The Annoying Orange

Some things have been happening to the metalflake orange Fox convertible. Not as many things as need doing, and nowhere near as quickly as I'd like, but they're happening. First, the silver rolling shell that I bought in for spares arrived looking like this:

It's now looking like this:

A bundle of bits have been sold; the rest have been stashed in the unit, mostly on top of the rust-free Fox shell that's in there so it now looks like Mount Foxshite. 

On the annoying orange front, I dropped the fuel tank and the original 8.8" back axle - the latter needs returning to the previous owner.

I decanted the fuel into the daily driver, and removed the in-tank electric fuel pump. The new motor won't take 45psi from the electric pump, so I just replaced it with a length of rubber pipe and some cable ties. Hurrah for cable ties!

I cut a notch in the bottom of the pipe so that, should it touch the bottom of the tank it won't seal itself off. I also replaced the fuel filter The one that came off was a Motorcraft one, which means that either a previous owner was very fastidious about using OE-spec parts, or, more likely, it was the one it left the factory with 22 years and 92,000 miles previously. I know that after I emptied the residual fuel out of it, I tried to blow through it and nearly shat myself with the force required to get the tiniest breath of air through it. I replaced it with a UFI pattern filter made in Tunisia, that well-known industrial centre of excellence, which was so easy to blow through that I almost expected a party streamer to come out of the other end accompanied by a feeble "parp" noise. It also has to be said that if you want to change the fuel filter on a fuel-injected Fox, removing the axle first makes the job a shed-load easier.

With the 8.8" out, I got the 7.5" axle ready to go in. I'd already replaced the wheel cylinders, so I took the brake pipes and flexi off the 8.8 and fitted them to the 7.5". The original arrangement from the 7.5 wouldn't link up with the car's brake lines - they're routed differently to clear the dual exhausts - hence using the 8.8 gear, but with the car up on stands and the axle hanging down, the 8.8 flexi was being stretched tighter than Susan Boyle's knicker elastic. It must just be the fact that the axle casing is so much smaller than the 8.8's. 

While I was under there, I noticed that one of the upper arms had a rather baggy bush.

It's never pleasant finding a baggy bush. Oddly, the axle end bush had been changed recently, but at the body end, the rubber was halfway out of the housing. I dropped the arm out, and the bush was truly buggered.

The system on the fox is very similar to the old MkIV Cortina, and while I've seen plenty of ruined void bushes on those, I've never seen one where the rubber bush has got scared of the dark and is making a break for it. 

The advantage of having several tons of Fox spares (there had to be ONE advantage) is that a replacement arm with reasonable bushes is merely a trip to the shelves full of shite away. Anyway, the axle is now on, the brakes have been fully rebuilt - after a brief recap on the process when I discovered that I'd fitted both trailing shoes to the same drum...), the prop's back on and the exhaust - the original 4-pot one - has been fitted. I think it'll take a bit of tweaking to not rattle against the rear lower GT skirt, but it's all coming together...

... and just as well, because at the last round of racing, reverse gear has disappeared from the daily's transmission. It's looking less like it'll make it to the expiry of its MoT in July, and it has the Power Tour to do at the end of this month.