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7th September, Minis By The Sea.A friendly show organised by the West Sussex Mini Owners Club. It was only a couple of days before the show that we decided we were going, and even so the night before 'Spagley Show Planning' had still not decided which car(s) we were going to take..... Hmm, should we take Doris for a nice 220 mile round trip when the 'hot fuel fix' has not been fully tested.... But at 5:30am on the day of the show we decided that with the AA in hand it would probably all be ok ! After about another 30 secs of deliberation Elaine decided to leave Edward at home and take the newly acquired Annie (£150 998cc auto) for her first long trip on the basis that it could prove an amusing unreliability competition ;-) So after a quick 6:30am meet up with the AMOC crew we had a fairly uneventful motorway drive down to Worthing. Doris ran like a dream except for a bit of misfiring as we were actually arriving at the show. The show was pretty good despite it's 'compact' nature, and Annie even won a prize for being the 'shed of the show', although we haven't quite worked out the full details of the accolade yet......... For the return home we decided to take a nice scenic run along the coast - much the same route as the fated return from the L2B in May. The first part of the trip seemed OK, but then when Dorisses tank was down to about 1/2 the hot fuel misfire kicked in. A quick fuel stop cured the problem for a while - until the fuel warmed up again, then we made an 'interesting' stop outside a pub near Hastings. Top quality 1/2 cut locals, and short sighted kids who exclaimed 'Minis as far as the eye can see' (7 actually), all helped the emergency cooling fix which involved securing the bootlid open with a 3" gap. After this Doris ran perfectly until just after Rye, then slowly degraded until we got to Ashford. Luckily we made it to Dave's house where we cooled the petrol tank with a few wateringcanfulls of water. With suitably cooled fuel the final hop home was fine. Mechanically Doris did really well, but the hot fuel will need some serious attention soon !!!...... Click for the pics & things (well just pics really)
14th -15th September, Action - hot fuel.OK, time for a serious fix for the fuel problem. In an effort to force myself to look at the problem I removed the fuel tank, rear radiator, fans and fuel pumps from the back of the car. Now that I have to put it all back together before I can use the car again I may as well redesign things :-) A couple of spare radiators were trial fitted and a few different fan locations were tried before the disco smoke machine was set up to see how the air was flowing with the fans running. Looks like I will probably go with a large Ford radiator and 'suck through' fans fitted against the boot lid which will have some hooge vents or holes in it. As this will intrude on the space for the original tank, a spare 50 litre stainless beer keg will be used instead. This should increase the range a bit over the standard 7 1/2 gallon Mini tank !! 27th -28th September, Tank work.Not really big action this weekend, just a bit of pottering about playing with the beer keg. Having worked out that the barrel would be used lying on it's side, I cut an access hole in what would be the new top, then welded about 7" of 2.5" steel tube into the bottom of the tank, the pick up pipe will be positioned in the bottom of this tube. The tube has got some small holes around the bottom to allow fuel to flow in and out slowly and the hope is that this will baffle the fuel to prevent starvation with low levels in the tank. In case it doesn't work as expected the tank will have a removable access hatch in the top so that that I can still fiddle about with! Next I drilled a circle of holes for the filler neck, jigsawed the remaining bit out and welded in a spare bit of 2" exhaust pipe. The fuel pick up and return were drilled into the top of the tank through one of the reinforcing ribs so that they lay flat with the main tank surface, they then go back through the lip on the end of the barrel so that both connections will be made near the old beer pump connectery thing. To keep them in place, lashings of metal loaded epoxy were used :-) With all the required connections on the tank I lobbed it the car (via the back seat because it's just a teeny bit too big to go through the boot opening). Filler cap & funnel were fitted into the hole left by the old filler neck and connected to the tank with some (eeek how much) posh fuel filler hose.
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fuel injection by MEGASQUIRT For General V8 info try http://www.v-8.org.uk/forum/ For sensible Spag stuff visit www.spagweb.com or for madtech mayhem try www.magicspanner.co.uk
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This page last modified 04/02/2008. |
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