PPC In the Park, then Pissed in a Field

Saturday was a busy day for me. I got up early (for me) and headed off to PPC In The Park at Mallory Park in Leicestershire. I really like this venue, it has a lot of character, and I haven't been for years. PPC ITP is a sort of open track day where interesting and oddball stuff can buy a 15-minute slot on track and go for it. There was everything there, and we even got a handful of NSCC cars along - myself, James, John P, Derek B and Simon B, plus new guy Andrew E in another TVR.

I'd always fancied going, but it was Martin Drake's kind offer of a free ticket that really swung the deal. In the pits, Simon's Bootlegger Camaro was certainly the favourite of the camera-phone crew, but sadly not the tech inspectors. With the local council paying a worrying amount of attention to goings-on at Mallory, plus a surprise visit from the clipboards, Mallory Park had dropped the noise limit to just 98 decibels, and even with his four-box duals on, Simon still fell foul. Bugger.

Silver lining, though - Simon let me have his track slot! What a gentleman. The NSCC was out in force in group G, and having unloaded all the junk and shite from the Mustang I passed my own noise test and headed out on track. Jeeez, I wish I'd checked my tyre pressures ... erm, this month. Still, driving a car is most fun when you're on the limit. A full-weight Mustang on budget radials with an automatic gearbox that changes up and down on its own schedule finds the limit a lot quicker than some lightweight, race-bred special! I got blown away by a Morgan, a white Fiesta Popular Plus (yeah, right) and plenty of other stuff, but had a great time in the process.

I also got dusted off by a real sleeper, a Rover 110 with proper patina, full leather and wood interior and stock tyres. Under the bonnet was a Corvette small-block and T56 six-speed manual, and even with stock single-circuit non-servo brakes, he still blew me away. He said he was struggling halfway down the straights, as the stock SU fuel pump couldn't quite keep up...!

Just as I'd loaded all my junk back into the boot, Simon asked me if I wanted his second track slot! I did, so I unloaded everything again and went back out after lunch. This time I had a clue about what I was doing, and my mission was to try to shadow John. I now had a passenger - Sarah B - who had been out with John in the first session, and was kindly taking some photos for me. I tried my damnedest, and managed to keep John in my sights. Sarah said that riding shotgun with John was a pleasant and relaxing experience, whereas with me it was a tyre-sqealing, oversteering thrill ride, which is a nice way of saying that John knew what he was doing and I was going at it like a dog at the postman's leg. She also had to upbraid me for waving to Womble on the spectator banking at Shaw's hairpin.

We got dusted down by the same Fiesta again, but I didn't care. I'd had the most fun I've had all year. Derek had a spin in his TVR but lived to tell the tale, while Neil L'Alouette managed to lightly kiss the barrier in his big-block Chevy pick-up, a bent bumper and cracked fibreglass wing bearing the brunt o the damage. After the clipboards had gone home, the organisers did let Simon out on track for a few laps, bless 'em, but I was already queueing to get out by then.

That evening, I went up to join the other half at a bike rally near Garstang. It was around 9pm by the time Womble, Sarah and I got there, and the evening's festivities were just getting going. I've been to a few club bike rallies now, and they always slightly puzzle me. People turn up on a Friday, pitch a tent, get pissed, then some go for a ride out on the Saturday but most just start getting pissed again before the main evening's drinking session, then on Sunday morning they pack up and go home. Aside from the mode of transport upon which they arrived, there doesn't seem to be much "bike" about a bike rally - it's just people getting pissed in a field. That, to me, seems like a weekend wasted - at least at the strip there's a day's drag racing in between the getting pissed.

However, the evening's clubhouse bash was a treat. Two bands and a DJ, and rock tunes all the way. The bar sold bottles of Spitfire, Speckled Hen, Bishop's Finger etc for £2 a pop - cheaper than my local Co-op - and it went on into the early hours.

Overall it was a top day at the track, and a top night at the bar. It was just a shame they had to be about 150 miles apart.

Eugene

Valve Lap Dancing

Here's the latest in the ongoing (read: dragging on tediously) saga of the Bedford CF with the crook cylinder head.
I have decided to go back to the original cylinder head. Yes, it was cack and the valve seats had receded so far they were almost in another engine belonging to a passing Peugeot, but at least it was a known quantity. So, I set about the head with some degreaser and a toothbrush.

After cleaning it up and scraping off all the welded-on remnants of the previous gaskets, it began to look okay so I had all the valves out. Obviously, the exhaust valve with the chunk missing would need replacing, so I nicked one out of the other head. The inlet valve on pot #2 was absolutely caked with shite, which would suggest a lot of oil down the guide, and lo and behold the stem seal was knacked.

I cleaned the valves up on the poor man's lathe (put the valve in a drill and use a screwdriver to chip the shite off) and they came up alright, though the exhaust valve in pot #1 was showing some radial cracks so I nicked another out of the other head and began the tedious and charmless lapping-in process.

It was while lapping in #4 exhaust valve (the one that had a chunk missing) that I spotted a tiny crack in the seat. It's so tiny I could barely get a photo of it, but if you look hard enough at the photo, at about 4 o'clock on the valve seat there's a bloody crack. God damn it. I don't think it actually goes further than the seat, and after all this mither I'll just have to live with it. I also found a tiny bit of play in all of the valve guides except #1 exhaust, where there was a sodding shedload of play - about 2mm at the valve head. This will get a new stem seal and it had better make the bloody best of it. I've ordered a new head set off eBay (which is due to arrive tomorrow) so, at this rate, I should just about have the poxy old nail up and running in time for it to fail its MoT in July.

In other news, I went along to the NASC Neil's Springnationals at Drayton Manor yesterday. What has happened to that show? There seemed to be about 150 cars, and despite the organisers' best efforts, the atmos was truly lacking. The weather was sodding miserable, raining, windy and cold, and everyone looked like they'd rather be somewhere else, but I spoke to some people who had done the weekend, and they said that the evening do in the clubhouse was just as lifeless, but for no good reason. Where has the spark gone from this event? It was such a blinder, back when the HRG crew helped the set-up and organisation, it really was what you spent all winter looking forward to. Now, I went along for the day, got there at 12 and had buggered off again by 3. Most of the showfield had thrown in the towel even before then. I don't know what's gone wrong - it doesn't seem to be a lack of anything on the NASC's part. What's the answer?

Eugene

Off With Its Head!

I've been posting a lot of tripe on the HRG Faecebook page about my Bedford CF cylinder head woes. The latest was that I'd replaced the cylinder head with one from another 2.3 CF and now it boils within 7 miles. Having checked everything, flushed the system and checked everything again, I had to take the head back off. First thing I noticed was that the little bypass hose between the water pump and this little water manifold bolted to the front of the block was definitely on its last legs.

It was looking a bit plump before the multiple boiling episodes, but now it was looking like a pot-bellied dick. Anyway, it came off along with the water pump which, naturally, was fine. I was hoping that would be the nice, easy explanation. No such luck. With the head on the bench I gave it a damn good coat of looking-at but failed to see any problems.

It all looked pretty good. There was a lot of sludge that had accumulated in the water galleries despite repeated flushing, but not enough to actually stop the water circulation. I checked the intake manifold side against the old original head.

The original is on top; the replacement below (with the blue gasket-goo all over it).As you can see, the water jacket hole on the left-hand end is a lot bigger on the original, and there are a few slight machining differences, but not enough to cause any major issues, surely? I was starting to get really pissed off with the whole show. Then I had a shufti at the gasket itself, the brand-new, very expensive Payen head gasket that had covered about 25 miles.

Well bugger me with a gypsy's stick, there's a dink in it. A little groove going from No3 piston straight into the water jacket. If anything, this photo makes it look worse than it is, but it could certainly account for pressurising the cooling system, couldn't it? But here's the issue: I'm damn sure the damage wasn't there when I fitted the gasket, but did I do the damage while FITTING the head or while REMOVING it again afterwards?! Because the engine is half under the bonnet and half in the cab, plus it's canted over at 45 degrees, there's no easy way of dropping the head onto the block, especially not for a slack-sided glass-back like me. I could well have done this while fitting the head to the block, or equally easily while taking it off again.
I think what I'll end up doing is putting an exhaust valve from the head I've just removed into the original head, grinding half a mil off the tops of the valve stems and putting it all back together. It does mean I've got to shell out for another gasket set, though, damn it.
To top it all off, I thought I'd better flush the remaining sludge out of the water galleries in the block. I also thought it would be a fine idea to wait until it was almost dark to do this. Poke hose pipe in one gallery, watch rusty sludge and bum-gravy pour from another. Poke hose into another gallery, watch same crap pour from another. Poke hose into another water gallery ... and, nothing. Ah! Could this be the cause of the overheating?

No, it couldn't, you great bell-end, because you've just put the hose down one of the oil drain-backs and filled your sump with tap water. Better add another gallon of 20W50 bogwash to the bill, too...

Eugene

Getting head

My Bedford CF transporter was running sick. The old 2.3 was way down on power, usually sounded like it was running on three at best, and would backfire like a vegetarian full of Guinness. When I tried to adjust the tappets, I found that there wasn't enough adjustment left to put enough gap on the exhaust valves. Bugger - looks like I'm not the only one receding. 

I have another two Bedford CFs that aren't going to be seeing the road any time soon, neither of which will miss its cylinder head, so I picked the nearest and relieved it of its head, then took it along to a local engine place. A few days later I got back a lovely clean head with hardened valve seats and reamed guides..

On Sunday, after the Curborough jaunt, I started on the transporter. I drained the oil, removed the filter, then drained the radiator and removed it. You don't need to remove the radiator, but it gives you a bit of extra working space and gave me the opportunity to back-flush it for good measure.

Jeeez, the guy who painted this didn't believe in wasting any masking tape... Mind you, he did succeed in making a spray paint job look like the worst kind of brush-job. Not even a brush so much as a chewed twig. Anyway, once the radiator's out the way, access is pretty good.

After everything's disconnected, you just remove the cambelt and rocker cover, then the cam carrier lifts off wholesale... and if you're lucky, the followers stay on top of the valve stems and don't drop into the gravel.

Then you have to remove the exhaust manifold to get at the outer row of head bolts, but this was surprisingly easy. Then 10 head bolts let you take the head off complete with intake manifold. With the head on the bench the problem became pretty clear.

Not only were the valve seats receding, number 4 exhaust valve was missing a big chunk. Yeah, it really doesn't think much to this unleaded petrol lark. So, before opening the nice, new Payen head set, I thought I'd just check the new head lined up nicely on the block. Hmmm, it really wasn't keen. So with both heads on the bench I got the caliper and drill bits. Right, on the "new" head, the holes for the locating dowels were a tight fit on a 9.5mm drill bit, whereas on the bust head you could wiggle a 10mm drill bit in there. Maybe the dowel holes need drilling out? I wasn't going to risk my expensively-reconditioned head to me with a hand-held drill, so I popped over to James's where there's a massive drilling machine and somebody who knows how to use it.

This photo looks very cool and industrial, but doesn't convey the fact that it took at least an hour to get the head level and clamped to the bench before the drilling could commence. It took over an hour of build-up for about 90 seconds of drilling. We didn't draw any sexual comparisons there at all, of course.

The following evening, I went back to the unit with my freshly drilled head. First I took the intake manifold off the busted head, which would be very easy if it weren't for the thermostat housing which, naturally, is cheap, nasty alloy and the bolts corrode into it. I had to persuade the manifold with a blowtorch before it'd release one of the bolts.

You have to take the thermostat out of the way because, believe it or not, one of the bolts for the intake manifold lives behind it.

Yes, a steel bolt lives inside the water gallery, sealed by nothing more than a copper washer. Anyway, with the intake manifold to one side, I went to trial-fit the "new" head. Still it won't seat. Bugger. Back on the bench I looked at both heads side by side.... just a f**king minute. Out with the caliper. Yep, the dowel holes aren't in the same positions on both heads. They're only out by about 5mm, but the "new" head ain't going on the old dowels. Could I just forget the dowels? No, as it happens, because some of the water jacket steam holes don't line up either! Out with the caliper again, and off to check the engine on CF#2 that I'd relieved of its head. Bore x stroke = ... well bugger me bandy and call me Dorothy, it's a bastard 2.0. The DVLA think it's a 2.3, the guy who sold it to me said it was a 2.3, even the letter L cast into the block says it's a 2.3 (though L could also designate a 2.0, according to the Haynes manual. Thanks, Bedford). So, lesson learned - a 2.0 head doesn't fit on a 2.3 block.

Now what? I suppose I'll just have to see if CF#3 is a 2.3 and rob the head off that. Off I trot to CF#3, and set about removing the head. Now clearly this CF hasn't been buggered about with at all - the 53,000 miles looks to be genuine, no chopped wires, no cable ties, it's all factory. The exhaust manifold still has those bend-over locking tabs on the bolts, which is nice to see but unbending them took the thick end of an hour. Taking the rad out was a revelation - not only was the a truly diarrhoetic dribble of frightening brown sludge from the rad, but also I have never seen hoses or a thermostat housing quite so caked with that white crystalline gubbins.

Anyway, when the head finally came off, I tentatively explored its inner dimensions with the caliper. It was a 2.3, and seemed to be in very good order! I did a triumphant run around the yard,waving my arms about like a footballer's goal celebration and breaking into an impromptu chorus of the Goons' Ying Tong Song. No, I don't know where that came from either.

So I know have three headless engines. It's like Ozzy Osborne's been round. I'll be refitting head #3 this weekend, with a bit of luck. It also means that if anyone needs an expensively-reconditioned unleaded head for a slant-four Vauxhall/Bedford, I have one for sale. If you want the short engine to go with it, you can have it, but you'll have to be quick...

Eugene

Sundays have mornings?!

Apparently, 9 o'clock appears twice on a Sunday, just like every other day! I know, it was a surprise to me too, but I got my rancid arse out of bed at an almost churchgoing hour this morning for a special trip out.

Near my workshop is Curborough Sprint track. It's a lovely little place, no grand facilities, but a pleasantly green place to go to watch a few interesting motors. Quite by chance, I happened to spot that they were running an "Introduction To Sprinting" day, where you could turn up in your road car and give it a go. Anything for a chuckle...

Sprinting falls into the same bracket as hillclimbing - it's solo against-the-clock competition. The day (and most of the events at Curborough) are run by the Shenstone and District Motor Club, who are a lovely bunch, and the whole place has a really nice vibe to it - a bit like Shakey County. There's nothing pretentious about the place, but there's a tea wagon, some half-decent bogs and not too many potholes. The track itself is racing-grade asphalt and really nicely prepared.

There were plenty of people there to try out this free trial offer, predictably loads of Minis, Super Seven-type things, Subarus and Evos, plus a couple of frighteningly fast Honda hatchbacks, but there were dozens of people just out for a giggle in the daily. The guy behind me had a Rover 820 on LPG, and one guy was there in a Mondeo and hadn't even bothered to take the bike rack off the roof. There was a nice Rover-powered Pop but I didn't see the owner and didn't see it on track.

We were all grouped in batches of about 12, and first off we were told all about sprinting, the hows, whens and wheres. Then we moved on to another guy who talked about all the paperwork you'd need -  sprinting requires an MSA Class B licence - and club membership. Then onto the scrutineer, who gave us a bit of gen about the rules and regs using a Volvo marked up with dayglo arrows! Very effective. One thing that struck me was that, in roadgoing Production class, you've got to run road treads from a prescribed list of manufacturers; no slicks, else you're bumped up to Modified and have to have a roll cage and all that jazz.

Some of the regular competitors were there in their road cars, and we got to jump in for a couple of trips around the track with someone who knows what they're doing. I got shown around by a single-seater racer in his Passat towcar - a diesel, automatic estate - and his sightseeing "lap", conducted whilst talking over his shoulder to the newbies in the back seat, was probably quicker than me in the Mustang at full chat.

Then you get to have a go in your own car with the instructor sat next to you. You sit at the startline until the light goes green, then tonk it up the long double-apex left, a shallow right, then into a sharp right-left called the Molehill, then a deceptively tight right-hand hairpin and there's a quarter-mile straight back to the finish line. In your head it takes about five seconds; in reality, the course record is something like 27 seconds, my instructor's tarmac rally Escort does it in 33, and I probably did it in about 50.

I had a couple of goes, and it was proper good fun. It also highlighted that the uprated springs and dampers have made a mighty difference. At a messy approach to the top hairpin, I approached too fast and was late turning in. The instructor said, "You're going to go off, you're going to go off... " then the car turned in beautifully, I powered it out of the corner and he just said, "Oh... okay then."

These sprints are damn good fun, but they ain't cheap. After your race licence and club membership, it's at least £70 per day for a sanctioned sprint meet, and you should get 4 runs - two practice, two timed - or more if it's not a packed schedule. That doesn't seem like a lot of track time, but I suppose £-per-minute it's not that different to drag racing... I did enquire about track days, and the secretary of the course told me about private "club test day" hire... but more about that later. The venue's website is www.curborough.co.uk if you fancy a gander.

Eugene

The Hot Rod Gazette Literary Review

In the big void in my life left by the absence of a new Terry Pratchett book, I read Fifty Shades of Grey. The trilogy of Grey books were far and away the best-selling books of 2012, outselling the next most popular author by five to one. And I expect at least 9.5 million of the 10+ million copies sold were sold to women. I read the first book over the course of a few weeks on my daily visit to the peace and solace of the dump station.I learned a few things. First is that each chapter is just slightly too long to avoid pins and needles whilst reading on the cacker. Second is that Fifty Shades of Grey is absolute, steaming tosh.

Now I appreciate that I ain't the book's target demographic, but given the old chestnut of 'If you locked 1000 monkeys in a room with 1000 typewriters for 1000 years, one of them would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare,' clearly one of the other monkeys with lower literary ambitions and a nasty case of the horn typed this bollocks and EL James is the clever bugger that got it published. Hopefully the monkey subsequently left the typing pool to pursue a career as a laboratory test subject, as it's just about the only animal in the world that deserves such a fate.

****Warning: following paragraph contains spoilers******

If you're planning on reading the book – and I highly recommend that you don't – the premise is thus. A young woman, who is nothing special, meets a man. He is breathtakingly good looking, cultured, straight, and with a dong like a cooking apple on a Pringles tube. Oh yeah, and he's a multi-millionaire. Having previously enjoyed a life of casual sex and S&M, this squillionaire falls for Miss Average after she changes him and proves him wrong, and he puts up with her shit with stoic good grace. Despite his capacious intellect, he seems to confuse her whiny neuroses with 'character' and feminine mystique. Then in the end, SHE leaves HIM.

On the back cover, in four-point text, is the word 'Fiction'. Jesus Christ, this should be printed in bright red block capitals on every page! It's a fairy story for bints, with less emphasis on ugly sisters and more emphasis on bondage and shagging. It's also been a brilliant marketing strategy for making a mucky book respectable, all the while making the Readers' Letters page of a Paul Raymond title seem not in the least bit far-fetched, and fuck my flat cap if it hasn't sold 10 million sodding copies. 

So while there are, presumably, 10 million women out there frothing at the bung-hole over this dream guy and the amount of nonsense he'll put up with, us blokes would never fall for that sort of cynical shite. Unless it's printed in a Haynes Manual. I can't get over the fact that Haynes have never been taken to court by Trading Standards just for the phrase “Reassembly is the reverse of the removal procedure.” Maybe it is, if you're working in a surgically clean, heated garage with all the tools and facilities you could ever want plus at least one assistant, and the car you're working on is six weeks old and has yet to see rain. For everyone else, the statement should be, “Reassembly is the reverse of the removal procedure, though you'll have to go out and buy new nuts and bolts to replace the ones that have stripped/snapped, you'll have to spend an hour looking for that spring or circlip that went pinging past your ear in step three, and as you've wrecked the gasket you'll have to make a laughable attempt to seal that joint using some four-year-old Hylomar that's gone off in the tube. The shops are now shut, and you've got to go to work in this car in the morning, so face it: you're knackered, mate.” Or, if you need a Haynes manual for a more modern car, why not save yourself £20 by writing "This is a complex procedure that should not be attempted by the home mechanic. Return the car to your franchised dealer" several times on a sheet of paper, photocopy it 200 times and have it bound in hardback. 

Old Haynes manuals were great, though, as they told you pretty much what you needed to know and how to go about doing it. I like manuals for cars where the entire wiring diagram fits on one page and you don't need to know every colour in the spectrum in German to understand it. The other day I had to look at the Haynes manual for the Bedford CF. Most of it was written in about 1968 when the CF was still new, and it didn't change too much until well into the Eighties. In the introduction, the author was bemoaning these new-fangled tightly-packaged modern vans, and the fact that there was far less working room around the engine than the reader may have become used to.

Jesus. What would the author have made of a 2012 turbo-diesel transverse front-wheel driver? Open the bonnet, lift the hatch from the floorpan, and you couldn't get much better access to the engine if it popped up on a spring like a jack-in-the-box. On a modern van you'd have to return it to the dealer to find out how to open the bonnet...

Then there's the timing belt. On a modern car, failure to attend to the expensive and labour-intensive timing belt at the specified intervals can basically lead to even more expensive and labour-intensive terminal engine damage, warranty voiditude and the subsequent ruin of western civilisation. What does the Haynes manual say about the timing belt on the old slant four? That it should never need adjustment or replacement. How far we've come...

Eugene

Hot Rodders from Outer Space

It's been a while since anything got posted on here, but a chance post from a mate of mine of Faecebook last night got me thinking, so stand by for a ramble.

He mentioned that he'd been listening to an interview on the radio with two people who claimed they'd been abducted by aliens on their way back from the pub. As excuses for rocking up home plastered at 5am go, that one's pretty tenuous.

But this is what got me thinking. If aliens are coming down to earth to abduct people, surely they're here to learn about humans and what makes them the highest life form on the planet, and top of the food chain. If that's the case, why do they never appear in cities and abduct a world leader, or a brain surgeon or a professor of physics? Why do they always go to rural areas and abduct some bloody hick who has spent the last 12 hours on a scrumpy bender and drunk his own bodyweight in Doctor Liverfucker's Special Reserve? And what the bloody hell's going on with the anal probing? If they want to learn anything about humans, surely they'd learn more by concentrating on the brain or the central nervous system than whatever they might find up someone's barking spider?

Alien 1: "The subject is sedated and under hypnosis, ready for the experiment. Shall we investigate the higher functions of the cerebral cortex?"
Alien 2: "Nah, let's poke something up his catflap. Pass the gloves."

No, I reckon that any alien life form concerned with the advancement of science, interdimensional contact and relations, or even invasion have reached Earth's outer stratosphere, taken a good gander and said, "Sod that. Those dumb shits are still burning fossil fuels for power, for Christ's sake. Let's head back, I'm sure I saw a nice pub just past Neptune."

I reckon that any aliens that have actually made it as far as earth are, in fact, space hot rodders, or galactic rednecks out on some interplanetary cruise or joyride, and their spacecraft is probably the space equivalent of a 1975 Camaro or a Cortina with a jack-up kit on the back. They've all got pissed up on Interstellar Artois and gone out for a burn-up, chucking beer cans at the Mir space station, mooning the moon and taking pictures of each other at the big sign saying "Welcome To Uranus".

They've happened across earth, decided to find some poor bell-end wandering around pissed off his swede, "abducted" him, stuck a daffodil up his dirtbox and taken photos of each other standing next to him with their camera-phones, then dropped the poor twat back where they found him.

Crop circles? Spaceship doughnuts.

Roswell? That happened after the cruise-out from the Celestial Street Rod Nationals, where some dude in a Mercurial Cougar tried to drift it around Venus, overcooked it and crashed into New Mexico. That "meteorite" that fell in Russia a few weeks ago? A rod thrown by come cosmic redneck giving it too much in the burnout in his Ford Millennium Falcon.

The truth is out there. And it should probably stay out there, otherwise we'd have them rocking up to some of our events. Just imagine how you'd feel, proudly telling some alien how you could run the quarter in nine seconds on treads, then him showing you the button on his dash marked "Warp Drive"...

This rambling load of old cock has been brought to you by Cabin Fever, sponsored by the damn snow, which means I can't get down to the garage. Makes me bloody honk...

Eugene