That was a year that was..

[Bfg]

Thanks Pete I'll check that website out.

And also for your thoughts. The fuel pump has obviously been replaced recently, but I don't know when because there is no receipt for one in the file.

I hadn't noticed the oil on the dipstick being grey nor a whiff of petrol, but tbh I didn't know to look for those things, only emulsified water on the rocker cover cap, and then when I lift that cover to see what's inside.  Even peering down inside the rocker cover looks very clean, aside from around the cap's orifice.  I'm of course hoping that the previous owner just forgot to re-torque the cylinder head bolts after he replaced the figure of eight gasket in April 2016.  As he's only done 200 - 250 miles a year since then ..local club meets and shows, it's likely he just forgot to do after 300 - 600 miles. I'm always the optimist !    

I dare not do the re-torquing today because the farm yard, where my container & tools are, is a sandy dust bowl.  I was amazed yesterday, while greasing the king pins and wire wheel splines, how sand and straw was getting in my hair and literally collecting around to leave a silhouette of where I lay on the concrete. It's not the environment I want to take the rocker cover off in, but if the wind dies down for tomorrow - I'll tackle it then.

Pete

[Pete Lewis]

mayo on the filler cap is often mistaken for some deep seated head gasket problem as you say the rockers are all sparkly clean

its just moisture in the oil gets heated and condenses on the cool rocker cover and its cap

alloy covers take on better engine heat and are cooled less than the cap of say a tin cover .

old gap in the 70s was lag the cover or add baffle to deflect fan cooling air   all sort of worked 

coolant in the oil is rare unless its a catastrophic failure  much more the high combustion pressures get passed into the coolant jacket   and when you stop at rest the low coolant pressure seeps coolant into the bore 

bearing in mind combustion is like 1000psi and coolant jacket is 7-13 psi   no contest on which way the wet stuff will go 

but rarely the sump even with wet liners which are i guess more problematic 

just some waffle 

 

Pete

 

[Chris A]

10 minutes ago, Pete Lewis said:

mayo on the filler cap is often mistaken for some deep seated head gasket problem as you say the rockers are all sparkly clean

Pete

When I took delivery of my Herald the inside of the oil filler cap was the same. I gave it a wipe over and has never reappeared (hell, that's jinxed it) the car hadn't been used properly for ages before I got it. 

[Bfg]

When I collected the car and the gauge read that she was over-heating, so I stopped to remove the thermostat, I wiped the cap clean then.  At that time I just assumed it was there from where the car had been sitting through the winter.  When I check it yesterday there was far more emulsification on it.  

But yes I hope you may be right.  Your advice is sound and encouraging - Thank you.  The head bolts need to be checked for peace of mind now, and then I think the car needs a good run.  After all she's not been used probably since our test drive in November and has since been put away through the winter. Prior to that it saw very little use because of Covid putting an damper on club meetings and car shows.  So possibly she's been sitting idle for 18-months.  

 

[Pete Lewis]

its found of shopping cars not on motorway cruisers a good get it hot and a hours run should clean it /not get any worse 

Pete

 

[thescrapman]

Pete

Bob may not have been aware of the clutch, he may well have assumed they were all that heavy. You know better as we spotted a problem.

when I purchased the 2000 from the auction, I was not the first to drive it, Chris from Felixstowe kindly offered to pick it up for me, and he drove it back from Kings Lynn, and didn't report any issues. Whe I drove it a few days later it was obvious the pin had snapped, he just assumed all the clutches were like that as that's was how his TR clutches felt. Heavy.

And I have blown a head gasket on a new car at least once with a much more "enthusiastic" driving style.

 

[Bfg]

4 hours ago, Pete Lewis said:

mayo on the filler cap is often mistaken for some deep seated head gasket problem as you say the rockers are all sparkly clean

and the loss of coolant and that being a frothy stream across the car park every time I park ?

That would suggest the head gasket leaking gases into the water, No ? 

 

^ From directly above this isn't very noticeable ..when you're looking at a car into an engine bay inside a garage ..and when I'm a pratt looking through rose tinted glasses.!  The car was then pulled out to go for a test drive, in the drizzling rain, and any subsequent under bonnet inspection was quick. 

But now that I have the car, well.. where the eye can't see - a small camera can get in.  And it seems to me that the 'issue' is not something new.

 

[Pete Lewis]

44 minutes ago, Bfg said:

That would suggest the head gasket leaking gases into the water, No ? 

i think  Yes   

are you going to try a re torque or bite the bullet and change it 

Pete

 

[Bfg]

13 hours ago, Pete Lewis said:

i think  Yes   

are you going to try a re torque or bite the bullet and change it 

Thanks, I suspected so. I'll try a re-torque and hope. 

Yesterday I popped out to to sniff the dipstick !   and couldn't discern petrol vapours, so I poked my nose down into the rocker cover and there seemed to be a faint smell of petrol there.  So just perhaps, I have two issues of the head gasket and the petrol pump diaphragm.  However as the petrol pump has recently been replaced (it is spotless clean) then perhaps Bob changed that but the residue smell of petrol within the crankcase remains. ?  I do hope he changed the oil.  

Pete.

[Colin Lindsay]

2 minutes ago, Bfg said:

Yesterday I popped out to to sniff the dipstick !  

That's a level of enthusiasm I never had...

However: if the pump is clean, then ask has it been changed or just cleaned for inspection, in which case - why? I'd have a look anyway. You will get a faint smell of petrol from the engine anyway, so maybe not much to worry about, but a quick removal and inspection of the pump will reassure you.

If the coolant is frothy it does sound like it's getting gases from somewhere; but those brown rusty marks around the bottle don't point to much antifreeze?

[Bfg]

I'll leave the faint smell of petrol for the time being, after all I have the clutch-fork pin most-likely sheared and the head gasket blowing a bit to first sort out. Then rusty radiator water, chafed water hoses, and rear tyres from 1994 (can't see a date on the deflated spare), plus shot wire-wheel splines which may be why the steering wobbles alarmingly at 60mph. A noise which sounds like a dry prop-shaft U.J. and the passenger's door only shuts if it is slammed really hard. The flanged edge of the bonnet is split through, and the driver's seat which twists and gives me back ache after just a few miles - I think with the other minor things that I'll not bore you with a list of, that's enough for my first week of ownership.  

All will be good though, and I just know that Katie and I will soon settle down to having fun together.

Pete.

[Pete Lewis]

the joys of classics  

pete

[Chris A]

Hey, doing all those little adjustments will enable you to get to know and love the car. The initial anguish will disappear soon. 

[Colin Lindsay]

Anyway just to take your mind off it - member Ascalon is selling a Herald Estate; currently posting in Matthew's '2500s Estate' thread in this very section...

[Bfg]

As I've said the farm yard, where my storage container is, is a dust bowl of sand & straw in blustery winds, so Saturday was a no show in regard to removing the engine's rocker cover.  However yesterday, although still a little breezy the ground was damp, and so I did pop across there to check and tighten Katie's cylinder head nuts. 

It's only a few miles drive from where I now live, but this is what we had . . .

^ what was that advert " it's frothy man !"  ?

  

^ yuk.

^ The rocker shaft needs to be removed to access the cylinder head nuts on these engines. I'd not had to do that before on bike engines, but it's not a big deal because the valve clearances would all have to be reset anyway ..if of course the nuts did tighten a little more.

Btw., I spotted before buying the car that the cylinder head was, I think, a TR4 rather than 4A one, because there’s no flat boss for its serial number besides #1 inlet port of the manifold. When I asked Bob about this, he said the head was simply an exchange unit for unleaded petrol. 

 

^ the two inside end studs showed frothing around them. That may be coincidence though, insomuch as the flow of oil may have washed the others clean of froth. Conversely it may be indicative that combustion gasses had been leaking passed the head gasket into those stud holes.

^ the core plug doesn't appear to have been leaking (no froth sitting on or immediately around it when I first removed the rocker cover, but judging by the pitting it does look like I'd better come back in here to change it sooner rather than later. 

^ The serial number on this cylinder head reads 3151, so I guess that implies it is a pretty early high-port TR4 head as opposed to a 1967 TR4A one.?   Its cast-in part number reads T276.

Anyway regarding re-torquing the nuts to the prescribed 100 - 105 ft lb -   I checked before releasing them and each were already tight to 105 ft lb or more.  But following Mikey's advice (on the TR Registry forum) I cracked them off just a little, which in practice was more like 25 - 30 degrees of the torque wrench handle.  I wasn't clear on whether I should do just one at a time and retighten it, or else to crack off each nut and then to retighten them all. I opted for the latter, cracking each nut off ( in the recommended head-tightening sequence), before re-tightening them all ..again in sequence.  I re-torqued them yet again at the same 105 ft lb., just as a check and to ensure they were all even.

Perhaps it's usual practice with car engines but I'd not heard (..or perhaps registered) the advice to crack the nut’s tension off.  It makes every sense and so obvious when one thinks about it, and perhaps so commonplace that no-one even mentions it. Anyway a BIG THANK YOU to Mickey for that tip .. because they all took up considerably more than the less-than one-quarter-of-a-turn they were undone.  Indeed I was just a little anxious when four or five swings (albeit in limited confines) of the torque wrench was needed to re-tighten some. This old dog learnt a useful lesson here.

While the rocker spindle assembly was out of the way - I cleaned out the frothy residue, and numerous blobs of what looked like silicone-gasket-sealant, and refitted the rockers. I set the valve clearances (pushing the car forward in 4th gear to turn the engine over) in accordance with the manual to their prescribed 0.010" gap.  And again did it twice., just to be happy with the feel of the feeler in each clearance. The rocker cover was of course clean out of its mayo and refitted. There is however no crankcase-breather re-circulation, catch tank, or valve on this car ..its pipe just leads down to the ground. 

 

^ task done, although I will surely revisit it some time soon, not least to get the cover's fastening studs the same length.

Next task was to flush the coolant of rust, but first I needed to address some chafing issues . . .

 

^ As it was..  To be fair Bob (the prior owner) had fitted a sleeve over this very coarse thread, but that had slipped down, out of sight. 

The angle of the heater's valve ought to be altered but just for the time being I shortened the overly-long angle-clamp on the battery and swapped its hook-bolt for a correct / smoother one. I then used heat-shrink around that to soften it.  It's a temporary fix but better than leaving it as it was.  And yes I'll need to replace that frayed bonnet release cable too.

The rust tinted coolant in the radiator had a faint taste of antifreeze, but there wasn't much in there.  Its rusty discolour is now all flushed away by first removing the radiator's bottom hose.  I’ve cleaned up around and inside the overflow bottle, as best I could without dismantling things further (the bottle doesn't just lift out) and refilled it all again with just clean water.  I'll come back to add the antifreeze, which is nowadays just as important as rust inhibitor) after I've done some testing. 

On Friday I had shortened the radiator’s top hose by ½” and adjusted the radiator stays to pull its angle slightly back. The bonnet now clears it rather than clatters.

With everything back together again and a few cable ties added to prevent cables chittering away against each other, and a neoprene foam pad added under the bonnet stay to stop its own demented chattering away when the bonnet is closed.., all was good to go. 

I took a car for a 20 mile run, but by then the rain was starting to get a bit heavy for driving around with the top down, so I called it a day. With the wet from the rain, and now clear water in the radiator I couldn't see if anything was overflowing when I stopped, but from what I might make out there wasn't anything more dubious happening than the coolant water having expanded in volume as it got warmer.  I peering in to the radiator, and the water level was to the very top.  This is certainly a vast improvement on the radiator's core being exposed after just a few miles run.  

Since removing it, on the day we collected the car, I've had no thermostat fitted (one is on order) but even without that the temperature gauge used to read 1/8" off cold.  For yesterday's run it remained cold and the engine was hesitant (as if needing a little choke) when pulling away from junctions.  

So, although presently inconclusive, it seems that Bob simply forgot to re-torque the cylinder-head-nuts down, or didn't know to back those nuts off first, after he had the engine apart for the same gasket blowing into the water reasons in April 2016. 

I am hopefully now that the water ought to stay put.

Fingers, and all sorts of other things, crossed.

Pete.    

[Pete Lewis]

yes  Pete  backing off a fixing to re torque is normal  if you retorque without back off you get a very false reading as the stiction of the nut /stud  has to be overcome before any torque measure ,  and that might be quite a high % of the original 

so back of 1/4   to 1/2   a turn is definitely  a correct call. generally  done one at a time 

if you want a flush two cups of cheapo washing soda crystals is my favourite run for some good circulation and then 

seriously flush out   works wonders and cheap 

Pete

[Bfg]

Thanks Pete. I'll try backing off the cylinder head bolts on my vintage bike engine next time. It may make all the difference to those.

It's particularly difficult on those because the nuts are between the cooling fins so you can only get an open ended spanner i there anyway, and then the torque is low because the cases are aluminium whereas the gasket is thick copper so needs pinching up as many as half a dozen times in the first thousand miles. 

One at a time eh., OK - Thanks, I'll know for next time. I did them all together so the tightening sequence was more regular.

Cheapo washing soda - two cups.  How big a cup.?  I'm not being funny but I drink tea out of a big mug and coffee out of a smaller one, I don't have cups but I do have a measuring jug (somewhere).  I've never used washing soda crystals only powder and so putting crystals inside my engine seem a frightening prospect, but I'm willing to learn.

Thanks, Pete.

[Bfg]

On 14/03/2021 at 11:25, Colin Lindsay said:

Anyway just to take your mind off it - member Ascalon is selling a Herald Estate; currently posting in Matthew's '2500s Estate' thread in this very section...

Is that the one listed in the classified ?

[Colin Lindsay]

33 minutes ago, Bfg said:

Is that the one listed in the classified ?

I'll have to go check; I'm trying to avoid the Classifieds - took a mad hankering for a Vitesse convertible so am trying not to fuel it any more than necessary.

He's posted in Matthew's 2500S thread, page 4 posted at 9.48 yesterday morning: "I have to sell all my cars including my Herald Estate."

Send him a PM.

[Pete Lewis]

1 hour ago, Bfg said:

I've never used washing soda crystals only powder

cup  jug handfull enough to shift the grot  not teaspoon  no point in tickling a elephant with  a feather 

crystals or powder  dont thing theres much difference 

a good few on here have tried all the £££s must have products and then found soda works wonders 

Pete

[PeteH]

Soda will clean Copper and brass, but don`t overdo it where there are solder joints. White vinnegar works too. I use it to de-scale the S/S tank in the Boiler.

Pete

[Chris A]

2 hours ago, PeteH said:

Soda will clean Copper and brass, but don`t overdo it where there are solder joints. White vinnegar works too. I use it to de-scale the S/S tank in the Boiler.

Pete

Here too white wine vinegar is widely used as a descaler, very cheap and comes in 5 litres for that very reason.

[Bfg]

Today :  Clutch-fork pin replaced, 3/16" dia roll pin fitted and lock-wired in, the clutch itself replaced, and successfully all back together again (save the interior) - I drove home in the car at six this evening ...all THANKS to invaluable advice from the learned gentlemen of this and the TR Forum,  and to Colin ..the AO of our TSSC group, who came to a very timely rescue with letting have his own new clutch fork pin.   

After months of activity, and then a 9 hour day today of clambering over, under and contorted inside - I'm knackered !!   ..so I'll report with photos on the forum over the weekend. Perhaps my thumb will have stopped throbbing by then ! ?

Pete

.

[dougbgt6]

On 15/03/2021 at 13:01, Bfg said:

I've never used washing soda crystals only powder

I'm with Pete, but two cupful's of soda, ran 200 miles and flushed. Soda does attack aluminium, but slowly and there's nothing aluminium very closely engineered in the cooling system.

Doug

[Colin Lindsay]

11 hours ago, Bfg said:

Perhaps my thumb will have stopped throbbing by then ! ?

Pete

By the throbbing of my thumbs, something Triumph this way comes...