richyb66

I've got a blue line drawn on the side panel where the wing fits. It's not quite in line with the arc of the chassis tube because I've used superspec wings and mounted them lower down so they follow the curve of the tyre - thereby avoiding the 4x4 look. I will need to do a double check but the panels are away being sprayed at the moment.

It's very quiet, but then I've not started the engine yet! According to the CBS catalogue it runs at 94dB on a K series so it should be OK. With a bit of luck I should get it running in the next few weeks so I'll keep you posted. I have put a suppoort under the rear end of the silencer now which has a rubber mount on it. I wanted to get the mount tucked as far out of the way as possible so it wasn't contactable. I'll post another picture when I get the chance. If I can find some decent stainless steel mesh I might make a shield but If I do, I'll mount it to the silencer not the side panel. I don't want holes in the side panel in case I decide to remove it later.

Having read a number of threads about silencers and relised that the standard RH silencer is unlikely to pass IVA, I had ben considering a few options for a suitable replacement. In the end I decided to go for the nuclear option, got out the visa card and shouted up a 5" silencer from CBS on the basis that it was re-packable and looked likely to reduce the noise to an acceptable level. As a bonus, my return from China on Friday night meant I could have a rare weekend at home in the garage which resulted in this: I order to fit the silencer parallel to the side panel I needed to make a small pipe to join the manifold to the silencer which is OK, but as it involved welding 3 bits of pipe together and a load of grinding, I may use it as a template and get something bent up in a single piece. I'm wondering now about a heatshield - obviously the silencer will get hot but it doesn't have any sharp edges like the RH silencer and as I can't find a specific requirement for one in the IVA manual, do I actually have to fit one (aside from the risk of burnt legs getting in and out). If I can get away without one for the test them I'd prefer to leave it off and maybe fit something later.

Thanks for that Nigel, I'm probably a bit too late to easily add a return hose so I'll cross that bridge if I come to it. Most likely route forward after the Weber will be bike carbs or maybe a turbo.

I've got a 28/36 Weber and the standard Sierra mechanical fuel pump. Do I need to use the Sierra fuel pressure regulator? Do I need to pipe up the fuel return on the carb? I the past I've not used a regulator and I've just Tee'd into the fuel line before the pump and piped the return into that - saves running a fuel return up to the back of the car.

After having had my wishbones blasted and powder coated, I had some issues with screwing in the top ball joint due to contamination of the threads with shot and plastic. Ideally the threads need an M18 tap running through them to clean them up. Taps this big seem expensive so as I'm currently in Shanghai for work I thought I'd take a trip up the Beijing Road to see what was about. I nipped into a small shop and needed to do a quick drawing to be understood but the bloke had a rummage under the counter and produced the said item. He drove a hard bargain and showed me the retail price in the catalogue first, but I've got form for haggling and I managed to knock him down from 46 RMB down to 42 RMB. Now I know it's probably not A1 quality so probably not suitable as a machine tap but for hand cleaning a tread it'll be ideal. The price? £4-20 Result!

Had a similar thing on my VW transporter, I checked all the usual suspects but found nothing and annoyingly it would do it for a few days or a week and then go quiet before returning weeks later. I even pulled the boots of the cv joints to see it they were damaged but found nothing. In the end I suspected driveshafts but wasn't sure and couldn't tell which side so I swapped the both complete - about £100 a side exchange so not worth stripping down and fitting just joints. Not had any bother with it since. I'd suggest trying different rear wheels first to eliminate wheel balance issues. If it still persists, chock the car, jack up each rear wheel individually and drive the car through the gears allowing the raised wheel to spin (assuming no lsd), this should isolate which side is causing the issue. Make sure the jack is under the trailing arm, can't slip, go down or otherwise move or you'll be in big trouble. Get an assistant to observe the wheels turning and look out for vibration or run-out. That way you can concentrate on the driving bit.

I agree that not fitting the screen for IVA is a good 'work around' as it also eliminates a number of other potential fail points but I've decided to press ahead with everything fitted and attempt to get everything fully compliant. I was looking at Martin's 2B Superspec at our area meet last night which has very recently passed IVA at Birmingham. Martin had his screen fitted and it was marked exactly the same as mine i.e whilst this doesn't appear to fully comply with the ECE43 regulation as described in this earlier thread http://www.rhocar.org/index.php?showtopic=25675&st=0&p=199143&fromsearch=1entry199143 it seems that the testers at Birmingham thinks it ok, which is good news for me. I guess it's proof (if any were needed) that whole test process is still not clear cut and is open to a degree of interpretation.

Presumably one of the 4 standards mentioned on page 11 would have to be specifically marked on the glass to comply - I know for a fact that my toughened glass screen doesn't have any of these on it. Neil and Keith both had 2B's pass IVA yesterday - I'd be interested to know whether they has screens fitted and if so what markings they had on them. Any chance of some more information or photos guys?

Weather looks like it's improving: http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/forecast/2199

Sadly I can't make it but for anyone who's not been before the museum is well worth a visit. I know Gaz has put a lot of effort in to get this organised which isn't easy when Coventry City Council are involved - let hope this event gets the support it deserves.

This shows an example with wishbone suspension where the contactable surfaces of the wishbones (and presumably the track rods) are checked but then the whole volume enclosed by the wisbones is exempt. This is good news as it means that the front spring / damper is exempt as is the front hub but the brake caliper could still be contactable as it falls outside of this volume in places.

I've got a single key and barrel spare, only swapped on mine because it's a bit worn and I wanted a pair of keys, it still works fine. Yours if you want it FOC - I can drop it in the post. I bought a replacement of Ebay - a pair of keys and a barrel for about a tenner: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/IGNITION-LOCK-BARREL-CYLINDER-MOST-FORD-TIBBIE-KEY-/270594983205?cmd=ViewItem&pt=UK_CarsParts_Vehicles_CommercialVehicleParts_SM&hash=item3f00b7c525

Nothing to do with me but spotted on another forum I frequent, located in Epsom: http://www.nsra.org.uk/newforum/showthread.php?t=40422

Remember that the outer edge is the widest part of the car, which could be the rear wings not the front.

Blue Hylomar is petrol resistant and I've heard that JB weld (the 2 part stuff a bit like Araldite) also works well on fuel tanks. Use aluminium pop rivets but make sure they're the sealed type - the end you put through the hole is closed off so you don't get a through hole when the mandrel snaps off and the bulb on the end of the mandrell remains captive inside the rivet.

The gap's around 25mm on mine ( nice build consistancy - not) so I'll be needing some packers too. My scuttle is also fixed but even with a couple of temporary packers it all seems pretty rigid, which is probably just as well as it's going to have to support the back edge of the bonnet which most definitely isn't very rigid.

It's at the Malt Shovel on the A45 / A452 island here: The car park entrance is off the Northbound side of the A452, 50 yards off the roundabout.

To be honest, probably not. It's quite time consuming laying the parts up as I've only got one mould which was hastily made and as it was a bit of an experiment that just happened to turn out OK. The bulk of the time though is trimming out the holes to allow the wishbone to swing without wiping out the moulding which involved a lot of trial fitting and trimming. Given that virtually every car is different (even one side to the other), the trimming probably takes the biggest time. Ideally I'd like to make a new mould, with 4 impressions in it, that also has grooves in it to show where the mouldings need to be (roughly) trimmed for the wishbone holes. This would at least mean that 4 parts could be laid up at a time to speed the process up a bit. I'll see if I can find some spare time to see what's involved.

OK, now I'm finally starting to get things assembled for the last (hopefully) time, this is what my finished covers look like sprayed up and with my suspension bits all powdercoated.

You could use a pulse converter which would halve the pulse output from the coil. I used one for my digital speedo as the sensor output from the gearbox was nowhere near what it needed to be for the dash. Best thing is as it's pretty well infinitely variable, I can adjust it so the speedo reading is bang on for IVA. Got mine from here http://www.picbits.co.uk/catalog/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=pulse&x=13&y=8 The guy who makes them was very helpful, made one up for me and sent it out in a few days, cost around £35. No doubt you can get the tacho modified but I don't know what the cost would be.

The topic of bottom ball joints has been well covered already but I thought I'd just post this information which I thought might be relevant. I'm still in the process of building my 2B and I wanted the wishbones powder coating so I had to remove the balljoint. Knowing how tight they are and not having the proper tool I knew that some damage was inevitable and I ended up chewing up the outside of the joints around the 4 cut-outs, so a pair of replacements were purchased. The two photos below show the old joint on the left and the new one on the right for comparison The new joints arent QH but are made by First Line ( http://www.firstline.co.uk/PAGES/aboutus.html ) and sold as a replacement for the QH QS972S Peugeot 405 type joint. I noticed that the old joints have the ball fitted from the underside of the joint and are retained by a seperate metal disc that is held in by rolling over the bottom of the joint body whereas the new joint has the ball fitted from the top and are retained just by forming over the edge of the hole that the tapered part of the ball comes through. This is more obvious if you remove the rubber covers (which I did) but I'm wondering if the retention of the ball into the body is better on the old type joint as the hole in the main body only needs to be big enough to accomodate the articulation of the tapered part whereas the hole in the new joint must have started big enough to allow the actual ball part to pass through and is made smaller by the forming process. I suspect that the load bearing portion of the nylon cup inside the joint may well be smaller on the newer joint but short of cutting a pair of joints in half, this is something I can't prove - although I may well buy another new joint and do just that out of curiosity. The joint is subjected to loads that it would never see in it's original application and although I'm sure it has a fairly generous safety factor designed in, it can still fail. I've still fitted the new joints (together with some tabs to stop them unscrewing) but when I finally do get on the road I will be keeping a close eye on them and in particular look out for damage to the rubbers that might lead to accelerated wear.

Damp tarmac, rear wheel drive, V8 engine - what could possibly go wrong? Well this could apparently: this was preceeded a few moments earlier by a display of supreme muppetry with arms flailing at the steering wheel while trying to power out of it but the end result was inevitable. Personally I'd have just throttled off, wound on a bit of opposite lock, come to a standstill in the road in front of 200+ onlookers and taken the shame. The car's a TVR of some description and despite up-rooting 2 small road signs, it did drive away - once it had been pulled out of the ditch by a Land Rover that was also at the event together with a short 'chat' with a couple of passing police. Sadly I didn't get a photo of the other side but given the speed of impact I think someone's going to be busy with the P40!!!! This is a good event with a nice variety of stuff to see - it'll be a shame if t!ts like this end up getting it shut down.

Yes http://community.rhocar.org/index.php?showtopic=23666

Assuming it's Ford it could be a replacement for a type 5, used behind the 3 litre Essex in Capris, Granadas etc. These are a short box because they don't have an extension housing on the back for the 5th gear set (being only 4 speed).