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Mjit

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Everything posted by Mjit

  1. I wondered why they seemed to have used one of the chunky Lucas SPB106 style push buttons like I use as a push starter button on my Spit. as they require quite a firm push - but if you actually need a strong spring that's probably why.
  2. They do reduce noise a little bit, from the sping leaves sliding against each other - but so does a good squirt of spray Lithium grease between where the leaves touch every few years. And they do reduce wear, caused by that leaf rubbing - but you'd probably need to drive 50,000+ miles to be able to see anything. They also make reassembling your spring a royal PITA as they keep trying to escape and need to compress the spring a lot more to do up all the shackles - and that's with an original spring with the little recesses for the buttons. Aftermarket replacement spring tend to be simple 'flat' strips of spring steel. I did replace them when I overhauled my orginal spring 30 odd years ago - and found most of the rubber had crumbled and escaped after a couple of years. I've since switched to an aftermarket replacement spring and run sans-buttons without issues.
  3. Personally I'd save youself a load of masking hastle and just paint the full rim while the old tyres off. If you do go for the split inner/outer painting option one trick I found tarting up the "S" alloys on my big saloon was a pile of cheap index cards, the ones about 2/3 the size of a postcard. Flexible and small enough they will happily tuck down between rim and tyre and stop overspray landing on the tyre. Much easier than trying to mask up the tyre with tape.
  4. Generally the answer is an expensive ratchet crimping too. I say that as someone with has bought a cheaper one...then had to buy a more expensive one when the cheaper one turne dout to be a PoS.
  5. Would it be any cheaper if they were doing a run of several tanks, rather than just a complete one-off? I'd certainly be interested in higher capacity, in tank EFi pump equiped Spitfire tank...
  6. I'd go the other way actually, bolting the hard top down at the back, loosening the windscreen frame, and moving the frame to just/snugly fit the hard top. Do that and chances are when you wind the windows up they will be in the correct place.
  7. Looks like a classic case of "slouching windscreen frame" - could be just miss-aligned windscreen frame, could be 50 years of people pulling themselves out of the car by the windscreen frame, could be a bad sill replacement job that let the body sag a bit. As the windscreen frame on a Mk3 is a 'bolt in' rather 'welded in' like the Mk IV/1500 hopefully it's just poorly assembled and you'll be able to finagle the frame mounting bolts to rotate the frame enough to let the side windows fit, and that will also likely resolve the hard top fit issue too.
  8. And that's assuming you're actually looking/trying to match to the original paint. I know my Spitfire's currently on it's 4th colour since rolling off the production line - Sienna Brown > unknown White > Inca Yellow > custom Yellow.
  9. Hey, don't blame this on the children, they aren't the ones parking the cars! It mummy/daddy parked farther away very few children would refuse to leave the school gate until they moved closer. This is all about mummy/daddy being too lazy to walk more than a few feet, often not even willing to get out their cars so all wanting to be in sight of the gate.
  10. Out of interest which ones, especially calipers, did you go for? Put 4-pot Willwoods from Chris Witor on my big saloon and, well let's just say I really notice the difference jumping between the big bus and my Spitfire now in a way I didn't before! Plus it's an excuse for more shiny things...
  11. Something like MegaJolt is the 'optimal' solution as the ECU is getting a signal every 5° of the 4-stroke cycle and directly from the crank. The flip side is it also involves the most work to fit (its not a bolt-on solution). Next best is one of the 123 Distributors. This is much more 'bolt-on', just replacing the distributor - but that means you have some accuracy losses in all the gears between the crank and distributor drive, plus far fewer index points in each 4-stroke cycle. I think your spark's still coming from a 1930's coil design rather than a 'modern' (1980's) one. And you're not really increasing power by swapping to mappable ignition (alone) but rather optimizing it. The same amount of fuel/air is going into the cylinder, you're just lighting the fire closer to the perfect time to get the most of the bang's energey converted into force pushing the piston down the bore, turning the crank. As a result the max BHP of a mapped car is no different to the max BHP of the same (correctly tuned) engine running on points/dizzy. The difference comes in the fact if you tune a points/dizzy to be perfect under one condition, be that max power/at idle/at motorway cruise, while it might be perfect there it's unlikely to be perfect anywhere else/under any different conditions. At the end of the day you're relying on a couple of weights and springs, with a little bit of vacuum advance to handle everything - and all of that takes time to respond to changes. With MegaJolt the ECUs looking at the load/RPM condition thousands of times a second so can fire the spark at the optimum time, every time, so you get as much of the energy out of each bang as you can.
  12. Buy a car based on body condition, then tinker to your hearts content. Regardless how much tinkering you do it's unlikely to cost you more than buying a 1500 that needs any body work doing. Oh, and if you want an engine that revs AND has torque - swap to mappable electronic ignition. After driving my car one of the Triumph specialists asked me if I'd swapped to a 1500 engine following the swap from dizzy to MegaJolt.
  13. To be honest there isn't that much between the engines. Certainly we're not talking the difference between one that tops out at 60MPH and one that will give a modern GTi a run for its money! If it was me I'd buy based on the condition of the body, as you could buy a 1500 engine and gearbox and swap them for a hell of a lot less than it would cost to replace a few rusty panels...
  14. I seem to remember trying that...only for half the oil to then drain back overnight! As others have said so long as it's in a consistent place don't worry.
  15. Ah, but that "incompressible fluid" part's important - and certainly on my car there's a good amount of air in the plastic and air is compressible. If there's more air in the new pipe you'd get a lower reading.
  16. Some on eBay ATM - though at £42.24 (+p&p) for 16.
  17. Have you ever seen anyone riding a Lime bike, Iain? You see them discarded everywhere but I've only once seen someone actually riding one...
  18. Mjit

    Compression test

    If you get good compression without oil you don't need to bother retesting with oil. If you get poor compression without, retest with oil. The oil 'sinks' so helps the piston rings seal so if you get good/better compression with oil your poor compression's probably down to worn rings/boars. Oil doesn't 'levitate' though so has no impact on the valves so if you still have poor compression with oil it's probably down to worn valves. Or of course it could be both!
  19. Mjit

    Quandary

    First off don't do anything until the house is sorted. Let's face it if you were to sell it now the money you get would end up being spent on the house. Once that's done sell the Spitfire and buy something else, maybe a Dolly 1850 - easier for you to get in and out of (so you'll actually get to use it), slightly sporty (vs. 1300/1500 Dollys at least), but also a good one more in the ball park of what you'll get for the Spitfire (unlike say a Sprint).
  20. Logged-in members have been able to access digital versions of back issues via the website for some time now, so no need to keep the paper version once you've read it - https://www.tssc.org.uk/tssc/courier.asp
  21. I doubt the actual printing and postage costs for 12 copies of the Courier would make any meaningful dent in the annual subs. Much of the real cost is actually in the layout and prep. of the document rather than the physical applying ink to paper side. And on the ink to paper side at a guess we pay for a print run of a fixed number of copies, one for each existing member and some spares for new members/lost in post/sell of give away to prospective memebers at shows. As a result 1 person swapping to digital delivery doesn't change the priting costs, just means one more spare copy at HQ. It would need a significant percentage of the membership to swap before the size of the print run could be reduced - and even then savings wouldn't be as great as the reduction in numbers as generally the more you print, the lower the per-copy price. Personally I'd stick with the paper version - much better suited to the life in the 'private reading room'...
  22. Mjit

    Synthetic Fuels

    Or you go the route Nio are pushing, where batteries are 'hot swappable'. Basically while the plugging in would be the norm you also have a number of automated service centres spread around the country where you drive up, the garage takes control of your car (you still in it) and rolls you into a service bay, automatically removes your battery/replaces it with a fresh, fully charged one, you drive off with a full 'tank'. So when you do need to make a long journey 'refuling' doesn't take norticably longer in a Nio EV than it does in a ICE powered car.
  23. Mjit

    Synthetic Fuels

    Well the simple one would be to charge people for how long their EV is plugged in, rather than how much electricity they pull. Want to leave it there blocking the charger from 9 to 5? Go for your life - but you'll be charged for 8hrs of charging time (even though you only recieved a 30min 'top-up'). Most people would be motivated to pop back and unplug - and if you've done that you might as well move the car. The other option would be to change the way the charging cable is 'locked' to the car. In my limited experience currently it seems the car locks on to the cable - so someone can't just yank it out and plug it in to their car the second you walk away. If the charger was given control of the lock instead/as well you could site the 'pump' in the middle of 4 parking bays. As soon as the plugged in car's full the 'pump' could unlock the cable from the car/switch from "Engaged" to "Available" and someone in one of the other bays could unplog from car A/plug in to theirs and start their charging cycle.
  24. Mjit

    Synthetic Fuels

    Can't say I understand the hatred of stop/start people seem to have on here. Hell now I have them both behaving well I do manual stop/start if I'm in queueing traffic. I just don't see the point in sitting still burning petrol when you're not moving, and modern stop/start is seamless in my experience. Based no my limited experience of lane assist I can't way I'm a fan of that - no idea WHAT it was seeing but my mum's Kia was desperate to pull me into the gutter going along one very specific streatch of road. Took my a couple of drives to realise what was happening and freaked me out the first time it happened (when I didn't even know the car had lane assist). Had an electric hire car back in the summer and had to switch the regen. profile down when I was driving. Just too many years of coming off the gas/covering the brake and coasting to get over in 1 week, so lots of randomly slowing down 100m from junctions as I took my foot off the gas and the regen. jumped right in.
  25. DOES the spring length actually change the ride height? Surely the maximum distance between the spring top and bottom plates is fixed by the maximum extention of the damper, which is how an assembled spring/damper would be sat on the bench. Fit them to a car and the weight of the car will compress the spring to a degree - but how much is more down to the spring rate than length isn't it? Too early to think.
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