Snapperpaul

I did the same and also triangulated from the rear seatbelt mount to the roll bar, I fitted steel plates under the roll bar where the ends meet the boot floor and augmented the standard exhaust U clamp securing the roll bar to the tub by drilling 2 holes through each down tube, welding in anti-crush tubes and bolting to the tub with spreader washers.

I used the original steel plate that came with the kit and one of those £3 captive nut spreaders but also put a large steel plate behind the stainless panel first as I thought it may be a bit thin. The mounting point for the shoulder straps is too low on a monocoque chassis, IVA states a minimum height above seat squab, be careful as there is a block that can be made out of wood of a specific dimension that is placed on the seat and a measurement taken from the heights point of the block. you can email me at paul.kemp111@gmail.com and I’ll send you a folder of stuff about my IVA mods

You can buy jet cleaning brushes but would need to remove jets or your just stuffing the dirt further in

I put drilled flat bar across pairs of studs to spread the load and stop the tank/sender mating surface from warping

I bolted spreader plates behind the panel, you don’t need to weld, I also did extensive triangulation of the rear upper belt mount and welded a tube across the roll hoop at the correct height as required for IVA

So I have just had the most difficult of journeys with fitting a new set of bike carbs and manifold from DanST to my home build 2.1 Pinto, I will try and keep it short… I bought a new set because I was convinced my old spaced parallel set did not work properly so invested in a set of DanST carbs with manifold vac takeoffs, Pipercross air filter back plate and long trumpets. my engine was run up on Penguin motors engine dyno (Graham Bahr, he of Turbosports and Classic Ford mag game) with his distributor and 45DCOE’s to set a bench mark we achieved 166bhp on 36mm chokes and 175 on 38mm chokes (please see his YouTube videos, my engine is the blue one with alloy rocker cover) other dyno runs were done with several different exhaust manifolds before we fitted my bike carbs which made 7bhp on the first run (yes only 7bhp) the slides were not lifting so I took them away and rebuilt them with new seals, O rings and float valves (I had previously cleaned out all the jets) i had trouble with the slide diaphragms and with advice from DanST managed to get the diaphragms to fit and took them back the Penguin motors dyno where we achieved 87bhp, Graham commented that in any other scenario a gain of 80bhp would be considered an excellent result… I took them away again… you can see where this is going but Graham put my old set of carbs on and drilled out the biggest jets I had provided and raised the needles produced 173bhp, how annoying that I spent well over £750 unnecessarily. I dug deeply and whilst Graham thought this was job done I really wanted the new carbs to work. First thing to note is that the dyno jet needles and block air jet was wrong for this setup, DanST said they wouldn’t fit dyno jet kits but that is what it had so he sent a set of standard profile adjustable needles, I drilled out the air jets and made a special diaphragm stretch tool out of an old aerosol cap and a heat gun and we tried again, all slides rise at the same time and torque and bhp were very close to the old bike carbs. Last job was to get the ignition timing spot on with my Megajolt, Graham had previously fitted an Emerald ECU when the bike carbs got in the way of the distributor so I only needed to transfer the timing to my Megajolt, the mappable ignition timing smoothed out the torque curve and gained a few Ft/Lbs and BHP, both sets of carbs work albeit with one making a bit more bhp and the other more torque. I learned so much with this journey and whilst Graham is not convinced about bike carbs he to has increased his knowledge.

My thoughts are that you could change the jets to limit overfueling but would need a rolling road to set it up. You can’t just slap on any old carb and hope it works. I would consider other carbs that have been fitted to the 1.6 Pinto first i do have Weber Carburetors by Pat Braden (HP Books) which gives standard jetting, production jetting and conversion kit jetting that has some examples 2 of which are 2.0L Capri (32/36 DFAV)and 1600 Cortina (DGAV) both using 32/36 with 26/27 chokes 1600 had 3.5 Aux Venturi F50 emulsion 1.35 main jet 1.70 air corrector 0.55 Pump jet 2.0 needle valve the difference for the 2.0L Capri was minimal with aux venturi 4.50 F6 emulsion 0.45 idle jet 0.65 Pump jet however there is another line of jets that pretty much matches the 2.0L so you may be ok but should at least check AFR if you fit it perhaps the difference was less than I expected.,,

Just putting a 2.0L carb on a 1.6L is likely to over fuel the smaller engine

Earth cables should be same thickness as power cable. I run 2 earth cables 1 from block to chassis and 1 from starter motor bolt to bellhousing to same chassis point as block earth then run single earth to battery. the gearbox also has a smaller earth strap that bridges the rubber gearbox mount. previous comment about taking king lead off distributor to see if engine turns more quickly is a good idea, if this makes no difference pulling the plugs and cranking will also start to identify the issues.

Another option is to fit a vac takeoff to the other runners and use a balance tube so all takeoffs go in and 1 goes to the distributor

You don’t need much to get 130bhp just an injection head and an FR32 cap

My cheap(ish) recipe for pinto power is an injection head ( very important as it gives 10bhp over non injection head) an FR32 cam and bike carbs. Thin Rheinz head gasket to up the compression a little and you should see a solid 130bhp Tuning the Pinto is so dependant on a good head and compression, most modifications fail to deliver because they have only thrown a cam in and expect big power. Rods restrict peak revs but I’ll visit 7500 on the odd gear change but 7000 is safe

By god I think they’ve got it...

I would go back to basics and take out the jets and clean them with carb cleaner and jet brushes, I’ve just done this with some bike carbs and you’ll be surprised at the amount of fine dirt that comes out. I have a very small pot with a lid and spray enough carb cleaner in it so I can immerse a jet, soak that for a little while then take it out and use jet cleaner brushes (some are just twisted wire) and push through every hole, I also have some canned air but a compressor would be better just don’t blow the jet out of your hand. check all the cast in air and fuel runs in the carb body. once you’ve done this you should at least have a base to start with. have you checked air leaks around the throttle plate shaft? can you help idle by using the throttle stop? some people drill the throttle plate to allow a little more idle air, I’m not proposing you do this just pointing out that there are ways to make carbs work

What air filter are you using? it may actually be running lean if air flow is greater than stock or running rich if you have one of those chrome/wire things that are ½” thick

Thermostat is a must or at least a blank plate with a hole as the high water flow can cause air pockets to form. would recommend an 82degree thermostat Do you have a header tank? If not then the hose from pump to manifold will be the highest part of the system and will have air in it, fit a T piece with a small cap and do final water fill through that. Even with a header tank this hose can have air in it so T piece solves the problem. When it’s cold of course

That is the answer, the S7 or S3a have a large cross beam where the suspension mounts and that will block over half of your radiator airflow. Mount the radiator in the nose at an angle if required and put the biggest fan you can fit on it (in front is ok). I used some alloy tube to extend the lower pipe through the bulkhead and silicone for the top. once this has been done and you have driven the car report back. i had a number of issues originally as I had a standard single core Cortina radiator, I moved to a cool man double core with 42 tubes up from the 27 single tubes on the original, I think your ally rad will be just fine. i use a thermostat that opens at 82 degrees (standard one opens at 88 degrees) and added an adjustable thermostatic switch which cam in a ready to fit joiner in to the top hose. I have a header tank and fitted a T piece bleed to the heater hose as that was the highest point. I don’t have a heater so just ran a 16mm silicon hose from water pump to inlet manifold. This pretty much solved my issues but in the (long) journey to finding a complete solution I tried a number of heat management tricks. There is a lot of heat under a Seven’s bonnet because it has an almost complete floor and nowhere for the hot air to escape. I heat wrapped the exhaust which helped a bit but the best mod by far was to prop the rear edge of the bonnet 5 to 10mm which lets a huge amount of hot air out. The final heat management addition was to fit a 16 row oil cooler with thermostatic takeoff, this maybe overkill but I have 2 highly modified Pinto engines that rev high. The only thing I have not done is the surround Brumaire has put on his and that would probably saved me money and time because it is a simple easy solution to getting more cool air through the radiator.

I asked my cousin who is a very skilled panel beater and painter the very same question. his advise was to key the surface or any paint would not adhere to shiny stainless. I would explore etch primer after keying the surface with wet & dry then use a high build filler. Be aware that every panel edge on a Robin Hood is like a razor... ask me how I know!

Should have read higher up. The only car I ever ran pressures like that was my 2 tonne Galaxy with 6 up in full holiday mode 20psi more like it did that make a noticeable difference?

What tyre pressures are you running?

Don’t raise the rear to cure the geometry issue, it only adds another issues. if you fit camber wedges and it does not cure the problem( or moves it to far the other way) you can remove them and have them skimmed. it all gets a bit complicated but an old oval racer trick is to use washers to change the rear geometry 1 washer at a time until you have the Geo you want then you will have measurements that can be transposed on to a camber wedge. The reason company’s that do 4 wheel alignment can’t realign the rear is that it is not adjustable.

ME have great customer service so that would be my first place to call and WTF are “ R1 Big Bang ITB’s” and yes I know they are ITB’s from an R1 but that means nothing. The Duratec works well with 44/45mm ITB’s (throttle plate diameter not inlet or outlet port size) and an RF 3S4G head

B is minimum level, oil should not ever be below this or oil starvation may happen, in reality you can go a little below but if you drive enthusiastically oil slipping about may uncover the oil pickup result damaged big end or main bearings D is maximum fill level and is there to prevent to higher level of oil where the crankshaft weights may it the oil and froth it to a useless foam, again you can over fill a bit but if you drive enthusiastically oil may slip into the path of the crank weights

I now have images but can’t add them, u2u or email me for images

The camber corrector does two things, corrects the camber issue and also corrects toe so it will be thicker top front and thinnest bottom rear. You should get the cars geometry measured before fitting the wedges and after because you need to know what the numbers are. Toe out on the rear is not good.