So, ten minutes of reading about resistors and I'm ready to electrocute myself, if only I knew how.

This is about the simplest explanation of how resistors affect voltage I could find and I still have no idea what they're talking about -

http://www.learningaboutelectronics....-resistors.php

I'm so glad I decided to run a (nominally) zero resistance wire to my coil and give it 12 volts under all conditions.

The reason I've got myself in a tizzy about this is that when my midget developed a misfire I noticed that the coil was getting red hot, so replaced it with a non-ballast 12v one as I didn't realise I had a ballast resistor in the circuit.

First run out after fitting it the misfire had gone and the car ran fine suggesting the old coil was on the way out, but at the end of a 30 mile trip to the coast the engine conked out as I pulled on to my driveway and wouldn't restart.

After a bit of investigation I replaced the coil with a ballast coil but still no spark, then I took out the fancy electronic ignition module and put the points back in and it ran. A bit of research revealed that the electronic ignition module probably failed because of the wrong voltage going to it.

By then I had already committed to electronic ignition on my Speedster's engine and I don't want to burn it out by under or overpowering it. At least now I know that it's connected in accordance with the manufacturer's instructions so it shouldn't fail.

Fingers crossed.

I've just taken a commission to build an outlaw styled Formosa 236CM .....

Sounds good Gary, are you going weather-beaten patina paint and faded numbers?

Sounds interesting

Quick update as it's been a couple of months.

Progress has been a bit slow for a couple of reasons: First off, engine issues, more specifically trying to get a leak free cooling system. I've had two cracked water pump housings and the third one I tried had stripped threads on both bolt holes for the thermostat cover. That's all sorted now and I'm hoping to fire the engine this weekend.

Second reason is that it's now the season for my other hobby, grubbing around in muddy fields looking for 'treasure'.

I'd like to say 'There's gold in them there hills' but I live in Norfolk. Gold, there is, nonetheless -

https://i.ibb.co/3p7bDXy/IMG-20201106-154109922.jpg

Et Voila, one Ambiani Gallic wars gold stater, struck in about 57BC by a tribe in Gaul (Northern France) to pay an army of Celtic warriors to fight against the invading Roman army led by one Julius Caeser.

Nice.

That's a fantastic find, well done!
Do you get to keep it?

Nice little rippa ! Some good pay dirt over in Norfolkshire !

Thanks guys.

Norfolk has the largest number of 'treasure' items recorded under the 1996 Treasure Act in the UK. Its history is one of the reasons I settled here from my native Essex back in the early 90's.

What I'll do now is record this find with the local archaeological unit then have it properly valued. I have a 50:50 agreement with the landowner for any valuable items I find and this certainly qualifies.

Once we know what it's worth I'll hopefully be able to afford to buy out his half so I can keep it as it's all about the connection with history for me rather than the value.

After all, the last person to touch this before me was almost certainly an Iceni warrior who fought in battles against Julius Caesar. You can't really put a price on that!

Wow - fantastic find. Doing an online search (which you've probably already done) suggests about £500 - £1000, but as you say it's the history that's important. It irritates me how the TV programmes (and indeed classic car magazines) highlight the 'value' in ££s as the main objective - In fact if I see the classic car mags with covers saying 'what's the best investment car to buy?' or similar, I deliberately avoid them. Hope you will be able to keep your coin!

Whose been watching Aussie gold hunters

I also enjoy Aussie Gold Hunters - a good 'escape from reality' viewing experience. Apparently, the best way to get gold these days is via scrap electrical equipment!

Electrical equipment gold recovery is too messy. Nitric acid needed gives off too many toxic fumes that will make you puke !
The local car boot yields some nice little nuggits from time to time !
Well done on your find Mr Towed!

Thanks for the kind words, guys. It is a spectacular find and in pretty much as minted condition once I rinsed the mud off it.

Given that, I'd estimate it to be at the high end of the value range for one of these, so around £1,000 to £1,200

Luckily I can afford to pay my half of that so I should be able to hang on to it, but if the valuation is much more then my (wealthy although he'd never admit it despite the pristine E Type roadster/other classics/new Velar etc.) farmer friend might have to buy out my share.

He's also really interested in the history of his land and I often hand over small items that have a connection to the land he owns as he loves them just as much as I do.

These have included a lovely 14th Century bronze seal matrix used for impressing the owner's personal coat of arms in molten wax to seal documents, and most recently, an enamel badge from the National Agricultural Labourers and Rural Workers Union, which was an early 20th Century land workers' rights movement.

It's a great hobby which gets me out in the fresh air, but it does eat into the time I have for car building. It won't be long until all the land I have permission to search is under crops, though, so I'll be back in the garage soon.

It's nice, soft metal - easy to cut in half if you have to :rofl:

I'm afraid not ... I'm doing shiney paint etc but with an outlaw attitude towards stance etc.
Customer has some definite ideas and comes from a VW / Porsche background

Is it because your product is much cheaper than doing a beetle outlaw or a 356 replica outlaw .. can’t wait to see what ideas he has

Looking forward to seeing the Outlaw Formosa. Will you be doing a build thread or does the customer want to keep it private?

Ive been missing in action for a while on here and had wondered how your outlaw build was going Mr T, its good see you are making good progress. Are you going down the rebody route for registration?

I also liked the coin you found and the history it holds, just thinking of the last person to have held the coin and how did it come to be originally lost is worth more than the money value, hope you manage to keep it.

Hi Swifty, thanks for your interest in my little piece of history.

I will be putting my Speedster through the rebody process - I'm going to be crossing my fingers as I bought the bodyshell second-hand and don't have a manufacturer's receipt. I do have a screenshot of the ebay sale transaction though, so I'm hoping they will accept that.

Current delay is that I haven't managed to get the engine running yet. I have fuel getting into the cylinders, I have a nice, fat spark and I have provisionally set the timing to 6 degrees before TDC with a timing light on turnover, but it isn't making any attempt to fire.

Last thing yesterday I tested the compression on one cylinder with a compression tester and it read zero. That could be one of two things: my (cheap Chinese made) compression tester might be faulty or I've installed the new camshaft in the wrong orientation so there's a valve still open on the compression stroke.

I ran out of enthusiasm yesterday so I'm having a day off the car today, but I'll pick it up again next weekend (Thursday for me) and test the compression tester on the Midget's engine to see if it's the gauge that's faulty. If it shows compression on the MG then it must be the cam timing that's the issue.

Hopefully my next post will have some better news about starting the engine for the first time.

I shouldn't worry about not having a receipt. The photo shot of the ebay ad will be fine as is the case with a hand written receipt for second hand bodies. Mick didn't have a problem with his Monaco recently, he got that second hand as a swop for a bottle of JD and a bacon sandwich. I think he wrote that in the comments second of the form !

What about if you build the body yourself? maybe receipts for wood, matting & resin?

Thanks guys, yes, it does look like the people signing off the rebodies at DVLA do actually seem to understand the specialist car/bike world.

There has been the odd scary story circulating, but it's mostly multi-millionaires trying to register their brand new Argentine built Type 35 Bugatti's as 1920's originals to multiply their value by 10x.

Close. Tell the truth and shame The Devil, as my late mother taught me.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...3da23563_b.jpg

Regards, Mick

No problem there, just tell them its a home made body. Come up with a name for it so they can fill in the make / model section.

Wow, that's a real beauty.

I see it has fully adjustable wheelarch gaps, you just need to select the right hammer.

Mr T : how's your waterworks if I might be so bold!? Have you sorted out the leak and have you managed to fire it up yet?
.....Good find in the field :)

Thanks Slarti, leak sorted but haven't fired the motor yet due to me probably installing the cam out of sync. with the crank.

I'll be taking another look at that tomorrow and hoping to hear some vrooming noises this weekend, but I'm not going to hold my breath...

Success!

Of sorts.

The story so far is that, before continuing with the bodywork I wanted to make sure that I had the engine running as it's much easier to access everything with no bodywork in the way.

As with all things Kit/Classic Car, it sounded so simple - Take an old Triumph Herald 13/60 engine that the seller showed me running so I knew it was a good one.

Modify to Mk3 Spitfire spec with a rebuilt, high compression head and a Piper 270 cam. Add a pair of rebuilt HS2 SU's and an electric fuel pump. Wire up to a new battery. Ignition on. Press starter and run engine for 20 minutes at 2500rpm to break in the new camshaft.

Only it didn't quite pan out like that. The engine turned and turned but there was no hint of it firing.

I double checked the cam timing - full lift on no.1 inlet valve at 108 degrees atdc as per Piper's spec. Check.

Valve clearances set as per Piper's spec. Check.

Compression checked on all cylinders with my compression tester, which I believe may have been manufactured in the land of China*. Check.

*A cheap piece of crap which, once I'd spent an hour trying to get the connectors to hold together under pressure showed 45psi in all four cylinders. Eek! A quick check of my Midget, which runs fine and returns 40+mpg showed exactly the same result, so it's clearly a faulty gauge. Phew.

New plugs properly gapped. Check.

Nice fat spark from each plug on turnover. Check.

Firing order 1-3-4-2 anti-clockwise. Check.

Ignition timing set to 6 degrees btdc. Check.

Carburettors rebuilt with new SU service kit. Check.

Fuel getting to carburettors. Check.

But the engine just wouldn't start.

So, I double checked everything again and decided that the only thing I couldn't check was whether the fuel was getting from the carburettors into the engine (anyone know a way to check that?).

As an experiment, yesterday afternoon I tried squirting some fuel directly into the intakes and turning the engine over again. It didn't start, but it did cough on one or two cylinders, which was encouraging, as it confirmed my suspicion that it was a fuelling issue.

So, this morning I removed the HS4 carburettors and manifold from my Midget's engine and bolted them up to the Speedster's motor.

All hoses and other connections double checked, ignition on, press the starter and...

https://i.ibb.co/zQ2X9kF/IMG-20201024-110206666-1.jpg

Sorry, forgot to show you how I set up the cooling system with an old Renault header tank, so thought I'd share this pic with you.

Ahh yes, the engine.

After about two revolutions on the starter IT FIRED!

I quickly ran it up to about 2500rpm and held it there with a bolt mechanism I'd cobbled together. I also switched on the electric fan so it wouldn't overheat, eased off the choke and adjusted the revs.

As I've already said, I needed to run it for twenty minutes at quite high revs to avoid ruining the reprofiled cam, and it behaved itself impeccably, running really smoothly and sounding awesome. No clattery bug engine for my Speedster!

I was so happy I did a little dance.

After just under ten minutes I noticed that the coolant in the expansion tank had risen to near the cap, then scalding hot coolant started gushing out of the overflow on the radiator, then about a minute later I got a 360 degree shower of boiling coolant from the cap on the expansion tank.

Damn, it was boiling over so I had to shut it down.

As soon as the engine stopped running I realised what the problem was as I couldn't hear the electric fan running. A quick check of its power supply - zero voltage, a fuse must have blown somewhere in the loom.

A few seconds later I connected the fan up to another live wire and got it running. After topping up the coolant, ignition on and a press of the starter saw it fire instantly, but running it up to 2500rpm again almost immediately resulted in a shower of fluid cascading upwards from somewhere near the distributor. Damn.

It wasn't coolant this time, but oil, and I got covered in it. I looked like Red Adair after capping a gusher (google him if you're too young to remember).

On closer inspection with the engine off, the oil pressure switch housing has a take off for an oil pressure gauge, which had been capped by a previous owner with a length of plastic tube with a bolt screwed in the end. That tube had become brittle and been ejected by the oil pressure from the engine, spraying about a litre of oil all over me, the engine and chassis and all over the inside of the garage door that was open above my head.

So, to avoid that happening again I softened a new length of plastic tube with a heat gun and pressed it over the 'Christmas Tree' barbs on the take-off tube. Once that had cooled I wound a bolt into the other end, then applied some heat shrink tube over the whole thing and shrunk it down with the heat gun to lock it all in place.

After a nice cup of tea and a quick top up of the oil, I started the motor up again and it ran perfectly for a full twenty minutes at 2500rpm without overheating or losing any oil.

Success! Even if I did have one hell of a clean up job to do on the chassis, the inside of the garage door and me.

So, something's wrong with my HS2 carburettors and I'm thinking of using something else instead, maybe a single 45 DCOE. Has anyone tried one of those?

At least I now know that the engine works and I'm both delighted and relieved in equal measure.

Mr T - Apologies, I am behind in my replies...

But many congratulations on getting to the bottom of your engine problems. :cool:

Am old enough to remember Red Adair, so I have a great mental image. ;)

Good luck, Paul. :)

PS
Any chance of another photo of your coin find, after you cleaned it?
(That was a great story too.)

Your epic non starter reminded me of two embarrassments. Number one. A 1725 Hillman Hunter with a cast iron block and head and clapped no.3 big end. Replaced with aRapier (I think) Identical engine only with an ally head and twin exhaust pipes, so I replaced it with the cast head all bolted up, would it go? No!
Very long story short after taking the manifolds off it was obvious. Different valve placings. IIRC In Ex In Ex Ex In Ex In vs Ex in Ex In etc. Two days later, Ally head replaced and it ran like a dream. Two days of bodging twin pipes and away we went.

Number two after rebuilding a non running 2.5 Sherpa Diesel it wouldn't start. Again very long story short another engine sourced, heard running, fitted it. Fitted the polished ally rockerbox cover of the first engine. Would it start? No! So I took the rockerbox cover off to check the valves and it started!! Cover on and it stopped, cover off, and look inside microscopic marks where the rockers fouled on the shiny rocker box so that the valves didn't close. The previous owner of engine number one had put the cover in the vice to polish it, after which it wouldn't start, since it was old and not very good anyway he sold the vehicle and I bought it as a non runner that did need a rebuild. I then had two running engines and a rocker box that needed ten minutes to fix. Oh what fun I had, Not!

Great news Mister Towed. I think you must be relieved this is nearly sorted out and you can progress with the build. Looking forward to see more updates.

P.S.good luck with the treasure hunting too.

Thanks for the encouragement, guys, it's much appreciated.

I partially stripped down the offending carburettors on Thursday but couldn't find anything wrong with them - with the dashpots off and needles removed, fuel bobs up out of the jets when you blow down on them and everything else was set as per manufacturer's instructions. I'm guessing it was just that they are adjusted way too lean for the engine to fire.

Plan was to fire up the engine with the Midget carbs fitted just to check everything still runs after its shenanigans when breaking in the cam, then refit the 1 1/4's and richen them up to see what happens.

...which I will do next weekend when a new starter motor arrives as the old one has died since last weekend. I'd rob the one off the Midget but it's a PITA to get to and there's a danger I'll have no Midget left by the time the Speedster is up and running :(

Paul - I'll take some pics of my Stater today, Gold really is incredible as after spending 2,000 years rolling around in the mud, a quick rinse under the tap saw it as clean and shiny as the day it was minted.

Good news on getting the engine up and running

Hopefully you’ll be able to move forward a bit quicker

Sounds like the detecting bug is taken over that gold coin is just stunning.

As a child my dads mate had detectors and we used to borrow them found some musket balls in knole park and coins somewhere else

The guy lived near biggin hill and was forever digging up relics of air raids like bombs and shells etc I think he was the bomb disposal squads best customer at one time in the end he used to rebury the items as couldn’t be bothered with the hassle and all detecting is now forbidden in the area if I remember correctly

Issue with the HS2 carbs now solved. They weren't set too lean and everything was adjusted fine. The only thing I hadn't done was fit a breather 'Y' pipe from the rocker cover to the carbs, but that couldn't stop the engine firing, surely?

An internet search didn't throw up anybody who'd cited it as a reason for their engine not working, and the breather pipes on a MkIII engine are just tubes with no one-way valves in them so it made sense to me that running without them fitted would make no difference to the manifold pressure so shouldn't affect the running of the engine.

Despite not really thinking it would make any difference, I stuck some insulation tape over the breather tube on each carb, then, ignition on, press starter and Vroom! It worked.

So, for future reference the old Triumph Spitfire or Herald motor won't fire if the breather tubes are disconnected. Who could'a known?

Hoping to make some real progress now I have a working motor :)

I hope everyone had the best Christmas possible given the circumstances, I certainly did so now I need to go on a serious diet!

Nothing much to update on the Speedster yet, but I'm aiming to get on with it in a day or so. I did have an interesting day out in Iris the Midget last Friday, though.

As you may be aware, after selling my Spyder I bought Iris as a running car to use on sunny days while I finished the Speedster. That quickly turned into a total mechanical refurbishment of the suspension, overdrive unit, cylinder head, new clutch, new brakes, full respray, etc., etc., which swallowed about a year of kit building time.

Okay, with hindsight I should have just got on and finished my Speedster instead, but at least Iris now looks like this -

https://i.ibb.co/7vvd05J/IMG-20201218-083941039.jpg

Which rather unexpectedly led to me being asked if Iris would like to appear on television.

So, after a wash and polish (and the inevitable strip down and rebuild of one of the carburettors due to a jet jamming open when the choke was released) it was off to a secret film set hidden away in deepest, darkest Norfolk -

https://i.ibb.co/fqXK35s/IMG-20201218-103818522.jpg

Setting up took about two hours - the camera track had to be dismantled to get the car into the 'garage' (mostly made of polystyrene and ply board) then reassembled and levelled, and the set had to be dressed to look like a domestic garage scene -

https://i.ibb.co/VmbCzLW/IMG-20201218-104145312.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/4JN6Czy/IMG-20201218-105228462.jpg

Which was followed by lots of lighting adjustments, camera checks and test shoots -

https://i.ibb.co/hCxXcLN/IMG-20201218-112325165.jpg

Before I went on set to play second fiddle to Iris and do some acting -

https://i.ibb.co/54qJn50/IMG-20201218-121244934.jpg

The young media savvy production team just loved Iris and apparently I'm a natural in front of the camera, perfecting the art of zipping up my overalls and pretending to remove a hubcap in only about 200 takes.

The shoot was for the sponsor of a new series of The Car Years, which is due to go out on ITV in February. They have also shot a selection of other vehicles - a modern, high performance SUV, a 70's Escort rally car, a Rat Look Bay window bus, etc., and the film will be edited to look like the camera is scanning a row of terraced garages with owners attending to the various needs of their pride and joys.

If they use the footage (I hope they will), Iris and I will be on screen for about three seconds at each end of the adverts. I guess if they repeat it enough times we'll get our fifteen minutes of fame.

All in all it was a very interesting day out and the fact that Iris was considered worthy to appear on TV just shows what you can achieve with a bit of mechanical ability, a domestic garage and a £150 spray gun at home.

Bloody brilliant!!! Well done that man :)

Great stuff. Lovely car the Midget, we had a Mk2 Sprite in the '70s my wife would get 3 children and a large Golden retriever in it when I was working weekends. They were broken-hearted when I swapped it for an A40 countryman!
I wish my garage looked as clean and tidy as yours! Good luck with the new career. The Saint (Rodger Moore) had a P1800 and you have a Midget!
All the best for the New Year to everyone out there!
PS Re breathers: Maybe there is a small hole in the rocker box pipe. Failing that, who cares, it works!

Wow, that’s exciting!
Next you will be working with Mike Brewer - go on, hold yer hand out...

Seriously though, that’s so cool. What a great end to an otherwise rubbish year.

Thanks for your kind words, guys, and yes, it was a good end to a piss-poor year in terms of classic car events.

Funnily enough, the whole thing came about because my wife has some pictures of my old Spyder on her facebook page and a friend of a friend got in touch to ask if she knew anyone with a more conventional classic car. She sent back some pictures of Iris and that's when we were invited to take part in the advert.

It was a grand day out and I was pleased to see how genuinely interested the young trendies doing the filming were in Iris as most of them had never seen an MG of her vintage.

Chatting to them during the setting up process it turned out that most of them aspire to own a really old classic car themselves. Maybe something like an E46 M3 from as far back as the late 1990's. You know, from the time before they were born :(