparks today displaying how badly the front end needs to meet my grinder.

I’ve just gone over the air idle again since I did the last float adjustment and now it’s running really nicely 🙌

Accelerator pump is set correctly. Yes vac advance on the dizzy. The accelerator pump feels like it is working well, it comes off idle really nicely now, it’s just the high vac situations that are terrible. Idle and low throttle cruise.

There was a lot of blue silicone to deal with though, so it might be worth me pulling it apart again to check over

It is the carb that was on the car but I have ultrasonic cleaned and re-kitted it. It responds to the idle screws.

Yeah that was my theory as well, the timing was way off and the carb was full of sealant, so I think they had been chasing that issue for a while. It is a Holley 600(650? Can never remember) 4150(4160?) vacuum secondary

Yeah it was still running terrible 🫠 I’ve brought myself a vacuum gauge and watched a few YouTube videos and set about going over the basics, one thing at a time. I’ve never really played with carbs on a car before and only gone as far as setting the timing. I rechecked the timing, and tested the new vac advance unit to make sure it was working. Doing that showed up the first issue, I had clamped the hose to set the timing but it either already had vacuum, or it sneaked by anyway, so instead of 12deg base timing, it had 2deg… So I fixed that. Then I checked the float levels, the front was spot on. The rear had the screw wound in to the point the adjuster hex wouldn’t pick it up to wind it back out. I pulled the bowl off (which was dry), adjusted it out to what looked reasonable and refitted it, but then no amount of adjusting was getting the level up to the weep hole. So I gave the bowl a tap with the screwdriver handle, which freed up the stuck float valve and then sent a fountain of fuel out the top. A few more taps and it seemed to be working properly, so I adjusted the level and suddenly the idle smoothed out quite a bit. Next I hooked up my vacuum gauge and set the air idle. At the end of this I had a beautiful smooth idle, and really nice snappy response. It had a nice 20in-hg vacuum and I was a happy boy. So I shut it down, and came back a few minutes later to find a puddle in the manifold and one of the secondary throttle shafts dripping a teensy bit. Bugger. I was hoping that it might just be that I had left the rear bowl a little high, and was planning to take the kids for a drive, so I fired it up, brought the rear bowl down to where it should actually be and set off for town. Now my beautiful smooth idle is utter shit again… But it does all drive much better with proper timing stuff happening! My current working theory is that it probably has a vacuum leak at that throttle shafts, and that my nice idle was probably being supplemented by the bowl level being high and feeding it extra juice. In driving, it really feels terrible in light throttle (high vac) cruising, like 70km/h slightly downhill. Ill get a can of carb cleaner to squirt at it and test for leaks tomorrow. It is nice to know that several problems are now solved though, and hopefully I’m nearly there… I don’t have any photos with sharing, so here is the mockup my kids and I did today of our trolley derby racer.

Ha! Loving the scope creep going on here.

@sheepers what do you think the odds are that the adjuster cable is the same as my Galaxie? They look like a very very similar arrangement. I accidentally ordered way too many cables from rock-auto, so can measure one for you (assuming I haven't lost them all). Would happily send one your way.

We've been rego & wof'd for a few months now, and still really chipping away at working through a few little issues. I haven't ventured far from home yet, but was finding that when I got out into about 80km/h it would start running like an absolute bag of dicks. Popping and backfiring and running terribly. I cleaned up the points, checked some voltages and found that the coil was not compatible with the balast resistor, so bypassed that. Still a bag of dicks. Went to double check the timing, and when I clamped the vacuum line to disable the advance I discovered that a hissing noise I hadn't noticed, stopped. The diaphragm on the advance unit was stuffed. So I've put a new one of those in, and am yet to venture back onto the open road, but have my fingers crossed. I also need to do some carb tuning, I think it is super lean just off idle, or the accelerator pump isn't working properly. It is sooooo flat pulling away from intersections, but comes to life if I feed it the beans. Aside from that its just been typical wagon stuff. So much to do and so little time.

May I introduce you to the model engineers society...

Ah man that is such an "oh fuck" moment. I had it happen once with my 04 Mach 1 Mustang, the window buttons had broken from their mount and were very slightly sunk into the door, so it would occasionally self press a button if you leant on it wrong. I hopped out with it idling in the driveway and as the door swung shut I heard the locks "clunk" from the button self pressing. I managed to feed a wire in around through the pillarless window and press down on the "unlock" button. Where there is a will there is a way!