New member hello & APD rebuild

[Alan]

A bit like this Alan

Not like that at all it was the rear of no4 that broke.

[Goldnrust]

Wow, I didn't realise it had been nearly 2 months since an update, where does the time go! Progress on the Austin has slowed down a bit here, with the realities of life with young children kicking in a little and when I do get a free hour or two I'm less inclined to be in the shed now the spring is here and the suns out, tempting me to wake some of my other vehicles from their winter slumbers. Not that I want to sound ungrateful, I feel very fortunate to have a selection of vehicles to ride/drive! 

Anyway, let's have a bit of a round up of Austin progress  .

First, before I get distracted by the interesting engine bits, I finished off the brakes. As I believe I mentioned before, my car has a bodenex conversion fitted. I believe the original kits would have required individual front brake cable adjustment, but mine looks to have a home made equaliser/balancer fitted. It appeared to work ok, but it looked a little light duty to me and wasn't especially pretty. I also found that some of the threads on the boden cables were quite badly corroded, and I almost gave up on the system all together. After a bit of thought, instead I decided to remake the equaliser, with a different offset so that I would pick up on a different part of the cable where the threads were still in good condition. 





The cables were also full of thick old grease, melting all of that out and re-oiling with a nice light oil, has made a world of difference to how smoothly they work. Not a fun task though! Anyway, with that done the brakes now function from handbrake and pedal, so that's nice. I need to do final adjustment but that can wait for now.

Back to the engine! After the previous posts I had dropped the crank and cylinder head off at a local machine shop. Thankfully the good news is that the crank passed its crack test and has come back to me with polished bearing journals and looking lovely and clean. The cylinder head cleaned up nicely with a light skim and also looks much better.



With that little confidence boost, I have decided to risk it on the original crank, throw the pistons I have back in it and do some of the cheap/free power modifications to the engine while it's apart. If it doesn't run right I'll just have to pull it out and spend some more money, but aside from a few lost hours there's no harm in trying.

It seems I tripped over while carrying my die grinder past the cylinder block and manifold...



The valve train was all stripped and cleaned out, valves lapped and reinstalled with new single springs and new 3/4" radius cam followers fitted.



It's a good job that I don't think this engine had ran munch since it was last overhauled, as when cleaning out the tappet area I founds lots of big flakes of black paint.



As far as I can tell, a previous owner must have painted the cylinder block with the tappet cover off and simply painted right over the valve springs! It was a good number of hours with a wire brush in there getting all that mess out! I'm guessing chunks like that would easily block an oil jet!

Speaking of oil jets... one of my next tasks was to give the crank case a really good deep clean to get as much of the old oil and carbon build up out. I didn't get any pictures but it was a messy long old job. I don't think it was me, but after I'd cleaned the oil galleries I could see that the top of the oil jets were badly damaged. I presume a wire brush attachment has been run down there a bit aggressively at some point? I guess they would flow ok, but for peace of mind I fitted some new ones!



Lastly on the modifications I tapped my front cam bearing to 5/16BSF, and turned down a bolt to locate it.

[Goldnrust]

After that it was time to throw it together!



I've been a bit lax with picture taking at this stage, and I apologise for that. It kind of fell by the wayside as I focused on getting things done in the limited time I had. But I continued putting what I could together on the engine. The starting handle arrangement needs work, as do all the other ancillaries, but I was aiming towards just getting the basic block and gearbox back in the car, which would gain me a lot of space in my shed to then work on the other parts.

I thought I was ready to install the engine, but when I bolted out up to the gearbox it was quickly obvious I had no clutch. Taking it back apart I could see two issues. Firstly the clutch levers were sitting much too low and secondly they were quite uneven heights. The second issue became obvious as I stripped the clutch down further and could see that one of the friction discs was damaged, causing it to not sit flat. That was easy enough to fix. The levers sitting too low puzzled me though. After some thought, it looks to me like my pressure plate has been previously 'repaired' for wear on the fulcrum of the clutch levers.



The pins that have been drive/threaded in don't seem to want to come out without a fight and aren't quite thick enough to lift the levers to the sort of working heights mentioned in the, very helpful, article on the Dorset A7 club website that described the clutch parts in detail. I decided to make some little shims to pack out the fulcrum part, and tack welded them into place. I've now got a working clutch! Boy, that pedal travel is short isn't it! I've daily driven engines with light weight flywheels and unsprung  racing type clutches and the clutch on my 60s Fiat 500 is very short throw with a narrow bite point, but I can tell this is going to be a whole other level! haha.

A friend dropped our shared engine crane over, and I was all set to drop it in place... till I realised at the last moment that once of the new engine studs I'd bought didn't fit in the chassis! The car came with not engine mounting hardware, and I hadn't noticed that someone had stripped one of the front mounting stud threads out of the chassis and partially drilled it out. Luck was on my side that night though, I only had one piece of steel hex bar in ,and it just happened to be 3/4" which is exactly what I need to turn up a stepped stud. I tapped the chassis 7/16BSF and made the new stud to match. My homemade one closest to camera against the shop bought stud.



And so finally, several hours after I started that 'simple' job of lifting the engine in, I had lowered it down into place.



And that about brings us up to date. As you can see the engine is far from finished, but it's a nice moral boost to have it in there and now I have some space to dig into the ancillaries.

[Ivor Hawkins]

Well done! Those subtle engine mods should add a bit of sparkle, you are making great progress.